Comparing protest actions in Soviet and post-Soviet spaces

Research Project of Prof. Dr. Heiko Pleines and Prof. Dr. Susanne Schattenberg, funded by the VolkswagenFoundation
project duration: since 2016
 

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The project is conducted in three phases:

first phase (2016-19): political protests
second phase (2020-23): social protests
third phase (2024-26): data re-use (Ukraine)

The first two phases were devoted to research on the following themes: Under what conditions do minor protests develop into mass events that challenge the political order of a country? Bringing together historians, political scientists and sociologists, Comparing Protest Actions investigated three major events of political protest and – largely neglected by previous research – their pre-history:

1) in the Soviet Union during Perestroika and in the preceding decades (starting from de-Stalinization in the 1950s),
2) in Russia since 2000, and
3) in Ukraine since 2003.

The team comprised junior and senior researchers as well as archival and data collection staff from the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, Memorial St. Petersburg, the Public Sociology Laboratory (St. Petersburg), the Center for Social and Labor Research (Kyiv) and the Foundation to Preserve the History of Maidan (Kyiv). In each country, junior scholars produced case studies as either doctoral or post-doc research project. Together, senior and junior researchers developed comparative analyses that placed the case studies in a broader perspective.

In the first project phase (2016-19) larger political protests in the narrow sense have been examined. In the second phase (2020-23) social protests were added to the analysis. Political and social protests differ in several regards. First, since social protests are concerned with the distribution of resources, welfare measures, labour conditions, and wages, authoritarian and hybrid regimes like the ones under study have more leeway in making concessions to protestors, since they do not necessarily challenge the incumbents’ hold on power. Second, social protests often display different patterns in their organizational structure, their participant base, and in the repertoire of contention. This is why an explicit comparison of political and social protests regarding A) key individuals, B) the diffusion of strategies, C) discourses and popular perceptions, and D) elites’ reactions, offers insights into the logics of regime functioning more generally, which promises to advance theoretical debates beyond the geographical limits of the post-Soviet region.

In response to the large-scale Russian war of aggression against Ukraine in February 2022, the project team has decided to investigate the reactions of Ukrainian and Russian societies in the last year of the project. For Ukraine, the main issue is the sense of unity in the fight against an external enemy, which marginalises internal conflicts of interest and thus protests. For Russia, the attitude of the population towards the war as well as protests against the war were examined.

The second project phase ended in June 2023 with a conference.

In a third phase from 2024 to 2026, the interviews collected in Ukraine will be made available for further use. There are a total of 834 qualitative (semi-structured) interviews with a length of over 1,400 hours for which an integrated index on the relevant aspects of political culture and identity will be created. The complete data collection will be published in open access at the data repository Discuss Data (“Archiving, sharing and discussing research data on Eastern Europe, South Caucasus and Central Asia” – see www.discuss-data.net).


Data collections available online

The partner institutions hold substantial bodies of archival material and data, which were indexed and enhanced through extensive additional data collection. At the end of the project all data collections were documented at the Discuss Data-Platform and - as far as possible - are also available for  download. The collection on dissident movements in the Soviet Union (digitalized documents) has been integrated into the  catalogue of the project partner Memorial. An overview of the collection on the Perestroika period (Alexeevsky Archive) is presented on a separate website.


Project-related Publications:

Viedrov, Oleksii (2023): Back-to-normality outsiders: Zelensky’s technocratic populism, 2019–2021, in: East European Politics 39:3, 478-501

Matveev, Ilya / Zhuravlev, Oleg (2023): When the Whole Is Less Than the Sum of Its Parts: Russian Developmentalism since the Mid-2000s, in: Russian Politics 8:1, 76-96

Pleines, Heiko / Somfalvy, Esther (2023): Protests by journalists in competitive authoritarian regimes: repertoire and impact in the case of Ukraine (2010-14), in: Democratization 30:1, 101-118

Alona Liasheva (2022): 52 apartments for IDPs. The gap between housing poliyc and the shocks of war, in: Spil'ne/Commons (23.09.2022)

Jan Matti Dollbaum, Andrei Semenov (2022): Navalny’s Digital Dissidents: A New Dataset on a Russian Opposition Movement, in: Problems of Post-Communism, 69:3, 282-291

Jan Matti Dollbaum (2022): When Does Diffusing Protest Lead to Local Organization Building? Evidence from a Comparative Subnational Study of Russia’s “For Fair Elections” Movement, in: Perspectives on Politics, 20:1, 53-68

Ilya Matveev, Anastasia Novkunskaya (2022): Welfare Restructuring in Russia since 2012: National Trends and Evidence from the Regions, in: Europe-Asia Studies, 74:1, 50-71

Esther Somfalvy, Heiko Pleines (2021): The agency of journalists in competitive authoritarian regimes. A case study of Ukraine during the Yanukovich presidency, in: Media and Communication 9:4, 82-92

Jan Matti Dollbaum (2021): Protest Event Analysis Under Conditions of Limited Press Freedom: Comparing Data Sources, in: Media and Communication 9:4, 104-115

Volodymyr Ishchenko (2021): Die Ukraine im Teufelskreis der post-sowjetischen Hegemonie-Krise, in: Ukraine-Analysen 256, 8-10

Jan Matti Dollbaum, Morvan Lallouet, Ben Noble (2021): Navalny. Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future?, Hurst Publishers (translated into several languages including Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Polish and Romanian)

Jan Matti Dollbaum (2021): Social Policy on Social Media: How Opposition Actors Used Twitter and VKontakte to Oppose the Russian Pension Reform, in: Problems of Post-Communism, 68:6, 509-520

Petr Bizyukov, Jan Matti Dollbaum (2021): Using protest event analysis to study labour conflict in authoritarian regimes: The Monitoring of Labour Protest dataset, in: Global Social Policy 21(1), 148-152.

Ilya Matveev (2021): Measuring Income Inequality in Russia: A Note on Data Sources, in: Russian Analytical Digest 263, 5-11

Ilya Budraitskis, Ilya Matveev (2021): Putin’s Majority?, in: Sidecar, 13 Feb. 2021

Ilya Matveev (2020): Wie wird die Ungleichverteilung der Einkommen in Russland gemessen? Anmerkungen zu den Datenquellen, in: Russland-Analysen 390, 5-10

Jan Matti Dollbaum (2020): Aleksej Nawalnyj: Der Giftanschlag und die Regionalwahlen, in: Russland-Analysen  390, 19-20

Volodymyr Ishchenko (2020): Insufficiently diverse: The problem of nonviolent leverage and radicalization of Ukraine’s Maidan uprising, 2013–2014, in: Journal of Eurasian Studies, 11(2), 201-215

Jan Matti Dollbaum (2020): Aktion und Reaktion. Russland: Protestbewegungen im autoritären System, in: Osteuropa, 70 (6), 109–120

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Special Issue with Post-Soviet Affairs: "Trajectories of Political Protest in Post-Soviet Spaces"

Jan Matti Dollbaum , Heiko Pleines, Susanne Schattenberg (2020): Trajectories of Political Protest in Post-Soviet Spaces. An introduction, in: Post-Soviet Affairs 36 (3), 189-191

Jan Matti Dollbaum (2020): Protest trajectories in electoral authoritarianism: from Russia’s “For Fair Elections” movement to Alexei Navalny’s presidential campaign, in: Post-Soviet Affairs 36 (3), 192-210

Dmitry Kozlov (2020): “Do you dare to go to the square?” The legacy of Soviet dissidents in Russian public protests of the 2000s and 2010s, in: Post-Soviet Affairs 36 (3), 211-225

Oleg Zhuravlev, Volodymyr Ishchenko (2020): Exclusiveness of civic nationalism: Euromaidan eventful nationalism in Ukraine, in: Post-Soviet Affairs 36 (3), 226-245

Andrii Gladun (2020): Protesting that is fit to be published: issue attention cycle and nationalist bias in coverage of protests in Ukraine after Maidan, in: Post-Soviet Affairs 36 (3), 246-267

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Volodymyr Ishchenko (2020): Left divergence, right convergence: anarchists, Marxists, and nationalist polarization in the Ukrainian conflict, 2013–2014, in: Globalizations, 17 (5), 820-839.

Jan Matti Dollbaum (2020): Gekommen, um zu bleiben? Ablauf und Entwicklung des Protestzyklus 2011–2013 in den russischen Regionen, in: Oleksandr Zabirko, Jakob Mischke (Hg.): Protestbewegungen im langen Schatten des Kreml – Aufbruch und Resignation in Russland und der Ukraine. Stuttgart: ibidem, 67-102

Jan Matti Dollbaum (2020): Aufstand und Stillstand, in: Internationale Politik 2/2020, 32-36.

Jan Matti Dollbaum (2020): Controlled confusion [on Russia's proposed constitutional reform], in: Russian Analytical Digest 246, 2-3 [German version published in Russland-Analysen 381, 6-7]

Oleksii Viedrov (2020): Selenskyjs »integrativer Populismus«, in: Ukraine-Analysen 228, 7–8.

Oleg Zhuravlev, Natalia Savelyeva, Svetlana Erpyleva (2020): The Cultural Pragmatics of an Event: the Politicization of Local Activism in Russia, in: International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 33, 163–180.

Andrii Gladun (2019): Impact of repression on protesters’ mobilization. The case of Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, in: Social Justice Journal, 46 (2-3).

Jan Matti Dollbaum (2019): Wie politisch ist Protest? Außerparlamentarische Opposition in Russland. In: INDES - Zeitschrift für Politik und Gesellschaft, 3/2019, 110-118.

Jan Matti Dollbaum (2019): Outsmarting Electoral Authoritarianism? Alexey Navalny’s “Smart Voting” in Moscow and Beyond, in: Russian Analytical Digest No. 239, 5-11.

Natalya Mashtaler, Semen Gluzman, Robert van Voren (2019): Nekhaj roste! Desyat‘ nebajduzhikh. Usni istorii Majdanu, Kyiv: Alterpress, 272 Seiten

Jan Matti Dollbaum, Andrey Semenov, Elena Sirotkina (2018) A top-down movement with grass-roots effects? Alexei Navalny’s electoral campaign, in: Social Movement Studies, 17 (5), 618-625.

Fabian Burkhardt, Jan Matti Dollbaum (2018): Der Bolotnaja Prozess, in: Groenewold/ Ignor / Koch (Hrsg.), Lexikon der Politischen Strafprozesse.

Volodymyr Ishchenko (2018): Denial of the Obvious: Far Right in Maidan Protests and Their Danger Today, Vox Ukraine, 16 April 2018. [also available in Ukrainian]

Jan Matti Dollbaum (2018): Wahlkampf im elektoralen Autoritarismus. Alexej Nawalnyjs Kampagne für die Präsidentschaftswahlen 2018, in: Russland-Analysen 347, 9-12.

Mykhailo Slukvin (2018): Pro-Democracy in the Sheets but Less in the Streets: Social Movement Protest Alliances of Ukrainian Maidan 2013-2014, CEU Political Science Department Master Theses 2018/36, Budapest: Central European University, online access embargoed

Jan Matti Dollbaum (2017): When Life Gives You Lemons: Alexei Navalny’s Electoral Campaign, in: Russian Analytical Digest, No. 210, 6-12.

Oleg Zhuravlev, Svetlana Yerpyleva, Natalia Saveleva (2017): Nationwide Protest and Local Action: How Anti-Putin Rallies Politicized Russian Urban Activism, Russian Analytical Digest, No. 210, 15-19.

Susan Stewart, Jan Matti Dollbaum (2017): Civil society development in Russia and Ukraine: Diverging paths, in: Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 50 (3), 207–220.

Jan Matti Dollbaum (2017): Curbing protest through elite co-optation? Regional protest mobilization by the Russian systemic opposition during the ‘for fair elections’ protests 2011–2012, in: Journal of Eurasian Studies, 8 (2), 109-122.

Dmitry Kozlov (2017): Dve revolyutsii, dve sostavnye chasti politicheskogo inakomysliya epokhi "ottepeli", in: Sociology of Power, 29 (2), 153-177.

Dmitry Kozlov (2017): Review of Kathleen E. Smith, Moscow 1956: The Silenced Spring, in: Ab Imperio 18 (4), 335-343.

Oleg Žuravlev (2017) ”Vad blev kvar av Bolotnajatorget? En nystart för den lokala aktivismen i Ryssland”, i Från perestrojka till Bolotnaja. Utvecklingen av ett ryskt civilsamhälle, specialnummer av Arkiv. Tidskrift för samhällsanalys, No. 7, 129–164.

Dmitry Kozlov (2016): Mezhdu skrytym i publichnym: protest v poslevoennom SSSR, in: A.S. Arkhipova, D.A. Radchenko, A.L. Titkov (eds): Gorodskie teksty i praktiki. Tom I: Simvolicheskoe soprotivlenie, Moscow: Izdatel'skiy dom «Delo» RANKhiGS, 47–56.