The Russian parliamentary elections of December 2011 gave rise to a massive protest movement.

Turnout for the demonstrations against electoral fraud, Vladimir Putin, and the ruling United Russia party was unprecedented in Russia’s post-Soviet history. While the protests did not prevent Putin’s return to the presidency or force new elections, they have fundamentally altered Russia’s protest repertoire and generated a plethora of new self-organized groups and networks across the country.

Mischa Gabowitsch’s study is the first booklength account of the movement. In addition to hundreds of interviews with activists and regular protest participants, he draws on numerous written eyewitness accounts, blog posts, and videos of protest events from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok and from Paris to Seoul, many of them collected in a systematic database that documents the movement’s evolution. Gabowitsch provides a vivid narrative of the movement’s emergence, scope, and internal conflicts, but also explains its wider social, political and emotional context.
He links it to the local protest initiatives that have sprung up everywhere in Russia over the past decade or so, and shows how the movement is as much about new forms of social curiosity and the conquest of urban space as it is about politics and elections.
While informed by the academic literature on social movements and Russian history and politics, the book is written with a large international audience in mind and omits jargon or lengthy theoretical discussions from the main body of the text. Gabowitsch’s discussions of violence and nonviolence in Russia, domestic election observation as a social movement, and the emergence of new political diasporas is embedded in comparisons with countries ranging from Senegal to the United Stated, and from Argentina to Georgia.

Putting Out Putin