PECOB Portal on Central Eastern
and Balkan Europe
by IECOB & AIS
Università di Bologna  
 
Saturday December 07, 2024
 
Testata per la stampa
 
 
 

Moscow in Movement.

Power and Opposition in Putin's Russia


edited by
: Samuel Greene
published by
: Stanford University Press
pp: 296
ISBN: 9780804792141
price: Hardback £ 62/ $ 81 | Paperback $ 18.91/ £17.99 (only £ 12.74 when you quote CS1114RUSS ordering here)

Book's frontpage

Moscow in Movement is the first exhaustive study of social movements, protest, and the state-society relationship in Vladimir Putin's Russia. Beginning in 2005 and running through the summer of 2013, the book traces the evolution of the relationship between citizens and their state through a series of in-depth case studies, explaining how Russians mobilized to defend human and civil rights, the environment, and individual and group interests: a process that culminated in the dramatic election protests of 2011–2012 and their aftermath. To understand where this surprising mobilization came from, and what it might mean for Russia's political future, the author looks beyond blanket arguments about the impact of low levels of trust, the weight of the Soviet legacy, or authoritarian repression, and finds an active and boisterous citizenry that nevertheless struggles to gain traction against a ruling elite that would prefer to ignore them.
   On a broader level, the core argument of this volume is that political elites, by structuring the political arena, exert a decisive influence on the patterns of collective behavior that make up civil society—and the author seeks to test this theory by applying it to observable facts in historical and comparative perspective.
   Moscow in Movement will be of interest to anyone looking for a bottom-up, citizens' eye view of recent Russian history, and especially to scholars and students of contemporary Russian politics and society, comparative politics, and sociology.

 

Table of contents

List of Illustrations
Aknowledgments

1. The Puzzle of Russian Civil Society: An Introduction

2. Perspectives on Civil Society

3. Russia's Potemkin Revolution

4. Civil Society in Russia: What We DO and Do Not Know

5. Private Brutality and Public Verdicts: Defendinf Human RIghts in Ruddia

6. Our Home Is Russia: Russia's Housing-Rights Movements

7. Road Rage: Russia's Automotive Rebellion

8. Seizing the Moment

9. Conclusions

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Reviews

Review by Henry E. Hale, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, George Washington University:
"Moscow in Movement is an outstanding book that addresses one of the hottest questions today in Russian politics—when and why Russians do and do not mobilize as part of civil society and in opposition to the regime. It breaks new ground both conceptually and empirically."

Review by Sarah Oates, Professor and Senior Scholar, University of Maryland:  
"Moscow in Movement shifts the focus in the critical debate about civil society in Russia from a narrative of citizens who consistently fail to organize social movements into a far richer, more useful picture of the intricate relationship between state and citizen—illuminating a logic of living in an illogical state. A must-read for anyone attempting to understand the social and political landscape of Russia today."

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