‘We Will Not Forget, We Will Not Forgive!’: Alexei Navalny, Youth Protest and the Art of Curating Digital Activism and Memory in Russia

Moroz, Oxana Vladimirovna

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-32827-6_10

Cited by 7 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…The issues can certainly be connected to broader national issues, such as corruption and a lack of competition. This is most notable in opposition figures like Alexei Navalny, who has had some success in tying these local issues to the fundamental problems of Putin's regime (Dollbaum, Semenov, and Sirotkina 2018; Moroz 2020; Nikolayenko 2021). However, the issue is with local governance, and Putin can even play the role of savior as in the story of the Kushtau mountain discussed in the introduction.…”

Section: Protest As Political Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Protests in Russia's regions: The influence of regional governance

Clardie

2022

Social Science Quarterly

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This study addresses the question of what accounts for variation in the number of protests across Russia's regions. The article argues that protests in Russia are best framed as acts of political communication, in which the protestors are making claims against local government entities as opposed to the national government. Viewed in this way, protest can be viewed as accountability mechanisms directed toward local and regional governments. Examining protests across 82 Russian regions from 2007 to 2010 finds that the quality of local governance is a significant factor in explaining the variation of the number of protests, whereas support for the national government is not significant. Kushtau mountain, located in the Russian Republic of Bashkortostan, is one of the four "Shihans." The Shihans are limestone mountains that are the residue of ancient sea reefs. They are unique geological features that have long been sacred places for the local Bashkirs. In addition, Kushtau contains approximately 40 plants and animals classified as rare or endangered by the Russian government. The mountains, however, have been targets of the Bashkir Soda Company, which is interested in mining the limestone. Shakhtau, another of the Shihans, has been destroyed and replaced with a quarry due to mining. The Bashkir Soda Company intended to move to Kushtau mountain next, as the other two Shihans already had protected status. The mining company received permission to develop the site in August of 2019 and planned on beginning August 16, 2020. The planned development resulted in large-scale protests on August 15, 2020, by local residents to preserve the mountain and stop the mining of the limestone rock. The resulting protests turned violent, as protestors clashed with both police and private security firms. The efforts to develop were halted on August 17 in order to reach a compromise. On August 26, President Putin suggested local authorities should investigate the concerns of the local protestors, and on September 2, Radiy Khabirov (the head of Bashkortostan) officially granted Kushtau protected status, effectively ending the threat to the mountain (Abbasova 2020).While the speed at which this situation escalated and was resolved is uncommon, the general characteristics of this protest situation are not atypical. The protest focused on a local issue and a place with local significance to the community. The target of the protest was not the national government but was the regional government, as well as a private company. The protests were not largely about abstract notions of democracy or anti-Putin. They were about a specific case of corruption and government action affecting an area of local significance. This is what many discussions of protests in Russia are missing. Protests in Moscow and anti-Putin protests are certainly noteworthy, but there are many other protests that occur outside of Moscow that tend to focus on matters of local concern.

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Section: Protest As Political Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Protests in Russia's regions: The influence of regional governance

Clardie

2022

Social Science Quarterly

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“…In the countries covered in this special issue, most have experienced highly visible resistance to their governing illiberal regimes. For example, in the last decade Russia has experienced two major anti-regime movements, the For Fair Elections movement in 2011-2012 (Zeller, 2020) and the anti-corruption protests in 2017-2018 (Moroz, 2020); the illiberal machinations of PiS have sparked several waves of mobilisation in Poland (e.g., Bielinska-Kowalewska, 2017;Król & Pustułka, 2018); Belarus has experienced periodic resistance to the Lukashenka regime -all equally doomed, it seems -the most recent of which Kascian and Denisenko cover; and Esteso-Perez reveals how in Macedonia an illiberal government's corruption and clientelism, ubiquitous characteristics of illiberal regimes, became the focal points of an anti-corruption movement in Macedonia in 2016, which played a significant role in ousting the government and then ensuring its electoral defeat. Such examples epitomise resistance by movements aimed at regime change (cf.…”

Section: Resistancementioning

confidence: 99%

Illiberalism, polarisation, resilience, and resistance

Zeller

Vidra

2021

Intersections

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Illiberal regimes undermine human rights norms that entail equal legal protections of citizens and social groups. Illiberal actors often intentionally drive social polarisation in hopes of bolstering their support and securing their political position. This strains liberal democratic-oriented social resilience and provokes resistance to the illiberal regime. The articles in this special issue, looking at the regimes and societies of Central and Eastern Europe—where the establishment and operation of illiberal regimes is conspicuous, where ‘pernicious polarisation’ (Somer, McCoy, & Luke, 2021) that strains social resilience is often striking, and where resistance is crucial to halt or reverse illiberalisation—address this nexus of concepts. In this introduction, we review the four key concepts that undergird the special issue’s articles.

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“…Most of the studies relevant to the link between SNS use and protest participation were undertaken based on the 2011-2013 Bolotnaya protests, rather than the more recent protests, and had no youth focus (Placek 2019;Enikolopov, Makarin, and Petrova 2020a;Zherebtsov and Goussev 2021). One exception is an article by Moroz, who focuses on the significant impact made by the opposition leader Navalny since the 2017 anti-corruptions protests (Moroz 2020). Navalny's impact on youth political engagement can hardly be overstated, as will be discussed below.…”

Section: Chapter 1: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is in no small part due to the Russian state propaganda which sought to dismiss the protests through the notion that they were mainly attended by underage youth who are, in the words of a Russian television news presenter, "pliant and gullible, [and] easily led astray" (Luxmoore 2021). Meanwhile, Russia's liberal public saw youth participation as a sign of the younger generation's dissatisfaction with Putin's regime and rising demands for political changes (Moroz 2020). Either way, youth presence in public demonstrations in the period of 2017 through 2021 (the period that will be explored in this paper) was perceived by many to be so 1 Both epigraphs are from a collection of autobiographical essays on the subject of Russian youth, entitled Vy nas dazhe ne predstavliaete: pokolenie Z [You don 't even represent (understand) us: generation Z] (Sverdlova, Mishchuk, and Vyzhutovich 2018) significant that "young faces have become the image of protests in Russia […]" (Krawatzek 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the Russian context, this characteristic of SNS takes on an especially important role. Since traditional forms of media almost never deviate from the official state position on important political matters (Becker 2004), SNS is one of the few information spaces where Russians can select into an information diet that is divergent from the official state position (Moroz 2020;Asmolov and Kolozaridi 2017). Notwithstanding the opaque workings of SNS algorithms discussed below, the output provided to an SNS user in the form of political information is largely dependent on the user's input.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Impact of Social Network Sites on Youth Political Engagement in Russia

Salojin¹

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This thesis argues that social network sites (SNS) do not just reflect already existing patterns of offline political engagement among youth networks, but also transform and augment these patterns, creating patterns that are wholly unique to youth networks operating through SNS. Political socialization through SNS can partly explain the shift in citizenship norms seen among Russian youth, in turn motivating youth toward networked activism aimed at issues of a highly localized and personalized nature.Russian state demobilization efforts have forced opposition networks to reshape and restructure their political engagement so that the political acts are declaratively "apolitical" or so those political acts that may have taken place "in real life" can only be observed online, thereby decreasing likelihood of persecution. Although a direct causal link between SNS usage and anti-regime youth alternative political engagement cannot be drawn, this type of political engagement in Russia is only possible thanks to SNS. "Likes, retweets, and comments confirm that this is not just some narcissism, but that someone is really watching this. And if on another planet only a select few can feel as though they're a star, ours gives this feeling to everyone. It turned out to be easier for us to create a new world, than to conquer television."-Elena Bazina 1 April 2014"Today, a lulling Instagram has become our cradle, and an updated Facebook feed has become our alarm clock."-Elizaveta Yakovets

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‘We Will Not Forget, We Will Not Forgive!’: Alexei Navalny, Youth Protest and the Art of Curating Digital Activism and Memory in Russia

Cited by 7 publications

References 21 publications

Protests in Russia's regions: The influence of regional governance

Protests in Russia's regions: The influence of regional governance

Illiberalism, polarisation, resilience, and resistance

The Impact of Social Network Sites on Youth Political Engagement in Russia

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