For the past several years, and certainly since the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the USA, references to Russia have been a steady presence in the news cycle, largely in connection with the investigation into Russia’s electoral interference. For anyone familiar with the Cold War rhetoric of the past, the parallels are as jarring as they are disconcerting: the image of Russia that emerges is straight out of a Bond movie, a bleak land of hostility and militarism uniformly rallying behind its cunning authoritarian ruler. Against this backdrop, Mischa Gabowitsch’s meticulously researched Protest in Putin’s Russia is a welcome breath of fresh air because it brings home what most readers know about their own nations: the commitments and priorities of their fellow citizens cannot be reduced to the follies of their leaders and the meticulously maintained façade of authoritarian control conceals multiple, variously directed projects of contention and mobilization.

The focus of the book is on the waves of mobilization that occurred in Russia between 2011 and 2013, starting with protest events responding to Putin’s announcement of his intentions to run for a third term in September 2011, and ending with the so-called March Against Scoundrels in January 2013. Gabowitsch is careful not to frame these as “opposition protests” nor the tide of activity itself as a “movement.” Indeed, one of the key arguments of the book is that the protest activity of the period involved a wide range of discrepant participants and agendas, not all of them self-consciously oppositional. It drew out experienced grassroots activists and members of opposition groups alongside with disaffected electoral observers and other unaffiliated “civic protesters” who could be motivated by a single local issue. It was this essential heterogeneity of motivation that the author sees as both the secret behind the protests’ breadth and appeal, and the difficulties eventually faced by those who attempted to formulate a unified set of demands on behalf of the Coordinating Council of the Opposition that was “elected with much fanfare” in 2012 (141).

In its opening pages, Protest in Putin’s Russia frames its intention modestly: to provide a “sociological and historical study of the wave of street protest that swept through Russia during the long year 2012” (8). This surely understates the scope of the book’s ambition. In actuality, it is as much of a tableau as it is a chronicle. Its commitment to combining vivid case studies (presented in a series of vignettes that open each chapter) with a pursuit of sophisticated theoretical questions brings to mind the praise art historian Erwin Panofsky directed at Jan van Eyck for his ability to represent the world as if simultaneously through a microscope and a telescope. In the book, the reader encounters the experience of protesters in a range of locales that go far beyond the metropole (extending, for example, to the village of Khomutino, a 1,800-person settlement 70 km from the Kazakh border). These protest events are not only viewed in relationship to one another. They are also filtered through the prism of transnational comparisons to recent mobilizations elsewhere, from the Arab Spring to the fair-election movement in the Philippines.

On the theoretical and conceptual level, Gabowitsch makes productive use of the work of Boltanski and Thévenot on political grammars and regimes of engagement in understanding the logics, triggers, and forms of protest activity (Boltanski and Thévenot Reference Boltanski and Thévenot1983; Thévenot Reference Thévenot2014). At the risk of grossly oversimplifying the book’s argument, one may summarize its main thrust as directed against the tendency to assume that mobilization activity in Russia during the long 2012 was fueled primarily by the individualistic “liberal grammar” of protest based in abstract ideological commitments and rational political choices. Resisting this assumption, Gabowitsch proposes to attend to alternative, and far more prominent, logics of engagement that were fueled by particularistic local attachments and emotional ties to people and place, the so-called “grammar of personal affinity” (24). While protest activity driven by these principles may have been less prone to institutionalization—and therefore less durable in the long term—Gabowitsch points out that it had greater credibility and appeal in the short term because it was perceived as more immediate and deeply felt. Thus, it was more contagious (one example of such activity would be the mobilization of electoral observers, fueled by emotional outrage at the disrespect and impunity of the electoral falsifications).

The book’s attention to documenting the regional, demographic, and motivational diversity of the protest mobilization wave from 2011–2013 is a valuable antidote to the prevailing journalistic tendency of reducing these events to “oppositional protests” limited to middle-class Muscovites, who are pejoratively referred to in the Russian press and blogosphere as the “office plankton” or “office hamsters.” But it would be a mistake to reduce the book’s contribution merely to a factographic correction of the record. What is perhaps more valuable is that the conceptual categories Gabowitsch deploys give rise to new and intriguing questions about the social life of the Russian protest.

One such question follows through on Gabowitsch’s observations regarding the role of emotions in the rhythms and outcomes of protest mobilization. If much of protest activity was indeed fueled by what he describes as the change in the prevailing “emotional regimes” of the 2000s—in particular the combination of discourses of optimism and hope about the possibility of change with the ascendancy of awareness and critiques of corruption—it may be worth inquiring into the forces that drive such transformations in emotional regimes. How (if at all) were the critiques of corruption in 2011 different from those prevalent during the kompromat wars that raged in the 1990s and the early 2000s?Footnote ¹ From what sources do the new discourses of hope spring? Can one speak of distinct generational or regional emotional landscapes? Finally, what is the role of the new media environment, especially social media, for fostering the particular emotional climate of protest? The viral spread of testimonials and electoral fraud videos with their vérité effect, circulating as they did from one friend to another, point to the need to understand the affective logics of social media insofar as they enable the “regime of affinity” (199) that Gabowitsch identifies.

A broader way of pursuing the theme of emotions in the mobilization wave of the long 2012 would be to ask about the place of emotions in the two regimes of political engagement Gabowitsch analyzes most closely. There is a sense in which the regime of affinity bears, in the very language of its definition, assumptions of affective attachment and emotional investment, and the book does a fine job of demonstrating that such affective attachments underlie the decision of many participants to step out onto the streets. But if emotions, or, for that matter, attachments to political symbols, such as the figure of Lenin that the book discusses early on, are viewed as antithetical to the more rational “liberal grammar” of political participation, it may be worth wondering if any mobilization or movement anywhere in the world can be considered properly describable in terms of liberal grammar. Put differently, while Protest in Putin’s Russia claims to take issue with the applicability of liberal grammar and “its vision of autonomous individuals coming together in a public sphere” (25) to Russian society, it may be that Gabowitsch’s quarrel is in fact broader, with the assumption that any political mobilization could be described in such impoverished terms. Indeed, as we know from classics of political sociology, such as Doug McAdam’s Freedom Summer, involvement in activism is almost always fueled by chains of friendship and networks of relationships as much as (if not more than) by preexisting political ideals. If that is so, Gabowitsch’s careful attention to the affective ways in which political mobilization has been lived in Russia in 2011–2013 would have something to offer to political sociologists and scholars of contention more broadly.

Indeed, the distinction between the liberal grammar and the grammar of personal affinity seems most productive precisely when the cases at hand resist a neat categorization as one or the other. One such example—though not tackled in the book and post-dating the events described in it—is the resonant investigation by a Tomsk-based activist, Denis Karagodin, of the circumstances and personalities involved in the 1938 repression of Karagodin’s grandfather Stepan. The investigation, conducted between 2014 and 2016 and publicized on Karagodin’s blog, was couched in emphatically bureaucratic and proceduralist terms; yet, it was justified by the activist’s personal connection and grief about his grandfather’s fate. When applied to this and similar cases, the distinction between the two regimes of engagement carries significant heuristic potential that is not fully explored in the book.

The closing chapters of Protest in Putin’s Russia attend to yet another regime of engagement that Gabowitsch terms “the regime of exploration.” Many participants in street protests, the author observes, were “driven by curiosity, not a common strategic project or a pre-existing attachment to a place” (199). While I had wished for a clearer sense of how this regime related to or coexisted with the other regimes explored in the book, the author’s attention to it lent further credibility to the book’s insistence on the multiplicity of motivations that drove protesters to the streets. Here too, this observation does not merely correct the factual record. The plurality of motivations and regimes of engagement behind the protests, Gabowitsch notes, complicates any effort to determine decisively whether the protests were a “success” or a “failure.” While it may be tempting to measure the success of mobilization by the degree to which it has managed to transform existing political structures, such a move reflects an impoverished understanding of what the protesters were after. For many of the activists Gabowitsch spoke to, resolving a specific issue or experiencing a sense of efficacy or camaraderie with others on the streets not only counted more, but felt closer to what drove them to participate to begin with. The relationships and new horizons of possibility forged during protest events may be among the lasting consequences of the mobilization of 2011–2013. Extending the maritime metaphors deployed throughout the book, Protest in Putin’s Russia invites us to consider not only the ebb and flow of the protest wave, but also its ripple effects, some of which may be still to come.