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  • Moscow in Movement: Power and Opposition in Putin’s Russia by Samuel A. Greene
  • Emma Gilligan (bio)
Samuel A. Greene, Moscow in Movement: Power and Opposition in Putin’s Russia (Stanford University Press, 2014), ISBN 978-0-8047-9078-9, 276 pages.

What are we to make of civil society in Russia today? Anna Politkovskaya, the esteemed Russian journalist, was murdered outside her apartment in 2006 and human rights monitor, Natalya Estimerova, was kidnapped and killed in Chechnya in [End Page 564] 2009. The human rights lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, was shot on a busy Moscow street, along with journalist, Anastasia Barburova, in the same year. In 2012, the state legislature approved a law that forced nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with foreign funding to register as “foreign agents.” After a wave of protests in 2011, the government exhibited symptoms of a siege mentality, resorting to inept measures to deal with the open criticism. That summer it began conducting raids on NGOs suspected of promoting foreign interests inside Russia, encouraging anti-government actions and protests in the wake of the 2011 winter demonstrations.

Samuel Greene is not the first writer to analyze civil society in the post-Soviet period—think of Elena Chebankova, Lisa Sundstrom, and Laura Henry—but his book is a truly excellent study of the complex layers that now define civil society in the region. No longer confined to a discussion of the most acclaimed human rights organizations, such as Memorial and the Moscow Helsinki Group, Greene’s analysis and empirical portrait casts a lens on the range of movements that have appeared in the past decade. In this sense, Greene has achieved something very original. By a combination of excellent scholarship, empathy, and writing that might best be described as fluent and committed, he gives a true sense of the range and diversity of social movements in contemporary Russia. He has set himself the task of focusing on the micro-level to track changes in civil society over time and in doing so has managed to escape a formalistic, top down approach.

His argument is that key protagonists in Russia’s civil society have failed, “not because of their own mistakes, or even for a lack of resources, but because of the failure of the state to provide the sociopolitical and institutional context in which citizens could begin to conceive of and develop strategies for collective action.”1 The argument is probably an obvious one, but the interest lies in the strategies adopted by the movements themselves in this highly uncertain political and social context, the ways in which NGOs deploy the media, personal contacts, and the coincidence of historical moments to further their cause. As Greene argues, citizens recognize the chaos in the state’s response to their initiatives; they fully understand that they cannot expect a collective response from a system that is largely built on elite power politics.

Greene strives for an explanation of the problems within Russian civil society that move beyond conceptions of trust, social capital, individual passivity, or the Soviet legacy. Instead, he argues that the state has maintained extraordinary power with little formal regulation and that there are “high bound individualists” who continue to navigate the shifting socio-political terrain. This is by no means fanciful speculation on Greene’s part; it is grounded in an empirical approach that illustrates both ad-hoc and traditional trends in social protest. Part of his method is a mapping of three distinct movements: Russia’s Housing Rights Movement, Free Choice: Russia’s Automotive Movement, and Public Verdict. The first represents thousands of citizens who were defrauded after purchasing apartments before they were built, including victims who were forced from their homes to make room for new high-rise developments, and those affected by the building of a new highway through Moscow’s Khimki [End Page 565] Forest. Free Choice: Russia’s Automotive Movement, one of the largest grass-roots organizations in Russia, emerged after the government tried to ban all right-hand drive cars (potentially effecting 1.5 to 2 million drivers east of Lake Baikal) with a protest movement conducted from their cars on the streets of major Russian cities, including Moscow...

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