The Micropolitics of Resistance

What should ordinary people do with their feelings of despair and helplessness in the face of naked power grabs by cynical figures? This is the question many civic-minded Russians face. The election of Trump might seem very distant from the realities of Russian society at war, but many Americans now find themselves asking the same questions, caught in a similar emotional landscape.

It’s easy for Americans to react further in two unhelpful ways: either the system will be robust enough to stop the descent into oligarchic dictatorship, or that the actions of individuals don’t matter, or can’t change things, so it makes no sense to stick one’s head above the parapet. Often this leads to the worst kind of ’inner emigration’ where people detach themselves from any and all forms of social solidarity or civic work, retreating into the husk of the individual.

Recently a formerly civically-active person from a large Russian city told me that, “since 2022 I have benefitted from trimming my exposure to people. To stabilize myself, I’ve learned by heart something I say over and over to myself: that it’s pointless to speak of politics and current events.”

But not everyone has the luxury of turning to personal problems as a way of avoiding the social. The human desire to connect to others and work on a common task is hard to fully suppress, as I argue in my forthcoming book “Everyday Politics in Russia”.

Many researchers focus on questions of ‘legacy’, on how Russians’ perception of what is politically possible is shaped by their past experiences. Indeed, there is a broad disillusionment with electoral politics, and increasing numbers of Russians when polled, express preference for a social and political system resembling the Soviet one.

In my book I talk to people from all walks of life about this disillusionment — indirectly. I talk to older people about what is missing from their lives now, about their ideals for the lives of their grandchildren. I talk to workers and thinkers about what kind of ‘good’ society can be imagined.

Even in the darkest of times the stories mainly resemble each other. Having a role which is meaningful in improving one’s social and physical environment, enriching the lives of those around us, and having a political referent that sees the possible future as better than the present — these are all unremarkably remarkable things. Moreover, while I talk to self-avowed ‘activists’, and ‘politically-minded’ people, they are the exception to the rule of the ethnographer, who aims to focus on the socially-typical individuals.

However, much of the time in media and scholarly commentary on Russia, the inheritance of the period before 1991 and in the interregnum of the 1990s, is cast as purely negative. This legacy allegedly forced people into double-think, subjected them to engagement in meaningless ritual political talk turning them into cynical individualists. Alternatively, on the economic level it forced them to engage in corrupt or illegal forms of survival strategies, often at the expense of the weakest in society.