Protest in Putin’s Russia

The Russian protests, aroused by the 2011 Duma election, have been widely portrayed as a colourful but inconsequential middle-class rebellion, confined to Moscow and organised by an unpopular opposition. In this sweeping new account of the protests, the sociologist and historian Mischa Gabowitsch challenges these journalistic cliches. Discussing protests across Russia and abroad, he analyses the biggest wave of demonstrations since the end of the Soviet Union. He shows that explanatory frameworks referring to the rise of an anti-Putin middle-class or the struggle between the opposition and the regime stem from wishful thinking and media bias rather than from accurate empirical analysis. Drawing on numerous interviews, an original database of protest events, photos and slogans, as well as a wide range of data assembled by research teams in different parts of Russia, Gabowitsch places the wave of mobilisation in the context of protest and social movements in Russia as a whole, particularly outside Moscow and St Petersburg. The first book-length study of the Russian protests to have appeared in any language, this English edition has been thoroughly revised and updated by the author.