Protest is politics at its most primal, its most emotional, its most exciting, and sometimes its most consequential. But, at its core, protest is a learning process, one in which people “at the top” and people “at the bottom” struggle to discover where the real power lies, and then to wield that power once they find it. Protest has been an integral part of the dramatic and often traumatic processes of social and economic transformation that Russia has witnessed over the past forty years, both as a driver of that transformation and as a result of it. Moreover, recent years have seen the Russian state reorganize itself and its relationship with society in order to suppress grassroots mobilization in general and protest in particular. This chapter reviews that history and the contemporary landscape of protest in Russia and asks what is being learned – and who is doing the learning – when Russian citizens take to the streets.
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