Skip to content

The green shoots of Russian grassroots activism

What do two Moscow parks and a truck drivers’ trade union have in common? They have been the focus of protests that have shown that the Russian public may be losing its traditional passivity.

Published:

Over the past few years, Russian artist Viktoria Lomasko has travelled widely across Russia, as well as to Armenia, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. In her many sketches, she has shed light on under-reported issues such as women in Russia’s media and in Dagestani society to the politics of Yerevan’s street life, and Azerbaijani dissidents in Georgia.

In this series of drawings, she focuses on recent grassroots protest movements across Russia. We are very grateful for this opportunity to translate and reproduce her work here (click images to enlarge).


Lomasko_1.png
Lomasko_1.png

A passer-by at the “people’s memorial” to Nemtsov. “[Aleksei] Navalny didn’t steal the timber”, reads his t-shirt (referring to a legal charge against another prominent opposition leader).At the start of 2015 Boris Nemtsov, one of Russia’s opposition leaders, was murdered by unknown gunmen just a few metres from the Kremlin.