In Today’s Russia, Dissent Means Keeping Hope Alive
In Russia, signs of opposition to the war in Ukraine haven’t developed into a mass movement. State repression has closed off the avenues of mass politics, forcing dissidents into mainly symbolic protests.
People signing support for the presidential candidate Boris Nadezhdin at his campaign headquarters in St Petersburg, Russia, January 25, 2024. (Artem Priakhin / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- David Broder
If Russia has a long tradition of antiwar protest, such opposition has struggled to raise its head during the current offensive against Ukraine. Brief street actions at the start of the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, could not develop into a wider movement — with long prison sentences inflicted on many critics of the war.
But if Russians have not protested in large numbers, this seems less like a gauge of the popularity of the invasion than a sign of a politically demobilized society. True, Vladimir Putin’s Russia still has its periodic electoral rituals, and the state often cracks down hard on (supposed) oppositionists. But the dissent that does exist is sporadic, generally the work of small minorities, and often more symbolic than a material threat to the authorities.
Maria Chiara Franceschelli is coauthor of a recent book on repression and opposition in Putin’s Russia. In an interview, she told Jacobin’s David Broder about the lack of mass politics in contemporary Russian society, the reasons why the state represses even seemingly innocuous forms of dissent, and the role of the war in reshaping the terrain of protest.
You start your book by telling us that it would be a trap to see the lack of traditional forms of mobilization as a synonym for political passivity or indifference. Why aren’t they the same thing?
We were determined to challenge a certain misconception, which imagines that the lack of a strong mobilization able to overthrow a regime is automatic proof that the population and civil society agrees with the government. This is commonly believed also because media often rely on opinion polls — hardly a reliable source of information in this context.
People often expect to see a revolution that overthrows an authoritarian government, although historically, that’s quite rare. But there are more underground strategies of collective action that have diverse effects. That’s what we wanted to investigate and bring to light.
When speaking about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, it should be separated from the [Boris] Yeltsin era, but also from the late Soviet Union. What we see now — including the absence of revolutionary mobilization — results from a specific historical process whereby the space for civil-society action has been gradually eroded. Indeed, this is the work of an authoritarian regime that has been working toward this goal for the past twenty-four years. The trend has been a constant, even though there were periods when civil society enjoyed more freedom, and other times of heightened repression.
In the book, we tell stories that are mostly unheard-of. We wanted to pay tribute to people who are taking huge risks to fight against something that is much bigger than them. They still choose to devote their life, their efforts, to this cause. It helps us understand that there are dissident stances in Russian civil society even if they can’t influence the decision-making process or the regime itself.
After February 24, 2022, Jacobin ran several articles about antiwar protests in Russia, even knowing that they were not a mass movement. Some opinion polls encouraged doubts about popular enthusiasm for the war. As you say, they’re not ever so reliable as indicators of opinion. But if people can’t mount spectacular mobilizations, then how can they express critical attitudes?
After harsh police repression during the first weeks after the full-scale invasion, protests shifted from mass street demonstrations to more dispersed and individual action. From a social-movement theory perspective, what we see is the increase of so-called “performative” activism and the politics of small deeds. For instance, graffiti, notes left around the city, or private political conversations in one’s individual sphere. Many Telegram channels were created to provide alternative sources of information about the war, to fight state propaganda.
This happens when dissent doesn’t find a space to thrive in the public sphere and cannot be channeled into organized mass mobilization due to the lack of the necessary infrastructure. Still, we have also seen another kind of opposition: cases of violence like Molotov cocktails thrown at army recruitment stations.
The re-signification of public rituals was also an important way to express dissent. For example, ahead of the [March 2024] presidential elections, hundreds of thousands of people signed in support of Boris Nadezhdin’s candidacy. The immediate stop to the “special military operation” in Ukraine was the first point in his program.
Supporting his candidacy was an extremely risky and tiring process. People had to stand in line for hours, with temperatures dropping as low as minus 20 degrees Celsius. They were often filmed, and their data was registered and collected by the state authorities — like a list of people who officially don’t support Putin’s presidency. All of this, in a country where electoral fraud is the norm.
Nadezhdin’s candidacy was eventually rejected by the Central Electoral Committee despite meeting all the requirements. Clearly, people did not support Nadezhdin’s run for president because they were actually convinced that such a turn in domestic politics was possible. Rather, because it was an opportunity to express dissent publicly, without incurring immediate and violent state repression.
Such protests hardly lead to policy change, let alone the removal of the government. But they are useful to keep dissent alive, and to send a message to all like-minded people.
To eventually create a post-Putinist Russia, they have to come together to rebuild a different political system. This means reinstating the rule of law, and creating horizontal means of participation and deliberation, while allowing civil society to play an active role in the state’s political life. The question of horizontal involvement hasn’t always been a factor in Russian opposition discourse, which has been both very oriented toward liberalism and individual freedom, and the figure of a leader. That has to change, in order to create an alternative system. Many of our interviewees for the book had this outlook: although we cannot create a mass movement, we are still laying the basis for that future Russia. It may or may not come, but if it does, it will have to be based on different principles.
You cite Albert Hirschman’s famous discussion of the choice between “exit, voice, and loyalty.” In this case, there seems to be a tension between a certain critical idea of society as atomized and passive, and the sense in which the dissent is a refusal to take part in a mobilized society. Is there an “exit” by the dissenting minority in Russia? Or do things like joining local Communist Party branches and residents’ groups at least provide a way to have a “voice” in society even if it does not produce huge political upheavals?
That’s an open dilemma in the sense that if you don’t like something, the first thing you want to do is to not take part. Leaving the country is not only seen as a way to preserve one’s own safety, but also the only real way not to contribute to the system anymore. My taxes won’t fund the war, my work won’t fund the military infrastructure. This is a slippery slope: it’s also something that people tell themselves to feel better. Most people I spoke to weren’t so comfortable with a choice whose direct result is to aggravate the problem: Who will stay to rebuild Russian society?
[The year] 2022 really marked a watershed. Before the full-scale invasion, it was still possible to engage in collective action, albeit with strict limitations and pervasive repression. The Communist Party also partially covered the role of an opposition party, not in the national parliament, but in local politics. It was behind some of the most mass protest waves in Russia in the last decade: against the pension reform, or the Shiyes protests over a landfill site in Arkhangelsk. Alexei Navalny’s organization also contributed a lot to the politicization of local issues. But now I think the situation is different, and that window of opportunity closed down. The Communist Party formally supports the war, and this also involves a reorganization of its cadre, also at the local level. And we know what happened with Navalny.
After the launch of the full-scale invasion, Russia saw a huge polarization that was cooking, we might say, even before that, but not so deeply. Many dissidents stayed in Russia, for example taking part in some media projects that try to convey information about what’s going on in Ukraine. But a lot of people have been arrested and there is no space for civil-society self-organization.
Before the full-scale invasion, there’d been a huge difference between those same institutions on a central level, especially parties, and on a local level. That was an arena available for organizing collective action and civil-society initiatives, even if not combating the central government. They don’t have that space anymore. The choices that people made had to be more radical. And that’s why a lot of people left after February 24, 2022.
Clearly, there’s a distinction between political dissent and the expression of an undercurrent of grievances in society. Beyond the fact that dissidents have less space, do you think that such parties are losing their role as a means (even functional to the existing power structure) of transmitting the pressures and moods in society? It is often said that the Communist Party was a vehicle for anti-vaccination protests, or problems like people not receiving their wages and pensions and thus seeking “redress” if not political conflict. Has that changed?
The Russian economy is hanging on this war. This is also the most worrying element of what we’re seeing: the regime needs the ongoing war in order to survive. This has greatly repressed space for any other kind of party or organizational structure outside of that effort.
There was already little space for expressing collective grievances, to engage in any kind of debate with the government. But the war puts things on a different footing because it is the overarching problem to which most other problems are related. People may want to raise issues like unemployment, or the relatives who disappeared — men that were sent to the front and then nobody knows anything about them anymore. But if a problem is related to the war like that, it’s not easy to channel it into public discourse, especially through parties like the Communist Party or Yabloko.
There has been the example of the movement of soldiers’ wives and mothers. The oldest such organization was corrupted a long time ago and has never served as any kind of oppositional force. So, other similar independent initiatives sprouted — only to be labeled as “foreign agents.” This is a telling shift. In the past, the soldiers’ wives and mothers were the only activists that were never openly repressed and beaten by the police. This still hasn’t happened in this case, although I think it will happen soon if these women decide to continue with the demonstrations — because in that case, they’ll be treated no longer as wives and mothers, but as foreign agents.
It’s a contradiction. These people embody what Putin wants his nation to be: a nation of soldiers, wives, and mothers. This means rigid societal roles, not only gender roles, but also how every single citizen contributes to the building of the “great Russian nation.” Now they are repressing the epitome of that. If you start repressing even stances like theirs, you cannot deal with any minimal space for civil-society action.
The Russian authorities crack down hard even on groups that seemingly represent almost no threat. It could be said that this repression is “spectacular” in intent: designed to send a message. But many accounts speak of “regime paranoia,” for instance being frightened by the Bolotnaya election fraud protests starting in 2011 or the 2020 protests in Belarus. Is this a real fear — or is the repression more about giving direction and internal coherence to the state machine itself?
I don’t like the psychologization of the regime — the idea that Putin is “mad” or “paranoid.” The important thing is not the psychological-pathological attributes but the function that the repression of dissent plays in this new Russia. And I say “new” because — again — it’s consistent with the path that Russia has taken since the rise of Putin, but the intensity has reached a whole new level.
For example, there was a huge crackdown on the queer community over the last year. Why? It would be reasonable to think that many people belonging to the queer community oppose the Putin regime. But it’s not like you have queer people marching on Red Square threatening to overthrow it. So, why has the Kremlin focused so much on them and harshened its offensive against them? Mainly because of the symbolic role that the repression of queer stances plays in the reframing of the Russian nation.
There is no space whatsoever for anything inconsistent with the Kremlin’s narrative. If the country is at war, all efforts must be channeled into that. It needs a more rigid definition of the role of all citizens and their contribution to the nation. Hence, the so-called “international LGBT organization” (which does not actually exist) gets labeled as an “extremist organization” under foreign influence.
We can also consider these dynamics from another perspective, i.e., that of Putin’s philosophical legitimization of the war. There is an effort to recreate a messianic background not only for the invasion of Ukraine, but for Putin’s view of foreign policy in general. There is an active effort to build a national identity for what is a multinational and multiethnic state. So, you need another narrative that becomes ever more exclusive and rigid. The repression of dissent plays a huge role in this. It’s not only about antiwar activism, it’s about anything that simply drifts away from Putin’s monolithic idea of a great Russia.
I’m interested in your book’s comments on the Orthodox Church. How far is it a deep-rooted force in society, able to mobilize masses of people based on religious conviction? Or is the Putinite use of the Church more like a kind of identity politics — a familiar ideological reference point to draw on, despite the lack of a mass of “believers”?
There’s an excellent book called The Moralist International by Dmitry Uzlaner and Kristina Stoeckl — I wrote the preface to the recent Italian translation — which addressed exactly this topic. The Orthodox Church is a huge contradiction. Compare it to the Catholic Church in my country, Italy. There are countless organizations and institutions in Italy bound to the Church, especially offering forms of welfare support. The Russian Orthodox Church is nothing like that. It is not very organizationally rooted in Russia’s social fabric, nor does it have a strong philosophical tradition. The Catholic Church in Italy has always played a huge role in defining moral codes, like telling people how they should behave and act in relation to each other, and act in society not only as Christians but also as citizens. The Orthodox Church has no tradition of social ethics, even in pre-Soviet times.
This creates a contradiction whereby the Orthodox Church is virtually absent from Russian society — partly because of the Soviet legacy, but not only that. It represents a powerful political ally of the Kremlin, not so much in relation to domestic policy as in terms of foreign affairs. The Orthodox Church is now one of the most important actors in the international neoconservative front, promoting initiatives and funding far-right organizations.
Domestically, it is used by the Russian regime as a source of legitimization from above: like God being on your side and justifying whatever mass killing you are doing. But it does so as a political actor rather than as a moral force really rooted in society.
Your book cites cases of protest and defiance, and a certain undercurrent of dissent that endures despite everything. How much do you think recent moments of protest are part of Russians’ collective self-understanding of their political situation? Western media often cast Navalny as the leader of a long history of protests that are now crushed. But how “sticky” is this cultural memory: Is this the “heroic narrative” of a dissenting minority, or does it have broader, public recognition?
On a structural level, Navalny played a huge role in the politicization of Russian society because he contributed to the spread of civic activism. Research has shown that many people involved in the 2011–13 Bolotnaya protests remained in politics afterward and started engaging also on a local level, where activism and collective action had been mostly apolitical until then. Those who took part in the protests have kept vivid memories of that moment and tried to recreate that atmosphere and unity in their local circles.
In the social-science jargon, we would say that Bolotnaya was an “eventful protest.” That is, it left a mark in the social and organizational structure of pre-COVID Russia due to its contingent effect rather than its theoretical claims. The power of Bolotnaya was in the collective experience, in the “being there” and in the sense of unity that such a huge mass protest sparked. The event itself had a transformative effect on civil society. In this sense, it left a mark in the collective history. However, due to the pandemic, and then the peak in repression after the full-scale invasion, much of its legacy was wiped away.
In a way, Navalny’s own political trajectory was a double-edged sword: on the one hand, he was a heroic figure who united people from many different backgrounds and political orientations in the fight against the Putin regime. He was a political transformist: a nationalist who somehow drifted to a more liberal approach. On the other hand, he retained a strongly leader-centric approach, presenting himself as an alternative to Putin, but without calling for a more horizontal and participatory way of engaging in politics. He was a leader against another leader.
This grassroots, participatory dimension wasn’t there even though his anti-corruption organization managed to engage a huge number of people and was present practically everywhere — something other opposition organizations hadn’t managed to achieve. But it was still very leader-centric. He himself recognized this limitation in his last letters from prison, where he reflected on the errors made by the liberal opposition since the 1990s.
This strongly echoes what some of our interviewees told us: it’s not enough for Putin to go, what must die forever is Putinism. For there to be a post-Putin Russia, the leader-centric model must be abandoned. Instead, civil society must be rebuilt on the principles of horizontal participation.