The Evolution of Civic Activism in Contemporary Russia

Abstract

This article examines Russian citizens’ support for and participation in civic activism today, nearly three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Specifically, we consider how activism has evolved over time in two key issue sectors—environmentalism and women’s rights. We draw on a recent nationally representative survey that challenges existing stereotypes of Russians as apathetic and/or fearful of participating in civic activism, showing, to the contrary, that Russians are willing and interested in engaging in public activities. Data from field interviews with environmental and feminist activists, along with the authors’ past twenty-five years of research in these areas of Russian civic activism, allow us to identify an ongoing shift from professionalization and formalization of NGOs in the 1990s and early 2000s, to informal organizing, often assisted by social media platforms, today. We argue that the three major social and political drivers of this change in Russian civic activism are the contraction of political freedoms, the decline in foreign funding, and the availability of web-based communication and fundraising technologies.

Introduction

In July 2018, residents of the settlements surrounding Shies, an out-of-the-way railway station 1200 kilometers north-east of Moscow, discovered that the Russian government was planning to build a gigantic landfill in their region to accommodate trash from the ever-burgeoning capital. Within a month, protests broke out, with participants insisting that the landfill would poison the air and water for local inhabitants, and blaming the government for its reckless disregard for public health. Protests insisting “The Russian North Is Not a Dump” were soon international news. Also in July 2018, three teenaged sisters living in Moscow made a collective, successful effort to kill their abusive father, having suffered his attacks for years, and were arrested and charged with murder, rather than self-defense. Muscovites responded with protest in this case, too, standing on the streets with signs proclaiming that they supported the Khachaturyan sisters and opposed the callous authorities who allowed such abuses to take place. These were not the only instances of family violence and environmental degradation to attract attention in recent years, but they both illustrate a conundrum about Russian politics in the Putin era. Although the Russian government has become increasingly authoritarian as the twenty-first century wears on, and although it has targeted civic activist groups explicitly and with increasing vigor over time, Russians remain willing to take the risk of protesting on issues of concern.

One puzzling fact about civic activism in Russia during Putin’s fourth term as president (and fifth in a position of executive power) is how relatively decentralized it is. In the 1990s, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian civic activists created organizations that focused more on lobbying and less on protest and outreach to the population, and were encouraged to “professionalize” themselves and apply for grants from Western European and North American governments bent on supporting “democracy” in the form of an NGO sector. Today’s civic activists, by contrast, largely avoid Western support, and use a different set of strategies to sustain their work—strategies that focus far more on raising public consciousness and building a constituency for their issues of concern, rather than building organizations. How can we explain these changes?

A recent nationally representative survey commissioned by this special issue’s contributors, comparable to the surveys conducted in the other CEE countries featured in this issue, challenges existing stereotypes of Russians as apathetic and/or fearful of participating in civic activism. To the contrary, the survey shows that Russians are relatively willing and interested in engaging in public activities. Moreover, survey respondents felt that progressive political concerns, such as the environment and human rights, in addition to socioeconomic problems of poverty and access to health care, were the most important issues for civil society to address.

We engage with two of the hypotheses that this special issue proposes regarding civic participation across the CEE region. The first is that in the current environment, citizens are most likely to support and participate in public mobilization efforts when they concern everyday social problems: concrete, material, local concerns that affect them directly (e.g., municipal garbage management, neighborhood green space, domestic violence, or reductions in government social welfare benefits), rather than issues that are more abstract and of only indirect concern. The second hypothesis is that in countries where foreign donor organizations are least present (such as Russia), activists most frequently will organize as informal groups (rather than legally registered NGOs) and use creative alternative means of acquiring resources, such as online crowd-funding or making products to sell. Due to the general reduction of foreign donor support, we expect that these alternative strategies will have increased in the past fifteen years, and will be more frequently used by younger activists who lack the lived experience of both communist party rule and the Western funding-saturated civil society environment of the 1990s.

In this article, we explore the recent shift from the trend toward NGO formalization in the 1990s and early 2000s, to one of informal organizing, often assisted by the use of social media platforms. We argue that three major drivers of this change are the steady narrowing of democratic freedoms in Russia, the exodus of foreign donors from the country, and the emergence of new online communication and fundraising technologies available to activists. We posit that the repressive actions of the Russian regime and loss of foreign funding have most directly affected the earlier generation of formal NGOs. The disappearance and difficulties of these organized and professionalized groups—despite the persistence of the issues that they address—highlight the disadvantages of formally organized activism under authoritarian rule, and the advantages of having local (rather than foreign) sources of support. In the current context, public concern remains high on issues such as the environment and domestic violence, but working with foreign partners and lobbying the government no longer appear to be effective strategies. The internet and social media have proven to be crucial components supporting informal civic activism—both on-line, and in the streets—in the face of repressive government. As a result, activism and protest in Russia are adapting rather than disappearing.

In order to better understand the changing nature of civic activism, we closely examine recent activism on domestic violence and waste management in Russia and place these campaigns in the context of the broader development of feminist and environmental activism in the post-Soviet period. Domestic violence and waste management have been highly visible problems in Russia in the past several years and share a high level of public opinion salience. Data from field interviews with environmental and feminist activists in several Russian cities, combined with the authors’ past twenty-five years of research in these sectors of Russian civic activism, ¹ allow us to articulate how these forms of activism have changed over time. We draw upon recent interviews conducted during field research in Moscow and St. Petersburg with a sample of long-time and emerging activists (gleaned from previous contacts and a search of Russian news articles and social media posts on relevant topics), including 19 feminist/women’s rights activists ² and scholars during May 2019 and 16 interviews with environmental activists in October and November 2017 (see Appendix). These formal, semi-structured interviews lasted between forty minutes and two hours; interview transcripts were analyzed to identify aspects of continuity and change in activism over time. The interview data are supplemented by evidence from relevant media reports about civic activism, as well as analysis of social media produced by environmental and feminist activists for recent campaigns.

Russia’s Post-Soviet Civil Society

In much of the literature on the post-communist region, scholars have focused on both the general weakness of independent civil society—with post-Soviet states having the weakest civil societies in the post-communist world—and the ways in which foreign donors unwittingly created new vulnerabilities in the civil societies of those countries. ³ In the 1990s, Russian society, and most other post-communist societies, as other authors in this special issue note, were widely portrayed as atomized and apathetic. ⁴ Scholars have offered various explanations for societal disengagement rooted in the Soviet legacies of forced participation in civic activities and lack of trust among citizens, ⁵ as well as in the post-Soviet social and economic environment, in which local material resources and infrastructure for civil society were severely lacking. NGOs in Russia and other post-communist countries appeared to be distant from the wider public within their own states, overly dependent on resources from foreign funders, and reluctant to engage in political protest. ⁶

Social change activists who persisted in the 1990s and early 2000s did so under unfavorable economic and political conditions. Russia was mired in a prolonged economic recession that limited domestic sources of financial support and preoccupied the population; most Russian citizens in the first post-Soviet decade lacked the typical means of proffering support for civic organizations: credit cards, checkbooks, and a functional postal system. ⁷ While the state did not actively repress social organizations during this period, it also failed to offer a predictable arena for policy-making and governance that activists could navigate. These phenomena made it difficult for NGOs to attract support from citizens as well as to build collaboration among themselves. The arrival of large sums of foreign aid to encourage Russian civil society development in the 1990s pushed a wave of newly created formal NGOs. Similar patterns occurred in other post-communist countries in the region, including Poland and Bosnia-Herzegovina as discussed elsewhere in this special issue. ⁸ In order to win grants, civic activists typically had to create organizations and look to foreign donors’ priorities to determine their own organizational agendas, often even before attracting a robust base of members or supporters from the community. ⁹ Donors, in turn, hoped that they were contributing to the development of pluralist politics and democracy in the region, not just addressing narrow social problems.

Although civil society was generally regarded as “weak” in the 1990s, NGOs did persist in a variety of issue areas, such as environmentalism, ¹⁰ women’s status, ¹¹ and youth politics. ¹² While these organizations had some success in changing attitudes and laws in Russia, they faced important challenges to their work related to donor-driven agendas and the NGO-ization of civic life. ¹³ Specifically, these groups appeared to be detached from their potential constituents in Russia, failing to reflect their immediate interests. Their founders often were highly intellectual or academic in their backgrounds and aspirations, and sought to influence government policy through lobbying or, more often, connections with the executive branch (a sensible approach in what M. Steven Fish labeled a “super-presidential” system). ¹⁴ The Russian government came to regard many of these organizations with suspicion, believing they were not representative of Russia’s national interests. The government’s 2012 Law on Foreign Agents was designed to disproportionately target this kind of group, discrediting activism that relied on funding and partnership from abroad and that aimed to change the status quo at home. ¹⁵

Responding to both pressure and opportunities, Russian civic activism has become more diverse than the formal organizations on which early scholarship focused. While Russia’s civil society is still populated by activists who might characterize themselves as professionals at the head of organizations that have endured since the 1990s, there also are many new, enthusiastic participants who are more likely to engage in informal group projects or social media campaigns, and may be less focused on organization-building than on movement-building and changing public consciousness. Newer forms of civic activism also appear less likely to rely on foreign funding to carry out their actions; one of the most significant changes in activism since the 1990s is the availability of diverse sources of funding within Russia, from federal “presidential grants” to local government grants, corporate donations, and individual donations easily accomplished electronically. ¹⁶

Below, we examine the consequences of three major social and political drivers of change in Russian civic activism since the 1990s: the contraction of political freedoms, the decline in foreign funding, and the availability of web-based communication and fundraising technologies. We show how activists have adapted to these new conditions through their organizational forms, and in their methods of online and in-person advocacy. As noted above, we draw our empirical examples from feminist activism on domestic violence and environmental activism on waste management because of the high visibility of these two sets of problems in Russia in the past several years. Many of the patterns of activism that we observe among feminist and environmental groups have parallels in other sectors of Russian civil society, as most of the drivers of change and continuity apply to Russian civil society in general. The innovative informal modes of organizing that have grown in Russia also parallel similar dynamics in Poland in response to increasing government repression of civil society. ¹⁷

Civic Concern and Participation: Surveying Russian Citizens

Analysis of the results of our nationally representative survey illustrates how Russians’ civil society participation compares to that of citizens in other post-communist countries in the CEE region. Among various demographic characteristics, younger age appears as a consistent significant factor predicting greater participation by Russians in civic activities (while sex, level of education, and urban/rural location mostly do not), although the effect is small and also appears in the other CEE countries surveyed. Contrary to existing stereotypes of Russians as apathetic or reluctant to participate in civic activism, the survey shows that significant numbers of Russian citizens are willing and interested in engaging in public activities—at least relative to their counterparts in three of the other four post-communist countries included in the surveys. While two-thirds (68%) of Russian respondents reported no participation in any surveyed civic activities, the participation rate of 32% in such activities was second only to Czech respondents, and ahead of Polish, Bosnian, and Ukrainian respondents. Moreover, as reasons motivating them to participate in civic activities, Russian survey respondents most frequently selected “to help someone or a group in need” (32%) or “to address a local concern or issue (clean water, green spaces/parks, school, development)” (25%)—far ahead of more abstract reasons for participation related to formal politics, such as to support either “a national government or a government policy” or “a local government or a government policy,” which were the least popular, with 1.6% and 2.2%, respectively, selecting them. In terms of issues sparking civic participation, survey respondents more often chose progressive political concerns such as the environment (48%) and human rights (36%), in addition to socioeconomic problems like health care provision (35%), and poverty (31%), as the most important ones for citizens to work to improve, while “traditional values” concerns about religious (1%) or national identity (2%)—emphasized in many examinations of Russian society—were the least salient. Women’s issues ranked close to the middle in terms of the level of societal concern expressed by respondents.

Other surveys show that certain issues within the environmental and women’s rights categories attract more popular attention than others. Whereas environmentalism encompasses a broad array of issues, from urban blight to climate change, in a December 2019 Levada Center poll Russian respondents ranked air pollution and household waste as their top two environmental concerns. ¹⁸ Among women’s issues, violence against women has become a focus of popular attention; as of December 2019, a national poll found that 90% of respondents were opposed to domestic violence, and 70% believed that a federal law on domestic violence should be adopted. ¹⁹ In this article, we focus on activism related to waste disposal and domestic violence, both because activism in these areas exemplifies broader changes to civic participation in Russia, such as the use of more informal approaches, and also because these concerns have prompted significant protest in recent years. We further suggest that activism has persisted on these issues because they highlight problems visible to a broad array of citizens and involve threats to the public, either through bodily harm (domestic violence) or public health (waste)—a threat to the national “body.” ²⁰ We characterize these successful recent pockets of civic activity as sharing the qualities of what we call “everyday activism,” in the sense that they attract participation by regular citizens rather than only full-time civil society activists, they tend to lack formal legal organizational structures, and they focus on problems that citizens encounter in their everyday lives.

Civic Activism: The Drivers of Change

A number of factors influential in shaping civic activism in Russia over the past decade have reduced the space for professional lobbying and increased the cost of maintaining formal organizations. New activists have learned the lesson that it does not make sense to invest in organization building, given the risks, and especially since technology has generated opportunities to coordinate civic action without an officially registered structure. These new, less formal types of activism in some ways resemble the informal initiative groups of the late 1980s and very early 1990s. Yet today’s informal initiatives differ from those of that previous period because of changes in the tools available—such as internet access and social media—that now allow feminist and environmental activists to reach potential allies, and also because of the increase in state repression of political and civic activism during the Putin era. Below, we analyze these drivers of change in the nature of civil society activism in Russia.

Where Has All the Funding Gone? The Decline of Foreign Sources of Support

A major change shaping Russian civil society is the mass exodus of foreign funding, encouraged both by donors’ decisions to move funding to other parts of the world (such as the Middle East and North Africa, particularly after 9/11), and by several actions taken by the Putin regime to limit the foreign funding of civil society. The 2012 Law on Foreign Agents, discussed below, is the most well-known of these. A number of related policies also coalesced during Putin’s third presidential term (2012–2018), such as the 2012 expulsion of USAID, a major funder of civil society in Russia, and the 2015 Law on Undesirable Organizations which allows the prohibition of foreign or international NGOs that are seen as a threat to national security. This law targeted several donors to Russian civil society groups, including the National Endowment for Democracy, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Open Society Institute. Environmentalists and women’s groups in Russia note that financial support from foreign donors lessened significantly even before 2012. ²¹ However, the new laws pushed more donors out of Russia and made accepting foreign funding untenable for most activist groups.

Given that foreign funding had encouraged many civil society groups to formalize themselves in the 1990s, donors’ departure, combined with the foreign agent law, led to the near extinction of the “formalized NGO” among feminist organizations in Russia. Additionally, most contemporary feminist groups are unlikely recipients of state funding, since the increasingly conservative-Orthodox turn of the government has meant overt hostility to the notion of changing traditional gender roles to promote women’s equality. This has left some of the original, early post-Soviet women’s organizations (such as the Saint-Petersburg Center for Gender Issues and the Moscow Center for Gender Studies) with neither operational space nor funding, resulting in their closure. Formalized environmental organizations have proven somewhat more resilient as they may be able to present their activities as patriotic efforts to preserve both public health and Russia’s natural beauty, although these groups, too, have felt the political and financial constraints of the new rules, and many have turned to informal modes of organization, even “de-registering” themselves with the state. ²²

The disappearance of foreign donors has forced activists to become creative in their operations, so that they either do not rely on money at all (working entirely through volunteer labor, without a physical office), or use other mechanisms such as crowdfunding, corporate sponsorship, or even state-sponsored grants to meet their material needs. On the one hand, it is a great loss that a number of organizations doing good work have closed; on the other hand, this changed context has led new and often younger activists to focus less on funding and more on societal outreach, laying the groundwork for cultural change and the broader acceptance of feminist and environmental ideas. ²³

Changing Strategies of Authoritarian Control: The Foreign Agent Law and Beyond

The 2012 Law on Foreign Agents, in addition to pushing civic activists to identify non-foreign funding sources, is also a means of increasing the barriers to and costs of certain kinds of political activism. The law is widely viewed as a response to the 2011–2012 protests against voter fraud in Russia’s parliamentary elections—protests said by Putin’s regime to have been instigated by foreign governments. The term “foreign agent” is reminiscent of the Cold War, implying activities counter to the national interest. The law is part of a broader trend toward greater government oversight of civic groups that began in the mid-2000s following the “color revolutions” in several post-Soviet states. ²⁴ Organizations that meet two criteria—financial support from any foreign sources and engagement in “political activities”—must be added to the foreign agent registry, managed by the Ministry of Justice, or face fines and other sanctions. Foreign agent organizations must clearly announce their status on their websites and publications. ²⁵

The foreign agent law has been disproportionately applied to organizations focused on certain issues, such as environmentalism and human rights, broadly defined. For example, the foreign agent law exempts the preservation of flora and fauna from the definition of political activity, but environmental organizations have been designated foreign agents for activities ranging from campaigns to raise public awareness about environmental pollution to encouraging citizens to send letters to the authorities. ²⁶ Environmental organizations placed on the registry include long-established groups, such as the Ecological Center Dront in Nizhny-Novgorod, the Northern Environmental Coalition SPOK in Karelia, and Environmental Watch in Sakhalin. Women’s organizations, too, have found themselves on the foreign agent list, including the Center for Social Policy and Gender Studies in Saratov, the League of Women Voters in St. Petersburg, the Soldiers’ Mothers of St. Petersburg, the Samara Center for Gender Studies, and the ANNA Center, a domestic violence research center and hotline in Moscow.

Other laws drafted following the 2011–2012 protests enabled the regime to control civil society more tightly. New laws or amendments to old laws were passed on issues from extremism and terrorism to blasphemy, and fines were increased for participation in multiple protests. ²⁷ Among these laws were changes that gave the state greater surveillance power over on-line speech. ²⁸ A 2018 law allowed prosecutors to impose a jail sentence, community service, or fines on any adult charged with encouraging minors to protest. ²⁹ Taken together, these changes attempt to reduce space for activism by increasing the regime’s ability to prosecute critics, although the question of whether the laws are having their intended effect remains open.

New Technologies: Social Media and Crowdfunding

Another major driver of the changes in Russian civic activism is information technology: the emergence and increased use of social media which allows even individual activists to find like-minded allies, build support for their activities, fundraise, and publicize any attacks on their organizations or activists by state authorities. Russian NGOs have made frequent use of the internet since the early post-Soviet era, largely through simple organizational websites, blogs and discussion boards. However, most websites of feminist and environmental organizations were rudimentary and did not constitute a key element of their advocacy strategies. Social media and longer-term exposure to learning how activists work in the rest of the world (facilitated by social media and the internet), as well as generational changes by which young adults today have no experience with life under Communist rule, have facilitated more of a turn to society on the part of activists.

Recent environmental campaigns to preserve green space or protest landfills have been coordinated primarily on-line, through social media such as VKontakte or using the Telegram messaging app. Social media is frequently used by environmentalists to raise awareness about issues that are not receiving much media attention by state-owned outlets. One of the most well-known on-line platforms for environmental activism is Activatica; its website allows activists to publicize issues of local concern, announce upcoming events, or chronicle protests. Posts frequently include images, videos, maps, and activists’ accounts of their successes and challenges. Activatica was founded by Evgeniia Chirikova, the former leader of the environmental campaign to save the Khimki forest (located just outside Moscow) from highway construction, and several colleagues. Following years of environmental activism and increasing participation in the political opposition—including several attempts to run for mayor of her suburban town and speaking at the Moscow post-election demonstrations in 2012—Chirikova eventually left Russia for Estonia, but remained highly motivated to support Russian activism: ³⁰

Sometimes spreading information is a matter of physical survival for an activist . . . The psychotherapeutic factor is important, too. It is very difficult to be an activist in Russia—everyone says at best you are crazy, an outcast and an accomplice of the United States. But when you open our website and see the map that tracks activism, you’ll see that all of Russia is actually engaged in this and you feel different. And of course, the role of our website is to unite activists so they can do joint campaigns and support each other. ³¹

Feminist groups also make avid use of the internet. For a time in the mid-2000s, discussion sites such as LiveJournal played an important role in allowing like-minded women to connect with one another and share information about projects and events. ³² In more recent years, activists have shifted away from old websites that have come under pressure from “anti-extremism” legislation and (for LGBT groups) the anti-gay propaganda law (which was passed in 2013, and bans the public promotion of non-traditional sexual relationships to minors), both of which have been widely used by the Russian government to prosecute activists or opposition-minded citizens for criticizing the government or traditional social values. ³³ Feminist activists have tended to migrate to social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and (initially at least) the Russian platform Vkontakte, though some of our interviewees mentioned that the latter was plagued by pro-government trolls and lacked security, provoking many organizations to switch to Facebook in the past few years. ³⁴ Increasing government repression of websites, mass media, and street protest has squeezed many groups onto global social media platforms, which ironically may have increased their public recognition and domestic support. As government reporting requirements and content censorship for even non-Russian social media platforms have increased since our field research, these platforms too may hold limited capacity for civil society organizing in the longer term. ³⁵

Adaptive Forms of Activism in Waste Management and Domestic Violence

The drivers discussed above have produced a shift from more formal ways of organizing—which are costly and may attract government scrutiny—to collective mobilization through informal groups and networks that often lack legal registration. With the increased availability of social media and online fundraising platforms, environmental and women’s rights activists have been able to raise money without relying on foreign grants, and to spread the word more quickly and effectively about events they are organizing, whether they be street protests (and police crackdowns) or educational festivals. Perhaps counter-intuitively (or at least counter to what the Russian government intended), the combination of increased repression, the disappearance of foreign grant incentives, and the availability of new technologies has facilitated a greater focus on gaining support from large numbers of Russian citizens, instead of building formal professionalized organizations and writing grant proposals.

New forms of civic activism may be decentralized or occur on-line, and can be hard to characterize tactically. The forms of activism are diverse, with various networked participants taking the initiative at different times. This fragmentation may be beneficial—no single leader or “head” that can be decapitated—but also may result in uncoordinated and ineffective activism. Activists without an organizational base generally have few resources at their disposal, but without office space, a staff, or bank account to manage, their activism may be more sustainable in Russia’s current political context.

In feminist activism, the salience of domestic violence as a problem of public concern has grown rapidly in recent years. This is, in part, due to activists’ adaptive strategies stressing the immediacy and ubiquity of the problem in Russian society. Activists have instigated social media campaigns in which legions of Russian women post their individual stories of gender-based violence, in a manner similar to the #MeToo movement worldwide. Traditional media outlets have picked up on these campaigns and paid greater attention to the problem as well. ³⁶ These campaigns have led to frequent public protest events attended by far more people than ever witnessed before on issues of gender equality in post-Soviet Russia. While evidence suggests an increase in the frequency of domestic violence in Russia as a result of the decriminalization of some forms of battery in 2017, and the COVID-19 pandemic, ³⁷ the emergence of widespread protest and commentary on domestic violence in Russia precedes these developments and can largely be attributed to clever campaigns by feminist activists. Using social media, individual storytelling, and public protest via informal networks, feminist activists have turned domestic violence into a focus of “everyday activism.”

For environmentalists, too, many adaptive forms of activism focus on immediate, practical concerns and could be characterized as “everyday activism,” in contrast to the NGO-building efforts of the 1990s. Everyday environmentalism often begins when average citizens feel compelled to take action. These grassroots environmentalists represent a broader swath of society in terms of their level of income and education, profession, age, and political orientation than those at the helm of professionalized environmental organizations. In Zubarevich’s formulation of the four politically and socially distinct Russias, everyday activists are less likely to come from the “first Russia” of major urban areas, and more likely to be located in provincial cities or small towns, ³⁸ and this is also the case for environmental protest (more so than for feminist activism to date). The issues addressed by everyday environmentalists are likely to be tangible, rooted in the material realities of daily life, and located close to home. For grassroots environmentalists, it seems to be the iterated interaction with a proximate and visible problem that prompts mobilization at the local or regional level. While these activists may receive some support from established environmental organizations, their actions generally grow out of decentralized community networks.

One pervasive environmental grievance generating significant new activism across major cities and small settlements in Russia alike is waste management. In the post-Soviet period, Russian society has experienced significant changes in consumption and household waste. ³⁹ Overflowing landfills and plans for new landfills and incineration facilities have sparked unrest among citizens living near existing or future sites of waste disposal. Protests have occurred since 2015 in the Moscow oblast (region) —which receives a large share of the city’s garbage—and spread thereafter. ⁴⁰ In 2017, more than 30 regions of Russia hosted some form of protest related to waste management. ⁴¹ The aforementioned campaign, “The Russian North is Not a Dump” (“Pomor’e—ne pomoika”), brought together people opposed to the creation of a massive new landfill for waste from Moscow at the site of a former logging camp near the Shies railway station in Arkhangelsk oblast. ⁴² Citizens living in Arkhangelsk and Komi raised numerous objections to the planned landfill, including the potential for seepage into the Northern Dvina river and White Sea, and airborne emissions. Opponents of the landfill charged that a comprehensive environmental impact assessment was never carried out.

While a systematic comparison of these areas of feminist and environmental activism would require more research, it is significant that prominent activism has persisted on certain issues that involve bodily harm (domestic violence) or public health (waste), problems that are visible to a broad array of the public. These issues affect people personally, and powerful individual stories about their impact can mobilize supporters. Moreover, waste disposal and domestic violence interest the broadest possible audience, and may not be perceived as controversial or radical. Also, while many forms of activism occur on-line, where actions may be less costly or risky, for both issues digital activism is supplemented by in-person actions, as we discuss below.

Shifts in Organizational Forms: Increasing Informality

In recent years, the most widely known, longstanding Russian feminist organizations in the area of gender-based violence have felt the negative pressures that accompany existence as legally registered NGOs with “brick and mortar” offices. In Moscow, the director of the Syostry (“Sisters”) Center, which has provided counseling, education, and a sexual assault helpline since the mid-1990s, admitted frankly that the organization must be very cautious about engaging in protest activities as a registered NGO, for fear of being labeled a foreign agent and losing their crucial office space. ⁴³ Indeed, a similarly longstanding organization, the ANNA research center and domestic violence hotline in Moscow, was deemed by the government to be a foreign agent in 2016, and acquired all the attendant fine-payment and reporting headaches accompanying that status. ⁴⁴

It has likewise become more challenging for environmental activists to maintain legally registered organizations. While high-profile organizations such as WWF-Russia and Greenpeace Russia have been left largely unscathed, possibly due to the negative international publicity that would result from restricting their activities, other environmental NGOs have found it increasingly difficult to operate under new legal conditions and without foreign funding. For those identified as foreign agents, compliance with new reporting and financial accounting requirements can be onerous. Oleg Bodrov of Green World noted that his NGO faced a 300,000 ruble fine for not registering voluntarily as a foreign agent and then monthly fines of 100,000 rubles for not submitting detailed reports on the group’s activities. ⁴⁵

To adapt to the new conditions and continue their activism, a number of groups have dropped their legal registration to become more informal, or diversified their activities to include formal and informal elements. ⁴⁶ In 2017, NGO leaders in Moscow and St. Petersburg who preferred to remain anonymous in interviews spoke of removing information from their websites and curtailing partnership programs with foreign embassies in order to avoid scrutiny. Olga Senova of the Friends of the Baltics noted that online environmental networks like the Russian Socio-Ecological Union have been able to remain active even as more formal organizations have struggled. ⁴⁷ However, even established environmental NGOs are finding new ways to continue their activism. For example, Bellona-St. Petersburg and FSC-Russia founded commercial entities in Russia to facilitate their work. Likewise, after closing Green World, Bodrov opened a commercial organization named Dekomissiia and created a public council to advise the firm. ⁴⁸ Some Russian environmentalists have begun to work directly with businesses to accomplish their goals; the Ecological Union in St. Petersburg offers private green certification for those businesses that undergo a third-party audit of their manufacturing and retail processes. ⁴⁹ While these environmentalists are creatively adapting to the changing context for activism, it is clear that traditional organization-building is no longer an attractive option.

It is worth noting in this context that unlike feminist and environmentalist activists in western Europe, Russian activists’ collaboration with political parties is quite limited. Russia’s only liberal-democratic political party, Yabloko, explicitly supports environmentalism and women’s issues; its current chair, Nikolai Rybakov, is the former leader of a Russian environmental group in St. Petersburg (Bellona), and the party is the only one on Russia’s political spectrum to have a “gender faction” (gendernaia fraktsiia). ⁵⁰ Yabloko, however, wields little political clout within Russia’s electoral-authoritarian system, having been excluded from the national parliament since the 2007 elections. Under these conditions, the incentives for activists to cultivate relationships with political parties are often outweighed by the risks associated with “politicization.” These include, for instance, the fact that party affiliation could result in an activist or group being targeted by the state as a “foreign agent” if they received any foreign funds. Environmentalist groups also hesitate to ally themselves with particular parties, fearing the loss of some portion of their supporters who may be of diverse political stripes, as well as those who believe it best for the movement to be “squarely apolitical.” ⁵¹ Nevertheless, on occasion, feminist and environmental activists have joined forces with opposition political parties despite their dismal chances of success. Environmental activists have run for local office on the tickets of opposition parties like Yabloko, ⁵² and feminist anti-domestic-violence activist Alyona Popova chose to run for a seat in Russia’s lower house of parliament as a Yabloko-affiliated candidate in the September 2021 elections, given the likelihood that she would not be permitted to gather the signatures required to run as an unaffiliated, independent candidate. ⁵³ On the whole, however, Russia’s environmental and feminist activists do not often regard alliances with political parties as a productive or practical strategy for furthering their goals, especially given the increasing challenges that formal organizational registration and party affiliation entail.

Online Activism: Publicity, Petitions and Virtual Advocacy Communities

Given the legal, financial, and logistical costs of organization building, contemporary Russian environmental and feminist activists have made increasing use of online platforms. Waste-related protests in the town of Volokolamsk in the Moscow oblast, site of the Yadrovo landfill, for instance, were largely coordinated through social media. Protests began after residents complained for months of noxious fumes and respiratory and other health impacts due to the landfill. In March 2018, after more than fifty children were hospitalized with symptoms of hydrogen sulfide poisoning, 6,000 residents—more than a quarter of the Volokolamsk population—took to the streets to demand that the landfill be closed. Protesters, who carried signs with slogans such as “Stop poisoning us!” and “Don’t kill our children!,” posted photographs and images to VKontakte in an effort to highlight their plight. ⁵⁴ Likewise, for the Day of Solidarity with Shies on 26 July 2019, supporters were asked to hang red banners from their homes and share the images on social media; these images were widely shared along with text supporting the movement’s goals.

Contemporary feminist activists, too, have made use of the internet as a site for organizing, especially for the sharing of personal stories as a means of civic participation. ⁵⁵ As with “#MeToo” in North America, in Russia there have been several viral social media hashtag campaigns related to violence against women, such as #Янебоюсьсказать [#Iamnotafraidtotell] in 2016, where women disclosed their experiences of assault and harassment. ⁵⁶ Another viral campaign arose on Instagram in 2019, initiated by feminist activist Alyona Popova and internet star Alexandra Mitroshina, called “#янехотелаумирать” (“I didn’t want to die”), featuring graphic photos submitted by women who write the slogan on their face or body along with makeup mimicking bruises or other injuries. This campaign was designed to boost an online petition that Popova launched on Change.org demanding that the Russian government adopt a law on domestic violence, and attracted over 900,000 signatures in a matter of months. ⁵⁷

Some longstanding formalized feminist organizations are now seeking to achieve greater public visibility online, despite increased government pressure on NGOs. As Khanna Korchemnaia—a psychologist at the St. Petersburg Crisis Center for Women, which offers assistance to women subjected to domestic violence—explained, one of her new strategies has been to boost awareness of the Center and its work by having a more active website and Facebook page. 58 For instance, Center staff organized a webinar featuring participants from five Russian crisis centers who took questions from the public about how to react when they witness violence, and how to become involved in advocacy against domestic violence. ⁵⁹ The Center also organized a feminist educational “festival” in the city, following which they posted video recordings of the festival’s discussion panels on their social media pages.

Given the decreasing space available for independent media in Russia today, most civic activists—including feminists and environmentalists—utilize social media to broadcast their activities and connect with supporters. The risks of street protest—discussed in the next section—are also reduced by social media, which enables activists to alert the public, publicize any incidents of police brutality, and potentially pressure the authorities to treat activists with more lenience than they might have done without the risk of negative publicity.

In-Person Activism: Demonstrations and Encampments

In addition to campaigning via social media, contemporary activists on domestic violence and environmental protection also organize public protests—a tactic that was less common, particularly among feminist activists, in the pre-Putin era. With regard to the aforementioned Shies landfill, for instance, four large rallies occurred between December 2018 and April 2019, with the largest unauthorized protest taking place on 7 April. ⁶⁰ Protest actions have occurred in villages and regional capitals alike, including in Madmas, Urdoma, Yarensk, Kotlas, Syktyvkar, and Arkhangelsk. While there are few estimates of the number of protesters, the local press reported that, in February 2019, approximately 7,000 people took part in rallies in Arkhangelsk; 9,000 in Severodvinsk; and 2,000 in Kotlas, with different individuals spearheading protests in different locations. ⁶¹ Protestors even created a semi-permanent encampment near the railway station where activists monitor construction at the site and occasionally disrupt deliveries of fuel and equipment, resulting in criminal charges. According to The Moscow Times, the camp relies primarily on crowdfunding to pay fines incurred by the activists, while visitors to the encampment bring cash and food to the activists. ⁶² Supporters have also used art to publicize the issue, with two Syktyvkar artists creating an Edward Munch-inspired artwork, “The Scream of the North,” crafted out of non-recyclable trash.

Domestic violence activists also engage in public demonstrations, though these have been smaller and received less attention than the protests and encampments favored by environmental activists agitating on issues of waste management. Moscow-based feminist, Alyona Popova, in addition to launching online hashtag campaigns and a petition to combat domestic violence via new legislation, has also organized street demonstrations against impunity for perpetrators of domestic violence. Since mass demonstrations are not allowed in Russia without a pre-arranged city permit (rarely granted for opposition causes), Popova has craftily taken advantage of the right to picket as a single individual on numerous occasions, attracting media coverage and publicizing her activities through social media channels, making the problem of domestic violence more visible.

Before the pandemic began, protests against the Russian state’s approach to domestic violence were growing. Citizens were particularly galvanized by the state’s prosecution of the aforementioned Khachaturyan sisters—three teenagers who killed their father in self-defense after years of abuse at his hands. ⁶³ The largest-yet demonstration specifically about domestic violence—estimated at 1,000–1,500 participants—took place in St. Petersburg on 4 August 2019, with local authorities’ permission. ⁶⁴ Other smaller demonstrations sparked by the Khachaturyan case have occurred elsewhere, and in response to other sensational cases of domestic violence, such as the grisly murder of Anastasia Yeshchenko, a graduate student at St. Petersburg State University, who was killed and dismembered by her professor boyfriend in 2019. ⁶⁵

Conclusion

Despite claims that Russian civil society is weak relative to other post-communist countries’ civil societies, and that Putin-era government repression has stunted civic activism compared to the 1990s, survey evidence and examples from environmental and feminist activism in Russia indicate otherwise. In fact, despite governmental pressures and the disappearance of foreign donors, and partially thanks to the emergence of new technologies, some areas of civic activism are flourishing. Using adaptive strategies like gravitating toward informal structures, social media communications and campaigns, and protest, activists in both sectors have experienced some success, particularly when they focus on “everyday” concerns visible to large segments of the population, often in their own towns and neighborhoods, that can be highlighted with individual stories. In many ways, these concerns with concrete local problems and the increase of informal modes of mobilization resemble similar developments in other CEE countries examined in this special issue.

In feminist activism, issues involving bodily harm—such as domestic violence—have been particularly resonant, while public health-related issues—such as waste management—have yielded significant mobilization for environmental activists. In both areas, successful campaigns have begun in less risky forms on social media, subsequently supplemented by in-person protest. Starting with online campaigns may help build a sense of solidarity that encourages supporters to join in-person protests later. Also, many of these protests do not question the wider political legitimacy of Putin’s government, so participants may perceive them as being less risky than protests directly opposing the regime. The COVID-19 pandemic has limited in-person activism to some extent, but has also moved some activism on-line, which may prove to be a more resilient form of organizing over time as it insulates participants from a variety of physical risks.

While there are similarities in Russian environmental and feminist “everyday activism,” we have observed revealing differences as well. Environmental issues have sparked more in-person protests than feminist issues have, in part due to the broader salience of environmental problems compared to women’s rights, as shown by our national survey. In addition, the physical, place-based nature of many environmental issues lends itself directly to in-person protests at those locations. In turn, we observe the more frequent on-line personal storytelling strategy of feminist campaigns, reminding us that a prominent quality of feminist claims is that “the personal is political.” Another difference is that environmental activism appears to be less heavily intellectualized than feminist activism, and has become more “democratized” over time with dispersal of participation across different socioeconomic classes and geographic locations. Feminist activism also occurs outside major cities, but more rarely than environmental actions—which may again illustrate the more place-based quality of environmental issues.

What does this analysis reveal about the wider implications of these new developments for civic activism and civil society in Russia? Are these more informal and more digital efforts more or less effective than work carried out by earlier, more formalized NGOs? While effectiveness is always hard to assess, in the case of activism on waste disposal, we do see signs of increased government responsiveness to environmentalists’ concerns, even as some face repression for their actions. The Shies landfill is on hold after a court ordered construction to halt and existing structures to be demolished, and a number of landfills around Moscow were temporarily or permanently closed following community outcry. ⁶⁶ Also, the Russian government has undertaken a major waste management reform effort, including an executive order related to the National Project “Ecology” that calls for an annual increase in the share of recycled waste from 1% to 36% of all municipal solid waste by 2024.

For feminist activists, unfortunately, the victories have not been as significant or numerous as with environmental activism. However, the 2019 draft law on domestic violence made it further through the legislative approval process than had the many previous attempts to pass a law, and domestic violence activists were deeply involved in the drafting process. ⁶⁷ This is undoubtedly due in part to the online petitions and in-person protests demanding adequate legislation. Ultimately, opposition by the powerful Russian Orthodox Church derailed the bill. But the protests continued, with far more participants than in the past. This mobilizational growth is a success in its own right.

It is paradoxical that, in some ways, the changes described in this article can be seen as signs of a more vibrant and sustainable civil society than that which existed in the early post-Soviet era in Russia. The activists we described are developing creative means of survival to adapt to their environment, and they are arguably better known by, and better rooted in wider Russian society than were their counterparts in the 1990s. But, on the other hand, if the political environment remains as repressive as it is currently, or becomes even more hostile (making it impossible to develop organizations with the capacity to influence policy, and to build programs and services), it is difficult to imagine that many of today’s civic activist groups will be able to achieve the practical changes to which they aspire.