No 8 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 268 Andrei Moroz Protest Folklore in December 2011. 1 The Old and The New The staggering creative wave that washed through the streets and the Internet in relation to the events of December 2011 demands attempt to comprehend what happened. The mass surge of creativity was initiated, and filled every nook and cranny of the Internet, considerably sooner than the protest demon- strations themselves actually began, but before these, it was less dominant in general social terms, and did not have as strong a resonance. In December, the closeted creative activity in the blogosphere emerged on to the street, and from there, through the media and blogs, it again returned to the Internet — but now occupying a far more prominent place. It should be noted that, as far as can be judged by the author’s own memories and testimonies found on the Internet, previous instances of street protest activity in Russia (from the end of the 1980s up to the beginning of the 1990s) had been in essence more ‘serious’. There were virtually no slogans of placards containing wordplay, collages, caricatures and so on. That Andrei Moroz said, even then, alongside serious slogans Russian State University such as ‘Yeltsin is the faith, hope and love of for the Humanities, Moscow Russia’, ‘Government! Quit mocking history!’ [email protected] or ‘Shame on Garbachov_Yazov_Kuzmin! And 1 We would like to thank Andrei Moroz for his help with some tricky linguistic problems in the material cited. [Editor]. 269 MASS PROTESTS IN DECEMBER 2011 the contempt of the nation!’, one could find playful examples like ‘President Misha is good, but President Borya is better!’, ‘Land for the peasants / factories for the workers / Communism for the Communists!’, ‘Freedom! I love you!’, ‘Yeltsin, Yell at Him!’1 and ‘Yegor, you’re wrong!’. From time to time the ‘joke culture’ would spill out onto the streets (‘I put the bullet in Pugo’s carcass’2 — regarding the member of the State Emergency Committee), but there was not the same mass creativity or visual expression that we see today. Such material was simply an appendage to the extremely outspoken political statements of the time. Only in rare cases could street protests then could be considered folklore — they were predominantly individual in nature. Andrei Moroz. Protest Folklore in December 2011 A peculiarity of the present day, on the other hand, lies precisely in the ‘folklorisation’ of individual creativity. This has come about largely thanks to the great extent of the ‘Internetisation’ of the protester audience, and the dissemination of individuals’ work on social network sites, accompanied by a loss of authorship. However, this is by no means the only peculiarity. It is possible to identify the formation of a specific canon of ‘folk placards’, leaflets, de- motivators and other forms of literary and visual creativity. The limited range of themes that, for whatever reason, came to the authors’ attention is crucial, and the subsequent creativity develops either through the independent creation of texts/pictures by different people on one theme or by the use of a single range of hints and allusions, a single visual series, a single textual model, or through the development, deconstruction or re-working of existing placards. The expectations of the masses, therefore, defined the theme and the form of the protest’s creative energy, which allows us to discuss it as a folkloric phenomenon in a certain sense of the word. The Old Throughout December the wave of protest creativity grew rapidly, and was to a large extent facilitated by government reactions, primarily speeches made by Vladimir Putin that were literally torn apart into quotations. However, it was not only this that lay at the base of the protest folklore. It should be noted that we were unable to identify any succession between present-day events and the protest wave at the beginning of the 1990s, at least in terms of the specific nature of the protest events. No doubt there are currently numerous appeals to the folklore of the past, but the period most noticeably alluded to is the Brezhnev era. This parallel has been discussed 1 In Russian: ‘Boris, boris’ ‘ (literally, ‘Fight him, Boris!’) . [Trans.]. 2 In Russian: ‘Zabil zaryad ya v tushku Pugo’, a variation on a famous line of verse by Lermontov, ‘Zabil snaryad ya v pushku tugo’. [Trans.] No 8 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 270 among the media,1 primarily after the announcement on 24 Sep- tember 2011 that Putin would again be running for President. Indeed, the resemblance was indirectly confirmed by the Government itself.2 The sense of similarity was made explicit on placards throughout the Moscow protest on 24 December 2011: a placard with the slogan ‘United Russia is the worst form of the Communist Party’ and a depiction of Brezhnev and Honecker kissing inside the outline of a bear — the symbol of the party ‘United Russia’ (photo 1)3; and a placard with a collage depicting Putin in Brezhnev’s dress uniform with all his medals and the characteristic Brezhnev eyebrows (photo 2). The Soviet era (and the motif of taking steps backwards) is also referred to in the caption ‘D j vu time’ written on a small hat in the form of a cardboard boat with holes cut out for the eyes, worn by one protester (photo 3). On the other side of the boat was written ‘Freedom of speech?’. A series of jokes, recently brought up to date to correspond to recent events, indicates a certain recognition of this resemblance. 1. A crow sits on a tree with some cheese, and below a fox asks, ‘Did you go to the elections?’ ‘Yes.’ The cheese falls, and the crow wonders, ‘If I had said ‘No’, what would have changed?’ 4 In recent months this joke began to be widely circulated orally and on the Internet in relation to the State Duma and Presidential elections: A crow is sitting on a tree with a piece of cheese. A fox running past asks, ‘Crow, are you going to vote for Putin?’ The crow is silent. The fox again asks, ‘Well Crow, are you going to vote for Putin?’ Still she is silent. The fox asks again… But the crow cannot help herself, and shouts out, ‘YES!!! I’m going!’ Naturally, the fox got the cheese… The poor crow sits thinking to herself, ‘But if I’d said no, would things be any different?’5 1 Cf.: ‘Putin Brezhneva dogonit’ [Putin’s Catching Up with Brezhnev], Kommersant, 3 October 2011. <http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1785754>; P. Svyatenkov ‘Putin nachal kak Shtirlits, a zakonchil kak Brezhnev?’ [Did Putin Begin as Stirlitz, and End Up as Brezhnev?] (Informational portal KM.RU. 5 October 2011) <http://www.km.ru/v-rossii/2011/10/05/prezidentskie-vybory-2012-goda/putin- nachal-kak-shtirlits-zakonchit-kak-brezhnev> and others. 2 ‘Putin otverg sravneniya sebya s Brezhnevym’ [Putin Rejects Comparisons to Brezhnev] (Lenta.ru. 17 October 2011) <http://lenta.ru/news/2011/10/17/putin1/>. 3 Most of the photos used are taken by Maria Akhmetova, Mikhail Alekseevsky, Dmitry Gromov, Vadim Lurye and the author, but some were also found on the Internet. Due to the nature of fi le sharing on social network sites it was not possible to identify the names of those who took the photos. 4 From Aesop’s fable of the Fox and the Crow, adapted by La Fontaine, and most familiar to Russians in the version by Ivan Krylov (1769–1844). [Trans.]. 5 The website ‘Anekdoty iz Rossii’ [Jokes from Russia] <http://www.anekdot.ru/id/-2040519022/>. 271 MASS PROTESTS IN DECEMBER 2011 Andrei Moroz. Protest Folklore in December 2011 Photo 1 Photo 2 Photo 3 2. In other cases we find a more advanced development. A Soviet joke gained a new lease of life: A bloke is handing out leaflets on Red Square. He is stopped and the police see that he is giving out blank sheets. He is asked: ‘Why are they blank?’ and he replies ‘We all know what’s going on in any case’. It would seem that in itself this joke did not have a return to popularity (although it is occasionally recollected in blogs), although its subject was quite consciously selected as a model for protest. For example, at the Moscow demonstration on 24 December 2011, round white badges without any picture were given out, which on the one hand No 8 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 272 can be judged to be a variation on the white ribbon, and on the other an allusion to the cited joke. There was also a placard on show in the form of a blank white sheet with a caption underneath that read ‘Why write anything? We all know what’s going on…’ (photo 4). There was even a plain white board. Three years earlier (31 January 2009), this Brezhnev-era joke was dramatised, in a literal sense, by activists from the movement ‘We’, who stood in front of the Russian White House in Moscow with placards in the form of blank sheets with mouths stuck on. After a short confrontation with the police they were taken to the Department of Internal Affairs. Their arrest reports state that the demonstrators were holding placards with slogans of anti- government content.1 Photo 4 3. Similarly it is possible to examine the widely-discussed motif of money being given by the US Department of State to fund the protests. On 8 December 2011m at a meeting of the National People’s Front Coordination Council, Putin announced, ‘The US Department of State had put hundreds of millions of dollars into the Russian elections.’ This rhetoric is not exactly original — it was used even in Soviet times, and noisy accusations on similar lines were heard during the Orange Revolution in Kiev.