The current paper proposal aims to explore the events that took place in Moscow’s Manezh Square on December 11, 2010. The conflict started with the killing of a fan of Moscow’s Spartak soccer club by a young man from Northern Caucasus. Five days after the tragic protest events escalated with the gathering of some 5,000 to 10,000 football hooligans and nationalists in Manezh square, chanting nationalist slogans and beating up everybody who did not look Russian to them. As a result 1,300 people were detained, more than 30 people were injured and 12 criminal cases were opened, whereas minor ethnic clashes spilled over the streets of other Russian cities. Parting from the question whether contentious politics is changing into violent protest in times of crisis, the paper seeks to analyze the violent protest of Manezh square from a structural perspective. The hypothesis is that economic and socio-political crisis affects both movement mobilization and framing processes. Frames in continuation affect the type of violence. In the case of Russia, the combination of increasing economic problems, corruption and lack of democracy, with the subsequent parliamentary and presidential elections, offered people the reasons to go out on the streets, whereas frames as “Russia for Russians”, “Moscow for Muscovites”, “Kill! Kill”, and Nazi salutes gave the resurgent movement its extreme nationalistic and xenophobic character. The author suggests that research on undemocratic settings could contribute to the furthering of the theoretical debate of protest event analysis. In the case of Russia, the paradox is that a large part of the people on the Manezh square were members of the pro-Kremlin Nashi movement, , because for the first time the Nashis manifested anti-systemic attitudes that were accompanied by violence.
