In addition to contentious protests, youth movements believe in discussions and intellectual training of their current and future activists. According to Johnston (2009, 9), these kinds of ‘specific workings of movements also have performative aspects’, which are directed towards internal audiences. Oborona organizes training seminars to which they invite guest speakers to talk about the legal rights of Russian citizens. These seminars are small-scale and usually attract only a few new people in addition to the usual participants. Seminars and discussion clubs are advertised on the Internet and sometimes
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in the hallways of the universities, and they reach only a small fraction of possible audiences. Through these performances, the activists reproduce their intelligentsia identity both inside the movement and for the audience. The background symbolism of these actions is drawing on the western ideals of liberal democracy and political rights as well as non-violent resistance tactics, and the seminars usually deal with the legal rights of citizens or practical advice such as how to communicate with the police or how to effectively organize a protest event. One big seminar, iWeekend, which Oborona was organizing together with other liberal youth groups, dealt with online activism, social media, Internet security and online campaigns, which have become more imported for the organization of protests in Russia (Lonkila 2012). Also, the English name of the seminar and its references to information technology re-established Oborona’s strong connection to the West and to contemporary Internet activism.
Besides seminars and debates, Oborona also organizes practical ‘training’ for the activists of youth movements and their like-minded friends. One popular training event is the City-quest (Kvest) that is organized in cooperation with other youth movements, such as Smena (Change) and the Nation of Freedom. Quest is a game where the participants have to solve different tasks together. Tasks often involve orienteering in the city, problem solving, and practical protest methods, such as fastening banners with slogans against the authorities on bridges. City-quests are exciting and educational for its participants. They involve a lot of running and excitement, but also demand different activist skills such as leadership and collaboration, since usually one of the activists is designated as the leader of the group, who other group members need to follow. The concrete results of these games, besides ‘training’, are the banners that are fastened in public places and sometimes graffiti. Usually the banners and graffiti repeat the familiar slogans of the demonstrations (‘Down with the Chekists’, ‘Down with the police state’, ‘Russia without Putin’). These activities follow the logic of public protests and the script of opposition activists struggling for freedom and against totalitarianism.
Another form of action that combines the previous ones is the ‘Partizan’ camp that Oborona organizes annually. These camps can be seen as shadow camps for the big youth camps that the pro-Kremlin youth movements organize by Lake Seliger. Partizan camps are much smaller with a couple of dozen participants, but they offer a space for intensive discussions, lectures and ‘training’ for its participants. The camp’s highlight is the quest-game that takes place on the last day of the camp. Camps are usually three days long and the participants sleep in tents and cook their food on a fire. These camps are advertised as a place for activists to relax and learn about activism. Often the participants themselves give lectures in their own areas of expertise. These camps as performances combine the background symbols of the need for ‘action’ and the intellectual tradition of educating the masses. They also strengthen the activist identity as radical and active and not only as intellectual ‘nerds’, since the physical exercises of the camp, such as the Quest game in the woods, are often demanding.
Camps are also interesting since in such a closed camping situation, activists cannot avoid talking about their political ideologies. The activists spend many evenings by the campfire in heated debates or arguments about politics. When I participated in the
‘Partizan’ camp in 2010, there were many debates between the libertarian activists and the
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more left-oriented activists. For example, these included arguments about state-society relations such as total freedom of markets and people or the benefits of anarchy or order.
These arguments often spread to the activists’ presentations as well, but in that situation, other activists or presenters had more authority to ‘steer’ the discussion back to ‘neutral’
topics of non-violent methods or talking about the repressive Russian state and the
‘common enemy’. These political discussions show how inside the activist group, people draw on different background symbols and how this creates tensions that reflect the rather weak collective political identity of the movement. Some activists show frustration in not agreeing with others on socio-economic issues, but also seem to enjoy debates. These debating skills are appreciated in the movement as a form of cultural capital.
6.6 In Conclusion
Oborona’s repertoire of action brings together the ideals and norms of the activist identity and the discursive frameworks of the movement. These are performed in the protests, whose scripts follow the self-understanding of the activists as supporting constitutional legality, individual freedoms, and its resistance against the authoritarian state. Background symbols also articulate with the activist identity, which is constructed upon an entanglement of identification with the intelligentsia, Soviet dissidence, western-mindedness, and action in contrast to general passivity of the Russians.
However, the re-fusion or success of the performance can be contested. Performances are built on unfamiliar symbols drawn from western thinking and the scripts often remain distant from the wider Russian audiences. This de-fusion of the audience from the actors and the text is partly because of the political opportunities and restrictions (social power), but also because of the construction of intelligentsia identity based on distance from
‘ordinary people’. Performance makes sense (is re-fused) for its actors themselves but not for the wider public. Therefore, the results of the protests seem to be more intra-movement than extra-movement.
At the high point of the Strategy-31 demonstrations and also Oborona’s active period in 2010, only one to three per cent of Russians recognized oppositional youth movements, while around 20 per cent recognized the pro-Kremlin movements. According to a survey (Levada Tsentr 2010b) among the university students, only 7 percent of students had heard of the Oborona movement and only 1 percent knew its political goals. 58 percent of the students recognized the pro-Kremlin movement Nashi by the name but only 8 percent knew its goals. 47 percent of the respondents did not know the goals of any of the movements listed. This is of course partly due to the lack of interest of the wider public in political movements per se, and the lack of media coverage. However, the action repertoires of the youth movements emphasize the intra-movement outcomes, bonding and training of the already established members of the oppositional movements, while the extra-movement actions remain few. This shows in the small numbers of memberships, but also in the overall recognition of these movements. These performances do not reach to the wider masses of youth, but concentrate on the youth that are already like-minded or even active in other protest movements. The big mass of the Russian ‘apolitical’ youth
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still remains out of the reach of the repertoire choices, and tend to see the grievances of the oppositional movements as somewhat foreign and distant.
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Image 12 Partizan 2010 campers planning their upcoming group presentation.
Image 13 Banner criticizing Moscow mayor Luzhkov on a Moscow Bridge after the City Quest game: General Plan of Luzhkov is Killing Moscow.
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Image 14 Activist learning to draw graffiti in the abandoned building site.
Image 15 iWeekend: New Technologies for Civil Society
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7 CONCLUSIONS
7.1 ‘The Day X’
In October 2012, when the political protests against Putin and the falsified election results had already cooled off, the Russian ‘non-systemic’ opposition held their first Internet elections for the opposition’s Coordinating Council that was supposed to take a fresh lead in mobilizing people against President Putin. On the weekend of the elections, I met with Viktor on Tsvetnoi Boulevard to stroll around the park where the weekend event around the elections was organized. Since many people who wanted to vote in these elections did not have access to the Internet or did not know how to use computers, the organizers had set up several tents in the park where they had installed computers and helped people cast their vote. There were long lines outside all the tents. We were standing in one of the lines with Viktor when he explained to me how the voting would proceed; people chose 45 candidates to the council from a list of over 200 people. Furthermore, all the voters had to choose candidates from all the lists, nationalists, liberals and non-affiliated, to prevent any one coalition taking over the whole council. Of course choosing this many candidates took a long time and the lines to vote were long. I saw people getting anxious and frustrated;
they had stood in line for a long time, even an hour. Their frustration was eased from time to time when the ‘stars’ of the opposition, Boris Nemtsov, Aleksey Navalnyi, and Sergey Udal’tsov, came to greet people standing in lines and thanked them for being there. All three had their usual ‘entourage’ with them, their personal bodyguards, assistants and a crowd of reporters following them.
When meeting Viktor by the metro station, I was surprised to learn that he had not voted online and was not planning to vote in the park either. He explained that he was not used to voting since voting usually does not solve anything in Russia, since the elections have been rigged for so long. However, when he saw people lining up to vote, and probably after my questioning his reasons not to vote, he decided to cast his vote anyways.
While standing in line, I asked Viktor for whom he was going to vote. He said that he did not know yet, but was just going to look through the list and mark the familiar names in it.
I was again taken by surprise that he was not very interested in the political programs of the candidates. However, on the previous day, I had met with another activist who complained that this was the usual case among the voters; no one was willing or even able to read through the 200 individual programs of the candidates. She gave this as the reason that she herself did not vote in these elections that she did not even support wholeheartedly. She told me that some of the candidates had ‘stupid’ claims in their program, such as ‘it’s my birthday, you should vote for me’. These elections seemed to divide the ex-Oborontsy even further; some of them took part in organizing the elections, some of them boycotted the elections entirely and some were trying to decide whether to vote or not.
After standing in line for about 20 minutes, it had not moved anywhere and Viktor decided to leave without voting. We walked through the park, but there was not that much
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going on. We greeted a couple of ex-Oborona activists who were now taking part in organizing the elections as Solidarity members. The stage was empty and the speakers were playing background music. Most of the people walking around or talking in groups were elderly and the only flags visible were the traditional red sickle and hammer prints.
Viktor decided to leave to meet his girlfriend and I left the park, too. When walking away from the park, I took some pictures of the large number of police cars and trucks that stood around the park. In some of them, the police officers were sleeping or playing with their smartphones. Before entering the metro, I saw two clowns around the circus handing out leaflets saying, ‘vote for them in the circus’. They must have been some pro-Kremlin activists. I entered the metro thinking that this seemed to be the end of Moscow Oborona and a good time to end my fieldwork.
Image 16 Clowns outside the park where the opposition gathered.
Oborona had dissolved right when the long awaited mass protests against the government, which Mikhail had earlier referred as the Day X (see chapter 3.5), took place.
In my first interview with Vova in October 2009, I asked him what the movement wanted to accomplish in the near future. He answered:
Well, we want to achieve the change of regime as a result of free elections. We will certainly orient towards the years 2011–12. We have to work very hard and we want that the vector of direction in the country to change to democracy, to European values: not authoritarian but democratic. (Vova)
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However, even if Oborona wanted to orient towards the electoral period of 2011–12, it failed to achieve this goal. On the contrary, Moscow Oborona dissolved right around the time when the larger mobilization against the falsification of elections started. The movement had been drifting, since its symbolic leader left at the end of 2010. It did not manage to gather people again and was not able to reorganize its structure according to the wishes of the older section of activists and the newcomers. The time that was supposed to be the prime time for Oborona ended up creating such a big need for an organizational reform, that the activists decided to freeze the movement altogether. The post-electoral protest movement forced Oborona participants to break the ‘silence’ in regards to political affiliations and ideologies, and the negotiation process of a new strategy for action revealed the weak political connectedness amongst the participants and led to the group’s dissolution. It seems that the wide spectrum of political opinions and goals was too fragmented to create a concrete platform for action. I argue that in this sense, Oborona reflects the problems of the non-systemic opposition in general; persistent vertical power structures (even if symbolic), an nonexistent political program, and the inability to create an alternative vision of the future without Putin that would help to gain people’s trust and support. In this concluding chapter, I discuss my findings in relation to Russian political culture and show how the case of Oborona illustrates the problems of the liberal opposition in contemporary Russia.