Bolotnajarörelsen: politisk kultur, identitet och mobilisering

[The Bolotnaya movement: political culture, identity and mobilization]In December 2011, international attention was drawn to the parliamentary elections in Russia that caused numerous accusations of electoral fraud and generated a wave of protests not seen in the country since the 1990s. The consequences of the “Movement for fair elections†(also called the Bolotnaya movement and the Snow revolution) were profound for the society at large even though the protests of 2011–2012 did not lead to democratization of the political system as its goals intended. Aleksej Sachnin’s article traces the forms and mechanisms of mass mobilization around the movement, its social base and collective identity. Sachnin demonstrates that the oppositional and state-affiliated elites attempted to integrate the movement into the populist political agenda they represented. At the same time, the movement demonstrated an enormous potential for grassroots activism, based on horizontal organizational structures and a preference for specific (and often pragmatic) forms of activities. The movement’s diversity generated different forms of collective identities, which in the end became the decisive weakness of the movement.Publication history: Published original.(Published 8 February 2017)Citation: Sachnin, Aleksej (2017) “Bolotnajarörelsen: politisk kultur, identitet och mobiliseringâ€, in FrÃ¥n perestrojka till Bolotnaja. Utvecklingen av ett ryskt civilsamhälle, special issue of Arkiv. Tidskrift för samhällsanalys, issue 7, pp. 93–127. DOI: https://doi.org/10.13068/2000-6217.7.3 ; I december 2011 drogs världens uppmärksamhet mot ett parlamentsval i Ryssland som kantades av omfattande anklagelser om valfusk och genererade en protestvÃ¥g som vi inte sett i landet sedan 1990-talet. Konsekvenserna av â€rörelsen för rättvisa val†(ocksÃ¥ kallad Bolotnajarörelsen och snörevolutionen) blev djupgÃ¥ende för det ryska samhället trots att protesterna 2011–2012 inte ledde till den eftersträvade demokratiseringen av det ...