Mechanisms of Movement Emergence and Sustainability in Russia: a Case Study of the Shiyes Protests in Arkhangelsk Region, 2018-2020

• Main Author: Slabinski, Daniella
• Format: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: social movements; cultural frames; emotional regimes; mechanisms; Russia; Shiyes protests; Arkhangelsk
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10852/100328

In the wake of the predominantly Moscow-centered protests in 2011-2012 against the falsification of the 2011 parliamentary elections, a wave of protests in the Russian periphery of the “silent majority”, widely assumed to underpin President Putin’s political power, erupted. Using one of the largest regional protests in modern Russian history as a case – the protest movement in Arkhangelsk region against the planned construction of a landfill near the abandoned railway station Shiyes – this thesis investigates mechanisms triggering protests in Russia in which an understudied section of the Russian society participated. Moving beyond the cause-effect model of studying protests in Russia which implies that contentious actions starts with a “spark”, this thesis examines the complex interactions between the Russian authorities and the Shiyes social movement through the conceptual lens of poststructuralism. Under the difficult structural conditions in Russia, this thesis demonstrates that there are social structures that constitute social life, such as a dominant emotional regime, that may serve as a mobilizational opportunity. Examining successive interactions between the Russian authorities and the Shiyes social movement using contentious episode analysis and cultural frame analysis on articles covering the protests and protest groups in VKontakte, this thesis suggests that the authorities’ continuous efforts to engineer desired expressions of emotions regarding the Shiyes construction project in public created mobilizational opportunities for the protest movement. Rather than employing harsh repression, this thesis demonstrates that the authorities attempted to contain the protests by engineering and sustaining a pluralism of emotional management styles sending mixed messages and attempting to discourage escalation. These state-led efforts were then perceived by the movement and successfully framed as a problem that needed fixing and, thus, a cause for protesting. These findings change the way we understand protest ...