The New Local Activism in Russia : Biography, Event, and Culture

In this monograph, the author analyzes a new type of politicized local activism that emerged as an outcome of the nationwide post-election 2011-12 protests in Russia, while these protests have been widely criticized for their political vagueness. Outwardly, new local groups resembled numerous activist groups that were active before the post-election mobilization. However, the pre-protest local activism was deliberately “apolitical” and focused on concrete and small problem-solving, while the post-protest local activism combined oppositional politics and “real deeds” tactics. This integration of opposite practices and meanings led to the emergence of the new politicized civic culture. The question the author answers is how the event of the protest mobilization could lead to the long-term changes in activist political culture. Considering this political evolution, she focuses on activists’ biographical trajectories. Basing on qualitative data (interviews, focus-groups, and observations of local activists groups organized in Moscow and St. Petersburg) and the existing theories of social movement studies, social events, and political socialization, the monograph proposes a new approach to the analysis of social and cultural changes through an event. The results show that patterns of activists’ socialization highly influenced the types of their future political involvement. Moreover, the post-election protest as an event (in terms of W. Sewell, 1996) helped people with different experiences who would never meet and act together before (e.g., apolitical volunteering and oppositional struggle) suddenly find themselves together and pushed them to continue their activity. Meanings and know-how that ordinarily are at odds (apolitical ideology of “helping people” and politics) met in post-protest local activism, thus creating new hybrid forms of civic participation and negotiating the opposition between the apolitical and the political. In the scholarly literature on an event and a biography, biographies are considered usually among the things an event can influence on, together with social structure, cultural meanings, etc. In the monograph, it is argued that the biography can be considered as an important tool, helping scholars to understand how exactly an event influence on structure or culture. The socialization taken in interactionist perspective, i.e., as the careers and not as the set of more or less stable dispositions, is a necessary tool to study how different experiences, visions, and know-how are accumulated, transferred from one place to another, find each others in the same groups or even the same lives, and how all these processes finally contribute to the creation of new elements of political culture. In this monograph thus, the author claims that in order to explain social movement transformations and changes produced by an event, people’s biographies should be brought back into the analysis.

Grantor dc:publisher

Helsingin yliopisto

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Erpyleva, Svetlana

• Social science

Statement dc:rights

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Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10138/301023

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:helda.helsinki.fi:10138/301023