Earlier this year, opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s return to Russia provoked a political crisis and mass unsanctioned rallies. It seemed that Russia’s protest movement had reached a new level: a large number of new protesters, mass participation in cities and towns across the country, and, finally, new slogans, themes and emotions – all this pointed to a new development in the country’s democratic movement.
But the latest unsanctioned protests, held in Russian cities on 21 April, seemed to blur the novelty and scale of the new protest wave. This protest took on a new, angrier mood – anger against Russian law enforcement responsible for violently dispersing protesters and the elite’s luxury lifestyle mixed into a blend of class hatred. For many, it felt if the protest’s new ideas and emotions, which a few months ago had appeared a guarantee of the movement’s further development, had disappeared somewhere. Many, it seems, experienced a feeling of disappointment in the aftermath of spring 2021.
New research allows us to look at Russia’s latest protests differently – without unnecessary pessimism or excessive optimism. Together with the Monitoring of Contemporary Folklore, Public Sociology Laboratory, an independent research initiative, conducted 89 interviews at rallies on 21 April in defence of Alexey Navalny both inside and outside the country. These interviews made us ask the question: is what’s new about these protests really so new?
