Book
Cultural Forms of Political Protest in Russia
Alongside the Arab Spring, the 'Occupy' anti-capitalist movements in the West, and the events on the Maidan in Kiev, Russia has had its own protest movements, notably the political protests of 2011–12. As elsewhere in the world, these protests had unlikely origins, in Russia’s case spearheaded by the 'creative class'. This book examines the protest movements in Russia. It discusses the artistic traditions from which the movements arose; explores the media, including the internet, film, novels, and fashion, through which the protesters have expressed themselves; and considers the outcome of the movements, including the new forms of nationalism, intellectualism, and feminism put forward. Overall, the book shows how the Russian protest movements have suggested new directions for Russian – and global – politics.
Jonathan Brooks Platt’s chapter compares the strategies of the Voina (War) group and Petr Pavlensky at the end of the Russian actionist tradition in Russian contemporary art. If Voina preserves the movement’s elusive irony and the pursuit of “festive indistinction” with power, Pavlensky asserts the uncompromising position of art’s own law, utterly opposed to the law of the state.
The capter is dedicated to the description of the fragmentation of the Russian media-based public sphere, in particular - to the dymanics of media use of the participants of the 'For fair elections' political protest movement in Russia of 2011-2012. Authors counclude that: 1) socio-economic divisions in today's Russia are mirrored in the media use patterns; 2) traditional textocentricism of Russian intelligentsia shows up and shapes media preferences and opinion leading: 3) changes in political behavior online (weakly) correlates with differences in online media use patterns; 4) a nation-wide public counter-sphere has formed in the Russian big cities. A prediction is made that fragmentation of the Russian public sphere will be deepening.
In this paper, we propose a theory-based measure of alertness, the ability of a protest event to facilitate further contentious activity and attract higher numbers of protesters for further events. Our measure allows to pinpoint key features of contentious events and distinguish protest that leads to political instability. We use political protest in Ukraine as an empirical example to demonstrate our measure’s sensitivity to protest scale, activity and the nature of protesters’ demands
Pro-Putin rallies before the 2012 presidential elections became campaign venues in which the Kremlin used political symbols—woven into a narrative of nationalism and tradition—to define and activate core voters across the Russian Federation.
Samuel A. Greene, one of the leading British experts on Russia and post-Soviet space, presents a thoughtful and comprehensive study of the evolution of Russian civil society in Moscow in Movement: Power and Opposition in Putin’s Russia. Greene’s book presents a noteworthy reflection on Russia’s political regime, elite strategies, and social movement organization. It balances theoretical speculations on the nature of the Russian political regime with a new, refreshing perspective on the acute problems of state-society relations, explored through several case studies.
The article is concerned with the notions of technology in essays of Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jünger. The special problem of the connection between technology and freedom is discussed in the broader context of the criticism of culture and technocracy discussion in the German intellectual history of the first half of the 20th century.