Are Copycats Subversive? Strategy-31, the Russian Runs, the Immortal Regiment, and the Transformative Potential of Non-Hierarchical Movements

Democratic and Autocratic Nation Building

“…In autocratic nation building, those in power restrict or co-opt alternative builders. For example, the Putin regime integrated itself into the practice of the Immortal Regiment on Russia's Victory Day after civil society actors developed it as an alternative, nongovernmental way to commemorate the sacrifices of loved ones in World War II (Gabowitsch 2018). While democratic nation building allows for greater independence of civil society actors in how they enact their national identity, autocratic nation building necessitates control at the top.…”

Biopolitical conservatism in Europe and beyond: the cases of identity-making projects in Poland and Russia

“…Ontological security may, therefore, be found in reinforcing or strengthening the boundary between "self" and "other" or "friend" and "enemy"' (Shani 2017, 277). Understood in a biopolitical terms, it is a reversed Foucauldian understanding of biopolitics, which mostly implies its affirmative role in fostering population in a liberal environment (Foucault 2009). Instead, illiberal states use the rhetoric of 'protecting' and 'taking care' of individuals and their bodies as actually parts of an aggregated national body (Puumala 2013).…”

Memory, Kinship, and the Mobilization of the Dead: The Russian State and the “Immortal Regiment” Movement

“…The dream left an "unforgettable" impression on him, and he decided to make this dream reality, organizing his friends to come out that year on Victory Day carrying photographs of deceased veterans ("O Dvizhenii" n.d). As Mischa Gabowitsch (2016) notes, it is the case that Gennadii Ivanov's Tiumen' initiative was (like other initiatives of its kind, based on the same idea of introducing veterans' photographs into Victory Day commemorative ceremonies) technically a precursor to the Tomsk movement, albeit one that mostly failed to spread further beyond the Tiumen' region. But for my purposes it is the BPR's narrative and the tropes it employs that are of interest here.…”

“…The journalists immediately realized that they needed urgently to set down principles in order to defend the movement's autonomy, and they adopted a statute that specified that this was a non-commercial, non-political movement that was independent of the state (Nordvik 2015). 7 Subsequently there ensued a battle for control and leadership of this movement, while simultaneously it grew in popularity and spread across different regions of the country (see further Gabowitsch 2016). Officials from the ruling "United Russia" party made attempts to link the party to the movement, in violation of the movement's statutes ("O situatsii" n.d).…”

“…There are in fact two separate movements, with very similar names: "Immortal Regiment" (moypolk.ru) and "Immortal Regiment of Russia" (polkrf.ru). 6 The latter is a state-affiliated "clone" organization set up with the aim of displacing and/or taking over the original grassroots movement (see further Sergei Parkhomenko 2015;"O situatsii" n.d;Gabowitsch 2016). The original Immortal Regiment movement was the initiative of a small group of journalists, historians by education, who were friends and colleagues working for the Tomsk TV station TV-2 (the station that was closed down in February 2015) (Nordvik 2015).…”