Social mobilizations and the question of social justice in contemporary Russia

ABSTRACT

Notwithstanding stereotypes of Russian apathy, long-term field research reveals that there have always been grassroots and labour protests in post-Soviet Russia, even as the shock of ultraliberal reforms led to mass precariousness and social disorientation. However, the social mobilizations that do occur are scattered, weakly publicized and mostly small-scale. This paper conceptualizes them as ‘everyday activism’, that is, an activism embedded in everyday life experience and pragmatic sense. Only recently, and in a paradoxical relation to the populist and patriotic Kremlin discourse, some new trends have emerged towards other popular variants of the new discourse that includes social equality claims and what the paper calls ‘social critical’ populism. However, this populism from below does not automatically lead to mass mobilization, although it provides the necessary background for it.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobilizations
• neoliberalism
• populism
• precarization
• social justice

Acknowledgements

The author wants to express her gratefulness to the special issue’s editors and to all the anonymous reviewers who contributed to the enhancement of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Karine Clément http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2710-928X

Notes

1. Everyday nationalism is being investigated as part of ongoing research entitled ‘Patriotism in Contemporary Russia’, under the supervision of the author and supported by the grant for the Foundation for Support of Liberal Education at the National Research University Higher School of Economics St. Petersburg.

2. Data from the Institute of Collective Action, Moscow (IKD).

3. Vladimir Putin, speech held on 23 February 2012, at Luzhniki stadium in Moscow, at a rally in opposition to the ‘For Fair Elections’ movement.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karine Clément

Karine Clément is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of Saint-Petersburg State University. She is an Andrew Gagarin Fellow at the Andrew Gagarin Center for Civil Society and Human Rights, St Peterburg. She has conducted multiple field studies on labour relationship and grassroots social movements in Russian regions since 1995. She is the author and editor of three books devoted to social mobilization dynamics (in Russian), as well as many academic papers, including in high-ranking international journals. She is now conducting a wide-scale research on everyday patriotism in contemporary Russia (2016–2017).