Forum 8.Indb

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 political 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 political 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 inspiration 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 slogans. 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-globalization 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 activists are extremely serious.2 Ill. 1. Placards from the street demonstration ‘Occupy Wall Street’ in New York in September 2011. Photograph taken from: <http://millefiorifavoriti.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-wtc-progress- and-occupy-wall-street.html> 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 slogans 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.

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