At a time of heightened attention to Russia as a global political actor, Mischa Gabowitsch’s Protest in Putin’s Russia is a timely take on political life beyond the Kremlin. The book provides invaluable insights into why, nearly a decade after the 2011–2013 protest mobilizations, this movement continues to matter to local activists as well as to scholars of Russian protest. The volume’s publication will not only help us take stock of the late Putin era. It will also sharpen our analysis of protest activity to come. Below, I outline my understanding of Gabowitsch’s nuanced theoretical argument. I then suggest how we can tweak the proposed framework to do justice to the “reflexive” dynamics of Russian protest activity.
The aim of Gabowitsch’s historical and sociological study is to open the “black box” of protest (13). He wants to “take protests seriously as events” in order to reveal the “considerable diversity of views and expectations within a crowd,” “the different kinds of interactions between protest participants,” and “the cognitive effects of the spaces in which protest takes place” (14). As he opens this “black box,” Gabowitsch includes discussions of varied topics useful for scholars of protest culture. For example, he surveys paradigms of different types of protest, from “ad hoc communities” (9, 20) to “dilemma actions” (11); he considers competing styles of corruption critique used by Russian activists (65); he discusses the political legacies of the Soviet technical-scientific intelligentsia (63); he explains the “stickiness” of personal ties between Putin’s regime and the liberal media (147, 150–151); and he draws out the complex shape of Russian post-secularism (179).
Gabowitsch’s most generative contribution, to my mind, is to shed light on a methodological debate between political scientists who study civil society and scholars who conduct historical and empirical research on various social movements (13–21, 242–245, 18–19). Gabowitsch synthesizes studies from both sides of this divide, which he represents as that between researchers who privilege “political” as opposed to “social” protests (243–244). He observes that those who work on political protests are most interested in tracking changes in the status of the political system—they may not recognize social protests that seek remedies for specific grievances as truly political. Scholars concerned with the long history of social protest in Russia argue, on the other hand, that such protests “are in fact potentially more political than the opposition rallies, since they form part of struggles for real-life interests rather than formal rights and candidates for office” (244). Gabowitsch argues that these two perspectives on protest are not merely the result of grassroots rather than institution-level analysis, or bottom-up and top-down views on the same thing—a larger, theoretical difference is at stake.
Grammars of Engagement
One of Gabowitsch’s key arguments in Protest in Putin’s Russia is that “political” and “social” protests have different logics of articulation, or “different grammars of engagement.” They “offer different ways of getting from the ‘bottom’ to the ‘top’—of formatting intimate concerns as causes for collective action” (243). This difference, Gabowitsch notes, “mirrors a difference in perspective, and often acrimonious debates, among Russian protesters themselves” (243). On the “political” side are activists who protest “as part of a larger project of changing the political system;” and on the “social” side are those who protest “out of personal affinity to specific threatened places,” for whom the efficacy of protest is measured by solving problems in particular cases (e.g., wage arrears, environmental destruction, homophobia) (253). Gabowitsch encapsulates these differences as one between “those speaking the language of liberal individualism and those fluent in the idiom of personal affinity” (245), respectively the “Liberal Grammar”and the “Grammar of Personal Affinity”:
Deploying a liberal grammar, the civil society approach expects people to band together as individuals, forming associations […] intimate attachments that cannot be expressed as individual preferences are to be left behind in the private realm […] By contrast, the grammar of personal affinity requires shared objects—symbols, narratives, places.
(243; italics mine)Gabowitsch’s use of the terms “regime” and “grammar”—alternatively, “idiom” and “language—to differentiate types of protests is inspired by Laurent Thévenot’s “sociology of regimes of engagement” (21). One key point of using this approach is that “the [liberal] grammar of individual preferences,” which fits with the civil society approach taken by area scholars, makes it difficult to acknowledge “protest that speaks a different language” (254). Gabowitsch, however, points to the plurality of “grammars” of types of commonality.
Gabowitsch concludes the book by suggesting that the distinction between the “liberal” and what has been called the “a-liberal” (Thévenot Reference Thévenot, Dumouchel and Goto2015, 101) grammar of contestation is in fact most useful in allowing us to track the evolution of political culture in Russia. The framework is not meant to hypostasize the “different parts of a whole” regime (47). He convincingly argues that “In Russia, in the end, the dynamic between different regimes of engagement will be of greater relevance to many people than the question of whether protest can formally democratize the political system” (255). I would only suggest that—rather than shift our attention to the dynamic between different regimes of engagement—we should instead look more closely at the relations between different groups of activists and styles of political contestation.
The Self-reflexivity of Protest Participants
We get a glimpse of the dynamic between different groups of Russian activists from Gabowitsch’s account of the “sociological curiosity” and “self-reflection” of those who participated in the 2011–2013 wave of mobilizations (198). Gabowitsch repeatedly underscores the fact that “many if not most participants in the protests were engaged in exploration rather than strategy” (198; see also 26, 254). He reiterates that many protesters were highly reflexive about attempting to build solidarity despite incommensurate social goals and strategies of political articulation:
The scale of the protest wave that started in December 2011 surprised almost everyone, including the protesters themselves. Societal self-reflection became one of the most important topics of conversation, not just in blogs and traditional media, but also at the demonstrations. […] The composition of Russian society, the workings of politics and the effect of the protests on social relationships were topics of endless debate.
(198)While there is extensive theorization in Protest in Putin’s Russia of socio-political “grammars,” or the “rules that structure how we relate to each other” (22), I found little description of how such rules become subject to the kind of joint reflection and experimentation recorded in the study. How do activists reflect on their own divisions? How does their reflexivity, in turn, impact protest tactics? While Thévenot’s original research was focused on disputes and deliberations as events, Gabowitsch mentions “endless debates” but does not explain such (online and offline) debates’ connection to protests or other aspects of cultural and political socialization. If we were to trace such connections, in addition to opening the “black box” of protest, what more could we learn about assembling commonality?
Registers of Political Action
Given my own expertise in the anthropology of language, I also wonder whether the concepts of “grammar” and “regime” may inadvertently shift the spotlight away from Russian activists’ self-reflection, which—as Gabowitsch underscores—has been a key feature of the protests. I gather that Thévenot chose “grammar” to describe styles of political socialization because the term focuses our gaze on the defaults of communication necessarily relevant to each instance of persuasive talk. While useful for describing the patterned nature of talk, the grammar metaphor has the downside that linguistic structure generally lies beyond our limits of awareness (unless we are linguists!). My concern is that what enables protesters’ joint reflexivity and exploration is for the most part within their limits of awareness. Whereas grammatical change happens mostly behind our backs, styles of assembling commonality are associated with particular individual and social voices, and unfold one speech event at a time.
Linguistic anthropologists use another term to account for the social regularities of communication, while also allowing that participants may be highly reflexive about such regularities—the concept of “register.” Perhaps other social scientists would find this term useful for thinking about how political change takes place through communicative practice. The term also reinforces a fruitful connection between the sociology of practice and the Peircian insight into the indexical dimensions of language use—that is, those features of speech that link it to social context. As elaborated by Asif Agha, a register is a means of linking speech repertoires to social identities. Agha summarizes:
Metalinguistic labels for [registers] link speech repertoires to enactable pragmatic effects, including images of the person speaking (woman, upper-class person), the relationship of speaker to interlocutor (formality, politeness), the conduct of social practices (religious, literary, or scientific activity); […] This is the space of register variation conceived in intuitive terms. […] the very study of registers requires attention to reflexive social processes whereby such models are formulated and disseminated in social life and become available for use in interaction by individuals.
(Agha Reference Agha and Duranti2004, 23)Rather than seeking social meaning at the level of grammatical defaults that are beyond our limits of awareness, the concept of register points to how linguistic (and other) signs are associated with interpersonal roles and social—or political—types. Unlike grammatical categories, registers are differentiable because of the reflexive activities of members of a community who formulate their significance. And, in turn, registers enable social reflexivity because their significance is—explicitly or implicitly—formulated in cultural life. It is for this reason that registers often take part in rapid processes of revalorization and societal transformation.
Using the concept of “register” to describe styles of political action, scholars studying protest in Russia could attend to how activists test out and contest the rules according to which they group and differentiate themselves (e.g., the typical Moscow “liberal;” the “local activist” advancing a specific grievance; the Navalny-type activist who innovatively hybridizes such personae; the activist “troll” who plays the anti-liberal, pro-government simpleton to elicit public sentiment in support of liberal causes). It is because of the public circulation of such social and political types that associated patterns of political communication enter the awareness of protest participants, enabling the negotiation and re-negotiation of political identities. Learning about how different styles of “attesting, protesting, and contesting” (Thévenot Reference Thévenot2014, 28) are subject to activists’ implicit and explicit elaboration would help connect the historic lessons of the 2011–2013 movement—as detailed in Gabowitsch’s thorough account—with future research on Russian public culture.
I conclude by underscoring that Gabowitsch’s take on the methods and frameworks used to study Russian protest is a much-needed intervention in the field. Protest in Putin’s Russia is an ambitious work, and an invaluable reference for the way it synthesizes diverse Russian and non-Russian language sources and juxtaposes literatures with disparate disciplinary perspectives. Ultimately, this volume paves the way to thinking within—but also outside—the “black box” of protest, by locating Russian protest events within longer chains of ever-assembling commonality.
