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Forum 8.Indb 231 MASS PROTESTS IN DECEMBER 2011 Dmitry Gromov ‘We Are Not the Opposition, We Are the People’: New Features of Street Political Activism From September 2005, I have been researching the street protests carried out by politicised youth groups. At the beginning of 2012, as the regular electoral cycle came to an end, this research was supposed to reach its conclusion. In view of the general drop in political activity, I did not expect to discover anything new or interesting; still fresh in the memory were the events of December 2007, when an opposition protest against the legitimacy of the parlia- mentary elections only managed to gather around 50 people from the whole of Moscow [Traurnyi gimn 2007]. It seemed in all certainty that there could be nothing unforeseen on the political horizon: one need only think back to the political action that took place on 10 De- cember, as a result of which it was initially reported that only 300 people had made their way to the mass protest at Bolotnaya Square – its organisers had not counted on such a large turnout. What happened from then on fundamentally changed our ideas of Russian street political action. Firstly, from the end of the 1980s to the beginning of the 1990s this kind of mass action simply did not exist. Secondly, there was no mass action of any kind with a similar system of parti- cipant mobilisation. Strictly speaking, the action Dmitry Gromov of the Nashi youth movement can be classified State Republic Centre as ‘mass’ in that, according to organisers’ of Russian Folklore, Moscow calculations, up to 70,000 people would gather [email protected] at its meetings, but they were organised thanks No 8 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 232 to a special system of stimulation (not necessarily only financial)1 catering to the desires of young people [Gromov 2009]. The protests at Bolotnaya Square and Sakharov Prospect did not have this kind of motivational basis; on the whole they were, to paraphrase the poet, ‘a free protest of freely gathered people’. In my discussion here, I intend to focus precisely on the ways in which the protest demonstrations in Moscow in December 2011 differed from traditional forms of political activism, as well as iden- tifying which traditions were preserved in the new type of social manifestation. A first-timer uprising. Usually street protests are organised by members of political organisations with the involvement of sym- pathisers, who, as a rule, have some experience of street action. However, the protest events in December 2011, beginning with the demonstration at Chistye Prudy (on 5 December), were attended predominantly by novices who did not belong to any kind of organisation. The modest scale of events, carried out independently by different political organisations, went with decidedly small numbers of protesters. As I mentioned earlier, initially the protest on 10 December was reckoned to have amassed only 300 people (the liberal organisation Solidarnost claimed a similar figure), while the nationalist protest on 11 December at Bolotnaya Square gathered 250–300 people [Nationalisty 2011]. In this respect, a figure cited in one of the articles in this collection [Sokolova et al. 2012: 227, fig. 4] seems eminently plausible: only 12 % of those who participated in the protest on 24 December belonged to any kind of political organisation. Other characteristics of the gatherings in question also included the absence of any definite leaders.2 Therefore the events we are examining constitute action taken by novices who had no experience of street protests. As I will show, this fact in many respects conditioned the mood of the December protests. The reaction to the protest on 10 December shown by some ‘pro- fessional’ activists was revealing: the art group Voina3 announced 1 A reference to the accusations made by opposition supporters that the followers of United Russia generally turn out on the streets because they have been paid to do so. [Editor]. 2 Judging by the data from a sociological survey [Levada Centre 2011], the political fi gures who took to the platform did not have any particular authority among those who had gathered, with the exception of Alexey Navalny (36 %) and the liberal Grigory Yavlinsky (27 %), who do not belong to offi cial political organisations. The greatest trust among attendees was enjoyed by cultural fi gures who are at some distance from politics: the TV presenter Leonid Parfyonov (41 %), the writer Boris Akunin (35 %), and the rock musician Yuri Shevchuk (33 %). 3 ‘Voina’ [War] is an avant-garde group well-known for organising scandalous protests, such as a mock- orgy in the zoological museum of Moscow State University, the inscription of an enormous phallus on Liteinei Bridge in St Petersburg pointing directly at the FSB headquarters (‘The Dick Held Captive by the FSB’), etc. [Editor]. 233 MASS PROTESTS IN DECEMBER 2011 that it would not be participating, and Eduard Limonov used the phrase ‘They’ve stolen my revolution’ [Mimimiting 2011] and attended the Bolotnaya Square nor the Sakharov Prospect meetings. Presumably, accustomed to being at the cutting edge, the established oppositional figures felt uncomfortable amongst large crowds of unorganised, inexperienced people who, despite their neophytism, had ‘got the better of’ the professionals thanks to their large numbers. One indication of the adaptation of inexperienced citizens to the role of street activists was the heightened interest in advice literature that was observed over the course of several days prior to the protest at Bolotnaya Square. There were large numbers of online publications with advice on how to behave in cases of shots being fired, gas attacks, clashes with OMON, being arrested and so on. It seems that the Dmitry Gromov. ‘We Are Not the Opposition, We People’ heightened interest in such material was not only linked to the need to channel anxiety before the demonstration and the tendency to posit an extreme reaction on the part of the authorities, but also to frequently-noted phenomena such as the increased interest in subculture symbolism among new entrants to a subculture [Shche- panskaya 1993: 144]. Since they did not have enough of their ‘own’ signs, the novices compensated for this by emphasised use of external symbolism and demonstrative behaviour; this trend faded as more experience was acquired. It is revealing that protest participants did not retain this interest for long: the novices soon realised ‘how it really is’, and behaved more appropriately from the run-up to the next demonstration. Of course this was also enabled by the conflict-free nature of the protest on 10 December. From greater numbers to increased legitimacy. Many opposition demonstration protests held in Moscow in recent years took place under the watchful eye of the police; sometimes one had the impression that there were more members of the security services than there were protesters. Demonstrations took place in observance of previously agreed conditions, and any deviation from them was perceived by the police as a violation and caused conflicts. Things were somewhat different during these mass protests. The police presence was small, and their behaviour more tactful. During one episode of the protest on 24 December, those in charge even sought police officers out specially, addressing them from the stage. Deviations from the announced protest format were also dealt with calmly: on 10 December the police peacefully allowed movement to take place from Revolution Square to Bolotnaya Square. As far as we are aware, the supportive attitude of the security agencies was not only due to the logistical difficulties of controlling large crowds of people. It was also due to the knowledge that the higher the numbers No 8 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 234 of protesters, the more legitimate the demonstration: the large scale of the protest limited the moral right to suppress it. Number manipulation. It is primarily the number of participants in a street protest that intimates its scale and how representative it is. In view of this, a disparity is continually observed in the evaluation of participant numbers in opposition demonstrations: organisers give overestimated figures while the security agencies understate them. In the case of the protests on 10 and 24 December we have tried to clarify how great the discrepancy is between the estimates of both sides. During the protest at Bolotnaya Square that was calculated to have drawn up to 30,000 people, the leader, referring to the police assessment, gave varying figures of protester numbers that ranged from 70,100 to 150,000 people. As a result the official assessment given by the organisers settled at 100,000 [Protest na Bolotnoi 2011]. In Channel One’s news programme, referring again to police assessment, a figure of 24,000 participants was mentioned. For our assessment we used a photograph of Bolotnaya Square taken from a satellite (an image from Google), and highlighted the zones of protest activity of different density;1 to achieve this we made particular use of aerial images taken from Ridus News Agency’s hexacopter.2 In the space around the stage (around 4,000 m2) the crowd density was at its highest – three people per square metre; other areas had a reduced ratio. Taking into account the rotation of the total number of people we estimated a figure of 30,000 people; remarks made by protest participants tended to elevate this figure, but not significantly. Therefore we were able to establish that police estimates were more precise than those given by the organisers. Attendance estimates also differed immensely in relation to the protest on 24 December. At 15:20 the MVD gave an estimate of 29,000 people [Chislo 2011], while from the stage the organisers announced a figure of 120,000.
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