ABSTRACT
FOLLOWING THE EVENTS THAT ENSUED AFTER THE DECEMBER 2011 Russian parliamentary elections, the study of civic activity in Russia became highly topical. We can make two immediate observations on the nature and methodology of research on Russian civil society. First, the media and some academic critics tend to equate Russia’s civil society with the liberal opposition to Putin’s government. While liberal oppositional movements undeniably have a civic character and represent a significant part of Russia’s civil society, much of Western analysis tends to appropriate this opposition’s narrative for the purpose of narrating Russia’s entire civic activism. Hence, these critics often focus on what they see as suitable, relevant, and reflective of the political and philosophical consensus prevalent in the West. As a result, those movements, personalities, and ideas that mirror core European political values receive wide analytical and media focus, while others that fall beyond the bounds of the existing liberal consensus are shelved, considered irrelevant or even plain erroneous. Yet, those ideas, which may appear at first glance to be at odds with the contemporary Western context, may prove upon close examination to be of the most immediate political significance for Russia. Second, the balance between the coverage of the ‘active and latent’ (Keane 1989, p. 249)
components of mobilisation is not always adequate. Researchers tend to confine their analysis to the visible side of mobilisation, thus ignoring its latent dimensions. This approach tends to ignore the fact that civic activity begins with the emergence of what Melucci calls ‘an alternative framework of sense’ (1989, p. 248). It starts with a change of mind-set (Williams 2001), and often functions within the ‘invisible realm of social consciousness’ (Havel 1989, p. 397).1 By taking these points into account, the study of the ideological landscape, in which the struggle for hegemonic interpretations, semantics, meanings, ideas, and cultural codes takes place, must become a cornerstone component of the literature on civic movements in Russia. Hence, I propose that Russian civil society could be studied through the prism of struggling ideological factions whose views have a radically different philosophical and existential premise.
