ABSTRACT
Anti-government rallies in the winter of 2011-12 raised questions about the rebirth in Russia of an intelligentsia that could challenge the existing political and social order. This chapter tackles the post-Soviet protests from a cultural perspective by examining the ways in which the category of dissent and the symbolic legacy related to it have been appropriated and elaborated. The establishment of individual relationships across generations and the participation of several former dissidents in the anti-Putin rallies has elicited, both in Russia and abroad, many comparisons with Brezhnev's Stagnation. Especially in Russia the question of similarities and differences between new and old protesters became the object of passionate debates among intellectuals. While Russian observers generally tended to underline discrepancies rather than continuity between Brezhnev's Stagnation and Putin's sovereign democracy, Western journalists adopted the notion of dissent as a commonplace label to present Russian protesters to Western audiences.
