MASARYK UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF SOCIAL STUDIES
Department of Sociology
Social Media as a Threat to National Security The Role of Facebook in the Russian Protests of 2011-2012
Master‟s Thesis
Evgeniya Fomenko
Supervisor: Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky, Ph.D. UCO: 404898 Study Field: Sociology Year of Enrollment: 2012 Brno, 2014
I hereby declare that this thesis I submit for assessment is entirely my own work and has not been taken from the work of others save to the extent that such work has been cited and acknowledged within the text of my work.
Date: Signature
2 Table of Contents
Abstract ...... 4
Introduction ...... 5
Theoretical Background and Literature Review ...... 7
The Cultural Turn to Social Media: Jeffrey Alexander...... 7
Tweeting the Protests: Social Media and Revolutions ...... 11
The Russian Scenario: The Internet Revolution ...... 16
Methodology and Methods ...... 18
Analysis ...... 28
The Anatomy of Protests ...... 28
The First Stage: “For Fair Elections” ...... 28
The Second Stage: Free Pussy Riot! ...... 42
Facebook as a Tool of Emergent Protest ...... 48
Facebook as a Threat to National Security ...... 64
Conclusions ...... 68
References ...... 70
Total Character Count: 140,829
3 Abstract
The medium is the message. During the last decade people all over the world witnessed appearance and establishment of different kinds of social media and saw how they little by little had become stronger and more powerful. Being extremely accessible, they enabled any person to contribute to the creation of meaning and to express his/her will. Social media played an extremely important role in the global wave of protests, which started in 2011 with the Arab Spring. This research focuses on the Russian protests of 2011-2012 and approaches the functioning of social media from the perspective of cultural sociology, analyzing the discourse of Facebook messages and comments concerning the organization of the Russian political meetings and demonstrations. Besides the content of the messages, their number and spreading speed were also scrutinized, in order to identify the role of Facebook in the
Russian “White Revolution”. The results showed that Facebook was used as one of the main tools for the organization of protests, as people had tended to express their political views via this social network. Thus, taking into account the enormous audience of social media and the scale of protests, which can be organized with their help, it can be stated that social media are becoming a powerful weapon for people, especially in times of social disturbances. Therefore, they can be considered a threat to national security.
Keywords: social media, protests, Russia, discourse analysis
4 Introduction
The medium is the message. For a long time people lived in the world of classical media that were established, funded, and developed by different social and political forces. The message of a particular medium was shaped by the political views and social status of its creators and owners, and it was not so hard to orient oneself in the world of various media. However, during the last decade we witnessed appearance and establishment of different kinds of social media and saw how they little by little had become stronger and more powerful. In case of social media it is no longer obvious who is responsible for creating the meaning of a particular source and it seems that any person has equal right and access to these type of media and can contribute to the creation of meaning.
Taking into account the speed of the information flow in the modern technological world, such accessibility may potentially lead to many problems and even disasters on social, national, and even worldwide levels. With social media it is extremely easy to spread any false information and thus incline people to trust it.
Repeated by many, especially by people whom you trust, any information becomes believable. This may cause a misunderstanding of any situation—political or social— by large groups of people and potentially lead towards the collisions based only on the wrong interpretation of facts. Even the usage of social media for the purpose of charity (for example, when some amount of money is needed for a surgery and people try to collect it via Twitter or Facebook) can be dangerous now, since you never know if the situation described in a sorrowful pleading is real or not. With the anonymity, which is common for the Internet, social media become a perfect place for any kind of fraud.
The information is spreading within the networks of social media like a virus,
5 and this virus is likely to capture people‟s consciousness. As a result, we can see a boom of revolutionary and protest activity in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and this activity is not just a local phenomenon, it is observed all over the world (e.g. the Arab
Spring, the Occupy Movements in the USA and in Russia, British and Spanish riots of
2011). In some countries (Egypt, Tunisia) this protest activity led towards some prominent changes in the state structure; in others (the USA, the Great Britain,
Russia) its impact was not so serious. However, it can be said for sure that these protests were not unnoticed; in each country they caused a lot of concerns at the time.
With this research, I would like to address the issue of social media from the perspective of national security. Apart from the entertaining component of social media, in the recent years people started to take them as a perfect ground to express their political views and, therefore, social media became a powerful weapon for people, especially in times of social disturbance. What are the consequences of this transition? While people got a tool, which allows them to coalesce quickly if needed, the governments all over the world got a complicated apparatus, which can either help them to establish closer connection with the citizens of their countries or become a real threat to national security. As for now, most of the governments try to take advantage of social media; many governmental institutions create and maintain their accounts in various social networks and use them to interact with ordinary citizens, regularly on bilateral basis (the institutions share some public information on their pages, while people can submit their queries directly to the social media account of the particular organization and get response). However, in times of social disturbance many governments tend to block social media, as it was during the 2011 protests in
Egypt (Alexander 2011) or in Turkey in 2014 (Lenta.ru 2014).
The question whether such anxiety is reasonable for governments seems very
6 interesting to research. Using an example of the Russian “White Revolution” of 2011-
2012, for this study I am analyzing the role of social media, particularly Facebook, in these events and trying to understand the potential danger of the social networks.
Scrutinizing the content of the Facebook messages related to the protests from the perspective of cultural sociology, I am also assessing the scale of the Facebook audience involved in the protest activity and illustrating the changes observed during the movement. As a result, I show a general image of the Russian protest discourse with a particular focus on the period at the peak of the protest movement in December
2011. This discourse was developed on the basis of the clear division of its “sacred” and “profane” components, which I also analyze in this study. Based on the analyzed data, I am stating that Facebook was used as one of the main tools for the organization of the Russian protests and pointing out its potential threat to national security.
Despite the fact that these protests came more or less to nothing, I show the future potential of social media in terms of the organization of all kinds of protest activity and explain why governments tend to block them in times of social disturbance.
Theoretical Background and Literature Review
The Cultural Turn to Social Media: Jeffrey Alexander
In the recent years social media became an inherent part of people‟s life, allowing every person to create his/her own page within the global network 1 .
Therefore, they became the specific tools, which people started to use in the day-to- day process of the cultural formation. A part of the cultural capital2 continuously
1 The biggest social network, Facebook, achieved a number of 1,000,000 users in 2012 and continues to grow (CNET 2012). 2 The term “cultural capital” was suggested by Pierre Bourdieu. He states, “Cultural capital can exist in three forms: in the embodied state, i.e., in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body; in the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, 7 produced be people, which earlier was very brittle and short-living due to its existence only in form of oral communications, for the first time in the history of humanity got the chance to be preserved. Thanks to social media many of vivid discussions and dialogues are stored now on the web-servers, forming the new field of cultural sources that can be used in order to analyze any society. As close to the face-to-face interaction as they may be, these data reflect the state of affairs in every particular moment of time, as well as the social mood of this time and, therefore, can be used in the historical analysis of discourse.
The new data helps sociologists to build a more colorful model of the cultural interactions within society. Taking into account the fact that these data are represented mostly in the form of information, the language units rather than some material objects, it is necessary to find an appropriate strategy for working with them. One of the most prominent theorists of the cultural approach, Jeffrey Alexander argues that culture is no longer just a set of beliefs, values, and certain material objects. In his view, any of these culture indicators has its own meaning that is much more important than the indicator itself (Alexander and Smith 2003). He advocates the concept of cultural sociology in contrast to sociology of culture, stating that “every action, no matter how instrumental, reflexive, or coerced vis-a-vis its external environments, is embedded to some extent in a horizon of affect and meaning” (Alexander 1988, as cited in Alexander and Smith 2003:12). In short, the main difference between the cultural sociological approach and the approach of sociology of culture consists in the attitude towards the autonomy of culture. Cultural sociology considers culture to be independent and autonomous, while sociology of culture treats culture as a dependent
machines, etc.), which are the trace or realization of theories or critiques of these theories, problematics, etc.; and in the institutionalized state, a form of objectification which must be set apart because, as will be seen in the case of educational qualifications, it confers entirely original properties on the cultural capital which it is presumed to guarantee.” (Bourdieu 1986). 8 variable. It seems that sociology of culture prefers to think about culture as a result of human activity in different spheres of social life, such as economy or politics, while cultural sociology mostly considers it to be the defining element of people‟s life.
Depending on the attitude towards the autonomy of culture, sociological theories occupy “strong” or “weak” position, and strong program gives culture more autonomy than whichever theory else, admitting that culture can have an effect on politics, economy, etc. Alexander (2003:22) states that the first step towards the strong program was taken by Clifford Geertz, when he suggested that societies “could be read like a text” and that they “contain their own explanations”. While this idea, in
Alexander‟s view, might be inadequate, “it indicates the need for the explanation of meaning to be at the center of the intellectual agenda and offers a vigorous affirmation of cultural autonomy” (Alexander 2003:22). Moving meanings into the center of the cultural sociological perspective, Alexander (2003:24) shows us that culture is not feeble and incredibly subjective structure, saying the following:
Because meanings are arbitrary and are generated from within the sign system, they enjoy a certain autonomy from social determination, just as the language of a country cannot be predicted from the knowledge that it is capitalist or socialist, industrial or agrarian. Culture now becomes a structure as objective as any more material social fact.
Alexander (2003:24) claims also that culture should be understood not just as text “but rather as a text that is underpinned by signs and symbols that are in patterned relationship with each other”. When it comes to practice, Alexander analyzes society and its cultural representations, using the Durkheim‟s idea of binary oppositions. In his recent work Performative Revolution in Egypt: An Essay in Cultural Power
(2011), on the example of Egyptian Revolution, Alexander shows that a social fact is not the only important thing in any social event, as its representation also plays
9 significant and even crucial role for the course of events and their interpretation by public. He states that this interpretation is determined by a certain set of binary oppositions, or codes, which he defines after Durkheim as “sacred” and “profane”, claiming that the criteria for these categories are different for people from different background. The scheme of the discourse formation on the basis of binary codes is fully applicable to the Russian protests, as in times of social disturbance similar to
Russian the contrast between the “sacred” and “profane” becomes more prominent.
Any protest has its supporters and opponents, which is a binary opposition itself; and each group develops its own representation of the events and creates specific binary codes to interpret it. The analysis of the Russian protests conducted during this study demonstrated the sharp division between the “sacred” and “profane” components of the Russian protest discourse. Based on the Facebook data, it was analyzed how the binary codes were used during the protests and how did they shape the discourse of these protests.
It is important that, in Alexander‟s (2011) view, nowadays media turn from observers and reporters into active participants of social life. Analyzing the events of the Egyptian Revolution in chronological order from the preparation of the protest to its logical outcome in Mubarak‟s resignation, Alexander studies the international reaction on the revolution as it was represented in the news reports and argues that journalists‟ judgments “were not „objective‟ but interpretive” (Alexander 2011:75).
Interpreting the events and publishing different reports that could be easily accessed by people from various parts of the world, media, in fact, provoked the interchange of meanings (in Alexander‟s terms). In case of social media, and Facebook in particular, this “interpretive” component was even more important, because all posts and messages there contributed to the development of the Russian protest discourse and
10 cannot be treated as independent coverage of the events. It can be said that Facebook was used as a platform for organization of the Russian meetings and therefore the information published there could not be “objective”.
Taking into account the importance of media that was proclaimed by Alexander, the study of media is necessary for sociology. Being comparatively new, the approach of media analysis can help sociologists to understand the process of shaping the culture, its role in the social development, and the mechanism of interaction between culture and actors. Actually, the study of media is not just a study of various texts, it is rather a study of different meanings. Cultural sociology states that, in order to understand any phenomenon or process, you need to understand all meanings involved in it. Meanings, however, continuously change, influencing the society and simultaneously being influenced by it. Maybe this permanent transformation of meanings is the driving force of the whole society? It is rather probable. At least, as
Alexander (2011:66) says, “meanings make revolutions”, so we have to be careful with them.
The great importance of media in the social life is indisputable and the example of the Egyptian Revolution proved this thesis. In the title of his book about the
Egyptian Revolution Jeffrey Alexander used the words “cultural power” and the analysis of media coverage of any contemporary event, in fact, shows this power in action. This cultural power is one (if not the only) of the most important and influential driving forces of social life and, of course, those people, who control it, in fact, control the whole society. As Allen Ginsberg, American poet of Beat
Generation, said, “Whoever controls the media — the images — controls the culture”.
Tweeting the Protests: Social Media and Revolutions
11 Social media opened the new horizons in terms of social organization. Giving people an easy access to participate in social and political life, they became soon a powerful tool, which can be used in case of need. Posting a message in any social network, every person gets a chance to reach an audience much wider than it would be possible without the involvement of social media. While many messages continue to be personal and are addressed only to tiny groups of people, some of the content spreads within the network with an amazing speed, involving more and more people in its distribution.
This feature of social media allowed people to find like-minded persons from all over the world and led towards the possibility of formation of some big and well- organized groups. People quickly adopted the social media style of messaging and got used to the new environment, contributing to its growing in the same time. However, the real organizing potential of the social media became apparent during the wave of protests of 2011-2012. By this time social media gained enough power to influence enormous amount of people, while people themselves learned how to use them in the most productive way. As a result, the first protests of 2011 (the Arab Spring) were not only well covered in social media, but also had a huge impact from social media, since without the new informational tools these protests would not have been possible
(Alexander 2011; Joseph 2012).
The specific of each social media predetermined its role in the events. For example, Twitter became a perfect tool for live translations from the hearts of events.
In the modern world full of information, the demand for such live translations was extremely high, because people tended to get lost in all news from different sources, while the usage of Twitter allowed them to follow the news from the first hands
(Alexander 2011). Of course, this involvement of social media influenced the events a
12 lot, as well as the events themselves influenced the further development of social media.
Taking into account the fact that the protests of 2011-2012 were the first social/political events, where social media were used so widely due to the “advent of mobile social media” (Joseph 2012:149), it is hardly surprising that the new informational agenda became an extremely interesting object for analysis. Apart from
Jeffrey Alexander with his study of the Egyptian events, many other sociologists started to investigate the new phenomenon of social and political activism within social networks (see, for example, Castells 2010 and 2012; Ford & Gil 2001;
Morozov 2012, etc.). Not only the role of the social media in particular events was studied, but also the interdependence of the rise of social media and the rise of political protests.
Despite a big role of social media in the 2011-2012 protests, it cannot be said that social media is a universal tool of protest because of their dichotomic character.
As Sara Joseph (2012:167) states, “social media and the Internet can facilitate oppression as easily as they can facilitate pro-democracy activism”, because while they “can be used to support pro-democracy forces, it can also be used to push pro- government propaganda” (Joseph 2012:172). However, even without the governmental influence social media activism is often not sufficient to achieve its main purpose, which in case of the Russian protests of 2011-2012 was to conduct re- elections and therefore change the state order. This insufficiency can be explained by the fact that protest networks build with the help of social media are not so united and consolidated as the networks built traditionally, because of the fleeting character of the information published there (Morozov 2012). As a result, “While loose networks may play a key role in forcing dramatic and profound political change, more
13 organized hierarchies are needed to anchor this change” (Joseph 2012:165). During the Russian protests of 2011-2012 this characteristic of the social media networks was demonstrated by the fact that relatively successful first stage of protests was followed by less organized and less prosperous second stage, when everything finally resumed its natural course.
The loose character of the social media networks caused some doubts between the scientists regarding the possibility of the “Twitter and Facebook revolutions”.
Thus, while Malcolm Gladwell (2010) states that a proper protest would never be tweeted, Clay Shirky (2011) argues that while social media may not allow “otherwise uncommitted groups to take effective political action” “they do, however, allow the committed groups to play by new rules”. Gladwell (2010) points out that a protest may find some supporters within the social media, but cannot be organized in the social media. The Russian protests, however, illustrates rather Shirky‟s position, demonstrating that using the social media people got an “ability to be more publicly vocal and to coordinate more rapidly and on a larger scale than before these tools existed” (Shirky 2011). The analysis of Facebook data regarding the Russian protests was a perfect way to clarify who was right in the Gladwell-Shirky debates and which statements of both scientists were confirmed by the Russian practice.
Despite the doubts regarding the role of digital activism expressed by some scientists, neither Manuel Castells (2010, 2012) nor Paolo Gerbaudo (2012) underestimate the importance of social media in contemporary social activism.
Castells (2012:58) points out that “Twitter provide the technological platform for multiple individuals to rise as trendsetters in the movement”. This allowed the protest movements of the digital age to be mostly leaderless and have a spontaneous character of development. The Russian protest movement of 2011-2012 also lacked
14 an identified leader, especially on the second stage of the movement when the political demands of the protesters almost dissolved (it can be seen from the analysis of Facebook posts and comments published in the groups related to the Russian protest movement). Castells (2012), however, states that being born in the Internet with the help of social media, a protest movement can develop further even without the Internet when people are already united by some common idea. Perhaps, on this stage a manifested leader and clear program are needed, but it seems that the Russian protest lacked both.
Acknowledging a deep relation between the social activism of the recent years and social media, Paolo Gerbaudo (2012) states that along with possibilities for protestors, social media bring some risks to the society. He also claims the disappearance of a strong leader of a protest in digital age because of social, participatory character of the activity. Since every person can contribute to the development of this protest, every person is somehow a leader. During the Russian events the participatory character of Facebook was widely used: sharing the information about the protests and inviting their friends to come, people became a leaders among their groups of friends and acquaintances. It seems that being such leaders they could not decline to go to the meetings and thus a huge attendance was guaranteed.
All in all, both scientists who recognize an important role of the social media in the political protests of the recent years and those who do not recognize it agree that some change in the character of activism occurred in the digital age. However, this digital age has its own specific—for example, the high instability of digital media discourse caused by incredibly high speed of the information flow. Every message in social media has a relatively short life, because one sensation is likely to give way to
15 another (Morozov 2012). Taking this into account, it is possible that even a big protest with a social media as its main platform can fade away when a new sensation occurs.
The Russian Scenario: The Internet Revolution
The Russian protests began in the very end of 2011, after the parliamentary elections that took place on December 4. During the several following months, however, the first enthusiastic mood completely disappeared along with a significant number of initial supporters of the movement according to the scenario suggested by
Morozov (2012). Nevertheless, the accessibility of the social media contributed to their wide usage during the Russian movement. Moreover, the examples of the Arab
Spring and Occupy Wall Street movement with their coordination via social media also played a great role, involving the social media in Russian protest activity (Reuter
& Szakonyi 2013). As mentioned in Anna Litvinenko‟s article (2013:181), “In the late 1990s and early 2000s the rise of Internet was praised as a chance for democratization in Russia via free access to political information and pluralism in opinions”. This representation if the Internet was common during the time when social media were not yet in use; with the advent of the social networks in the late
2000s and early 2010s it can be said that the praise of the Internet as a ground and tool for participation in Russian political life went even further.
The usage of the Internet as a main informational channel of the Russian protest movement predetermined the social composition of the protesters. Due to a relatively low number of participants in the Internet activity, the Russian Internet information field was to some extent isolated from a big part of Russian society, which does not use the Internet or use it limitedly (Litvinenko 2013). Because of the big difference in
16 number of Internet users in Moscow and in other Russian regions the protests were much more crowded in Moscow (Litvinenko 2013). However, “Russian activists pointed to social media as the single most important factor in the advent of their movement” (Meredith 2012:89). Moreover, it was demonstrated by Ora John Reuter and David Szakonyi (2013) that the level of political awareness and the level of the awareness about the electoral fraud was much higher among the users of social media than among the people who did not use any social media or did not have an Internet access at all. As a result, in Russia “relatively small part of the population” took part
“in the oppositional discourse” (Litvinenko 2013:186).
It is interesting to note that in the Russian case the media coverage at the same time contributed to the protest movement and damaged it. On the example of Twitter,
Galina Nikiporetz-Takigawa analyses the changes in the role of social media during the Russian protests and comes to the conclusion that they “played simultaneously neutral, supportive, organizational and destructive roles” (Nikiporetz-Takigawa
2012:16). Moreover, developing the program of the protests in the Internet and trying to organize as many small oppositional events as possible, the organizers, as it seems, forgot to develop a program suitable for prolonged protest. Many of the protests did not go further social networks: people were extremely proactive in expressing their opinion in the Internet, but at the end they did not do the same in the real life.
Therefore, on the example of the Russian events the ambiguity of the role of social media was shown, and this ambiguity was connected not only to the possible damages of national security, but also to the most likely damage for the protest movement itself. This dichotomous character of the social networks shown during the Russian events was demonstrated as well in Evgeny Morozov‟s book The Net Delusion: The
Dark Side of Internet Freedom (2012) where he expresses his doubts in the power of
17 social media as a tool of protest. Acknowledging the role of the social networks in worldwide protests of 2011-2012, Morozov (2012) states that these networks may easily become destructive for protests, because the protest network they form is too loose to resist strong governmental system.
It seems that in Russian scenario all possible problems mentioned by different scientists came into operation. On the second stage of the Russian movement protesters were stuck in the Internet discussions and lacked a significant activity in the real life, i.e. the activity, which counts by governmental structures as a potential threat for stability and national security. However, the Russian protests were not completely useless, because they demonstrated the power of the Russian society (even in its small part of Internet users) and showed some perspectives of the development of the civil society in Russia, as well as of the Russian democratic development (Meredith 2012).
In this theoretical framework it is extremely interesting to make a close-up view of the Russian protests documented in social media. While the statistical data were already analyzed (see, for example, Nikiporetz-Takigawa 2013), the development of the Russian protest discourse is still waiting to be studied. The analysis of meanings, of the binary oppositions using during the Russian protests can help to understand the validity of concepts developed on the basis of statistical data and show the Russian protests from the different point of view.
Methodology and Methods
Modern people live in the world full of information, and a big part of this information can be presented as text. For a long time all people interacted with text, but only few of them were involved in the process of its creation. However, the spreading of the Internet and emerging of social media during the last decades
18 changed this state of affairs. Nowadays, basically every person, who uses the Internet, creates a particular amount of text, being simultaneously a reader and a writer. Social media give all people an equal opportunity to express their opinions and thoughts in the form of text, and therefore text becomes the main subject of analysis.
In order to analyze the text created and preserved in social media, I chose a qualitative method of study. This approach helps me to understand the root causes of the events and to answer the main questions of “how” and “why” social media were used during the Russian “White Revolution”. Some numerical data were also collected from Facebook pages, in order to demonstrate the scale of the movement.
Using qualitative methods, I have a chance to analyze the concrete events and find the results based on data as opposite to proving a concept with quantitative evidence.
Moreover, qualitative methods allowed me to analyze meanings, which is particularly helpful for this study.
The study of social media, as any cultural study, is likely going to boil down to the study of meanings, and we definitely need some specific tools for it. In fact, cultural sociology suggests one of the best ways to explore meanings within various media and to examine them, namely discourse analysis. The concept of discourse is itself rather complicated. What is discourse? In short, it can be said that discourse is just a sum of vocabulary, different expressions and particular styles that were used in the conversation. However, it would be unwise to focus only on this linguistic component of the whole term and claim that discourse is connected mostly with philology. In fact, discourse is much more than just a set of words; it is a totality of denotations and connotations, a vivid interaction of words, meanings, and their interpretations.
During the 20th century several theorists and philosophers were developing the
19 concept of discourse. Perhaps, the most prominent of them is Michel Foucault, who defines discourse as a system of thoughts and points out its deep relation to power.
According to Foucault, discourse is connected not only to language, but also to the whole totality of the informational field, which exists in particular moment. In the
“Archaeology of Knowledge” (2002:123) Foucault gives such definition of discourse:
… a group of statements in so far as they belong to the same discursive formation; it does not form a rhetorical or formal unity, endlessly repeatable, whose appearance of use in history might be indicated (and, if necessary, explained); it is made up of a limited number of statements for which a group of conditions of existence can be defined. Discourse in this sense is not an ideal, timeless form that also possesses a history … it is, from beginning to end, historical.
Following this definition, it can be said that Foucault treats discourse as a frozen composition of connotations in history and therefore states that it can be analyzed historically. Moreover, Foucault points out that the term discourse “can be defined as the group of statements that belong to a single system of formation” and it is possible to speak about “the clinical discourse, economic discourse, the discourse of natural history, psychiatric discourse” (Foucault 2002:121). Taking this into account, for the purposes if this study it is possible to speak about the discourse of the Russian protests of 2011-2012 as well.
The Argentinian political theorist Ernesto Laclau points out as well that discourse is “a system of differential entities — that is, of moments” (Laclau &
Mouffe 2011:111) and stresses that it is unstable, since with the change of one element its relations to the other elements of the system are also changing. Speaking of this instability, Laclau uses a concept of a “floating signifier”, saying that the “field of identities… never manage to be fully fixed” (Laclau & Mouffe 2001:111). This instability of discourse leads toward the fact that the structure of discourse fully
20 closed (Andersen 2003:51). Therefore, while we can approach to the analysis of discourse from the historical perspective, it is necessary to remember that the object of our analysis is not the same for the whole period of study.
Both theorists agree that different texts in different circumstances possess different discourse. In addition to this, it seems that discourses of particular texts definitely depend on the general discourse of the concrete media and even on the whole discourse of the country, where the text was published, since any discourse exists in certain context. It can be said thus that discourse somehow mirrors the whole social situation of the moment. For the purpose of this study, discourse will be treated simply as a totality of meanings at a certain moment in time, in other words, as all the possible interactions between different meanings. The discourse will be studied here in its particular context, namely the social conditions at the time of the Russian protests.
The formation and shaping of discourse is connected with the identification of so-called binary oppositions and division of the world into two parts: “sacred” and
“profane”. Jeffrey Alexander (2003; 2011) studies discourse of the particular moment, analyzing the changes in the structure of these oppositions and their influence on the discourse of certain society. Since the binary oppositions are natural for any society and for any person the changes within them or the changes of principles for their classification lead towards the changes of the discourse of the society.
The discourse of the society cannot be isolated from the external influence. It is impossible to imagine that in our times of high-tech and swift spread of information any discourse can still remain to be just a product of the concrete society. Various discourses meet each other and interact with each other. Any discourse, thus, is an object of permanent influence of many external forces and therefore is changing in
21 accordance with these factors. Sometimes these changes are really small and it is hard to catch them, but their impact becomes apparent later, when the recent development of discourse can be seen in retrospect. It can be easily shown on the simple example from the sphere of technical development: in the first half of the 20th century people could not imagine a computer, but now they cannot imagine the life without it. The possibility of this emerged only because one single person started to think about it and share the ideas with others; thus, the discourse had changed, allowing the new inventions to appear and to change the discourse further. It should be noted as well that minor changes in connotations sometimes might lead to the great changes, for example, on the political stage — that is why all politicians watch their language very carefully.
Taking into account the possibility of historical analysis of discourse, it becomes even more interesting—and at the same time challenging—to study discourse of the modern times. While people for a long time had a lot of written documents, where part of the discourse of particular moment was preserved, now we live in the era of the Internet and social networks. Besides the huge amount of information that is stored on the numerous web-servers, for the first time in history we have a source to analyze, which is as close to our informal speech and informal language as possible. It is very probable that thanks to the frozen dialogues and discussions from social networks we can reconstruct the discourse of particular moment better and therefore subject it to a more detailed study.
Moreover, the new agenda of discourse, which includes the content from social media, gives new meaning to Foucault‟s statement about the deep relation between discourse and power. While it is more or less obvious who is responsible for the formation of a particular discourse in the situation, when power is concentrated within
22 a small group of people, it becomes much more complicated to identify the creators of discourse in case of multiple creators of meaning. Social media in fact allows every person to take part in the creation of discourse and therefore the concept of power related to discourse is becoming rather vague. Who has the power to control discourse when everyone has an access to its creation?
Since social media recently became an inalienable part of people‟s life, it is hard to find a sphere of this life, which was not affected by them. However, among the whole amount of different usages, in the last years there was one tendency that deserves a detailed study. During the wave of protests, which took place in 2011 and
2012 throughout the whole world, social media were widely used for the organization of protest activities, for the spreading of live news about them and for the expressing of the opinion of millions of people. The Russian protests of 2011-2012 were not exclusion: it can be definitely said that social media played an extremely important role in these activities.
The Research Questions
Social media is a new tool for people and governments. In the recent years they favored a lot to the establishment of closer relations between many governments and people, but in times of social disturbance many governments tend to block some of the social media (in the worst case, an access to the Internet) in their countries, feeling that they might be dangerous for stability and national security. Following the tricky question about the responsibility for the creation of discourse in the modern world, it is interesting to pose such research question:
- Why are social media dangerous for stability and national security?
In order to answer this question on the basis of the Facebook data, I raised
23 several small queries, which helped me to understand the whole situation in relation to the role of Facebook in the Russian protests. In particular, the following questions were posed during the study:
- How big was the Facebook audience involved in the Russian protests?
- What changes in the amount of people interested in the protest activity
occurred during the period of protests?
- How did protesters use Facebook during the protests?
- How did the Russian protest discourse develop within Facebook?
- Which binary codes were used on Facebook by the Russian protesters?
Principles of Data Collection
During the protests, three main social networks were used to create and maintain the movement, namely Facebook, Twitter, and VK.com (the Russian analogue of Facebook).
Twitter, taking into account the specific characteristics of this network (limited length of messages, orientation on continuous information flow, lack of possibility to conduct prolonged discussions, etc.), was used mostly for the up-to-date comments from the event spots. Also, with the help of Twitter, opposition maintained the interest to the protest movement between the protest marches and other activities, spreading short pieces of information just like viruses, using the features of the network (for example, hashtags). Keeping in mind this specific of Twitter usage during the Russian protests along with the main research questions, which presuppose the analysis not only of the scope of the activity, but also its content, the Twitter activity was not analyzed during this study. In order to answer the research questions, it was necessary to deal with more extended messages without the limitation of
24 140 characters per query.
The basic ideological platform for the protest movement was build within two other social networks, VK and Facebook. The audience of VK in Russia is bigger than the Russian audience on Facebook with almost 44 millions of monthly visitors against 13 millions (Digital Strategy Consulting 2013). Based on these numbers, it can be said that VK is the main social network in Russia. However, there was a concern among people that VK might be connected with Russian governmental forces, and this fear was improved when VK‟s administration had closed several groups of protest supporters due to extremist character of their discussions within the groups (Reuter & Szakonyi 2013). In such circumstances, Facebook was perceived by people as an independent and ideologically neutral social platform, and this fact explains its popularity among protesters (Reuter & Szakonyi 2013).
A lot of groups, pages and events on Facebook were created. Two biggest groups, according to the number of “Likes” and “Followers” on each page, “Millions of Citizens for Fair Elections” and “We Were on Bolotnaya and Will Come Again”, along with all Facebook event pages that were created for each protest activity, were chosen for analysis. As for now, most of them are either closed or not functioning anymore, while several of the sources still maintain some activity (mostly by re- posting news related to the Russian opposition). Groups and pages were connected with all stages of the Russian protest movement of 2011-2012: some of them were created for a particular event or a set of events; others served as an organizing force of the movement. All these pages contain hundreds of posts and thousands of comments from Facebook users, mostly in Russian. For the purposes of this study only 107 posts with their comments were analyzed.
In order to show the shaping of the movement at its peak, a specific time frame
25 was selected, namely the period between two biggest protests, which took place on
December 10, 2011 (on Bolotnaya Square) and December 24, 2011 (on the
Academician Sakharov Prospect). During this period, the meeting on the Sakharov
Prospect was organized along with the general consolidation of the protest movement.
In the group “Millions of Citizens for Fair Elections”, 47 posts were published between December 11 and 24 (Facebook 2011d), while the group “We Were on
Bolotnaya and Will Come Again” contains 60 posts related to the same period
(Facebook 2011e). Apart from the posts themselves, a significant number of comments in both groups were analyzed: up to 100 comments per post for the first group (Facebook 2011d) and up to 170 comments per post for the second one
(Facebook 2011e).
The study was divided into two parts. The first one was connected mostly with the analysis of numbers, while the second one introduced the discourse analysis of the content. On the first stage, in order to analyze the scale of the Facebook activity during the protests, it was necessary to understand the influential potential of the messages and information distributed within the network. This influential potential can be measured by the statistics on all Facebook event pages, which shows how many people were invited to each event, how many people decided to go there or said that they might come. The influential potential of the small messages posted on the particular page can be estimated by the number of “Likes” on this page and number of comments under the message. However, it should not be forgotten that this is a historical analysis of the living, unstable environment, so the number of “Likes” and the number of comments could have changed since 2012. This change will not affect the estimated number of people involved in any informational chain though, since the activity on these pages was quite low after the end of the first and second waves of
26 protests (December 2011 — summer 2012).
On the second stage of the study, the content of the messages was studied, in order to show how the facts could be misinterpreted, intentionally or unintentionally, which can lead towards the social disturbances and therefore demonstrate the dangerous character of social media. For example, it‟s interesting to show how opposition sometimes perverted the news (or just put more attention to minor problems), in order to warm up people‟s interest to protest movement. Moreover, such kind of “cheating” was used also to attract the attention of traditional media to protests and their preparation, in order to let more people know about the movement
(the audience of traditional media in Russia is still bigger than the audience of social media; plus, with the help of traditional media, there was a chance to involve people of older generations in protests). Sometimes false information from social networks penetrated into newspapers and magazines and, despite the low level of confidence in its sources, this information settled in people‟s minds, shaping their attitude toward the events in the political sphere.
The Time Frame
This research focuses on the period from December 2011 till August 2012, divided into two main parts: the political movement (December 2011 — March 2012) and the social movement, which also can be called “the hipster movement” based on the composition of the participants (March — August 2012). The political stage of the movement was connected with a purely political protest; the main statement of protesters during this phase was the demand of the “fair elections”. The social stage of the movement began after the presidential elections took place on March 4, 2012 and there was no longer any reason to fight for the “fair elections”, because the elections
27 had already come off. On the social stage of the movement, people started to fight for
“political prisoners”, for “the freedom of walking”, and for other social rights and demands.
The specified time frame covers most of the Russian protests, since after August
2012 there were only isolated events, connected mostly with the previous meetings and protests (for example, small manifestations in support of people arrested on
Bolotnaya Square during the “March of Millions” on the 6th of May, 2012).
Analysis
The Anatomy of Protests
The First Stage: “For Fair Elections”
The year 2011 was the year of global and local protests. Beginning in January and February with so-called Arab spring, the protests then came further, even to the seemingly safe and problem-free developed western countries, such as Great Britain and the United States of America. London protests and the Occupy Wall Street movement along with the disturbances in all Arabic countries had a huge impact on the social consciousness of the whole humanity. The sense of protest, the rebellious desire to remonstrate against the things that for a long time had been considered common and normal hanged thick in the air. When in the middle of December the
Time magazine announced as always the person of the year, it was hardly surprising to see an unknown Protester on its cover (Time 2011). This choice was a clear reflection of the time spirit.
After the whole year of protests that were very well covered by all media, including the traditional ones (such as newspapers, magazines, TV and radio newscasts) as well as the modern ones (Internet-based news feeds, digital editions of
28 popular classic media), the spirit of rebel came to Russia. Taking into account an easy access to all possible news channels from any part of Russia, and especially from the central region around Moscow and Saint Petersburg, by the end of the year people were aware of the situation all over the world and adopted the protest mood. They wanted, so to say, to take part in the history, which was created on the streets of different cities these months.
However, the Russian protests did not occur until the very end of the year.
Despite the strong sense of involvement in the global community, people in Russia needed a formal occasion to express their indignation. They needed a starting point, something they can actually protest against, because without the clear definition of
“the enemy” an organized protest seems impossible. In order to define this “enemy”, a certain group within society, which Jeffrey Alexander, following the concept of Max
Weber, calls “the carrier group” (Alexander 2004:11), started to spread its own representation of the Russian discursive reality. In the Russian case, it was the oppositionists to the official government who formed this carrier group. This opposition circle was formed around the Russian lawyer, political activist, and blogger Alexei Navalny, who had started an Internet campaign against corruption several years before the Russian protests occurred. During these years he attracted a number of supporters, most of whom were educated people in their 20s and 30s
(Levada-Center 2011). This was a rather narrow stratum, because in April 2011, according to the statistics of the Russian polling and sociological research organization Levada-Center, only 6% of the respondents knew who was Alexei
Navalny (Levada-Center 2012). Taking into account the fact that this number could increase by December 2011, it could not be more that 25%, as this was the result of the next poll, conducted in March 2012 (Levada-Center 2012). Nevertheless, being an
29 integral part of every society, including Russian, the oppositionists built more or less strong circle on the wave of the protest mood. Using Alexander‟s terms, it can be said that it was an institutional carrier group, which is characterized by representation of
“one particular social sector or organization against others in a fragmented or polarized social order” (Alexander 2004:11). According to Alexander (2004:11):
Carrier groups have both ideal and material interests, they are situated in particular places in the social structure, and they have particular discursive talents for articulating their claims—for what might be called “meaning making”—in the public sphere.
Being a classic carrier group with all characteristics from this definition, the
Russian oppositional carrier group started to play an important role in the meaning making process in Russia. By the end of the 2011, the protest energy within society was really huge and the catalyst for an organized movement should have been equally important. As a result, based on the analysis of the Russian protest activity of 2011-
2012, it seems that the parliamentary elections planned for the beginning of December
2011, were chosen by the carrier group, which shaped the discourse of society, to be this catalyst. Before these elections, there was no valid reason to go on the streets and organize meetings, but the elections were a perfect ground for all possible protest activity. It seems that in Russia, the desire of protests came to people‟s minds first, and only after it they found an actual reason for these protests. In fact, shaping the discourse of the Russian society and actively taking part in the meaning making, the
Russian carrier group designed all the Russian protests long before the contradictory event that split the society into its adherents and opponents took place. Thus, the informal leader of the opposition Alexei Navalny as early as in September and August
2011 asked his supporters to give their votes on the parliamentary elections to any party except United Russia in order to prevent its hegemony in the Russian State
30 Duma (Lenta.ru 2011c). He stated in his blog, “United Russia is a party of crooks and thieves. Come to the elections and vote for any party, against United Russia” 3
(LiveJournal 2011).
The main period of protest activity in Russia fall on the winter months of 2011 and 2012. The second big political event—the presidential elections—took place on the 4th of March 2012. After it the political movement practically came to its end and gave way to another kind of activity, this time mostly social. Taking into account the time frame of the protests and similarly to the recent “orange” and “rose” revolutions in the Ukraine and Georgia, respectively, these events are often referred as the “White
Revolution”. However, in contrast to the Ukraine and Georgia, there was no revolution in Russia—basically, the protests came to nothing. In order to understand the dynamic of the activity and its final outcome, it is necessary to study the events one by one.
The disturbing year of 2011 was the last year of Dmitry Medvedev‟s presidency in Russia and also the last year for the Parliament to work in its current composition.
Both parliamentary and presidential elections were set within several months. The state of affairs was such that the results of both elections were highly predictable, and many experts and ordinary people expected United Russia, the current ruling centrist party, to win the parliamentary elections and Vladimir Putin to return on the presidential post after a 4-year recess. Actually, there were a lot of objective reasons to make such forecasts, and the permanent and stable development of Russia during the last 12 years (since the beginning of the first Putin‟s term of office as Russian
President) can be considered as the main factor among others. The results of the numerous polls organized by the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion
3 Russian: «Единая Россия — партия жуликов и воров. Приходи на выборы и голосуй за любую партию, против Единой России». 31 (VTsIOM), which is one of the biggest and most respectable sociological research companies in Russia, showed that the majority of people supported the ruling party and its leaders. Before the parliamentary elections, in the late November 2011, United
Russia had 41% of supporters among the electorate, while its principal competitors, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) and the Liberal Democratic
Party of Russia (LDPR) had only 12% each (VTsIOM 2011). The situation with the preferences for the presidential elections was similar: on the first week of December
2011 42% of people wanted to give their votes to Vladimir Putin, while the next candidate, the leader of KPRF Gennady Zyuganov, had only 11% of supporters
(VTsIOM 2011). Based on these data, it can be said that Putin and his party were widely supported in Russia, especially in comparison with the other political entities.
However, this predictability was differently interpreted by the liberal part of the society—so-called new intelligentsia, the intellectuals. During the whole presidency of Medvedev, they supposed him to be Putin‟s protégé and claimed that the results of upcoming elections were prejudged not because of logical and objective reasons, but because of the hegemony of the ruling party (in this case, United Russia) and its total control over the whole spheres of social life in Russia (GRANI.RU 2011a). These intellectuals formed a narrow stratum—the Alexander‟s “carrier group” described above—that was called with the big word “opposition” in contrast to official
“regime”. Not surprisingly, on the threshold of parliamentary elections their activities became more noticeable and their views spread within a certain part of society. The
Internet and various social networks were due in no small part to the spreading of opposition mood, and this fact to a large extent predetermined the character of opposition that was composed mostly of young people, students of high schools and universities and newly graduated ones, along with people of their thirties and early
32 forties, which were familiar with the Internet and computers (VTsIOM 2012).
The parliamentary elections that took place on December 4, 2011 became the starting point for open protest movement in Russia. There might be different opinions of the legitimacy of the process and results of these elections; however, it is a big question to discuss and, actually, not a question of this study, which aims to understand the anatomy of Russian protest movement in relation to social media.
The first protest occurred on the day of the parliamentary elections, on
December 4, 2011. This protest was not a big one—only several hundreds of people took part in the event on the Revolution Square in Moscow—and was organized by the Russian nationalist movement “The Russians” (NR2RU.com 2011). However, despite the political statements of the protesters (the official aim of this action was to show the disapproval of the election results), this first protest was considered to be a nationalist action rather than a political one even by different traditional media. Most of the headlines of the news articles about the event contained the references to nationalism, but lacked the indication of the political character of the protest: for example, “The Nationalists‟ Protest Action Was Suppressed In Moscow on the
Election Day” (SOVA 2011); “Police Dispersed the Gathering of „The Russians‟”
(NR2RU.com 2011a). Even those headlines that referred to the main purpose of the event—for instance, “Russian Nationalists Declined to Recognize the Parliamentary
Elections as Legitimate” (NR2RU.com 2011b)—indicated that it was nationalists who organized the event. The action was announced by Alexander Belov, one of the leaders of the Russian nationalist movement, on November 4, 2011 (SOVA 2011), but was not covered in Facebook and other social media.
On the next day, December 5, 2011, the first big protest occurred in Moscow.
The action was organized by the Solidarnost (Russian for “solidarity”) movement and
33 took place on Chistoprudny Boulevard near the monument to the writer Aleksander
Griboyedov. This place was chosen not by accident: it was previously commonly used for a number of small silent protests against some articles of the Constitution of the
Russian Federation. The protest on the 5th of December was in fact the first protest, in which the wide range of people took part: in contrast to the nationalist action, anyone could participate in this activity. The protesters pointed out the possible illegitimacy of the elections and demanded re-election. Among others, the following taglines were used: “15 Millions of Our Votes Were Stolen”4; “Crooks and Thieves Stole Your
Vote”5; “Let‟s Give the Right of Choice Back to Our Country”6; “These Elections Are
Ridiculous”7, etc. (Novaya Gazeta 2011). A lot of respected politicians and public persons, including the informal opposition leader Alexei Navalny, spoke from the stage of this protest and declared that being there all people “proved that they exist”8 and “ready to struggle for their rights” 9, because “we are the power”10 (Novaya
Gazeta 2011). According to different sources, from 2 to 10 thousands of people came to this action; the official statistics of the Moscow Police reported only 2 thousands of participants (Interfax 2011).
The organizers of the protest on the 5th of December used different social media, including LiveJournal, Twitter, and Facebook for its propagation. However, with this first event the coordination of the social media propagation was quite bad and a lot of Facebook events were created with the same purpose. The biggest one was called “Let‟s sum up the results of the „elections‟”11, and the word “elections”
4 Russian: «У нас украли 15 миллионов голосов». 5 Russian: «Жулики и воры украли ваш голос». 6 Russian: «Вернем стране выбор». 7 Russian: «Эти выборы фарс». 8 Russian: «Мы доказали, что мы существуем». 9 Russian: «Готовы бороться за свои права». 10 Russian: «Мы власть!» 11 Russian: «Давайте подведем итоги “выборов”». 34 was put in quotation marks in order to emphasize the distrust in the legitimacy of the parliamentary elections (Facebook 2011a). According to the statistics of the Facebook page (see Table 1), 21.4 thousands of people were invited to this protest, 2.7 thousands decided to go there, while 1.2 thousands of people said that they might come. Another page, called “Monday, December 5 — the meeting following the election results”12 (Facebook 2011b) has only 708 people among the invited persons, while just 72 of them decided to go to the meeting and 40 said that they might come.
In order to coordinate the process and update all people listed on different pages, the organizers tried to spread the information and the link to the biggest event page. It was not obvious though in the very beginning who was responsible for the social media propagation; therefore people had to choose between the different pages almost blindly. Despite this fact, the number of people involved in all groups and event pages was considerably big. Moreover, it was really simple for Facebook users to express their political position by accepting or rejecting an invitation on Facebook, since all their friends would have an automatic indication of their choice. In the first days of
Russian protests, his Facebook feature also favored the propagation of meetings and other political and social activities via this social network.
Event Date Invited Going Maybe December 5, 2011 21.4 2.7 1.2 December 10, 2011 89.9 36 9.7 December 17, 2011 9.5 2.3 0.9 December 24, 2011 85.5 46 9.6 February 4, 2012 50.7 27.4 6.3 February 26, 2012 31.9 12.6 2.9 March 5, 2012 30.6 9.5 2.4 March 10, 2012 25.4 6.5 1.6
Table 1. Statistical data from Facebook event pages created for every protest during the first phase of the protest activity of 2011-2012 in Russia (thousands of people). For the event that took place on December 5, 2011, the most popular
12 Russian: «Понедельник 5 декабря — митинг по итогам выборов». 35 Facebook event page was used (Facebook 2011a).
The next big action took place on December 10, 2011. It was an organized by the leaders of opposition and approved by Moscow government political meeting on
Bolotnaya Square. During the week from the previous event the protest movement got stronger: finally the leaders were identified and the program with the urgent demands—the re-election or the recount of votes—was suggested. The opposition consolidated around Alexei Navalny and Russian liberal activist and politician Ilya
Yashin, while several public figures, such as writer Boris Akunin and TV anchors
Leonid Parfenov, Mikhail Shats, and Tatiana Lazareva along with the Russian socialite Kseniya Sobchak became a kind of lure for many people. The meeting on
Bolotnaya Square was very crowded: according to various sources from 25 to 150 thousands of people took part in it (GRANI.RU 2011b). The big difference in amounts can be explained by the fact that some statistics came directly from the organizing committee and it is possible that the amount of participants was exaggerated for propagandistic purposes. The protesters demanded the re-election as well as liberation of political prisoners (this demand was brand new for the modern
Russia).
The protest on Bolotnaya Square was well covered in all social media. Many of the Internet newsfeeds had live translations from the square, while the biggest source for live messages was Twitter. In Facebook, an official event page was created this time. It was called “Saturday on Bolotnaya Square” 13 and contained some organizational information, including the list of people from the organizing committee
(Facebook 2011c). According to this page, 89.9 thousand of people were invited to the protest, 36 thousands decided to go there and 9.7 thousand said that they might
13 Russian: «Суббота на Болотной площади». 36 come. As it can be seen from the numbers, this time the event was better propagated, as the amount of the invited people increased more than fourfold. Regardless the preferred statistical source, the number of participants of the meeting on Bolotnaya
Square (or simply Bolotnaya) was incredibly huge, and Facebook propagation favored this a lot. Following this protest, two big groups on Facebook were founded:
“Millions of Citizens for Fair Elections” (Facebook 2011d) and “We Were on
Bolotnaya and Will Come Again” (Facebook 2011e). This first meeting on Bolotnaya
Square became a symbol of the whole Russian protest movement and was widely used later for the propagation of other protest activities.
On December 17, 2011 the Russian United Democratic Party “Yabloko” organized another meeting against unfair elections. This event also took place on
Bolotnaya Square, but was far less crowded. The low interest to this protest can be seen even on the basis of Facebook statistics (Facebook 2011f): the event page has only 9.5 thousand invited people. Since it was possible for people to invite their friends, the low number of invitations to this event in comparison with the previous all-opposition event might show that by this time people understood who were the leaders of the opposition and did not want to participate in the activity, which was organized not by them. Perhaps, it can be said based on the statistics that people were not interested in participation in some smaller events, wanting to accumulate the protest activity for the big manifestations. Taking into account the specific of this event, which was positioned as an action organized by a concrete political party, the statistics from its Facebook page cannot be used as a representation of the changes in the whole protest movement.
The last event before the New Year celebrations occurred on December 24,
2011. The protest movement was well shaped by this time, and the demands of the
37 participants were the same: re-election, liberation of all political prisoners, etc. The meeting took place on the Academician Sakharov Prospect; from 29 (according to the
Moscow Police) to 120 (according to the organizing committee) thousands of people visited this event (FederalPress 2011). The protest was well covered on Facebook; both new groups, “Millions of Citizens for Fair Elections” and “We Were on
Bolotnaya and Will Come Again”, were used for the coordination of the organizational process. The number of people invited to this meeting was almost the same as for the previous big event on Bolotnaya Square (85.5 thousands), but the number of people accepted the invitation increased by 10 thousands and made 46 thousands (Facebook 2011g). In order to keep people updated about the next events, the organizers started to include the links for Facebook pages of the planning protests and meetings in the description of the previous ones. It was extremely important in case of the meeting on the 24th of December, because it would be inevitably followed by a long period of civic silence due to the New Year celebrations.
New Year is considered the biggest Russian holiday and after several big manifestations in December, people eventually came to their houses to celebrate it.
So, the first wave of protest came to its end. The opposition started to prepare a new meeting that was scheduled to take place on February 4, 2012, one month to go before the presidential elections. During the New Year holidays and the first month of 2012 people in the most part still were enthusiastic about both past and upcoming elections, what was demonstrated by the vivid discussions in Facebook groups organized yet in
December (Facebook 2011d; 2011e). Their messages show that people were pleased to express their political views and looked forward to the next meeting. During this period, several opposition websites were launched, including bezputina.ru where the symbols of protest were distributed (Facebook 2012i) and “Referendums of Russia”,
38 which was used by the opposition to count a “true” rating of the candidates on the threshold of the presidential elections (Facebook 2012j). A significant number of posts in January 2012 cited some analytical articles published in traditional media along with the experts‟ views of the Russian situation (see, for example, Facebook
2011k). Basically, in January 2012 Russian people were obsessed with politics, but their obsession started to manifest in rather passive (Internet-based discussions) than active (actual protests) form.
The New Year celebrations, day-to-day cares and a month-long break affected the protest movement. By the beginning of February, it seemed that most of casual participants of the December meetings forgot about the protest activity or just gave up being tired of protesting; only the true supporters of opposition were still up to go on the streets. This assumption is supported by numbers. According to the Facebook page of the February 4th meeting, only 50.7 thousands of people were invited and just
27.4 thousands expressed their desire to take part in this protest (Facebook 2012a).
Meanwhile, the protest movement started to improve its shape—protesters chose their symbol (a white ribbon) and claimed the most important aim of their actions, namely the organization of “fair” elections of Russian President. On February 26, 2012 another big action was organized. It was called “The Big White Circle”: protesters wanted to build a live circle around the city center while holding some white things
(ribbons, balloons, etc.). This action was also propagated on Facebook, but the coverage was even lower: 31.9 thousands of people invited and 12.6 thousands decided to participate (Facebook 2012b). Despite the lowering of the interest for the protests, it was probably the most inspirational period of the whole protest movement in Russia. Those people who still took part in the activities felt the spirit of protest and knew what exactly they were fighting for. During these days, a new strategy for the
39 elections appeared: “The protesters need to try to seat „their‟ president, using a strategy of voting for a single candidate” 14 (Facebook 2012l). This strategy was supported by the statement of Navalny who said, “It is not so important who wins the elections as long as the elections are fair”15 (Facebook 2012m). Soon, this single candidate appeared: “A strategy of re-elections: „Throw Putin and Prokhorov 16 together in the second round‟”17 (Facebook 2012n). With all these strategies and planning it seems that people who still took part in the activities felt the spirit of protest and knew what exactly they were fighting for. However, despite the inspirational character of protests on this stage, it was also the beginning of the end of the movement.
Not only the long break after the previous meeting caused the lowering of people‟s interest. It should be mentioned as well that the official government (or “the regime”) undertook a number of activities, in order to make the presidential elections transparent for all (for example, CCTV cameras were installed on every polling station and it was possible to watch the whole process of elections via the Internet). In this sense it can be said that the first wave of protests in Russia was more or less successful, because it pushed the government to provide a proper level of transparency for the presidential elections. Taking this into account, after the presidential elections it was harder to find evident breaches of the procedure of elections than it was in case of the parliament elections in December. Perhaps, these were the main reasons for people to lose their interest for protest activity and recognize the results of elections legitimate.
14 Russian: «Митингующим нужно попытаться провести “своего” президента, используя стратегию голосования за единого кандидата». 15 Russian: «Не так важно, кто победит, лишь бы выборы были честными». 16 Mikhail Prokhorov is a Russian billionaire and politician who ran for president on the 2012 elections. 17 Russian: «“Столкнуть Прохорова с Путиным во 2-ом туре» стратегия перевыборов». 40 Figure 1 shows that, based on Facebook statistics, it can be said that the main interest to the Russian protest movement was observed in December 2011, while there is a significant recession of this interest during the first months of 2012. The number of people involved into Facebook activity reduced from December 2011 to February
2012 almost in two, from nearly 90 thousands of people to 50 thousands. The recession continued during February and March 2012 and the numbers finally reduced almost to the level of the very beginning of the protests.
100 90 80 70 60 50 40 Invited 30 Going 20 10 Maybe 0
1 1 1 2 2 1 1 1 2 1 2 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 2 2 2 0 2 0 2 , , , , 2 , , 2 , 5 0 4 4 6 5 0 r 1 2 2 1 e r r ry y h b e e a r rc ch m b b ru a a r e m m ru M a c e e b b M e c c Fe e D e e F D D
Figure 1. The changes in the Facebook activity regarding the Russian protest movement of 2011-2012 based on statistical data from Facebook event pages shown in Table 1. The statistics of the event that took place on December 17, 2011, was not included in this chart since it was not organized by the main carrier group of the protests.
The presidential elections took place on March 4, 2012. Many people from opposition served political observers on different polling stations throughout the whole country. Even with all their commitment, the number of reported problems and issues relating the process of the elections was much smaller than in case of parliamentary elections in December. The political meeting for fair elections was held on the next day after the elections, on March 5, 2012. Even such a big cause as the
41 presidential elections could not attract to the new event as many people as earlier. It seems that the meetings to this point became a kind of routine for participants, while the leaders of opposition could not come out with an adequate program for the continuation of protests. This time, only 30.6 thousands of people were invited to the action via Facebook and 9.5 thousands decided to take part in it (Facebook 2012c).
Even smaller amount of people came to the next meeting on March 10, 2012
(Facebook 2012d).
By the middle of March, both parliamentary and presidential elections were conducted, and the choice was made. The first enthusiasm about the elections was gone, while the life went on. For the most of people there was no logical reason anymore to continue the protests and in that moment the protest of intellectuals changed into a new kind of movement, which can be referred as “the protest of hipsters”. This title is influenced by the fact that hipsters as a social group used tied to be at the peak of the fashion trends. Since the protests were also some kind of a fashion trend in 2012, young people who formed the basis of the movement started to protest for the sake of fashion. This fashion came into operation and excellently demonstrated its huge power and influential potential on the society. The real need for changes (or at least minor improvements in the election procedure) that was expressed by people during the winter gave place to fashionable protest trend that captured the whole world in 2011-2012.
The Second Stage: Free Pussy Riot!
On February 21, 2012 took place a famous action of punk-rock band Pussy Riot that lead towards the big judicial trial, which draw a wide response worldwide.
Several girls burst into the main Russian church, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in
42 Moscow, wearing balaclavas. They went to the altar area and began to jump around and yell some text, which they called a “punk prayer”. Among other lines, there were specific political statements (“Mother God, Drive Putin Away”) and blasphemous expressions (“holy shit”; “shit of the Lord”), which cannot be said in church according to Russian religious tradition. Most of the girls were soon arrested and put under a trial accused of hooliganism. This incident lead to a huge controversy within
Russian society, as blasphemy was not criminalized under the Russian law and it was not clear if there is a reason to bring a criminal accusation against the girls. As a result, the girls from the band were instantly equated with the martyrs of regime and called political prisoners. This attitude towards them was supported by the wide international response (for example, Amnesty International named the girls prisoners of conscience (Lenta.ru 2012)). The fact that they nominally were a rock band gave rise to a widely spread judgment that they struggled for their art. The girls received great support from protesters, probably just because of the worldwide fame of their case. The second reason of their popularity within the protesters was perhaps the fact that without clear program statements the whole movement needed a symbol to struggle for, and Pussy Riot became such symbol.
The lack of clear political agenda for further protests and the end of all elections led towards the new break in the Russian protest movement. During the first two spring months of 2012 most of the support for Pussy Riot was expressed in the
Internet and in some printed media. However, there were no manifestations and meetings, since the opposition was busy preparing a new action with a big name “The
March of the Millions”. It was scheduled to take place on May 6, 2012, the day before the inauguration of Vladimir Putin, on Bolotnaya Square, the iconic place for the protesters since December 2011. However, the organizing committee of protests had
43 been already dissolved and the Russian political activist Sergei Udaltsov became the main organizer of the event. Based on Facebook statistics, it can be said that people were not so enthusiastic about the new action and their social composition had changed. The discussions in the Facebook groups seem to lack the clear political statements (Facebook 2011d; 2011e), as if to that point people wanted to continue protest for the sake of protest itself, but not for the sake of any objective political demand. Based on the analysis of the two Facebook groups, “Millions of People for
Fair Elections” (Facebook 2011d) and “We Were on Bolotnaya and Will Come
Again” (Facebook 2011e) it can be said that the number of posts and comments increased in May 2012, while their content started to be less related to the political statements of the first stage of the movement (i.e. demand of the fair elections, expression of the desire to give people their stolen votes back, etc.). The character of posts changed as well: while during the winter months a lot of organizational information were published, in May 2012 many photos and live comments from the events were posted, among which it was more difficult to find the posts related to the organization of protests (Facebook 2011d; 2011e).
The “March of Millions” was propagated via Facebook as well, but in this case
(similar to the very beginning of the movement) there were a lot of small groups and event pages not coordinated by one common center. According to the protesters themselves, only 15 thousands of people registered as participants of this action in the social media as opposed to 46 thousands of participants registered for the meeting on
December 24, 2011, on Facebook only (Facebook 2011g; 2012g). The change in the character of opposition led towards the fact that the manifestation on the 6th of May came to no good: after several attempts of the protesters to pierce the police obstacle, which was built in order to organize the crowd, the street fighting began (Lenta.ru
44 2011a). During the conflict between the protesters and police, 29 law enforcement officers were injures, which lead towards the arrest of 436 people (Echo of Moscow
2011). They were accused in compliance with various Russian laws, including the prohibition of the call for civil disorder and use of force against a public authority, and a very long investigation started. Some of the people arrested on May 6, 2012, were imprisoned for almost two years before the final verdict was returned in
February 2014 (Kommersant.ru 2014).
In the second half of May 2012 there were several noticeable events related to opposition, including the Russian occupy-movement and so-called “Test Walk” along the Moscow boulevards. The Russian occupy-movement called “Occupy Abai” (after the name of the famous Kazakh poet and philosopher Abai Quananbayuli, the monument to whom participants had chosen to be their gathering point) lasted a week from 9 to 15 of May 2012 and did not have a clear program as well. It was actively propagated in social media, but at this time not as an upcoming event, but using play- by-play reports. A lot of agitation images (see Figure 2) were used as well. However, in contrast to the political protests, the majority of supporters of this movement included young students of high school and universities and newly graduated ones
(BestToday 2012). According to the statistics published on the website BestToday,
51.1% of participants of the “Occupy Abai” action were people under the age of 30, while 94.3% of participants were students or had already graduated from high school
(BestToday 2012).
45
Figure 2. One of the agitation images used for propagation of the “Occupy Abai” action, published in the Facebook group “Millions of Citizens for Fair Elections” (Facebook 2011d). For this image the easy recognizable stylistic of American President Barak Obama‟s election campaign was used, which was inspired by Che Guevara poster associating with the spirit of revolution (The Guardian 2008).
The conflicts with the police inclined the participants of the “Occupy Abai” action to organize a “Test Walk” with Russian writers, in order to check if it is possible to walk through Moscow without being stopped by a policeman. This event took place on May 13, 2012 and was propagated in Facebook, again in numerous small groups though with the maximum of 7.3 thousand people invited (Facebook
2012e; 2012f). Only 2.5 thousand people expressed their desire to come on the biggest Facebook event page (Facebook 2012f), but from 2 thousands people according to the official statistics of the Moscow police to 17.6 thousand of people according to the statistics of the protesters took part in the actual event (Facebook
2012h). The major platform for both “Occupy Abai” and “Test Walk” was Twitter
(Nikiporetz-Takigawa 2013), as the participants used it to send quick messages just
46 from the heart of events. “Occupy Abai” had its own newspaper as well, which was distributed in the camp of activists on Chistoprudny Boulevard.
During the summer months there were several more actions: the manifestations in support of Pussy Riot in front of the court building, a couple of other “Marches of
Millions”, etc. However, none of them was at least equally crowded as were the winter meetings, and there were no sign of announced “millions” of supporters. But the Pussy Riot trial also came to its end in summer of 2012. On August 17, 2012, three members of Pussy Riot were returned guilty in hooliganism and sentenced two- year imprisonments.
The protest movement again lost its purpose. However, in this case it was even harder to hold people‟s attention and to continue protests, because most of social issues that gave birth to all meetings and manifestations became the events of the past and they could not provoke such powerful response anymore as it was during the course of events and soon after them. Little by little, the protest movement faded away, despite the fact that several new not so numerous actions and manifestations took place in autumn of 2012 and spring of 2013. Most of them were connected with the last echo of the real protest movement—the trial of people arrested on the 6th of
May 2012 during the first “March of Millions”. On February 2014 eleven participants of the “March of Millions” were finally sentenced to various terms of imprisonment
(BBC 2014). Moreover, as an attempt to organize the disintegrating movement, the
Russian Opposition Coordination Council was created in October 2012, but this authority did not have a real power and was not viable. As a result, in October 2013 the Coordination Council was dissolved (RBK Daily 2013).
However, despite the lack of real achievements, the Russian protest movement of 2011-2012 was big and strong enough to make the government be concerned of it.
47 Moreover, taking into account the fact that this movement was organized with the huge support of the Internet and online social networks, it had shown the power of these networks and even provoked some fear of them in the context of national security.
Facebook as a Tool of Emergent Protest
Facebook played a crucial role in the organization of the Russian protests of
2011-2012. However, this social medium was used not only for bringing people together physically, i.e. for spreading the information of the protests and inviting
Facebook users there, but also for supporting the ideological consolidation of the
Russian opposition (Reuter & Szakonyi 2013). During the first stage of the Russian events, Facebook was a specific platform, where the main principles of the new protest movement were formulated and the certain symbols for this movement were propagated. In order to demonstrate this aspect of Facebook usage in times of protests in Russia, the content of two big groups dedicated to the movement was analyzed.
These are “Millions of Citizens for Fair Elections” (Facebook 2011d) and “We Were on Bolotnaya and Will Come Again” (Facebook 2011e). They were created on
December 11 and December 10, 2011, respectively.
A specific time frame was selected, in order to show the shaping of the movement at the peak of it, namely the period between two biggest protests, which took place on December 10, 2011 (on Bolotnaya Square) and December 24, 2011 (on the Academician Sakharov Prospect). During this period, the meeting on the Sakharov
Prospect was organized along with the general consolidation of the protest movement.
In the group “Millions of Citizens for Fair Elections”, 47 posts were published between December 11 and 24 (Facebook 2011d), while the group “We Were on
48 Bolotnaya and Will Come Again” contains 60 posts related to the same period
(Facebook 2011e). Apart from the posts themselves, there is a significant number of comments in both groups: up to 100 comments per post for the first group (Facebook
2011d) and up to 170 comments per post for the second one (Facebook 2011e).
Based on the analysis of the content of these messages (both posts and comments), it can be said that there were some common trends for both groups, while each of them had its own specific. First of all, it should be mentioned that the ideological consolidation of any movement is possible only when there is a sharp border between the supporters of this movement and its opponents. Since people choose their position based on their understanding of the facts, in order to attract supporters it is necessary to develop a strong network of representations, interpreting every social fact related to the movement in a particular way. On this stage the
Durkheimian concept of “sacred” and “profane”, extended by Jeffrey Alexander
(2011), comes into operation.
The division of world into the “sacred” and “profane” parts, which is natural for human beings, becomes more apparent in times of social disturbance, because all protesters need to understand what is the “sacred” they are fighting for and what is the
“profane” they are struggling against. It seems that in case of Russian events,
Facebook was one of the main tools used to draw a line between the “sacred” and
“profane”, providing rather “interpretive” than “objective” judgments (Alexander
2011:75). The results of the analysis of messages extracted from two Facebook groups demonstrate the sharp border between the two poles from the perspective of the Russian opposition.
Since the main reason for protests was connected with the Russian elections, the key terms representing the “sacred” and “profane” component of the Russian protest
49 discourse of December 2011 mostly relate to the general principles of elections, as defined by law and the world‟s practice, and the problems that occurred with the
Russian parliamentary elections of 2011.
"Sacred" Key Words in Russian English Translation мирные митинги peaceful meetings гражданин citizen гражданская позиция civic position право выбора right of choice право голоса right of vote честные выборы fair elections честная Россия honest Russia
Table 2. The key words representing the “sacred” component of the Russian protest discourse extracted from the content of the messages posted in Facebook groups “Millions of Citizens for Fair Elections” (Facebook 2011d) and “We Were on Bolotnaya and Will Come Again” (Facebook 2011e).
As it can be seen from the Table 2, most of the “sacred” terms refer to the ideals of democratic elections, which should be fair. The main purpose of the movement was defined using the key “sacred” terms: it was stated that protesters—Russian “citizens” with their own “civic position”—wanted to get back their “votes”, “right of choice”, and “right of vote” (Facebook 2011h; 2011i). In order to demonstrate the legality of the protest, the concept of “peaceful meetings” was used (Facebook 2011h). Finally, the concepts of “fair elections” and “honest Russia” were promoted to be a tagline of the whole protest movement (see, for example, the name of the group “Millions of
Citizens for Fair Elections” itself).
The “sacred” terms were widely used in Facebook posts and comments at the peak if the Russian protest movement (see Facebook 2011h; 2011i; 2011j, etc.), being therefore a powerful tool for consolidation around these main concepts. These terms in different combinations can be found in most of the posts that propagate certain events and actions, such as, for example, the spreading of a white ribbon as a symbol
50 of movement. The propagation of this symbol was really wide: 12 out of 42 analyzed posts in the group “Millions of People for Fair Elections” are fully or partly dedicated to this issue (Facebook 2011d). The choice of color for the ribbon had a simple explanation: it was stated that “white color is a color of purity”18 (Facebook 2011m) and therefore a color of the new, “honest” Russia. Actively propagating the new symbol of the movement, the organizers stressed again and again that carrying of the white ribbon is “a statement of our civic position” (Facebook 2011n), mentioning that this position involve the desire to take back the “stolen votes” (the actual “profane” term of the Russian protest discourse) to Russian “citizens” (Facebook 2011j; 2011n).
A desire to take the “stolen votes” back was expressed along with the global desire to take back the “right of choice” (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. A leaflet used for propagation of the meeting on the Academician Sakharov Prospect, published in the Facebook group “We Were on Bolotnaya and Will Come Again” (Facebook 2011e). The text states: “Our votes WERE STOLEN on the parliamentary elections. Come to the Academician Sakharov Prospect on December 24 at 2 p.m. Together we will take our right of choice back. /The meeting is approved by government. It will take place close to the underground stations „Chistye Prudy‟, „Turgenevskaya‟, „Sretensky Boulevard‟./”
18 Russian: «Белый — цвет чистоты». 51 During the first days of the Russian protests, a lot of famous and respected people showed their support to the movement. A well-known Russian writer Boris
Akunin, TV stars Mikhail Shats and Leonid Parfenov, poet Dmitry Bykov, socialite and TV anchor Kseniya Sobchak and many others were among them. Their figures were used in order to attract more people to the movement; therefore a new post was published in Facebook groups every time when the information about the political position of some of these people was revealed (Facebook 2011o; 2011p; 2011r). All these posts contained the main tagline of the protests and, perhaps, the main “sacred” term of the Russian protest discourse, namely the phrase “for fair elections”. Thus, on
December 19, 2011, the following post was published: “Boris Akunin, Olga
Romanova, Mikhail Shats and all others for fair elections! To be continued!” 19
(Facebook 2011o). This small description was followed by a video, in which all mentioned persons explained why they decided to go to the meeting. The expression
“and all others” («и все-все-все») used in this small message was taken from the
Russian title of A. A. Milne‟s book about Winnie-the-Pooh translated by Boris
Zakhoder and familiar to most of the Russian people (“Winnie-the-Pooh and all others”; «Винни-Пух и все-все-все»). It seems that this usage of the childhood memories automatically transformed a small Facebook message into a tagline referring to the hearts of people.
Based on the analysis of the Facebook posts, it can be said that the more people joined the Russian protest movement the wider the tagline “for fair elections” was used. On December 20, 2011, the next post was published: “Based on Maxim
Sukhanov‟s performance in a role of Boris Godunov, he stands for great acting. And
19 Russian: «Борис Акунин, Ольга Романова, Михаил Шац и все-все-все — за честные выборы! Ждите продолжения!» 52 it is equally pleasant that he stands for fair elections!”20 (Facebook 2011p). As in the previous post, the video with actor‟s comments regarding his political position followed the message. A similar video about poet Dmitry Bykov‟s position with a capture “Dmitry Bykov for fair elections!” 21 was published three days later, on
December 23, 2011 (Facebook 2011r). With a big number of famous and respected people supporting the movement, several Facebook polls were organized to decide whom people wanted to listen to on the meeting. The question was the same for all of them: “What famous people do you want to meet on December 24 on the Sakharov
Prospect?”22 (Facebook 2011e). Among candidates were listed all famous persons who had already demonstrated their support to the movement: Alexei Navalny,
Leonid Parfenov, Boris Akunin, Dmitry Bykov, and many others (Facebook 2011w).
It should be noted that a fortunate word play contributed to the fact that the tagline “for fair elections” («за честные выборы») was accepted among the protesters so well. In Russian, the word “честный” means both “fair” and “honest”, which led to the emergence of the phrase “honest people for fair elections” 23
(Facebook 2011s). It seems that, since people traditionally treat honesty among good traits, that phrase led towards the further “sacralization” of protests. It appears that thinking about themselves as honest people, the supporters of the protest movement believed that all their claims and demands were completely reasonable and therefore
“sacred”.
However, despite this “sacralization”, protesters occupied a completely legitimate position, making sure on the first stage of the movement that all protests
20 Russian: «Судя по тому, как Максим Суханов играл Бориса Годунова, она за великую актерскую игру. И, что тоже приятно, за честные выборы!» 21 Russian: «Дмитрий Быков за честные выборы!» 22 Russian: «Кого из известных людей вы хотите увидеть 24 декабря на проспекте Сахарова?» 23 Russian: «Честные люди за честные выборы». 53 and meetings were not going to infringe any of the Russian laws. Starting to organize the meeting on the Academician Sakharov Prospect, they stressed its “peaceful” character in the very first announcement (Facebook 2011h). It seems that such complete conformity to the laws was needed in order to contrast the legality of protests to the illegality of the governmental actions (“falsification” of elections;
“electoral theft”, etc.) and therefore to emphasize the difference between the “sacred” and “profane” components of the Russian protest discourse.
"Profane" Key Words in Russian English Translation кража голосов electoral theft украденные голоса stolen votes Партия жуликов и воров Party of crooks and thieves жулики crooks коррупция corruption фальсификация falsification беспредел чиновников bureaucratic outrage
Table 3. The key words representing the “profane” component of the Russian protest discourse extracted from the content of the messages posted in Facebook groups “Millions of Citizens for Fair Elections” (Facebook 2011d) and “We Were on Bolotnaya and Will Come Again” (Facebook 2011e).
The Table 3 demonstrates the key “profane” terms that were identified based on analysis of Facebook messages and comments that were posted in two mentioned groups during the specified time frame. Most of these terms refer to the problems occurred on the parliamentary elections of 2011: the oppositionists claimed that their votes were “stolen”, therefore reporting the “electoral theft” and discussing the
“falsification” of the results (Facebook 2011i; 2011k). Besides the problems of the elections themselves, several typical Russian problems (such as “corruption” and
“bureaucratic outrage”) were mentioned as well (Facebook 2011d; 2011e). The main opponent of the protesters—the ruling party United Russia—was referred in the messages mostly as the “party of crooks and thieves” (Facebook 2011e; 2011l), which
54 is a popular expression invented by Alexei Navalny in February 2011 (Lenta.ru
2011b). The members of the party were thus referred mostly as “crooks”.
These key “profane” terms were used in Facebook posts and comments to define the “enemy” of the protesters and therefore laid in the basis of the Russian protest discourse. It was easy to detect a supporter of the protest movement based on his/her speech: most of them used the key “profane” terms in their political conversations to elaborate their points of view. In order to attract more people to the movement, its supporters explained again and again that the parliamentary elections were “falsified”, addressing not only to Facebook audience, but also to the people who was not involved in any kind of Internet activity (Facebook 2011k). For these purposes informational leaflets were printed, where the main reasons for protests, including “electoral theft”, “falsification” of the results, and “bureaucratic outrage”, were listed (Facebook 2011i). These leaflets were written in popular form in order to make them understandable for people who were not so well educated in political sphere as were the organizers of the protests, i.e. for ordinary people. It was stated in the Facebook posts that these ordinary people felt suspicious about the new protest movement, because they did not understand its mechanisms (Facebook 2011k):
There is a great number of people who agree that the election were falsified, but these people do not use Facebook and do not know all of us. For example, my neighbor Tamara Vasilievna. Our ingenious creative ideas do not have any effect on her; she does not understand them and even has some fear about them.
She would like to take part in a meeting, but she is sure that it is something dreadful; that they beat and arrest all participants and then exile them to Siberia. I think, we should engage all such people. There are a lot of them24.
24 Russian: «Есть огромное количество людей, которые согласны с тем, что выборы были сфальсифицированы, но эти люди не сидят в фейсбуке и не знакомы со всеми нами. Такие, как моя соседка по лестничной площадке, Тамара Васильевна. На нее весь наш суперостроумный и талантливый креатив вообще не действует, она его не понимает и, кажется, даже немного 55
Figure 4. A leaflet used to address people, who did not have an Internet access, published in the Facebook group “We Were on Bolotnaya and Will Come Again” (Facebook 2011e). The text states: “Dear residents! The residents‟ meeting „FOR FAIR ELECTIONS‟ against the falsifications of the Russian State Duma elections will take place on December 24, 2011, at 2 p.m. on the Academician Sakharov Prospect (between Kalanchevskaya and Sadovaya-Spasskaya streets). The event if officially approved by the Moscow government. Everyone interested is invited. How to get there: the nearest underground stations are „Krasnye Vorota‟ and „Komsomolskaya.‟”
In order to bring in these people, it was decided to address them in familiar language: “Let us write some leaflets in THE FORM, which is used by authorities for
побаивается. Она бы хотела пойти на митинг, но уверена, что это что-то страшное, что там всех бьют, сажают в тюрьмы и отправляют в Сибирь. Мне кажется, нужно привлечь всех этих людей. Их много». 56 the notes about hot water outage”25 (Facebook 2011k). The hot water outrage due to maintenance of water delivery is typical for Russia and people see a notice about this at least once a year; it is always placed somewhere in the entrance halls of their houses. As it is stated on Facebook, the supporters of the Russian protest movement wanted to place their leaflets on the same spots and use in them the official language of the Russian service utilities providers. As a result, new leaflets were printed (see
Figure 4), in which Russian protest meetings were called “Moscow residents‟ meetings” 26 regarding the “falsification of the parliamentary elections” (Facebook
2011k).
It seems that the “electoral theft” made protesters think about the corruption as a form of theft as well. In both groups, the term “corruption” or other similar expressions and phrases, such as “they steal our money” and “they steal the money of our country” (Facebook 2011d; 2011e), were used. Another reason for the question of corruption to be so urgent was the fact that corruption was the main problem, which
Alexei Navalny tried to solve, publishing related documents in his blog. Since
Navalny became one of the leaders of the protest movement, the question of corruption was discussed widely among his supporters and started to be an important concept of the Russian protest discourse. It can be seen on the example of an open question, which was posed on Facebook on December 17, 2011: “What Symbols Do
We Need to Show that There Are Enough People to Win the Corruption Infection?”
(Facebook 2011t). In some comments, in order to show this “corruption infection”, people referred to statistical data saying, “we have a corruption rate similar to
Somalia” 27 (Facebook 2011x), and mentioning “thievery” and “kickbacks” 28 as a
25 Russian: «Придумаем листовки В ТОМ ЖАНРЕ, в котором пишут объявления на подъездах про отключение горячей воды». 26 Russian: «Собрания жителей Москвы». 27 Russian: «Уровень коррупции у нас, как в Сомали». 57 specific form of bribery (Facebook 2011x), which is very typical for Russia. A statement “they steal my state‟s budget” 29 was used in some comments as well
(Facebook 2011y).
The expression “party of crooks and thieves” was introduced by Navalny earlier in 2011. It was funny enough and felicitous enough to make people use it. It was commonly used in both Facebook groups either in its full form or as an abbreviation
“PoC&T” 30 (Facebook 2011d; 2011e). Both titles used in the expression (i.e.,
“crooks” and “thieves”) were also in use in most of the discussions without any further clarification regarding what exact “crooks” and “thieves” were meant; it seems that message under these terms was clear enough. As in case of the “sacred” term
“fair elections”, it can be said that a fortunate wording contributed to the acceptance of the “profane” term “party of crooks and thieves” as well.
It is interesting to note that most of the key “sacred” terms of Russian protest discourse, as demonstrated on Facebook, were connected with the global ideas of democratic liberties and equality of rights, while most of the key “profane” terms referred to the particular Russian situation. This observation can be probably explained by the fact that appealing to the global “sacred” the organizers of the
Russian protests could attract more supporters than in case if they were using only the
Russian-specific concepts (such as “for honest Russia”). Moreover, the global character of the “sacred” concepts allowed the Russian protesters to appeal to the international audience, giving people all over the world a chance to empathize the
Russian opposition. It can be also said that the key “sacred” terms were global just because these concepts of equality and equity belong to universal values treated as common “sacred”, but based on the analysis of Facebook content it seems that
28 Russian: «Откаты». 29 Russian: «Они воруют бюджет моей страны». 30 Russian: «ПЖиВ». 58 practical reasons mentioned above really played a very important role on the first stages on the movement. Without a significant number of supporters, Russian protests would be completely useless, and it appears that this fact caused an intention to appeal through the “sacred” terms to as many people as possible.
Moreover, the Russian-specific character of the “profane” terms helped as well to attract supporters to the movement. It can be said that using the narrow concepts and pointing out what exactly had been done wrong by the Russian government and
Russian authorities, protesters could make a comparison between the Russian situation and known international practice. In addition to this, it seems that concrete reasons for protesting, such as “electoral theft on the Russian parliamentary elections of 2011” (and not just “electoral thievery”), could make more people go on the streets and struggle for their creeds, because these concrete Russian problems disturbed them enough to take part in the open protest activity. It appears that using the global
“sacred” values as guidelines, protesters struggled against the concrete “profane” problems of their country.
During the two weeks between the biggest protests, in both Facebook groups there was a lot of propagation of the symbols of emergent movement (white ribbon, white balloons, and white as a color of protest at large) and of the movement itself. In order to make a white ribbon a recognizable symbol of the protests, imperatives were widely used: “Dear friends! Please add the white ribbon on your Facebook profile picture!”31 (Facebook 2011n); “Please add the white ribbon on your Facebook profile picture and ask your friends to do so!” 32 (Facebook 2011j), etc. During the organization of the meeting on the Academician Sakharov Prospekt, a new idea to use white balloons with some taglines emerged. The reasonability for using the balloons
31 Russian: «Друзья! Добавьте белую ленту на аватар!» 32 Russian: «Добавьте белую ленту на аватар и предложите друзьям!» 59 was explained by the fact that it is “much easier to carry small or big balloons in your hands than to carry a billboard or a banner”33 (Facebook 2011z). As a result, white balloons with a tagline “I Was Fooled!”34 (see Figure 5) were prepared and given to the participants of the meeting on site. This tagline was very pithy again, since in
Russian the word “надувать” means both “inflate” and “fool”. As a result, the balloons were inflated, demonstrating at the same time that their carriers were fooled on the parliamentary elections.
Figure 5. The balloons with a tagline “I Was Fooled!” used on the protest meeting on the Academician Sakharov Prospekt on December 24, 2011. The photo was taken from the Facebook group “We Were on Bolotnaya and Will Come Again” (Facebook 2011e).
The number “million” emerged on Facebook pages on the first days of protests, while there was no ground for using it. Even the most optimistic estimations made by protesters themselves reported only 150 to 160 thousands of participants at the peak of protests (GRANI.RU 2011b). However, as it can be seen from Facebook posts and
33 Russian: «Шарики и шары держать в руках гораздо проще, чем транспарант или флаг». 34 Russian: «Меня надули!» 60 comments, every supporter counted. People who already confirmed their participation in protests were asked to invite their friends, neighbors, and relatives and to share the information about the movement, in order to attract more supporters (Facebook 2011j;
2011u). On December 23, 2011, the day before the planned protest on the
Academician Sakharov Prospect, the following post (see Figure 6) was published in the group “We Were on Bolotnaya and Will Come Again” (Facebook 2011u):
And now please take your phones and find numbers of two your friends, who does not have Facebook and Twitter accounts and who is not yet going to the protest tomorrow. Call them and PERSUADE them to come! Arrange a meeting with them in the underground and remind them about it in the morning. Then there will be not just a lot of us, but A LOOOOT of us.
Please click SHARE/RETWEET to allow EVERYONE to get this message!
Figure 6. A Facebook post dated December 23, 2011 (the day before a big meeting on the Academician Sakharov Prospect), published in the group “We Were on Bolotnaya and Will Come Again” (Facebook 2011u).
As it can be seen from this desperate call, the numerical power was crucial for
61 the Russian protesters. The discourse of the emergent movement was deeply connected with numbers of protesters: these numbers were discussed in both
Facebook groups along with the ways of their increase many times (Facebook 2011d;
2011e). In the group “We Were on Bolotnaya and Will Come Again” several posts with live count of people already expressed their desire to go to the meeting on
December 24 were published (Facebook 2011e). Thus, on December 16 it was stated:
“We are 25,000 already; do not stop!”35 Then, on December 17: “There are already
27,000 of people going to Facebook event!”36 And on December 20: “We did not even notice that we are 30,000 already!” 37 Such adherence to numbers is fairly understandable: according to protesters themselves, the more people they could attract to the movement the more chances they got for its success (Facebook 2011i; 2011j). It was stated that it was necessary to demonstrate “how many people we have” 38
(Facebook 2011j) to make the government regard the demands of the protesters and to attract even more supporters: “If the citizens see that there are many more supporters of the meetings than it is shown on TV, many of them will quickly join us and it will look like an explosion”39 (Facebook 2011aa).
This bustle around the numbers predetermined the fact that the constant “rush” related to the protests became one of the important components of the Russian protest discourse. As it was shown earlier, many posts and comments in both Facebook groups contain the up-to-date numbers of participants of the next meeting, as well as the calls for non-stop activity (Facebook 2011d; 2011e). This commotion can be explained by the fact that permanent updates about the current situation helped to
35 Russian: «Нас уже 25 000, не останавливаемся!» 36 Russian: «На фейсбуке уже отметилось 27 000!» 37 Russian: «Мы даже не заметили, как нас стало 30 000!» 38 Russian: «Как нас много». 39 Russian: «Если граждане увидят, что сторонников митингов гораздо больше, чем показывают по ТВ, то многие быстро присоединятся и это будет носить взрывной характер». 62 maintain the interest to the movement expressed both by its supporters and opponents and also by media. With all these “rush” posts it was clear enough that the protest movement was alive, and its proponents were not going to surrender. For example, on
December 22 the following text was published: “Please at least repost this and like!
We need to reach the critical amount; otherwise our enthusiasm will fade away if we do not see that there are enough people!”40 (Facebook 2011aa). The requests to share the information and add Facebook “Likes” were added to almost all posts published in both groups prior to the December 24 meeting (Facebook 2011d; 2011e).
It should be noted as well that in order to unite the opposition almost every post with the direct address to the Facebook audience was opened with the phrase “Dear
Friends!” or just “Friends!” (Facebook 2011j; 2011n). This kind of addressing helped to maintain solidarity among protesters and strengthen the emergent movement. Also, it can be said that the usage of the term “friends” for the participants of the meetings contributed to the formation of Russian protest discourse as a discourse of mutual help and support in times of uncertainty.
Based on the analysis of the content published in two Facebook groups it can be said that while the overall discourse of the protests was more or less unified, there are some differences between the groups. The group “Millions of Citizens for Fair
Elections” has a lot of comments with discussions between the supporters of the movement and its opponents (Facebook 2011d), in which both “sacred” and
“profane” terms of the Russian protest discourse are used. The content of the second group, “We Were on Bolotnaya and Will Come Again”, also comes along with the
Russian protest discourse, but the group seems more consolidated and is used mostly as an organizational platform of the next meeting (2011e). Instead of long discussions
40 Russian: «Делайте хотя бы репост и нравится! Нам надо достичь критической массы, иначе энтузиазм угаснет, если мы не увидим, что нас достаточно!» 63 about the reasonability of the Russian protests there are practical tips and ideas how to attract new supporters to the movement and make protests better organized. At some point before the meeting on the Academician Sakharov Prospect, on December 18,
2011, a post with the requisites for money collection was published (Facebook
2011v). It was said that the organizers estimated “at least TREE MILLIONS OF
RUBLES expenses”41 and were sure that “the funding of the meeting is our common responsibility”42 (Facebook 2011v). Supporters of the movement responded to this call with great enthusiasm: by December 20, 2011, more than two millions of rubles were collected (Facebook 2011e).
However, despite the differences in the character of the Facebook groups, both of them attracted a lot of people who wanted to indicate their political position, clarify it, or take part in the organization of Russian protests. The analysis of the posts and comments published there demonstrated how the Russian protest discourse was formed and showed how Facebook features, such as possibility to share information with a big audience by one click, helped the emergent movement to gather momentum.
Facebook as a Threat to National Security
Actively using Facebook and other social media, Russian protesters contributed to the formation of the Russian protest discourse, which was shaped on the basis of
Facebook publications and according to Facebook specific. However insufficient the outcome of the Russian protest movement may be, this activity showed a big potential of the social media in the organizing of protests, as well as some problems connected
41 Russian: «По нашим предварительным подсчетам потребуется как минимум ТРИ МИЛЛИОНА РУБЛЕЙ». 42 Russian: «Финансирование митинга тоже общая наша задача». 64 with the wide usage of Facebook that can prevent the movement organized and maintained via social media from success. It seems that most of the Facebook benefits for protests can also be its shortcomings.
First of all, the incredible speed of the information flow demonstrated on
Facebook (base on the analyzed data from the two Facebook groups, it was discovered that posts and comments could appear one by one without any interruptions) can be treated as a threat to national security due to the character of this information flow. Pieces of information within social networks spread like viruses: the more people get some information the more they share it and thus involve others in the process of its distribution. In terms of national security, this Facebook feature can lead to potential problems, because apart from the verified information some false information can be spread as well. In the Russian case, the usage of humor (Facebook
2011d; 2011e) contributed to the high level of interest to the protest movement, since small satirical images, caricatures and funny videos were potential objects for the wider sharing (Litvinenko 2013). However, the high speed of the information flow on
Facebook can also lead towards the fast disappearance of the important information under a thick layer of less important data, such as humorous images, messages, and videos. Analyzing the Facebook data published in two groups in retrospect, it can be seen that every organizational post was followed by a number of messages of little interest, often repeating, among which it was not easy to recognize the important information. These unimportant messages often had more comments than the important ones and the transfer from one topic to another happened very quickly, according to the scenario suggested by Morozov (2012).
Second, as it can be seen from the Facebook data, many people were responsible for publishing information if the Facebook groups (Facebook 2011d;
65 2011e). It seems that it was necessary in order to make groups alive and to give people a necessary sense of involvement in the organization of protests. In such conditions it was not clear who controlled the information flow within the groups; and this again caused some problems for the protesters and may cause problems for government. When it is not obvious who is responsible for the information published on easy-accessible resource, it is not possible to control this information flow. This can be dangerous from the perspective of national security, because the anonymity of social media (posting in groups, as opposite to personal pages, a Facebook used can stay anonymous, using just a name of the group) allows people to spread any information they would probably not publish under their own name. The lack of control over the informational sources may lead to potential disinformation and therefore to all problems related to this. From the perspective of protesters themselves, the lack of control over the social media was also dangerous, because apart from supporters of the movement its opponents could publish their posts as well and thus propagate the other point of view on the Russian protests, which could be rather destructive (see, for example, discussions between supporters and opponents of the movement published in the group “Millions of Citizens for Fair Elections”
(Facebook 2011d)).
Moreover, the lack of control over the social media led towards the lack of clear hierarchy among protesters. While it is stated that Internet activism is often leaderless, because everyone involved in the process is somehow a leader of the movement
(Castells 2012; Morozov 2012), in the Russian case the lack of the leader caused the lack of organization of protest activity (Litvinenko 2013). Following the social media model of leadership, one person came to the advance guard of the movement after the other: thus, on the first stages of protests it was Navalny who unite people around
66 himself, while on the second stage it was political activist Sergei Udaltsov. As a result, none of these leaders could offer a clear political program suitable for the movement and protests soon came to their end.
Third, in Russian case people involved in the protests were people of the most active age—in their twenties and thirties—due to the composition of the Internet users in Russia. This caused a high participation rate of the events organized via the
Internet. These high participation rates can be potentially dangerous to national security (almost half of the invited people came to the biggest event of the Russian protests), because it demonstrates the high level of awareness about the political situation in the country and high level of dissatisfaction by this situation. Young people tend to be more active and respond to the external events more keenly, that is why the usage of Facebook and other social media can provide better participation rates for protests and meetings that the usage of traditional propaganda. This potential threat of the Internet and social media, however, will most likely fade away in the next ten or twenty years, because the composition of the Internet users will inevitably change by this time.
Finally, the accessibility of the social media (and Facebook in particular) from any part of the world allows almost anyone, including any foreign agents and governments, to tale part in any activity organized on their basis. The foreign governments may potentially use this way of participation in the protest activity in other countries in order to destabilize the state order of this country. This concern was expressed on Facebook pages as well (Facebook 2011d; 2011e) when some people stated that the whole protest movement on Russia was organized and funded by foreign countries.
All in all, as it can bee seen from the analysis of Facebook data and supporting
67 literature, the potential threats of Facebook and other social media to national security can at the same time disturb the anti-governmental forces, preventing them from the achieving of their aims.
Conclusions
The Russian protests of 2011-2012 were a perfect example of protest in digital age. Being relatively successful on the first stage (the protesters managed to make the government improve the mechanism of elections by the presidential elections od
2012), on the second stage they finally faded away, lacking a clear political program and a strong leader. However, these protests for the first time in Russian history showed the importance and potential power of social media in times of social disturbance.
Based on the analyzed Facebook data it was demonstrated that the discourse of the Russian protests was formed with active involvement of Facebook users, who identified the binary codes of this discourse during the discussions published in the
Facebook groups. The distinction between “sacred” and “profane” components of the
Russian protest discourse was clear enough to identify the “enemy” of the Russian protesters as well as what they were fighting for. Both “sacred” and “profane” terms of the Russian protest discourse were used in order to unite and consolidate the movement. The changes in participation rates of Facebook users in the Russian protests were demonstrated as well, showing a dramatic decrease after the first protests of December 2011.
The discourse of the Russian protests was analyzed in retrospect. It is now a historical formation preserved on Facebook and in other sources. Based on this discourse analysis, the potential threats if the social media to national security were
68 demonstrated and discussed, among which the high speed of the informational flow, the lack of the control over the social media both from the side of a government and from the side of protesters, and the accessibility from any part of the world can be counted. These changes were shown to be as dangerous to the protesters themselves as they are dangerous for the national security.
All in all, on the example of Facebook data related to the Russian protests of
2011-2012, this study demonstrated the process of meaning creation in the digital age and showed the importance of concrete meanings for the overall discourse of society in times of social disorder.
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