The Grassroots of Political Change in Russia

• In Event: Activism, Protest and Regime Responses in post-Communist Eurasia

Abstract

In repressive regimes, political action that directly confronts the regime may seem too risky to many citizens. Some turn instead to work on social issues that – while important in citizen’s daily lives – can be addressed without a direct attack on the existing regime. These groups include environmental activists, people trying to preserve the historical heritage of their cities, groups caring for stray animals, and others. In this paper, I explore whether participation in grassroots activism prepares Russian citizens for more direct political opposition. My expectation is that grassroots activism encourages political opposition both by contributing to the formation of new identities and by embedding citizens in networks of like-minded people.

Hank Johnston has argued that “small” claim making and grievance articulation is fundamental to the process of actor constitution in repressive states (Johnston 2006). The construction of collective actors requires many individuals to negotiate new identities, foregrounding parts of their selves that formerly had been submerged (Beissinger 1996, 104-105; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001, 315-317; Simon and Klandermans 2001). The more repressive the regime in which action is taking place, the more fraught this process of identity construction since individuals are forging identities the regime would rather they did not have. But this difficult and almost invisible initial process of constituting actors is a necessary step before contention can scale up or be sustained over time.

Considerable empirical research has shown that network ties support individual decisions to participate in collective action, especially when action is costly or dangerous (Clément 2015; Diani 2004; Leenders and Steven Heydemann 2012; McAdam 1986). By organizing citizens to act in defense of their own interests and values, grassroots groups embed participants in social networks of like-minded people. As such, they can be the training grounds for engaged citizenship.

This research will be based on new intensive interviews with activists that will be conducted in March and April 2020, as well as previous interviews with activists conducted in Russia between 2007 and the present.


References
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Johnston, Hank. 2006. "'Let's get small': The dynamics of (small) contention in repressive states." Mobilization: An International Journal 11, no. 2: 195-212.
Leenders, Reinoud, and Steven Heydemann. 2012. "Popular Mobilization in Syria: Opportunity and Threat, and the Social Networks of Early Risers." Mediterranean Politics 17, no. 2: 139-159.
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McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly. 2001. Dynamics of Contention. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Simon, Bernd, and Bert Klandermans. 2001. "Politicized Collective Identity: A Social Psychological Analysis." American Psychologist 56, no. 4 (April): 319-331.

Author

• Ellen Carnaghan, Saint Louis University