New Social Movements in Russia: Variety of the Self-Identification Patterns (Case of St. Petersburg)

This paper intends to contribute into the study of new social movements in Russia. Fraudulent 2011 State Duma elections triggered active, though abortive, process of informal social mobilization in major Russia’s urban centers. It resulted in emergence of a rather broad network of civil groups that were eager to articulate their dissatisfaction with the social and political status quo. The social and cultural background of this social discontent was recognized to be of those who belonged to the “new urban middle class” that was created by a decade of social and economic growth in Russia after 2000. At first it was taken for granted (given their anti-regime orientation) that all groups of the “discontented citizens” make a homogeneous social and cultural space. But a closer look at the identity and values of the new social movements raised a number of questions concerning their social and cultural homogeneity. In this paper we are to explore what could be found behind the screen of the common mood of social and political dissatisfaction and discontent shared by all groups of the “angry urban dwellers” (case of the “politics of discontent” period in St. Petersburg in 2011-12). To identify a variety of the new urban social movements’ cultural patterns we employed Q-methodology – an original method that combines qualitative and quantitative techniques to secure mapping of cultural/cognitive variety within a given social space. The main part of the empirical research was qualitative interviews with the civic activists that were done in St. Petersburg in 2012 and 2013.