Narrating De/construction: the Narrative Framing of Moscow’s Contested ‘Renovation’ Program

In February 2017 Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin announced Russia’s largest ever Post-Soviet housing project. The five story Khrushchevskiy buildings – largely pre-fabricated apartment blocks that had been constructed during the Khrushchev era (1953-64) to respond to a growing housing crisis – would be knocked down and their inhabitants resettled in newly built apartment blocks. The project potentially applied to over 5,000 apartment blocks and in total over one million of Moscow’s residents would be affected. The budget for the project, soon announced to extend across Russia, is an estimated 3.5 trillion roubles (or approximately €47,000,000,000). A large civil society group began, chiefly organised online in a Facebook group called ‘Moscovites Against Demolition’, which has provided a space for a range of activists who were critical of the program and the way it is managed. At the same time, government has used Renovation to foster support among the population, as it promises to renew residents’ apartments at no cost to the owner and to modernise the cityscape. In this paper we use Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to examine the contested narratives that have been generated among the two opposing policy camps: residents’ groups who mobilised to oppose the law and official government actors who support it. Drawing on data collected from the Facebook group and from official government sources, we examine the narrative elements and strategies that have been deployed by the two different camps. We seek to understand the different ways in which the negative and positive dimensions of the policy have been apportioned and ascribed to different actors and factors, the belief systems that inform them, and the way that narratives have changed in the two years since it was announced. The paper further seeks to test the relevance of the NPF beyond its use in Anglo-European contexts.