The methods of this research consist of thematic interviews, informal discussions, participant observations, and selected readings of central Internet and social media sites.
The data derived from interviews and participant observation was collected in Moscow over the period 2009–2012 and in St Petersburg in 2011. It consists of 38 interviews with the activists of youth movements in Moscow and St Petersburg. I interviewed 29 activists,
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12 women and 17 men. Of these activists, 15 were activists or former activists of the Moscow Oborona, 7 were from the St Petersburg Oborona and 6 were young people from the movements DA! – Demokraticheskaia Alternativa (Yes – Democratic Alternative), Solidarnost’ (Solidarity), MY (We), Svobodnye Radikaly (Free Radicals) and Natsiia Svobody (The Nation of Freedom) (see Appendix 2A).
In addition to the thematic interviews, I conducted biographical interviews with six key activists in Oborona. In these interviews, they talked about their lives through themes such as family life, memories of their school and university years, joining the oppositional movement as well as through their expectations for the future (see Interview Questions, Appendix 2B). I used the interviews with activists from youth movements other than Oborona to map the youth activism scene in Russia in general and to take the outsiders’
view on Oborona into account. All the activists were friends or acquaintances of each other and often took part in the same protest events and trainings, the boundaries between different groups were often fluid, and the activists moved between different groups.
Furthermore, the field notes from my participant observations, which I wrote during my stays in the field, form an important part of my data. In addition to the interviews and participant observations, I have used activists’ writing in social media (VKontakte and Facebook) and in their weblogs as well as my personal email correspondence with some of the activists as well as writings in the email-lists of Oborona groups, to confirm and illustrate some of my observations.
I spent a total of six months in Russia conducting this fieldwork. This includes three 1-2 month long visits to Moscow, a weeklong trip to the Partizan 1-2010 camp in the Moscow suburbs, and one month-long trip to St Petersburg in 2011. During my fieldwork, I participated in various activities, such as seminars, meetings, games, and protest events organized by the Oborona movement and other opposition groups, as well as other public demonstrations and rallies. I also spent time with some of the activists outside the actual activist events (even though these are hard to separate); I visited their homes and we went to museums and cafes, and traveled to nearby cities just to ‘hang out’ and to see my friends’ favorite places. In summer of 2011, two activists paid me a visit in Helsinki and we continued our discussions cycling around the sunny (and rainy) Helsinki, sitting in cafes, and in my favorite places. All the interviews and notes are transcribed in their original language (mainly in Russian, some in English and my notes in Finnish) and the analysis is conducted with the help of the Atlas.ti qualitative data analysis software, with which I coded the data for thematic reading and analysis.
According to Skeggs (1997, 17) methodology informs us of a range of issues from who to study to how to write, and which knowledge to use. The researcher’s ‘locatedness’
informs methodological decisions and the final product of the research. Knowledge is always situated and produced by someone in a certain social, cultural, historical, economic location. Additionally, there are numerous power relations embedded in field research.
Thus, also this study is written at the intersection of various power relations. I entered the field as a young female researcher studying a highly masculinized field: Russian politics.
My thinking was affected by western theoretical concepts of the social sciences as well as my studies in feminist theory. In fact, I did not manage (or even want) to establish myself strongly as a researcher in the field; I was usually referred to as the Finnish ‘devushka’
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(young woman), or jokingly as the Finnish ‘Oboronets’ (participant of the Oborona movement) and persistently, even after several corrections, as a Finnish journalist. My informants who got to know me gave me these labels to help me to find contacts; they did not think that writing a PhD thesis was really interesting enough in order to get to speak to people. However, I did my best to inform my informants that I was doing research and not just writing popular pieces on activist life in Russia that they sometimes would have preferred me to write.
My entry to the field was strongly dependent on one key informant that I managed to contact and create a trusting relationship with. During my fieldwork in Russia, I found out that personal contacts and networks are often an important resource in reaching out to people and gaining trust. This first activist contact from Oborona had a lot of international experience, and was openly writing about his activism on the Internet both in Russian and in English. His openness to foreigners and to research (he was himself also a PhD student) contributed to establishing contact with him. I was in contact with other groups’ activists as well, and conducted some preliminary interviews with them, but I did not manage to build trust in the same manner to become invited to their activities as in Oborona.
Furthermore, my key informant was much respected in the movement and in opposition politics in general, and turned out to be very important in helping me get new interviews and invitations to different seminars and demonstrations. He also invited me personally to one of Oborona’s meetings where I was accepted right away as an observer, participant, and eventually as a friend, which ensured my further access to information and movement activities.
During my fieldwork, I became friends with many of the activists and we have remained in contact after I returned from the field. Through these open and friendly relations, I gained wide access to activists’ lives and worldviews. Furthermore, I have paid even more attention to the ethical research questions due to my wish to not harm my respondent-friends. For ethical reasons, I have done my best to preserve the anonymity of the informants by using pseudonyms and in some cases by blurring the context and descriptions that would expose the respondent’s identity. All of the interview participants were informed of the research purpose of my interviews. However, in some situations, such as larger meetings, seminars and demonstrations, I was not able or willing to announce my researcher status even if I was observing the situation for research purposes.
This was usually due to the inconvenience or impossibility of the announcement for a larger crowd or my own, or the informants’, wish to stay out of the center of the attention in a situation where my existence as a foreigner would have posed questions, unwanted attention, or even a threat of violence to me or to my informants.
I have thematically coded the interviews and my field notes looking for interviewees’
engagement with various discursive practices, meaning-making, and the issues that they deem important to their activism. My interviews were semi-structured around a certain set of questions, such as democracy and civil society in Russia, protesting and other forms of action as well as activists’ personal lives. These questions were formulated on a general level, so that I could give the interviewees freedom to choose what they wanted to discuss in more detail, and I could ask further questions when something interesting came up.
During my initial thematic coding of the data, the questions of identity, the diverse
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definitions of civil society and democracy, and the actual practices of activism, among others, started to emerge repetitively and to draw my attention, which led me to structure this book around these themes. I started to analyze these questions with the help of theoretical tools such as identity theories and performance theory (Brubaker & Cooper 2000; Alexander 2006). I also paid attention to the actual practices of the movement with the help of my notes from various meetings and demonstrations, and to look for the ways in which the themes that were introduced by the activists in the interviews were actualized and performed in street activism. Therefore, my research questions have been reformed and theoretical tools rechecked during my research. My approach was inductive; I allowed the data to direct the forming of my final research questions, my choice of theoretical tools, as well as my analysis and conclusions.
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