After spending more time with the activists and becoming familiar with their political ideas and group practices, my confusion with the group’s idea that I mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, started to open up and I started to figure out the common attributes and grounds for solidarities within the group. In this chapter, I have suggested that the activist identity in Oborona is constructed along three main axes. Firstly, the activist identity is classed through a symbolic association with the intelligentsia and middle class. Activists have grown up in intelligentsia families and they identify with this class, and they articulate their activities through the intelligentsia’s ‘markers’ such as intellectual dispositions, high morality, discussion skills, and educating the masses.
Secondly, the activist identity is formed in relation to the cultural model of dissidence, which emphasizes the importance of resilience and non-conformism. Oborona activists often draw a parallel between the political field in contemporary Russia and the closed political field in the Soviet Union, where dissidence was violently repressed, and represent themselves as modern-day dissidents. The intellectual and dissident dimension of the activist identity is associated with the third dimension, international orientation or western-mindedness, which manifests itself in holding up western democracy as the ideal and re-establishing international connections. International experience and connections are incorporated into activists’ self-understanding, and they are strongly connected to the ideas of how democracy is understood in Europe, as we can see in the next chapter.
Furthermore, the activist identity is also gendered, through subscribing to essentialist explanations of gender difference associating the political sphere with men and the private sphere with women.
These dimensions of activist identity were strengthened in the group setting and created feelings of commonality among the group participants. However, instead of a shared political ideology, activists formed feelings of belonging through friendship and being together, practices that resemble Soviet traditions: the cultural practices of tusovki, kruzhki, and obshchenie. Paradoxically, the group that struggled with political goals was internally depoliticized; as Vova told me, he did not want to bring up his political views in public because they would divide the group, which, according to him, should be unified against the common ‘enemy’: Vladimir Putin and his government. Sometimes, in more
‘private’ settings, such as during summer evening gatherings around the campfire in the annual camp ‘Partizan’, people got into heated discussions about the ‘real’ meaning of democracy and the role of the state in a free society. However, in more ‘official’
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situations, other activists, often the coordinators, silenced these discussions by steering the discussion back to ‘safer’ topics of practical planning for a certain demonstration or seminar.
Conflicting political views and their exclusion from the group created confusion and even quarrels, and new activists often found it difficult to be accepted into the movement’s inner circle. Oborona’s older activists were a tight group of friends and the new activists often ended up being left out of conversations. Furthermore, new activists often had no clear sense of the behavioral norms of the group and sometimes raised questions that were not proper to discuss, and thus ended up excluded from the discussion. Some of the new members learned the proper behavior and speech and were then included in the group.
Often this inclusion was based on how well they got along with others on the informal or friendly level. Oborona’s intellectual jargon could also be confusing for many new activists. Many of the activists read a lot of academic literature on democratic theories and some of them are graduate students in political science or other relevant fields. For example Maria, who attended only one meeting, felt after that meeting that others were so smart and talked so intelligently that she felt that she could say nothing. Therefore, she sat silently and ‘answered if something were asked of her’. I sensed the same kind of admiration in other interviews that I did with new potential participants. Most of them did not continue in the group and the one who did, learned the ‘language’ fast and was considered a ‘cool’ and interesting personality by the older activists. He quickly achieved a coordinating position in the movement.
Oborona’s flexibility with regards to political ideologies created wider opportunities for forming political coalitions than a strictly framed political doctrine would have allowed. However, Oborona activists’ weak political connectedness and the strong inclination towards consensus inside the group contributed to the depoliticization of certain questions, such as LGBTI rights and social justice. Even if the movement positioned itself strongly against the government and identified with western liberal democrat practices, it remained silent on questions of social inequalities and economic liberalism, which might have created inner disagreements in the group. Therefore, the group activities revolved strongly around practical questions of organizing seminars and protest events and of questions of civil and political rights. Furthermore, Oborona’s group practices as well as its activists’ self-understanding drew on a heteronormative understanding of gender relations, which excluded the politicization of gender and LGBTI questions, which are often at the heart of many global social movements that consider themselves to be democratic. The restricted process of politicization also affects the movement’s ability to mobilize people when it cannot address questions that are pertinent to people’s everyday lives. For example, Lipman and Petrov (2010) have shown that Russians show more interest and protest attitudes when they feel that the mobilization concerns questions that touch their everyday lives, such as social rights and questions of redistributive justice. Oborona’s fluid political identity was concretized in the movement’s focus on abstract grievances that are formed around political rights and liberties, which formed the basis of their interpretation of democracy and civil society, as I will show in the next chapter.
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5 ‘I LOVE MY COUNTRY BUT HATE THE STATE’
– OBORONA ACTIVISTS INTERPRETING CIVIL SOCIETY, STATE AND DEMOCRACY
5.1 ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Traditions of Liberalism
I think that Russia has no other way than to eventually become a democratic country, so that one day we will achieve our goals. (Mikhail)
Oborona, as well as many other Russian liberal groups, draw on western liberal thought in constructing its discourse on democracy. However, Funk (2004, 697) reminds us that the Anglo-American liberal traditions ‘are only some among many liberalisms’ in the world.
Funk (2004, 696) identifies liberalism and proponents of liberal thought as ‘all those who, however else they may differ, advocate strong respect for the individual and individual rights, including rights to freedom of speech, conscience, and academic freedom; regard freedom as a fundamental value; and advocate a constitutional state, the rule of law, a division of powers, and a parliamentary system as well as some private property’. Funk (2004, 696) argues that even though liberal thought in Eastern and Central European socialist countries developed differently from western thought, liberal thinkers existed during socialism and post-socialism in the region. Nevertheless, liberal thought exists in different historical, political, and theoretical contexts, and thus, it differs from the classical and dominant forms of liberal thought in Western Europe and the United States. The
‘eastern’ forms of liberal thought include some of the aspects of ‘western’ liberal thought, but reject others, and it has formed claims different from Anglo-American liberalism.
According to Funk (2004), many eastern liberal thinkers rejected, for example, the social contract theory, that has been dominant in western liberal thought, but have included statist and nationalist thinking, collective rights, and socialist values to their liberalisms (Funk 2004: 699–700). Also Russian liberalist tradition that developed during the late imperialist period and was re-established after the collapse of communism has been described as state-centrist; it includes a general conviction that a strong government is a necessary precondition of liberty (Hamburg 1998).
The aim of this chapter is to show that these western and eastern traditions of liberalism are represented both in the Russian state’s as well as in the liberal-democratically oriented opposition’s discourses on democracy and civil society. I suggest that both sides involved in this struggle over the definitions of civil society, state, and democracy are constructing their competing discourses as an entanglement (Fournier 2010) of continuing Soviet ideas and liberal or neoliberal thinking. In this chapter, I analyze the definitions of civil society and democracy that Oborona and the state engage with. I am interested in how Oborona activists’ ideas of democracy and civil society are related to western liberal thinking and how they are translated into the Russian reality, and how they challenge the dominant Russian political order. I argue that Oborona not only appropriates the western liberal understanding of civil society and democracy, but also
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articulates it with the strong political symbols of nation, state and leadership (see also Verdery 1996). As Laura Henry (2010) observes in her study of environmental activism in Russia, Russian activists operate in the middle of enduring and heterogeneous Soviet political traditions, combined with new post-Soviet practices. She claims that ‘[n]orms, identities, networks and institutional affiliations developed in the Soviet period condition the way activists view current opportunities for, and obstacles to, mobilization’.
According to her, the activists have ‘recycled’ the Soviet era norms, institutions and networks in order to work and achieve their goals. (Henry 2010, 6.) In this chapter, I show that even though Russian political culture is influenced by western political symbols of individualism and neoliberalism, these principles are combined with social and cultural components partly resembling socialist symbolic frameworks.
In this chapter, first I will locate my understanding of liberalism and neoliberalism in the vast academic literature on the topic. Then I will introduce the concept of ‘sovereign democracy’ as an interpretation of a specific Russian version of democracy put forward by the Russian political elite. In 2007, a collection of articles named ‘Sovereign Democracy’
(Suverennaia Demokratiia) was published in which well-known political scientists, such as Vladimir Surkov, Dmitry Orlov and Vladimir Putin, ‘who were directly involved in the creation of this doctrine’ (Suverennaia demokratiia : ot idei k doktrine 2007, back cover), discuss the concept of Sovereign democracy. I use this booklet as well as previous research to trace the key ideas of the concept of sovereign democracy and how it bears on state and civil society. Then, based on my interviews with the Oborona activists, I contrast this official interpretation to Oborona’s understanding of democracy, and show how both these interpretations of democracy and civil society embody ideas of liberalism and Soviet continuities.