Stirring culture: Moral batteries and public characters in the battle over Moscow’s renovation

Introduction

Scholars of social movements have long treated them as a kind of laboratory for developing and trying out social theories of various types. Some, such as crowd theories (LeBon 1960 [1895]) and rational-choice theories (Olson 1965), have faded in recent years, although other older theories such as structuralism (McAdam 1982; Tilly 1977) and Marxism (Barker et al. 2014) continue to be respected and used occasionally. Cultural theory has been one of the most successful additions in recent decades (Jasper 1997; Johnston 2009; Johnston & Klandermans 1995; Melucci 1996), so much so that it has proliferated a range of theories that all highlight meaning, interpretation, and the subjective point of view of the players (Jasper 2010, 2017). These include theories of emotions, strategic decision-making, bodies, gender, interaction, memory and more.

By using emotion theory, we aim to assess and extend some classic cultural theories, especially those that focus on cognition and draw upon French structuralism and which helped define the cultural turn. Emotion theory has many roots, but some of its power comes from the ways in which it emerged from and drew upon cultural constructionism (e.g. Harré 1986). Social-movement theory has broadly shifted from structure to action in recent years (Jasper 2010), and emotions are crucial to developing any theory of action. To the extent that cultural meanings influence action, it is because of the emotions they suggest and stimulate.

We hope to demonstrate some of the power of combining cognition and emotion theory by examining the case of Renovation, Moscow’s controversial urban renewal program unfolding since 2017. The program proposed to demolish more than 4000 soviet-era prefabricated apartment buildings and to relocate residents to yet-to-be-constructed high-rises. The city announced that the old apartment buildings were crumbling, not fit for humans, and ‘morally outdated’, which meant that they did not fit the image of the world class city that Moscow was aspiring to become. The past–future, old–new, before–after contrast was stark.

The proposal affected more than a million residents: homeowners, commercial renters, and public renters. Residents were invited to express their opinions on the relocations: they could vote online (on the electronic referenda platform ( ‘Active Citizen’) or in government service centers, or they could hold a homeowner assembly. The proposal was immediately controversial, raising questions about private property rights, limitations of state power, and the desirable qualities of housing and urban environments. But this design for receiving public approval set neighbors in individual buildings against one another, triggering conflict and the mobilization of both supporters and opponents of Renovation.

The controversy unfolded in a variety of arenas, offline and online, formal and informal, public and private. To enable the relocations, parliament had to pass a special law concerning the voting procedures and conditions of the program. Rallies, public hearings, and social media discussions accompanied this process. For an apartment building to be included in the demolition lists, two-thirds of its residents had to vote in favor. Opponents and supporters of Renovation began organizing in their buildings and courtyards, turning the public spaces and common areas in the residential blocks into political arenas. Online, numerous city-wide and neighborhood-based groups and public pages appeared on social media. Residents of the affected buildings and other concerned Muscovites came together on these platforms to share information about the program and discuss their visions of the best future for Moscow and its neighborhoods. These online arenas on Facebook and Vkontakte (Russian analog of Facebook) were crucial for networking, learning, and doing character work.

This article is based on a qualitative study combining interviews (45 interviews in which 53 people participated), observation, document analysis, and digital ethnography conducted between 2017 and 2019. We interviewed people opposing, supporting, and neutral toward Renovation who resided in four Moscow districts selected for the study. We also used video- and audio-recordings of various Renovation-related public events (homeowners’ assemblies and other formal and informal arenas, where neighbors faced each other with their houses’ fate at stake) and monitored social media communities related to the relocation program (taking notes and archiving selected posts as ‘digital fieldnotes’) (for more information on methods, see Zhelnina 2020, 2021)

Theoretical background

One of the great trends across the social sciences in the late 20th century was the rediscovery, elaboration, and appreciation of cultural meanings as central to social life and action. Precursors included idiosyncratic scholars like Kenneth Burke and Suzanne Langer, cultural anthropology, the philosophy of language, and the history and philosophy of scientific knowledge. Parsonian sociology had a key logical place for culture, in the form of shared values, but then paid little empirical attention to it, often leaving the dynamics of meaning making and emotions to the idiosyncrasies of psychoanalysis. The study of symbols was also entwined with the cognitive revolution, usually to the exclusion of emotions. The cultural turn emerged most self-consciously in history, where it displaced social history while sharing its interest in common folk, and spread to other social sciences, including the study of social movements (Jasper 1997; Johnston & Klandermans 1995; Snow et al. 1986).

The cognitive power of binaries was a key ingredient in the cultural shift. Drawing on linguistic structuralism, Claude Lévi-Strauss showed how cultural systems such as kinship or myths rely on a series of oppositions such as – in the case of myths – life versus death and agriculture versus hunting. Cultural meanings could be mapped out in tree-like branching structures, much as words are defined in a dictionary through their differences from other words. An advance over earlier functionalist theories of culture, structuralism had an aura of science, not least because of Lévi-Strauss’ use of quasi-algebraic equations and the implication that binaries are grounded in the structure of the human brain (an idea compatible with the metaphor popular at the time of the brain as a binary computer).

Jeffrey Alexander (2006) adopted binaries in his theory of cultural meaning, shorn of the dubious biologism and algebra. In his theory of the civil sphere, he lists the oppositions that generate civil and anti-civil motives (rational–irrational, calm–excitable, autonomous–dependent, etc.), social relationships (open–secretive, altruistic–greedy, critical–deferential, deliberative–conspiratorial, etc.), and institutions (rule regulated–arbitrary, law–power, equality–hierarchy, inclusive–exclusive, contracts–loyalty, office–personality). Although Alexander presents a neofunctionalist account of these as actual motives, actions, and values, they could just as easily represent rhetorical terms meant to express approval and disapproval.

Understood as admiration or condemnation, binaries can be linked to another recent strand of cultural theory, the construction of emotions. Jasper (2018) offers several categories of emotions, among them moral emotions. These include pride and shame and praise and blame (along with compassion, revenge, contempt, indignation, and a feeling of fairness). These two pairs represent approval and disapproval applied to oneself (pride or shame) and to others (admiration versus indignation or blame) (Jasper 2018: 133). However, these are among the few emotions that can be readily expressed as binary oppositions.

Pairs of moral emotions like these generate several dynamics that recur in protest and strategic engagement more generally. Moral batteries are one: the juxtaposition of positive emotions (including hope, admiration, joy) with negative emotions (such as fear, indignation, hate). The combined push away from the negative feelings and pull toward the positive ones suggest a direction of action, especially protest (Jasper 2011). Negative feelings alone do not necessarily suggest an alternative, positive ones alone may not provide the anger that generates energy for action. Pride and shame are a frequent battery, much observed in social movements, which offer parades, new labels, ‘coming out’, and other ways of moving members from shame into pride (Bruce 2016; Gould 2009; Whittier 2012).

So moral batteries imply a time element, not usually remarked upon. They suggest a before and an after, with a sharp contrast between the two. This is how things are; this is how they will be in the future – with sufficient protest and political action. This is the utopian strand of social movements that has been discussed (Crossley 1999; Jamison 2012). Narratives of change may portray it as glacially slow or as abrupt revolutionary transition, but they are all clear about their favored direction of change.

Moral batteries help propel action when they stimulate indignation, often seen as the core emotion of protest and social movements (Jasper 2014; Miller & Jasper 2023). Indignation and outrage, as morally inflected forms of anger, are from the beginning an expression of protest against injustice or unfairness. They are linked to background emotions of moral values, principles, and intuitions, and they often are felt on behalf of a group that is being harmed or insulted.

A second cluster of moral emotions have to do with the construction of reputations, whether of individuals or of groups. In recent work on ‘character theory’ (Jasper et al. 2018, 2020), use two binaries – strong versus weak, good versus bad – to generate the basic characters of political dramas, rhetoric, and imagery: victims (weak and good), villains (strong and bad), heroes (strong and good), and minions (weak and bad). A third binary, active versus passive, further distinguishes subtypes of each, such as sleeping giants who only turn into aggressive heroes out of necessity – and are considered more moral as a result of their initial passivity. These ‘public characters’ affect audiences strongly because they have built into them the emotions those audiences are supposed to feel: we pity victims, we fear and hate villains, we admire and are grateful to heroes, we laugh at and are contemptuous of minions. Without these feelings, characters and the narratives they populate are lifeless and unmoving.

Group stereotypes are among the many uses to which character work is directed. Oppressed groups may be kept in their place through contempt and ridicule, or they may be portrayed as strong, dangerous, and menacing. The former reassures those on top, the latter characterization mobilizes audiences to attack the group. Most dominated groups receive both kinds of character treatment at different times. Minions are generally ineffectual, but when a villain organizes them they can be threatening. Wartime foes are a good example: American propagandists ridiculed the Japanese, portraying them as like insects or rodents, before Pearl Harbor; afterward they had to repaint them as a unified menace, caricatured now as King Kong and other powerful figures (Dower 1986).

Individuals, especially politicians, are regular recipients and creators of character work, but so are fictive individuals. Corporate public relations and modern electoral campaigns are all about character work: who is the proper hero, moral and strong enough to fix problems, protect the weak, save humanity. In the field of social problems, the construction of an issue typically starts with victims who have been harmed. Once they are acknowledged, the search begins for villains who have caused the evil. Heroes are often less clear, or merely implied: a nonprofit group, elected officials, even crusading journalists. In the case of so-called moral panics, the focus is on the villains, or ‘folk devils’, who threaten everyone and everything, especially moral order (Cohen 1972). Characters are used not just to describe problems but to motivate response and solutions.

In analyzing the impact of the videos of George Floyd’s murder, Miller and Jasper (2023) suggest that, among other things, the juxtaposition of a deliberate, calm villain with a subdued, childlike victim was a powerful moral battery using the basic characters of political rhetoric and imagery. White viewers experienced moral shocks, many acknowledging police violence more fully than ever before, while Black viewers were more likely to draw on group solidarity and history to frame this incident as unsurprising but still shocking.

Short-run emotional reactions occur against a background of long-run emotional commitments, and the two constantly shape each other. The long-run loyalties include, on one hand, feelings about groups, places, and ideas, especially all that goes under the heading of collective or group identity, but also negative feelings about people and things. On the other hand, long-run emotional commitments also include moral perspectives, the sources of shame and pride, triggers for compassion and indignation. Long-run emotional commitments such as love, hate, liking, disliking, disgust, pride, shame, compassion, and more are all capable of cognitive elaboration in symbols, images, narratives, slogans, and other material carriers of meaning. These orientations can change, but rarely do.

In the following sections, we examine the character work and other moral batteries that propelled the controversy over Renovation, beginning with the reputation of and trust in the Moscow government, followed by the construction of villains and then of minions. We go on to compare online and offline character work, and then examine moral batteries that juxtapose before and after time periods to generate their effects.

The government’s character

Character work is frequently aimed at government, which can be personified in the same way as corporations, nations, and other fictive persons. States work hard to present themselves as heroes: powerful, protecting their citizens against dangers, generous, trustworthy, and benevolent. Their critics on the other hand may either minionize them as inept, or more often demonize them as too powerful as well as malevolent.

The Moscow Mayor’s office framed Renovation as a gift to Muscovites, a ‘free’ improvement to people’s housing conditions. They did not expect that a significant share of the residents of the alleged ‘slums’ (‘khrushyoby’ – Khrushchev’s slums) would have a different vision of their housing and its quality. In almost every such building, it turned out, there was at least someone who loved and cared for their flats.

Inevitably, the program became symbolically associated with the Mayor’s office, Moscow’s government, and government in general. Decisions whether to sign up for the program therefore depended on how much people trusted the responsible government institutions. Officials promised that the residents would be relocated to better, more modern homes, with carefully planned surrounding areas and infrastructure. However, at the time of the vote, no clear plans, not even the timeline for the relocations, were finalized. The new high-rises were not yet built, and only a few potential construction sites across the city were identified for this purpose.

Moreover, the legislative basis for the program and for the relocations was under construction itself: the vote and the assemblies had to be finalized by 1 July 2017, while the ‘Renovation bill’, a document that defined the rules and the procedures of the program, was not approved by the legislature and signed into law until 1 August. This uncertainty made rational calculation difficult; emotions, and in particular, trust in government became significant factors in people’s decision-making processes. Muscovites naturally projected their feelings about government onto Renovation.

Trust in government is one of the long-standing emotional commitments that guide people’s perception of politics. When the Renovation program was suddenly announced early in 2017, people’s immediate emotional responses were shaped, at least in part, by their more stable emotional valuation of the government in general and Moscow government specifically. In many countries, people have some faith in their governments to act as heroes, protecting citizens and shaping the future. Not in Russia (Shlapentokh 2006).

For example, Kirill, who eventually became a key figure in the anti-Renovation movement in his district, described how the hearing about the possibility of the program immediately made him ‘tense’ (‘napryaglo’):

And then suddenly Vladimir Vladimirovitch [Putin] announces to [Mayor] Sobyanin that he knows the Muscovites’ wants and needs, and these wants and needs are that their homes be demolished and new ones built in their place. Of course, it made me tense, and I began to follow it all very carefully.

Kirill framed his first emotional reaction to the program as a reaction to the President’s statements at a meeting with Moscow’s Mayor. They are the nation’s and city’s highest officials. Kirill did not expect anything good to come from them. He was already skeptical about Russian politics before the program, although his political actions had never moved beyond following the news and voting. His long-standing skepticism primed him for a negative, ‘tense’ reaction to the program, too.

Some Muscovites were more trusting. For some supporters, their neighbors’ overwhelming mistrust of government came as a surprise. Artur failed to convince his neighbors to vote for Renovation and was puzzled that most of them refused to do so despite the backing by the President and the Mayor and all the written promises they made to Muscovites:

And I’m like: how can this be? Did they sign the Twelve Guarantees? They did. Is there a presidential decree? There is. Well, even if they lie to you, you could easily go to court, if your rights would be violated.

Like some other supporters, Artur presumed that, in the worst-case scenario, the court system would be there to protect his rights. Opponents of Renovation were extremely skeptical of the courts’ independence and saw their adversaries trust in courts as another example of their naiveté.

On the other hand, supporters of Renovation were not necessarily blind supporters of the government. Some acknowledged the risks and uncertainties of the program but decided to follow another habitual tool of trying to game the system, summed up in the Russian proverb ‘a tuft of hair from a mangy mare’ (s parshivoy ovtsy hot’ shersti klok). Some supporters even criticized Mayor Sobyanin for his earlier controversial policies; for example, the introduction of parking fees in residential districts and the seemingly unending repair of sidewalks, which many urbanites interpreted as a sign of corruption.

People trust heroes, who have both good intentions and the capabilities to follow through on them. They mistrust minions, who have neither. They mistrust villains for their malevolent intentions, and they fear villains because they have the strength to follow through. Victims are sympathetic but too weak to help.

Seeing the government as a villain, minion, or hero depends on what people think about its intentions and its strength. The Russian state, with its long and complicated history of abuse of its own population, has deserved many citizens’ mistrust. The Renovation controversy included, among other themes, a discussion of whether the government could for once be benevolent and deliver on its promises. The latter was also a question of how much strength people saw in it.

Surprisingly, a reputation as a villain was sometimes useful for the state to push the controversial policy forward: some people thought that fighting the powerful villain was pointless and would not join any activist efforts to fight for their homes. Ekaterina, a neighborhood activist against Renovation, summed up this perception of the government’s force and its effect on people:

This juggernaut (‘makhina’) just pushes forward so boldly and so rapidly, smashing everything around it. All this deception in the official media; of course, you understand, that you are trying to fight some giant windmill.

The lack of a hero to stand up to the villain weakens this moral battery. More powerful are titanic clashes between mighty heroes and equally powerful villains: the balance between them demands that other players join the fight. Movements and organizations typically try to play the role of hero, or they point to plucky players like Rosa Parks to inspire others. Sometimes, martyrs are constructed to be heroes.

If you cannot find a strong hero, one alternative is to shrink the villain, making it less powerful and more vulnerable. Transforming perceptions of the ‘juggernaut’ of the state into a less powerful character is difficult, but not impossible. At the national level, Alexey Navalny and his Anti-Corruption foundation tried to portray the autocrats as petty kleptocrats with bad taste, incompetent and incapable of implementing their evil plans. Turning them into minions would help make the task of fighting them feasible. Specializing in investigations of corruption, the foundation not only revealed the shady schemes which high-ranked officials established to profit from governmental contracts and kickback, but also showed how they spent their money. The gilded toilet brush found among the equipment purchased for Vladimir Putin’s palace in the south of Russia inspired a maelstrom of Internet jokes. The investigators also revealed the trajectories of some of the participants in the corrupt schemes, portraying them as incompetent losers who failed in everything until they were granted a cozy office because of their family connections. Demystifying the closed political regime like that helped reduce the perceived power of the regime and its main players.

Turning government villains into minions was also something activists tried to do at the local level while fighting Renovation. It was easier to portray a local council member or bureaucrat as a weak minion than to paint Putin that way. The state, taken as a unified whole, can be viewed as power even while the individuals who comprise it can be dismissed as ridiculous, ineffectual, and petty.

The villains of social media

Online, Muscovites enthusiastically engaged in character work, looking for individuals and groups to blame for Renovation or for ruining people’s chances to benefit from it. Most notably, Renovation’s opponents targeted Moscow’s Mayor Sergey Sobyanin and some of his closest administrators. Sobyanin’s public image is an example of the ‘villain-minion’ dilemma (Jasper et al. 2020: 157): on one hand, to mobilize more Muscovites against him, his opponents depicted the Mayor as a threatening villain. On the other hand, they sometimes portrayed him as more ridiculous than dangerous, which could give the protesters more confidence in their own power.

In either case, Sobyanin’s ‘non-Muscovite’ status became essential to his character, showing the emotional power of an insider–outsider binary (a common opposition in political rhetoric, yet oddly missing from any of Alexander’s lists). Sobyanin, as well as the majority of his top staff, are not Muscovites: they traveled with the Mayor from other regions where he had worked before. Sobyanin was born in a rural town in the Far North and worked as a city administrator and finally governor in cities and regions of the North and Siberia, before coming to Moscow. This trajectory made him a target of jokes and rejection from ‘true Muscovites’, who have a sense of superiority over people ‘from the regions’. Sobyanin’s ‘beautification’ policies caused ridicule: Muscovites made fun of ‘his’ bad taste when plastic flowers and huge colorful objects appeared in the streets of Moscow on any occasion.

Renovation sparked a wave of deep hatred instead of mild ridicule, pushing character work from minion to villain: the ‘reindeer breeder’ (a reference to the region of his birth) became the mildest of Sobyanin’s nicknames. Many critics brought up Sobyanin’s and his team member’s non-Moscow origins to explain their inadequacy to rule the city, calling for him to ‘go back to Kogalym’ (the oil mining city in the North, where Sobyanin started his administrative career). He became the villain. Some of the epithets criticized his obsession with remaking Moscow with concrete. Plitochnik roughly means ‘slab-man’, and bordurenfuerer is not far from ‘king of the curbs’. Attacks also drew on that great source of villain rhetoric, the Nazis. He was dubbed a gauleiter, after the regional leaders for the Nazis. His initials, SS, were also a source of amusement.

Vladimir Putin’s symbolic role in Renovation was small. He appeared early on as a powerful player ‘asking’ Sobyanin to do something about Moscow’s crumbling housing in the early days of the process, and he signed the new legislation in August 2017. After that, he faded as a player. For some anti-Renovation activists, Renovation perfectly symbolized Putin’s regime: corrupt, anti-democratic, and unjust. The role of a distant, powerful figure who could intervene if needed, especially when the hero is in trouble, is well known in folklore; they range from magicians to judges to powerful (and often mistrusted) donors.

Images invoked some of the strongest cultural tropes to stir emotions. In one anti-Renovation Facebook group, a user posted a collage with a comment ‘This is what true Muscovites need to know about Sobyanin!’ It was a drawing of a Slavic looking woman carrying a child in her arms, pressing against a door, trying to close it; behind the door, a figure of a man with a bow and arrows, in headgear associated with Turkic nomadic tribes, was preparing to shoot his arrow toward the woman. A face of Sobyanin was photoshopped onto the attacker: the collage stressed that he was foreign to Moscow and linked the Mayor and his team to the villainous Tatar-Mongols who occupied and enslaved Russia in the Middle Ages.

The minions of Moscow

Many Renovation supporters were, in fact, not blind followers of the government and were aware of the risks of the program, but still decided to take on these risks to get a chance at improving their housing conditions and the value of their property. But some opponents of the program engaged in character work to portray their adversaries as weak, manipulated minions helping the villains of the story ruin Moscow.

Brainwashed neighbors were not the only minions constructed: local-level bureaucrats and employees of local administrations, heads of the housing councils, municipal deputies associated with the ‘United Russia’ party, and other less visible players all helped the city administration push through the program. These players were not entirely powerless, and so they were sometimes portrayed as villains, but ridicule remained the most common treatment.

The district-level administrations, uprava, were tasked with informing their district’s residents about the program. For several months in 2017, the agendas of the required monthly public meetings were hijacked by Renovation, and these meetings became unusually crowded as worried residents tried to get some information about the unclear rules of the program. Upravas also set up dedicated ‘Renovation Cabinets’: offices where low-level uprava employees would answer questions from anyone interested in the program based on the information the employees got from a booklet provided by the Mayor’s office. Uprava employees did not have much more information about the program than the concerned residents already knew from public sources, but they were expected to push the program forward and recruit residents to vote for demolitions. Rumors also alleged that uprava employees had a financial motivation and were promised bonuses if their districts did well in including buildings in Renovation – the kind of petty greed often attributed to minions.

Some opponents of the program initially thought of upravas as villains, but at some point the perception shifted: the more people became immersed in local-level politics, the more they learned about the functions and opportunities of different players in this field. They learned that upravas carry out orders of higher-level officials. As Irina, a supporter of Renovation, said,

Our uprava now – they are powerless; they can’t do anything. They held these [public meetings], but I feel pity for them, as humans. I worked in this system myself. And it has nothing to do with them, they just received [orders] from above, that they must have this meeting. (. . .) But they don’t know anything themselves!

Many opponents eventually formed the impression that uprava employees were not villains, but minions, acting on behalf of a stronger malevolent player, the Mayor’s Office. Still, these minions allegedly infiltrated the communities and housing councils and tried to act in shady ways to include more buildings in the program. Denis described the situation in his building, where supporters of Renovation, who happened to be minor uprava employees, tried to stage a homeowner assembly and demand inclusion behind their neighbors’ backs:

This woman, she works as a cleaner in uprava. And her daughter, she is a small bureaucrat, she accepts paperwork, from homeowner assemblies and such. I don’t know her position, but she works there in an office. (. . .) And they explained that they kind of had a homeowner assembly. They made some lists, someone signed them, and they quickly approved it in uprava as if it were a legitimate homeowner assembly.

In some buildings, the uprava tried to recruit housing council leaders and ‘building elders’ to advocate for Renovation, and neighbors were distressed by rumors that these pro-Renovation activists were promised better apartments or better relocation conditions if they managed to get their building to join the program. Elizaveta saw the effects of this at her homeowner assembly. One of the residents, the ‘building elder’ who Elizaveta thought was ‘somehow affiliated with uprava’, organized the assembly to make sure the building was included in the program:

She was somehow affiliated with uprava, and she quietly brainwashed everyone (…) She turned out to be the ‘building elder’, and we found out that, according to the new Housing Code, there isn’t even such a position anymore. We knew nothing about her. And when the homeowner assembly was announced, the way she acted, it was clear that she brainwashed people before that.

How widespread this practice really was is secondary; what mattered was the emotion of mistrust in neighbors that these rumors stirred. It reflected and reinforced people’s views of their neighbors as individualistic and ready to bypass collective interests for individual gain, and their belief in widespread corruption in all levels of government, including local minor officials. Seeing how widespread this petty but malevolent activity was could be dispiriting (Bauhr & Grimes 2013); on the other hand, fighting the incompetent minions was more promising than opposing the juggernaut of the state and its propaganda. Diminishing the importance and competence of their adversaries often relied on classic urban tropes: ‘marginal’ people and newcomers. This character work not only made the task conceivable, it also allowed Renovation’s opponents to claim more legitimacy and more right to define the city’s future. They often relied on the binaries that fall into Alexander’s classification of civil and uncivil motivations.

Online and offline

Alexander’s classification of civil and anti-civil motives suggests a set of binaries people can use to judge the legitimacy of other people’s claims and their rights to participate in the democratic process. To be capable of making the right decisions, one needs to be ‘seen as rational and reasonable rather than irrational and hysterical, as calm rather than excited, as controlled rather than passionate, as sane and realistic rather than fantastical or mad’ (Alexander 2006: 57). Depicting some players as failing to comply with the ‘civil’ criteria can be a tool for their adversaries to diminish their right to make decisions and claims.

Online arenas provide a convenient space for this kind of character work and the questioning of motives, and stark binaries can be presented in an unqualified form. During the Renovation controversy, these processes unfolded in the thematic city-wide and neighborhood-based groups on Facebook and other social media platforms. Initially, these groups were created by concerned Muscovites to share the scarce information available about the program and to help neighbors in the anonymous city locate each other.

Both pro- and anti-Renovation sides had city-wide as well as neighborhood-specific groups. ‘Muscovites against Renovation’ was the largest of these groups, reaching nearly 30,000 members. Pro-Renovation groups emerged later and were mostly created and maintained by anonymous officials, not by mobilized citizens themselves. In the citizen-run groups, posts could be created by all members, whereas in the pro-Renovation groups content was curated by admins, and citizens could only interact in comments sections. Still, comments sections in both pro- and anti-Renovation social media became arenas for emotional exchanges and political character work.

Offline interactions among neighbors were often heated, especially when there were both pro- and anti-Renovation activists in the same building. Sometimes, people were intimidated by their neighbors and could not find a way to communicate with them. For example, Lyudmila, who had purchased her two-bedroom flat, renovated it and loved it, thought her neighbors were aggressive and unreasonable. In an interview, she called them ‘bydlo’ (‘white trash’) and felt powerless against them. She would not call them names in face-to-face interactions, however; if anything, her fear silenced her. She was intimidated into civil behavior.

There were no such constraints online. Depicting someone as passive, unrealistic, and irrational is a way to foreground their uncivil motives and unfitness for democratic processes. Pejorative labels like ‘marginals’, ‘drunkards’, and ‘ponayekhavshiye’ (a pejorative term for newcomers) often emerged in the anti-Renovation social media to justify why the supporters of Renovation were incapable of making good judgments or of acting in more than their immediate and selfish interests. It helped opponents of Renovation stimulate and maintain useful emotions: outrage, indignation, and an eagerness to fight the injustice.

But people also used these platforms to create useful identities and solidarities. The solidarity of ‘true Muscovites’ and proper, hard-working citizens was often the basis for the mobilization of emotions among the opponents of Renovation. The opposite was the character of a clueless newcomer or a ‘marginal’, an irresponsible person who wants to get everything for free. Blaming Renovation on brainwashed poor people and newcomers is a recurring theme in the interviews with Renovation opponents; it is even more dominant in their online posts.

Supporters of Renovation used the same labels to argue that their opponents were not fit to make good choices. Galina, an ardent supporter of Renovation, also claimed the ‘true Muscovite’ identity and thought that newcomers had lower housing standards and were overall less sharp. She said that her anti-Renovation neighbor would be content with ‘living in a tent’ if this tent was in Moscow, a desirable place for migrants from all Russian regions.

Identifying someone as irrational and anti-civil makes it possible to justify repressing them and limiting their participation in democratic processes, for their own good and everyone else’s. In anti-Renovation discourses, poor people, ‘marginals’, and addicts became the culprits whose poor, anti-civil choices undermined the greater good: a better city and protection of property for all Muscovites.

In offline interactions, these labels rarely came up explicitly because of underlying rules of interaction and potential reactions from their interlocutors; in online comments, however, people were freed from these fears and norms, and demonization of newcomers and ‘marginals’ could openly continue. Some anti-Renovation activists were concerned about this, because they anticipated the alienating effects of such extreme character work. It could make it impossible to persuade neighbors. For example, neighborhood activist Tanya formulated the risks and brought up Lyudmila’s case as an example:

She was not skilled in interacting with people, with neighbors. We spoke, and she was like: our neighbors are terrible, they drink! But of course no one would talk to a person, who thinks that I am a bad neighbor and I drink. Even if I do drink, why does that matter?

Even people who were careful with these labels offline, like Denis, could make a misstep online. Online comments, unlike personal interactions, lack the non-verbal dimension, and one can’t compensate for harsh words with intonation or immediately correct oneself after using a wrong word. Denis found this out the hard way, when in an exchange with his neighbors in an online group he said that newcomers in Moscow do not care for the city or the neighborhood. He used the word ‘ponayekhavshiye’, a pejorative for the newcomer, and his neighbors took it personally:

I tried to write in a civil manner, I did not use any harsh expressions. But they interpreted it in a specific way: he called us bydlo, called us ponayekhavshiye! I did not write it. I used the word ‘ponayekhavshiye’ in quotation marks, and in a very broad sense of the word. Meaning that these are people who have not lived here for a long time and who don’t care for this building and this neighborhood. There are newcomers in a negative way, those who have lived somewhere for three years, and they have moved, and it is mobility (…) But this place doesn’t mean much for them. They can choose. And this is what I meant when I wrote it, that they have a different attitude. (…) But people got offended. An elderly woman, it turned out, she read this group. And I know her, and I could explain to her that I did not mean to offend anyone, just expressed my opinion. But it was a very heated conversation.

Offline and in personal conversation, Denis was able to compensate for his misstep. However, not everyone who made similar mistakes online had this opportunity, and their relationships with neighbors could deteriorate even more. The stark binaries of civil discourse, especially their tendency toward demonization, contribute to punchy rhetorical points online but can ruin face-to-face dialogue.

Before-and-after moral batteries

In addition to character work, Muscovites employed temporal moral batteries to support their visions of urban neighborhoods and to try to change the way their opponents or the undecided saw these places and their future. Online, they did so by using visuals: opponents deployed images of the old and new residential districts, nostalgia for the ‘old Moscow’, fear of the bland high-rise housing complexes; proponents used disgust for the crumbling soviet housing and energizing hope and anticipation of clean and modern new buildings.

For example, Tanya, a neighborhood activist, referred to the disappearing ‘spirit’ of her old Moscow neighborhood. The disappearance began before Renovation, when new residential complexes were squeezed in between low-rise socialist apartment buildings, radically transforming the look and feel of the place. Fearing that Renovation would push the change even further, Tanya decided to become an anti-Renovation activist even though her own building was not affected:

My home is more than just my apartment. My neighborhood matters to me. [It] always had its own face [it was special]. And now many changes happened; they built two big buildings, made the road wider. And this spirit, it’s fading away. And I value it very much, I value the opportunity to live in the place, how it was 10-15 years ago. It’s not like that now, but I would like to keep the maximum of it.

These images had a temporal dimension and sometimes were even visually laid out as ‘before and after’ collages. People on both sides of the controversy used similar techniques. Opponents of Renovation emphasized their love and nostalgia for the disappearing low-rise Moscow, with greenery in the courtyards. They positioned these views against photos of construction sites, monotonous high-rises, and asphalt courtyards filled with parked cars. Supporters of Renovation focused on conditions inside the buildings and apartments. They juxtaposed photographs of dark and narrow staircases and lobbies, with peeling paint and dark stains of mold and leakage, against the bright renderings of the entry halls and elevators in the promised new buildings.

Creating these pictures, Muscovites tried to tap into people’s feelings of belonging and Muscovite identity, on the one side, and into their hopes for a better, brighter future, on the other. Opponents of the program, many of whom have renovated and maintained their apartments, also published pictures of their renovations to show that it was possible to keep these properties in good shape. They did it also to put blame on the ‘irresponsible’ inhabitants of the dilapidated flats who, allegedly, just did not do their part in caring for these apartments. In addition, opponents of Renovation sometimes pictured supporters as dupes, easily manipulated by propaganda and false promises – denying the utopian imagery of their opponents’ moral battery.

Powerful pairs of emotions helped energize not only the political character work, but also the competing visions of urban futures. The controversy revolved not only around the issues of property rights and comfortable homes; it included a discussion of the change Moscow had experienced due to previous policies of the Moscow government, as well as those proposed by Renovation.

The mobilization around the renewal proposal crystallized a variety of the city’s problems and ambitions in the form of competing utopian and dystopian visions. Opponents of Renovation adhered to the narrative about the ‘old Moscow’, associated with nostalgia and belonging, threatened by the dystopian version of the high-rise and car-dominated future. Their mobilization was driven by the desire to protect the former. Although most supporters of Renovation declared that self-interest and the promise of increased property value were their main motivations to mobilize, some of them still dreamed of a more modern, global, and wealthy city that would emerge because of the renewal and transformation. In other words, even a language of self-interest deployed before-and-after moral batteries.

The concept of moral batteries assumes that there is a dynamic between the poles, and emotions and opinions regarding an issue can be recharged. It also leaves room for non-extreme positions, placed somewhere near the ‘neutral’ middle. Activists on both sides of the controversy worked hard to win over the neutral and the undecided neighbors and draw them to their ‘pole’ (Zhelnina 2021).

Conclusion

Cultural theory continues to flourish in the study of social movements as well as more generally across the social sciences. In some ways it is an old approach, with roots in ancient Athens; in others it is a new formation of the last decades of the 20th century. Like any successful research program, it has expanded through internal specialization, elaboration, and differentiation as well as through synthesis with other paradigms.

Culture’s combination with neuropsychology has been especially fruitful (Barrett 2017). Old contrasts between mind and body, or between biological universalism and cultural construction, have been set aside so that we can understand the constant interactions between external inputs and bodily processing. Our feeling-thinking processes include neurotransmitters and muscle twitches but also the labels we attach to feelings, which vary by culture. Culture thoroughly shapes what triggers various emotions, how we display them, and what we label them – which in turn feeds back and influences internal bodily processes. Dozens of feeling-thinking processes interact to produce recognizable emotions. Just because the vast majority of feeling-thinking processes are beneath consciousness and entail recognizable physiological sequences does not mean that they are outside cultural influence (Jasper 2018).

All action involves emotions, and we cannot understand the role of cultural meanings in social action without understanding how they are linked with emotions. We can describe the words and images associated with a villain, but that villain matters to us only when it frightens us, when it threatens us in a way that implies an urgent response. We can understand the meaning of a word in neutral terms, as in a dictionary, but it ‘means something’ to us when we are engaged emotionally. Emotions force us to pay attention.

Moral batteries and public characters are just two examples of cultural meanings that mean something to people, enough so that they can motivate, sustain, and guide collective action and protest. But they are also very common examples, because of their rhetorical and/or emotional power. The before-and-after nature of many moral batteries is especially action-oriented. And public characters populate and animate a great many political narratives, public problems, and protests.

Political issues and controversies will differ in the precise characters and batteries they involve, and issues surrounding one’s home may be especially fraught (Zhelnina 2020). But it is hard to imagine political conflicts that do not generate some package of emotional-cultural mechanisms like these. Without them, why would anyone care? We might turn to models of rational calculations of self-interest, such as the maximization of wealth, but again we must ask, why exactly do people care about that, among so many other potential goals?

We should note some limitations of binary codes as a form of cultural analysis, because emotions do not always come in pairs. Compassion or indignation, for instance, do not have precise opposites except for the lack of compassion or the lack of indignation. And is the opposite of admiration condemnation, or ridicule? The reputations of governments (and other compound players) offer a particularly complicated case: they can be feared as powerful even while individuals who work for them can be ridiculed as inept, weak, or corrupt. Villains are often composed of large numbers of minions.

The study of social movements has been a showcase for both culture theory and emotion theory. We have tried to show that it can also be an opportunity to synthesize these two traditions. Cultural research has long operated alongside social psychological approaches to movements and protest, with all too little communication between the two (Jasper 2017). Perhaps emotions can provide the grounds on which different traditions can engage one another more fruitfully.