Digital Activism in Russia

This chapter evaluates the state of the Russian non-systemic opposition in the 2000s–2010s from several angles. I identify the opposition’s place in the Russian political regime known as “electoral authoritarianism”. Numerous electoral manipulations implemented since the 2000s were intended to impede any real opposition to politics, and to fixate the dominance of the United Russia party on all levels of Russian politics. The “troubled transformation” of the opposition resisting these challenges consisted of a sequence of ups and downs. Some political outsiders disappeared from the public sphere due to continuous suppression from the authorities. Only a few outsiders of Russian politics have employed an advanced communication strategy to challenge the dominant political grouping in the country. Activists like Alexey Navalny, Ilya Yashin, Lyubov Sobol, and others turned their interaction with citizens into regular, professional, and networked online communication attracting more supporters for their political actions. This allowed them to remain prominent in Russia’s public sphere unlike their predecessors or other opposition colleagues.

The conditions of press freedom in Russia have changed drastically since Perestroika times. The set of socio-economic and political reforms along with ideological changes in the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991 laid the foundation of political communication for the next decades. At first characterised by the policy of Glasnost or openness, it brought complications to the media market caused by “media wars” between Russian oligarchs, and later was defined by the authoritarian tendencies under the control of the strengthened political elite. The specificities of the modern Russian political regime impose great limitations for news media. The range of measures include censorship, radical attacks against critical journalists, and administrative and financial actions against editorials and outlets. The Internet and social media brought about new perspectives for journalists and opposition activists critical of the regime. It contributed to the creation of a new movement of online investigators who were willing to uncover critical issues of Russian politics. Navalny and his associates are part of this movement, which due to censorship and other restrictions was forced to play several political communication roles including those of amateur journalists to avoid the limitations of the authoritarian system.

The limitations on the Internet imposed by the state in the 2010s led international non-governmental organisation Freedom House to evaluate Internet freedom in Russia as “not free” in 2020. To understand the reasons behind the phenomenon, I look briefly at the history of the Russian Internet and digital platforms operating in the country, and the major political milestones and policies towards the Russian Web and Russian Net. The Internet in Russia was not always perceived as a threat to the state’s stability; it was a central point of the government’s modernisation program in Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency (2008–2012). However, after the protests “For Fair Elections” (2011–2012) the government took a different approach towards the Internet that is also dubbed the “Sovereign Internet”. This strategy included such measures as the blocking of social media platforms and punishing users for online activities, which directly affected the communication of Alexey Navalny and other Russian oppositionists, who performed mostly online. Despite major restrictions and censorship of the Web, the Russian opposition managed to find loopholes for spreading anti-establishment and anti-corruption discourses for digital publics in the late 2010s.

Russian opposition activists acting from the Internet underground, with the help of social media, performed several prominent acts of defiance against mainstream discourses and monopolistic powers dominating in the country. I also call this “digital resistance”. In this chapter I provide background on the cases of digital resistance to political regimes from non-Western contexts which are close to Russia’s political organisation. These are authoritarian, semi-authoritarian political regimes such as China, Turkey, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The digital emergencies within these countries help in understanding the similarities between these digital resistances and Navalny’s case, and also what makes his case unique among them, as well as taking a broader look at the phenomenon of digital resistance to authoritarian rule.

Global political communication shifts have shaped the interaction about politics over the last decades. These shifts include deteriorating press freedom, the decline of trust in mainstream media, and the rise of far-right populism in the world. In these conditions, the role of public scrutiny of political actors has become more vital than ever. However, when in most of the Western or democratic countries this role is usually assigned to the media, in illiberal contexts, where the press is weak, other actors are exposing officials’ misconduct or corruption. At the same time, most of the populism research focuses on Western examples of far-right populist parties and movements, whereas in non-democratic settings populism can help those who are fighting for democracy “from the bottom”. Both populism and investigative journalism as communication tactics can help political outsiders to overcome the limitations on political and press freedoms, which is seen in the case of Navalny and his colleagues. Both aim at the exposure of the abuse of political power and corruption in society, and its practices can be combined in political communications for political outsiders.

Along with populist content, Alexey Navalny and his associates also express a populist communication style, associated with presentational elements used to express populism. This style can be expressed in many formats, but is usually seen as comprising political performance elements, such as speech, body, performative labour, and the stage. In addition, I argue that the adaptation of the messages to a communication medium—in this case, YouTube—is also a part of the communication style used by Russian opposition activists. Thus, in this chapter, I explore YouTube in detail as a platform for hosting populist performances through its social media affordances. The visual representation of the body and the “stage”, as well as affordances of the platform interaction come to the fore, as all these factors determine the aesthetics of the populist genre online.

On December 13, 2016 Alexey Navalny announced on his YouTube channel that he was participating in the 2018 presidential election along with the incumbent president Vladimir Putin. His electoral campaign was guided by a large concentration of populist messages; however, this was also a time of the release of resonant video investigations into the corruption of high-ranking officials in Russia such as former Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. YouTube documentaries served as triggers to mass manifestations in major Russian cities. However, they did not lead to the resignation of officials and in the end, Navalny himself was barred from participation in the election. In this chapter, I look at his populist performances on YouTube during the presidential campaign of 2016–2018 and investigate how Navalny combined different communication tactics, be it journalism, activism, and populism, in his online interactions with citizens.

In 2019, mass protests hit Russia’s capital: in July, August, and September people gathered on the streets dissatisfied with the electoral process in the Moscow City Duma election. Many independent candidates were barred from participation in the election and refused registration by the Electoral Commission of Moscow, citing multiple reasons including invalid signatures collected for candidates. Four of those candidates were Navalny’s associates and allies such as Ilya Yashin, Lyubov Sobol, Vladimir Milov, and Ivan Zhdanov. They used various communication instruments inspired by Navalny to gather one of the largest demonstrations of the 2010s in Russia’s capital.

Alexey Navalny’s digital resistance maintained the protest continuum from 2011 and resulted in the emergence of similar snap communication campaigns by his associates, who repeatedly employed his communication strategies in 2019 on one of the popular platforms—YouTube. However, in 2020–2021, a rapid series of more restrictive events and actions escalated in Russia in anticipation of the parliamentary election. It implicated the media sphere, the Internet, and involved further suppression of the opposition including Navalny and his colleagues. This chapter reflects on the future of RuNet, digital platforms, the Russian media, and non-systemic opposition, and poses questions for future research on these complex topics.