No 8 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 250
Mikhail Alekseevsky Who Are All Those People (the Ones with Placards)?
The mass protests against the rigged elections to the State Duma, which took place in many cities across Russia in December 2011 were a surprise for the authorities and for ordinary citizens alike. For many years political street protests were not broadly popular in Russia; the last opposition protests that drew tens of thou- sands of participants happened at the turn of the 1990s, i.e. before the fall of the Soviet Union. It was not only the particularly high number of participants in the street protests that was unex- pected, but also the behaviour of the public at the different events. One of the distinguishing features of the December protests was the home made placards carried by participants. These were sometimes ironic, caustic or absurd, but at all times quite unlike typical forms of po- litical campaigning. It has been repeatedly noted both in journalistic articles and comments made by the government and participants themselves that the majority of protesters are not activists affiliated to any politi- cal movement, but rather people who have previ- ously avoided protests of this kind and who are not especially interested in politics. Unexpect- edly, a new and powerful force has emerged onto the political arena, about which little is known. It is evident that the majority of protesters oppose the current government, but that is not to say that Mikhail Alekseevsky they therefore belong to the parties or move- State Republic Centre ments that have been organising the protests. The of Russian Folklore, confusion of politicians trying to understand who Moscow [email protected] these people are and what they want is wittily 251 MASS PROTESTS IN DECEMBER 2011
exploited in the slogan: ‘You don’t represent us’,1 which first ap- peared at a protest in St Petersburg on 10 December and has since been reproduced many times in other cities. One might think that the slogans and placards made by protesters themselves should more accurately reflect their demands and goals. However, there is a series of problems with this argument: on the one hand, journalists are writing about the surge of ‘national wit’ evident in the creation of unusual ‘comedy’ placards; on the other, the inscrip- tions on some of them were so absurd and incomprehensible (‘Ballet- lovers’ convention’, ‘No Mopassan! No Croissant! No Marcipan!’,2 ‘Putin is a Sith!’), that they cast doubt on the seriousness of the protest. To understand why the slogans at the protests in December 2011 dif- fered so markedly from usual forms of political campaigning, it is important to consider the historical and cultural context. In 1975 the French philosopher Olivier Reboul published a book about slogans in which he proposed introducing the term ‘anti-slogan’. He noted
Mikhail Alekseevsky. Who Are All these People (the Ones with Placards)? that by their nature slogans are a means of political propaganda that often has an anti-humane message (incitement of racial or class ha- tred, provocation of impatience and aggression). In his opinion the effective weapon against these kinds of slogans should be the coun- ter-slogan that advocates the ideas of humanism, peace and tole- rance [Reboul 1975: 127]. However, the differences between these kinds of slogans are not only in their meaning: Reboul writes that ordinary political slogans are intended to provoke a specific action; he considers the alternative to be ‘anti-slogans’, which are based on paradox and humour and therefore do not stimulate action but thought processes [Reboul 1975: 128–129]. It is obvious that one of the main sources of inspiration for Reboul was the slogans of the French Situationists during the student street disturbances in May 1968 (‘Be realistic — demand the impossible’, ‘No forbidding allowed’, ‘All power to the imagination’ etc.). In the past, these kinds of ‘paradoxical’ slogans have never been wide- spread at political street protests in Russia: during and after Perestroika the placards of the protest movement were predominantly serious. Nevertheless, the absurdist placards of the protests in December 2011 were not completely unprecedented, it is just that the source of inspira- tion for their authors should be sought in art rather than in politics. On 1 May 2000 the creative movement ‘Svoi 2000’3 organised a street
1 This is a pun on the Russian verb predstavlyat’, meaning both ‘represent’ and also in this context ‘imagine’, thus the second way of reading it translates as ‘You can’t even imagine us’. [Translator’s note]. 2 Sic. ‘Mopassan’ is a letter-by-letter back-transliteration into ‘French’ of the Cyrillic transliteration of Maupassant [Editor]. 3 Svoi in Russian means ‘one’s own’, and the title of the group is clearly intended as a riposte to the youth group, ‘Nashi’ (Ours), the ‘All-Russian Association for the Support of the Development of Sovereign Democracy’, organised by the Presidential Administration. [Editor]. No 8 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 252
party in Moscow — a street procession acting as an opposition march. However, unlike participants in other marches, movement activists did not carry serious placards and banners, but absurd ones (‘Great adaptations’, ‘Unbutton your minks!’) [Koretsky 2002]. It was this protest that inspired the Novosibirsk artist Artem Loskutov to organise a monstration (a shortened form of the word ‘demonstration’) in his city in 2004, a Mayday procession with deliberately nonsensical slo- gans. Other monstrations were subsequently held in many cities across Russia, becoming especially popular after 2009 when an NGO de- fended Loskutov while he was in prison accused of drug possession [Loskutov 2010]. The more absurd placards at the December protests were probably influenced by this monstration tradition.1 The historical and cultural context for the protest activity in Decem- ber can also be found by looking at political street events in other countries. The most recent large-scale protest was the anti-globaliza- tion protest ‘Occupy Wall Street’ aimed at the international financial elite. From September 2011 these acts of civil protest have taken place in many cities around the world, although photographs show that the majority of placards and slogans created by movement acti- vists are extremely serious.2
Ill. 1. Placards from the street demonstration ‘Occupy Wall Street’ in New York in September 2011. Photograph taken from:
1 Some monstration placards have direct parallels with the December protest campaigning in 2011. Thus, in St Petersburg on 1 May 2011, the following placards was displayed at a monstration: ‘Where’s the money for the protest?’ (as echoed in the numerous placards about ‘State money’ at the protests against the falsifi ed election results). The direct infl uence of French street protests in 1968 can be identifi ed, so that, for example, during the protest at Bolotnaya Square a placard was seen with the slogan ‘No forbidding allowed’. 2 However, the cultural infl uence of the campaign of Occupy Wall Street on the December protest has been precisely traced. Some examples of borrowing include the Guy Fawkes mask from the fi lm ‘V for Vendetta’ (2006) or the popular placard seen at the December protests ‘We are 146 %’, hinting at the disparity in the preliminary regional voting results, a new version of the placards ‘We are 99 %’ which anti-globalization campaigners used to protest against the situation whereby the majority of the world’s resources are controlled by the richest 1 % of people on the planet. 253 MASS PROTESTS IN DECEMBER 2011
An analogy between the December protests and the street demon- strations of the so-called Orange Revolution, the political crisis in Ukraine at the end of 2004 that provoked disputes about the legiti- macy of the presidential election results, seems inevitable. Ukrainian folklorists actively gathered material during the protests on Inde- pendence Square in Kiev, although their articles contain little data about homemade placards [Britsyna, Golovakha 2005; Lisyuk 2005]. Much more valuable in this respect is the article by Ukrainian soci- ologist Tamara Martsenyuk in which she proposes a content analysis of the placard slogans seen in Independence Square during the Orange Revolution. As the author demonstrates, the majority of slo- gans are serious in nature, although irony and humour were used on placards targeting the protesters’ political opponent, Viktor Yanuko- vych [Martsenyuk 2005: 62–63], which is a similarity to the instan- ces of Russian placards targeting Putin. The closest analogy to the December protests in Russia are the street protests in Serbia in late 1996 — early 1997 that came about as a re- Mikhail Alekseevsky. Who Are All these People (the Ones with Placards)? sult of President Slobodan Milošević’s attempt to cancel the results of municipal elections in which the opposition had been victorious. Most of the protesters were students who took a creative approach to inventing new forms of expression for their opposition stance. Their slogans, placards and graffiti were witty and ironic, which enabled the ‘carnivalization’ of street protest [Dragićević-Šešić 2001]. One of the basic ways of creating up-to-date political slogans has become the parodying of ideological stock phrases and clichés from the lexi- con of the current government, as well as the use of references to emblematic works of Serbian and foreign culture,1 which become at- tached to the present political period [Ajdačić 2002]. Serbian anthro- pologist Ivan Čolović notes that images from popular foreign films and cartoons were used to mock Slobodan Milošević: for example, during the protests the Serbian president was called ‘Papa Smurf’ in reference to the popular American children’s cartoon (cf. using the image of Dobby from the Harry Potter films in relation to Vladimir Putin); frequently seen on the streets were placards with absurd and paradoxical messages such as ‘This is my slogan’ or ‘Have you come here to protest or to stare at this placard?’ [Čolović 2002: 298]. It is hardly realistic to talk about the direct influence of Serbian placards from 1996–1997 on the visual campaigning of Russian protesters in December 2011, although their typological proximity is evident. Studies on the semantics, symbolism and pragmatics of the homemade placards of street protesters based on material from different cultures have long been undertaken [Calvet 1976; Chaffee 1993; Muhena, Ny- ambe 2009; Gheytanchi 2010]; works in which the slogans of political
1 For example, the placards ‘Slobo, see you in the Ninth Circle. Dante’ or ‘I’m no Kafka, but I feel a trial coming on!’ [Čolović 2002: 299]. No 8 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 254
Ill. 2. Placards at the student protest meetings held in Serbia, 1996–1997. Their captions, written in English, are absurdist. Photograph taken from:
campaigning are analysed from the perspective of folklore studies are of particular interest [Ivanova 1991; Salamon 2001; Britsyna, Golo- vakha 2005]. Unfortunately, however, in works such as these, slogans and placards are viewed as ‘folk creativity’ in a rather vague sense, the ‘folk’ involved tending to be an almost abstract concept, so that the question ‘Who are all those people?’ still remains pertinent. For example, it is telling that when researching the placards of the Orange Revolution, Tamara Martsenyuk describes a ‘social and demogra phic portrait of participants’ in these street demonstrations only according to the slogan texts (based roughly on the placard ‘Kiev Veterans for Yushchenko’ she concludes that the capital’s veterans of the Great Pa- triotic War took part in the Independence Square protests, while the placards ‘Punks from Lutsk for Yushchenko’, in her opinion bore wit- ness to the fact that ‘the representatives of various subcultures, includ- ing youth subcultures’ were among the protesters [Martsenyuk 2005: 61]). Obviously this approach to describing the social and demogra- phic characte ristics of protesters does not withstand criticism. In the case of the December protests in Russia, a great deal of atten- tion was drawn to the placards themselves, meanwhile their creators again remained in the shadows. In order to change this situation, I carried out some field research during the protest on Sakharov Prospekt in Moscow, focusing on people who had come to the dem- onstration with placards. It should be noted that at the previous pro- test at Bolotnaya Square on 10 December 2011, I experienced first- hand how much having a homemade placard influences one’s behavioural strategy at a political demonstration and the attitude of 255 MASS PROTESTS IN DECEMBER 2011
other protestors. However, this is a topic for a separate article in the spirit of autoethnography. Importantly, just before starting his re- search the author gained experience of making a placard and using it in a political demonstration, so that he could more accurately for- mulate his questions for informants. The research took place in the following way. A work group was formed of two people: an interviewer (myself, Mikhail Alekseevsky) and a photographer (Natalia Klim). 40 minutes before the official start of the protest, the researchers crossed the police cordon, went on to Sakharov Prospekt itself, and began working with informants. When someone with a placard was seen, he/she was approached and asked for permission to take a photograph. Then the interviewer re- quested that the informant answer several questions, explaining that he was gathering material for an article about placards. There then followed a brief interview based on a prepared questionnaire whose questions were divided into 5 thematic areas: 1. Where did you get the idea for the placard from? What does it mean? Who thought up Mikhail Alekseevsky. Who Are All these People (the Ones with Placards)? the slogan text? 2. When and how did you made the placard? 3. Have you ever made a placard before? Why did you decide to make a plac- ard now? 4. Did you take part in any of the previous protest demon- strations (including the protest on Bolotnaya Square)? 5. To what professional category do you belong? It should also be noted that various types of symbolic signs visually expressing a civic position (such as white ribbons) were used by the overwhelming majority of those participating in the demonstration, whereas only a handful of protesters had homemade placards, which set them apart from eve- ryone else and made them the centre of attention among those around them (in particular, often they specifically were photo- graphed by other participants). The strategy for seeking new informants was also precisely defined. So that the results would be representative, the researchers endeavoured to interview the authors of any placards (not just the wittiest or most striking): after the interview was finished, the researchers looked around them and approached the closest person with a placard, even if this placard was less interesting than one belonging to a protester standing a little further away. They only paid attention to people with homemade placards, while protesters with flags, stickers, ribbons or leaflets were ignored. Once the protest had begun, access to the stage was difficult owing to the density of the crowd, and so the survey was primarily carried out at some distance from it, which may have influ- enced the research results (for example, it could be argued that the placards of political activists standing closer to the stage were different to those of protesters standing near the entrance to the street). In total 52 interviews were recorded although the overall number of informants was greater (60 people), because in certain cases a group No 8 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 256
of several people with placards was questioned. It should be noted that in several cases for objective reasons the researcher could not obtain answers to all of his questions, therefore the number of in- formants that answered each question varied, which could also affect the reliability of the results. In order to partly factor in this circum- stance, the figures given are absolute and relative (in per cent). The results of the research are for the most part presented as statistics, although in the case of intriguing findings, quotations from inter- views are provided. Data from sociological surveys of the protest participants on Sakharov Prospekt showed that the majority of them were male (according to data from the Levada Centre, 60 % were men [Leva- da Centre 2011]). Among those with placards in this survey the same trend could be seen even more clearly: there were 40 men (66 %) and 20 women (33 %). For convenience the age of inform- ants was divided into three categories: young (up to age 30) — 30 (50 %); middle-aged (aged 30–55) — 20 (33 %); senior (older than 55) — 10 (17 %). Therefore, the majority of those attending the protest with a placard were young people, with particular activity observed, from a subjective assessment, among those aged around 30, that is, the upper part of the young age category and the lower part of the middle-aged group. The survey yielded interesting results regarding the informants’ pro- fessional field: Pensioners — 10 (20 %) Students — 7 (14 %) Intelligentsia (Creative) — 5 (10 %) Intelligentsia (Technical) — 5 (10 %) IT — 4 (8 %) Academia — 4 (8 %) Commerce, marketing — 4 (8 %) Media — 3 (6 %) Lawyers — 3 (6 %) Finance — 2 (4 %) Doctors — 2 (4 %) Teachers — 1 (2 %) A statistic that stands out is that 76 % of those surveyed were working people.1 The percentage of students was relatively low, which sets the Russian December protests apart from the Serbian street protests in 1996–1997, where students were the main driving force. The number of pensioners with placards was significant, although their percent-
1 It is worth highlighting again here that some informants did not answer all of the questions. So within the survey, the same 10 pensioners might represent 20 % in one set of statistics, while in the previous break-down by age they were only 17 %. 257 MASS PROTESTS IN DECEMBER 2011
age is much lower than at the mass opposition protest organised regularly by the Communists. The author’s initial supposition that a significant number of placards were made by creative people (art- ists, designers etc.) was not confirmed; among those involved in this form of visual campaigning their numbers were not especially high. For example, among those surveyed, an equal level of activeness in making placards was shown by people in the category of the technical intelligentsia (primarily engineers), many of whom noted in their in- terviews that when making their banners they were aided by their professional drawing skills. In general, the majority of people with placards that were surveyed were young, working professionals who had attended higher education. From our observations the majority of informants came to the pro- test with friends or relatives. When calculating this parameter only those surveyed were included: if an interview took place with a hus- band and wife, and each of them had a placard, both were counted as coming ‘in company’; in a situation where two young men were Mikhail Alekseevsky. Who Are All these People (the Ones with Placards)? holding a banner together, while their friends stood nearby, only the man who gave the interview was counted. The results were as follows: 35 people (58 %) came in company and 25 people (42 %) acted alone. Jumping ahead, we can note the following regularity: ‘comic’ placards were more typical of those who came with friends, whereas lone protesters predominantly used serious political slogans. The majority of those surveyed said that they had previously attended other political events. In response to the question about participating in the Bolotnaya Square protest 27 people (66 %) answered that they had been there, with 13 people (33 %) saying they had not come to that event. However, almost every one of them considered it neces- sary to clarify that there was an objective reason (illness, business trip, work, an important meeting) as to why they could not attend. Among those who had gone to the Bolotnaya protest, the majority had attended without a placard. In answer to the question ‘Have you ever made a placard before?’, the responses were as follows: for the first time — 29 (72 %); made a placard for the protest at Bolotnaya Square — 4 (10 %); made a placard for other political demonstra- tions — 3 (8 %); made non-political placards (such as for occasions at work) — 4 (10 %). Among the 4 people who had been at Bolotnaya Square with placards, none had come to Sakharov Prospekt with the same placard: 3 people had made new ones and the other had radi- cally reworked and added to the old one. Intriguing results were yielded by answers to the question about when the placard was made. Only half of those surveyed answered, but among them 12 people (50 %) made their placard on the day of the protest, 8 people (33 %) the evening before, and only 4 people (17 %) began working on it earlier. Therefore, for a significant number of No 8 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 258
those surveyed, making their placard was an impulsive act made at the last moment: I came home at night [from the hospital], found a felt tip pen, scribbled something down, hung it up, and here I am today (male, 80 years old, holding placard with a garbled quotation from Pushkin ‘Believe, my friend, it will arise…’1); I sat at work today and made it (male, 25 years old, placard depicting Putin and Medvedev with the slogan ‘I am NOT loving it’); This morning I thought I’d get a scrap of paper and come with something (male, 65 years old, placard ‘Stop badmintoning’2). In the sample taken, the variety of placard forms stood out. The var- ious types are sorted below by popularity: Drawing on cardboard — 21 (35 %) Printout glued to cardboard — 11 (18 %) A3 printout — 8 (13 %) A4 printout — 5 (8 %) Hand drawing on A4 sheet — 4 (7 %) Print on photo paper — 3 (5 %) Fabric banner — 2 (3 %) Placard hanging around neck — 3 (5 %) Unusual forms — 2 (3 %) Drawing on T-shirt — 1 (2 %) In summary of the results, approximately half of the placards were drawn by hand, while half were created on a computer and then printed out. Interestingly, judging by the photographs available on- line from the anti-globalization demonstrations ‘Occupy Wall Street’, almost all activists who made placards for them had drawn them on cardboard by hand, without using a computer.3 The rather technically complicated placards from the Russian protests made us- ing graphic editing software stand out in this respect. Almost all the pensioners we surveyed used simple forms of campaigning: either A4 paper with slogans written by hand or text-based placards (written by hand or printed out using a word processor) hanging on a cord around their neck. Dmitry Gromov calls the latter type of visual campaign- ing a ‘person-banner’ and notes that in political street demonstra- tions of the 1990s–2000s ‘this form of self-expression is quite un-
1 Here and subsequently when quoting interviews the gender and approximate age of the informant will be indicated, as well as the basic content of the placard. [The Pushkin quotation — in full, ‘Believe, my friend, it will arise / The star of captivating happiness’ — comes from the poet’s ‘To Chaadaev’, about the collapse of autocracy, and is familiar to most of the older generation as it was compulsory reading in Soviet schools. Editor]. 2 The slogan on this placard hints at an initiative of Dmitry Medvedev, who in October 2011 addressed the country’s citizens on his videoblog, appealing to them to take an interest in badminton, which has become the basis of numerous political jokes. 3 It could be suggested that technologically complex placards made on a computer seemed too ‘bour- geois’ for anti-globalisation campaigners, therefore they preferred to write their slogans with simple felt tip pens on scrap pieces of cardboard. 259 MASS PROTESTS IN DECEMBER 2011
characteristic of young people’ [Gromov 2012: § ‘Details of the Per- formance’]. Indeed, among our informants this form of placard layout was chosen by just 3 of the most elderly pensioners (aged around 75–80). Curiously, they all composed their own verse1 to use as the text on their placards, which was uncharacteristic for the younger protest participants. Very unusual forms of campaigning were occasionally seen: for example, several students had cut out a cardboard space rocket made to look like a huge condom,2 from which Vladimir Putin was looking out and waving (if a string was pulled at the back the hand began to move), and at the bottom was the caption ‘Let’s go!’.3 It was these kinds of comic and unusual placards that attracted the most attention at the protest, and they were photographed and dis- cussed the most. However, this raises the question of whether the majority of placards at the protest were of an ironic or satirical na- ture. This research material shows that this is not the case. To deter- mine how to classify them, it is necessary to try to divide the sampled Mikhail Alekseevsky. Who Are All these People (the Ones with Placards)? placards into two categories: ‘comic’ and ‘serious’. The boundaries of these classifications are relative and it is not always entirely clear to which category a slogan might belong — such as, for example, ‘Pres- ident, do THIS’. Our main criteria was the presence of at least slight irony: thus the placard ‘I’m voting for Havel’ was categorised as ‘comic’ (since Russian residents have never had any possibility of voting for the recently deceased former president of the Czech Re- public), while a quotation of Havel ‘Truth and love will prevail over lies and hatred’ was designated ‘serious’. The result of our calcula- tions was unexpected: 29 placards (53 %) were classed as ‘serious’, with only 26 placards (47 %) that were ‘comic’. Of course assigning the placards to either category is in many respects subjective, and
1 I would like to cite an example of one such poem. One informant (male, aged around 80) had a piece of paper with an excerpt from a poem by Pushkin hanging on his chest ‘Believe, my friend, it will rise…’, and another on his back with some verse of his own composition, reproduced here with the author’s orthography and punctuation intact: ‘Today Russia is betrayed Left to be torn apart Today Russia is run Not by God or the tsar, but by SATAN. The awakening of Russians Is capable of helping Russia too be reborn To rise from its knees and get down from the cross A fearless battle, to the very end!’ In his interview the informant explained that by ‘Satan’ he meant Vladimir Putin, and told us that in the 1990s he took part in the protest demonstrations in Moscow by Belyi Dom and publicly read out politi- cal poetry that was written impromptu. 2 This is a hint at the comment made by Vladimir Putin, who announced after the Bolotnaya Square protest that when he fi rst saw the white ribbons that had become a symbol of the campaign for fair elections, he thought they were condoms. 3 This is the precise phrase (‘Let’s go!’) that was spoken by Yuri Gagarin, the fi rst Soviet cosmonaut, be- fore the launch of the space rocket that sent him into space. No 8 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 260
Ill. 3. Pensioner with placards hanging around his neck. In front is the distorted quotation from Pushkin’s poetry, on the back is verse of his own composition
Ill. 4. An example of a ‘high-tech’ comic placard: when the string is pulled, Putin waves his hand 261 MASS PROTESTS IN DECEMBER 2011 Mikhail Alekseevsky. Who Are All these People (the Ones with Placards)?
Ill. 5. The green background here is no accident: as the informant explained, it symbolises support for the Yabloko party
indeed the whole sample cannot be considered a hundred percent representative. Nevertheless, even allowing for errors, the ‘serious’ placards on Sakharov Prospekt were very numerous, but they were overshadowed by the more noticeable ‘comic’ placards. It is telling that in their interviews, many of those who came with ‘comic’ placards commented that they wanted to use humour to talk about serious things. Placards seen at the Bolotnaya Square protest that appeared to be completely nonsensical met with rejection: I just thought that last time there were a lot of not very serious placards, so I wanted to do something with irony but relevant (female, aged 30, placard with a picture of Medvedev with the caption ‘Get tired! Leave!’1). Moreover, even people who came to Sakharov Prospekt with absurdist placards explained in their interviews that there was in fact an apposite and political meaning behind them. For example, one informant (male, aged 30) with a placard ‘Seeking a wife’ gave the following answer about its meaning: This, you see, expresses my complex approach to the problems of choice. Do you see? […] I was at Bolotnaya and I’ve come here, and I know that there is no choice about how the situation will develop, no alternative. The country’s lack
1 This hints at the phrase of Boris Yeltsin ‘I’m tired. I’m leaving’, which he supposedly said in December 1999 while addressing Russian citizens to announce that he would be resigning as President of Russia before the end of his term. In reality, Yeltsin did not say it, but it was used in a parody of Yeltsin in a comedy programme and has since become very popular. No 8 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 262
of development is first of all my personal lack of development. The in- formant’s friend standing next to him (female, aged 30) explained that even the fact that the placard was green was no coincidence, as it represents the colour of the Yabloko party. In her opinion, this placard reads for Yabloko, personal needs and honest elections. On the whole, the authors of placards have a much more serious attitude towards the protests and the idea of public protest than it might ap- pear at first glance. The following trend can be identified: ‘comic’ placards tended to be more vivid than the ‘serious’ ones, not only in terms of content but also in terms of form (bigger in size, more tech- nically complicated). One of the working hypotheses of the research was the idea that a sig- nificant proportion of the placards were not created by those using them, but rather downloaded from themed resources on the Internet and then printed out.1 This hypothesis was not borne out: among those questioned on Sakharov Prospekt, not a single one said that they had used a ready-made placard. 36 people (72 %) explained that they had thought up the placard themselves; 5 (10 %) people had borrowed ideas from the media or the Internet but made the placard indepen- dently; 4 people (8 %) said that the concept of the placard was sug- gested by friends; finally, 5 people (10 %) stated that they were holding someone else’s placard and did not know who had thought up the idea. In reality, it seems, the creative independence of the creators of pla- cards was not hugely significant. Although everyone we surveyed had made their placard themselves, the ideas for slogans were sometimes manifestly not original but borrowed. For example, two people from the sample who separately cited the aforementioned popular quota- tion of V clav Havel on their placards commented that they had in- dependently thought up this idea, although it is very probable that they had taken it from an article about the death of the former presi- dent of the Czech Republic.2 However, in general the idea that they had thought up the idea themselves was extremely important for the placard creators; they insisted upon it, even when admitting some other sources of inspiration. In the interviews, many of the infor- mants told us that, after seeing the witty placards at the Bolotnaya Square protest, they decided to make something themselves. In some
1 For example, during the Bolotnaya Square protest several people were walking around with identical placards which depicted a mausoleum with the caption ‘Putin’, beneath which was the slogan ‘We be- lieve! We hope! We are waiting!’. The probability of there being identical homemade placards seemed high, not least because on 12 December the popular magazine ‘Bolshoi Gorod’ (‘The Big City’) posted a ‘placard creator’ on their website with the following note: ‘Since protests are now ranked among urban leisure pursuits, and going to them empty-handed is cold and uninteresting, BG presents a pla- card-making device. Enter any text, choose the colour and format, print and fi ght for your rights’
cases, the new placard was a kind of ‘response’ to someone else’s that they had seen previously: thus, at the earlier protest two similar pla- cards ‘Bring back snowy winter!’ and ‘Bring back fair elections’ were popular. One informant explained that he had had the idea of creating a placard with a list of demands giving two options (‘Snowy winter’ and ‘Fair elections’), with a tick next to the first: We saw that someone had demanded a snowy winter and fair elections, and decided to use that (male, aged 25). The responses of those who admitted holding other people’s placards require their own commentary. It emerged that the strategy of mak- ing additional placards ‘in reserve’ was quite common among protest participants. One informant (male, aged 40) who was standing with a placard ‘I’m voting for Havel’ even offered his second placard with the slogan ‘Parfyonov for president!’1 to the researchers. In other in- stances different informants also mentioned using random passers- by who were offered ‘reserve’ placards2 to hold: We found an old chap, gave him a placard and he’s holding it for us. We’ve not got enough Mikhail Alekseevsky. Who Are All these People (the Ones with Placards)? hands (male, aged 65, placard ‘The courts have 1,500 statements from the discontented’). Likewise, the people holding other people’s placards willingly talk about how they ended up with them: I was walking past. I looked over, someone was standing there, he had three placards. I liked them. I came and stood next to him. I like it, it’s nice (male, aged 45, placard ‘No to drugs in mainstream politics’). Some- times giving out your placards was a necessary measure if one of your friends had not got one: By Komsomolskaya station, where we’d gath- ered, the cops came up to us and asked us to throw away these placards, and one of our guys got his placard taken away, they tore up his placard. We decided to share with our friends and took apart these two-sided placards and gave them out (female, aged 30, placard with a picture of Medvedev and the slogan ‘Get tired! Leave!’). With regard to the content of the placards, one category of protester must be mentioned, which is not usually noticed. The majority of placards at the protest on Sakharov Prospekt were related to the rigged elections and criticism of the current government. However, several placards were on a completely different topic. Thus, for ex- ample, one informant (male, aged 35), who we met at the way out of the street had affixed a sheet of A4 paper to his rucksack with the un intelligible message ‘12.15. Ch. IV. There are more of us. We become more angry’. In his interview he explained that the figures on
1 Leonid Parfyonov is a Russian television presenter who achieved fame as a result of programmes and documentaries about the history and culture of Russian and the USSR. Parfyonov has been one of the most active participants in the protests for fair elections and has enjoyed great popularity among the Russian intelligentsia. 2 Curiously, one young person (male, aged 20), who was standing with a group of his friends with a pla- card about ‘Putin’s larcenous regime’, answered with a joke when asked ‘Who thought up the idea for the placard?’: I was given 300 roubles and told to hold a placard. No 8 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 264
Ill. 6. This person is holding Ill. 7. The second half of this placard someone else’s ‘reserve’ placard had to be given to a friend that he saw and liked whose own placard had been ruined by police officers the placard signify the article number of the Code of Administrative Offences that allows the revoking of one’s driving licence for driving on the wrong side of the road. When asked why he was protesting against this article while participating in a demonstration aimed at another issue entirely, the informant answered: This is a protest, the way I see it, for independent, individual people… And you don’t really have to… I don’t have a platform for protesting about this. An elderly pensioner (male, aged 80) was guided by similar reasons, and came to the protest with material in support of the historical research of Viktor Ilyukhin, deputy of the State Duma, who asserted that in 1941 the Poles who died in the Katyn massacre were shot by Germans, not Soviet soldiers: Well, comrade, you have been coming to protests for maybe a year or maybe two. But I’ve been coming for twenty years. […] Thank you to all those who have finally woken up and got moving. We’ve been troubling the nation for a long time now. These people with strange ‘irrelevant’ placards tended to get lost in the background of other more striking ones, although they form just one colour in the general varied palette of street protest activity. From a subjective assessment, over the month after the elections, the popularity of homemade placards appearing at the protests grew sig- 265 MASS PROTESTS IN DECEMBER 2011 Mikhail Alekseevsky. Who Are All these People (the Ones with Placards)?
Ill. 8. This pensioner has been participating in political street demonstrations for 20 years in order to convince society that Soviet soldiers did not shoot Poles in Katyn in 1941
nificantly: at the protest on 5 December that took place at Chisto- prudny Boulevard, there were very few of them; on 10 December at Bolotnaya Square these kinds of placards were being noticed; on 24 December at Sakharov Prospekt their number had increased markedly. At the procession along Bolshaya Yakimanka on 4 Feb- ruary, homemade placards were not only carried by ordinary protest- ers, but also by demontration organisers, such as the writer Dmitry Bykov, one of the members of the organising committee. How can this trend be explained, and why have unusual homemade placards unexpectedly become one of the most topical and popular forms of political campaigning? It would seem that the answer lies in the particular composition of participants in the protest demonstra- tions. It is considered that the main strength of any mass protest is the crowd, with its inherent anonymity, amorphousness and irregularity, since in a crowd each individual becomes part of a kind of human plankton. The privileged participants of the protest were those speaking out, people who, unlike ordinary participants, had voting authority and No 8 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 266
could voice their ideas, and could attempt to direct the crowd through speeches and slogans. The crowd can also express its feelings, but only in limited collective ways (applause, whistling, shouting and so on), and is generally the object of manipulation.
At the Moscow protest demonstrations this arrangement began to malfunction: those people speaking out who were attempting to manipulate the crowd were faced with its silent protest. It could be supposed that this happened because a significant number of pro- testers were bright, creative people who did not wish to be part of an anonymous crowd, amicably shouting, whistling and clapping. They were not partial to the straightforward slogans of many of those speaking out, but they took a liking to other forms of political protest such as preparing and presenting homemade placards. For these people, the placards were a means of individual self-expression. A person with a placard (especially a witty one) inevitably feels that he or she is not ordinary, but rather a privileged participant in the protest: people walking past pay attention, s/he is frequently photo- graphed and regularly receives compliments and words of support. The placard content becomes his or her individual public statement, making them more like a protest orator, someone who has prac tically attained the authority to vote on behalf of others. Similar ‘visual campaigning’ can have different forms and meanings, but the ten- dency is to create ‘anti-placards’ (by analogy with Reboul’s ‘anti- slogans’), based on paradox, humour or parody. These unusual forms of political protest bring pleasure not just to their creators, but also to viewers, stimulating thought processes and creative activity. There- fore it is unsurprising that the practice of creating homemade pla- cards for street protest demonstrations is gaining popularity, trans- forming an anonymous crowd into a gathering of bright individuals. The interviews show that for many of those surveyed, the prompt for them to create their own placard was someone else’s ‘visual cam- paigning’. This means that while street protest events remain popular the number of placards will increase. The hope remains that re- searchers from various disciplines will continue studying this dynam- ically developing cultural phenomenon, focusing on the placards themselves as well as their creators.
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Translated by Rosie Tweddle