Abstract
Focusing on a protest movement against unwanted development projects in Moscow, I consider their opportunities to act, framing mechanism, and outcomes. I regard theoretical tools of “cognitive liberation” and “social appropriation of claims” as most applicable in cases of sustained local activism in the context of Russia, adverse to collective action. One of such groups sets upon infill development projects at Taganka in central Moscow. After reviewing relevant literature, I then proceed to the case study. Given that little is known on the mechanisms through which such groups can persist and exert influence, I compare relative weight of several prospective factors. I conclude this article by arguing that framing mechanisms, especially a certain “ownership frame,” are most relevant in explaining such groups’ remaining motivated for long time and producing unexpected outcomes.
Introduction
Civil society might be seen as a large-scale collective action dilemma (Henderson, 2002), and social movements—as working to resolve it. This article is about a local protest group addressing this dilemma. By defending common-use green areas earmarked to be built over with new buildings, these activists appear as aiming to maximize the utility of their urban environment and, therefore, as rational. There is then a doubt that their action “against all odds” in a prohibitive environment is any rational, but that emotions are their motivating force.
The restructuring of cities all over the world involves intense development but also congestion, the loss of amenities, and a lack of democratic participation. Groups make efforts to defend an existing quality of life, and sometimes appear rational or emotional, environmentally conscious or selfish. Since little is known about collective action in Russian cities, I apply rational choice and social movement theories to a local group acting in adverse contexts in Moscow and argue that their involvement is achieved by a combination of rationality and emotions. Specifically, I study how ideological framing techniques help in activists’ motivation and how resulting appropriation of contentious claims by this group influences their opportunities to act and have influence. Given that “collective action cannot be parsimoniously reduced to a single factor” (Cammett, 2005: 384), I consider framing alongside other prospective motivating and constraining factors.
I organize my article around four questions:
1. Which theoretical paradigm(s) should be used to discuss local group’s motivation to act that would also account for their supposed rationality or reliance on emotions?
2. What are the features of context(s) in Russia, and how they affect public activism?
3. How a local group frames its actions, and how these framings help overcome the adverse context and enhance their opportunities?
4. What effects this collective action might produce?
Literature review: Rational choice and social movement scholarship
“Rationality” is described differently by rational choice theory, in philosophical constructions and in colloquial uses. However, all models of rationality assume that individuals choose the best action according to options and constraints facing them. The ideology promoting rationality is rationalism, which facilitates the formulation of some beliefs and values while defining others as irrelevant. This happens by presenting some course of action in terms of, so-called, strategic rationality, whereas all the other options are either declared nonrational or irrational or otherwise relegated to a position of instrumental rationality (Hajer, 1995).
Formal rationalization by Weber (1978) promotes a logic whereby economic efficiency reigns supreme and supersede a choice of alternatives. However, the more economies try to run according to this principle the more they open the door to unwanted and negative effects; and when applied to the case of nature, this is called ecological irrationality. For instance, formal rationality dictates that the most efficient action is to clear-fell a green square or a park, even if this is in no way substantively rational from an ecological point of view (Bartlett and Baber, 1999; De-Shalit, 2000; Hannigan, 1995). One example is rationalization of urban land use, which is a worldwide trend in urban planning driven by market mechanisms, the profitability of capital, and displacing other planning provisions that are increasingly treated as less rational and legitimate. However, organizational studies show that much enters into corporate and bureaucratic life besides “rationality,” and “the pecuniary and ideological motor of development drives decisions” rather than a “tight system of double-entry and surplus-value bookkeeping” (Molotch, 1999: 260).
The criterion of rationality is also applied to democratic participation by rank-and-file citizens where there is a “binary dichotomy” between the rational–civic interest and the irrational–special interest; and, hence, there are “good” and “bad” and “welcome” and “unwelcome” forms of participation. However, actions taken in an individual’s self-interest might also be considered as rational within free-market systems, and so, for instance, a protest based on fear of property devaluation can hardly be condemned, because, after all, it is a legitimate “expression of people’s needs and fears” (McClymont and O’Hare, 2008: 322–325). Thus, it is misleading either to accept uncritically the strategic rationality on the part of the elites or to criticize rationality of a protest group.
Reflecting the dichotomy of interests, there is a notion of urban movement that Castells (1983) initially defines as struggles with the potential to improve the class position of workers vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie and later includes struggles to maintain cultural identity, to achieve more decentralized urban government as well as conflicts over public services (Castells, 1994). Pickvance (1986) proposes a special category of “territorial defence” urban movements concerned with their proximate urban reality attempting to act offensively regarding spaces that they consider to be contributing to their general welfare (Castells, 1994; Pickvance, 1995). Despite its mass character, urban protest tends to be episodic and spontaneous, local in nature, and disruptive in strategy (Hamel et al., 2001); and activists face an increasingly recalcitrant and punitive state. Given this, it is only under rare conditions that their struggles against efforts to drive them out of central city areas allow them to develop solidarity, political consciousness, and organizational infrastructures—the preconditions for mobilization (Mayer, 2001).
Worldwide, almost any large city witnesses groups challenging redevelopment schemes and local concerns (Kolossov et al., 2002; Martin, 2003). For several decades, sociologists—following the contrast made between emotions and rationality—prefer to divert their attention from these groups’ motivation (believed to be based on emotions) to their rationality and thus employ rational actor models (Goodwin and Jasper, 2006). The predominantly rational explanations by social movement scholarship also known as political process models concern political opportunities, resources, and framing. Political opportunities and constraints, or political opportunity structure (POS; e.g. McAdam et al., 1996), and resources (e.g. McCarthy and Zald, 1977) are external factors of the emergence of social movements. The concept of political opportunities is overgrown with various contextual factors contributing to the contraction or extension of POS found in different combinations in the West and in Russia (Yanitsky, 1993a), and sometimes criticized for being too complicated and misleading (Uhlin, 2006). Resources traditionally relate to money and leadership, while claims that access to information on the Internet and electronic communications radically change the public sphere have been rejected by some authors (Bimber, 2003; Pickerill, 2001), but more recently increasingly supported by others (Falk, 2003; Yanitsky, 2013). Researchers argue that the social psychology behind relationships induced by the external factors is not based on emotions, but on the cool calculation of interests, opportunities, and resources vis-a-vis probability of payoffs and success, where action is possible if opportunities are sufficient and costs of protest are not too high (Johnston, 2014).
Even though social movements are capable of creating new opportunities and resources (Tarrow, 1998; Yanitsky, 2011), a properly internal factor is framing, a sphere where a rational “how” (cognition) mixes with an emotional “why” (grievances that often precede and accompany mobilization). Essentially rational, cognitive framing embodies emotional grievances into words and images, and further on into action (Goodwin and Jasper, 2006). Thus, framing is principally called to connect rationality and emotions. Despite some authors contend that the separation of reason and emotion is a value-laden act (Feree, 1996), political process models have traditionally devoted little attention to the emotional dimensions of activism. Even the framing approach is usually circumscribed to considering frames as rational “aggregates” of meanings and downplays the role of emotions in mobilizing people for collective action (Goodwin and Jasper, 2006; Salmenniemi, 2014).
The three major framing tasks involve “diagnosis” of a social problem at hand, “prognosis” embodying its solution, and “motivation” as a rationale for collective action. Again, frames oscillate between rationality and emotional impulses. Thus, diagnosis initially features (a) predominantly emotional injustice frames, and then it succeeds with (b) more deliberate attribution of guilt. Prognosis presupposes (a) rational strategizing and (b) conscious choice of tactics. Motivational framing involves (a) self-conscious identity stressing the commonality of goals and activities (Snow et al., 1986), whereas (b) morality and (c) altruism might be included among the emotions of approval and disapproval, even though rational choice theorists consider them as distribution of rewards fair calculation (Goodwin and Jasper, 2006).
Although the scholarship is criticized for prioritizing the rational over the emotional, it also tends to overlook the linkage between the two domains in collective action. Bridging the divide that is so prominent in social movement debates, there is the concept of “cognitive liberation” (McAdam, 1982), which is about how people start to believe that protest is possible and might succeed, the process that proves to be both cognitive and emotional.
Even though Burningham et al. (2006) suggested that local urban activism is less an issue outside the developed countries where people tend to welcome new developments, the latter are often opposed by Russian urbanites. There are two texts 1 (published in the West and in English) on directly addressing protests against infill development in Russia—by Yanitsky (1991) and by Gladarev and Lonkila (2012). The former piece of writing was about a successful protest that took place in Moscow at the end of the Soviet period. The latter is a recent comparative study of successful mobilizations in Saint-Petersburg and Helsinki, focusing on the role of the Internet-based social networking (used as a tool to mobilize supporters and as arena for discussions).
Among those who previously considered protest activism in Russia, Zdravomyslova (1996) indicated the importance of ideological framing for activists fighting over symbols with communist ideology in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). In her opinion, the mass mobilization of that period was largely due to a few universally accepted “master frames,” while the present-day fragmentation of collective action in Russia is a function of the multitude of frames in use. Concerning the role of the rational–emotional divide in Russia-focused political process models, Salmenniemi (2014) should be mentioned applying Bourdeau’s theory of practice to bridge it. Specifically addressing the role of motivational framing, Clément (2008) mentioned groups remaining active by inventing new identities. Most importantly, Pickvance (2001) discovered that motivation can overcome an unfavorable context but, typically, without leading to successful collective action. This article is based on a more recent evidence from Russia of a partially successful and sustained action due to motivational framing and social appropriation of contentious claims (Johnston, 2006), and I describe a concrete mechanism thereof—ownership frame.
The context(s)
The historical–cultural and macro-social contexts in Russia are formed by relations among state, civil society, and population (Yanitsky, 1993a) and characterized by decreasing democratic standards, and the authorities perceived as arbitrary, corrupt, and unconcerned with the needs of ordinary people (Clément, 2008). It holds true for Moscow in the 2000s, where and when market reforms triggered the booming high-end retail sector, infrastructure of communications, and business centers, while turning Moscow into a “dual city” with gentrification and social polarization. Whereas in Soviet time, land had no monetary value and was allocated uniformly on the basis of need irrespective of the location of the site, the Master Plan of the City of Moscow (2000) has adopted the “entrepreneurial” planning approach intended to link Moscow to the world economy. Modern prefabricated panel systems permit building of the higher blocks of apartments, decrease the standard land requirements, and thereby lead to the infilling of central districts. Proposed commercial projects involve the local state while ignoring ordinary Muscovites in planning decisions. These practices result in land-use conflicts (Bertaud and Renaud, 1997”; Kolossov et al., 2002; Kolossov and O’Loughlin, 2004).
The Moscow borough of Taganka can be regarded as both situational context (Yanitsky, 1993a) and “generating milieu” for local activism (Yanitsky, 2002). In terms of the built and lived environment, Taganka Street passes through the Taganka borough, situated in the historical center of Moscow and well-known to Russians, due both to the ancient Taganka prison, a reminder of Stalinist repressions that was demolished during Khrushchev’s “thaw” and to the famous “Theatre at Taganka.” The surrounding area consists of five- or nine-floor apartment blocks constructed during the 1960s and 1970s. Even though the Taganka borough is a large territory with 800 hectares in area and a population of 935,001, I use Taganka to refer to a smaller territory of about 190 hectares in area and a population of about 20,000 that encompass the area of principal application and constituency of a protest group under study. At one end of the street, there used to be a public garden that existed for 30 years. Now a shopping center has replaced it. Since it adjoined a two-storied mansion that was officially labeled of cultural heritage, the public garden was a protected territory where all construction activities were forbidden. However, the Moscow Vice-Mayor authorized the felling of the trees and the erection in its place of a new shopping center. Two hundred meters down the street from what is now the shopping center, a Children’s Park exists which was established in 1775. Today, it is considered a historical and cultural monument with a federal status that forbids any construction there. However, Moscow authorities issued permits for the construction of a commercial swimming pool in the Park. Despite these physical conditions have largely defined the social and cultural life contexts of the area, many other aspects of socio-political, economic, and cultural life develop at Taganka and elsewhere in Russia very fast and with abrupt changes due to rapidly establishing capitalist and new bureaucratic contexts (Yanitsky, 2011).
Considering the local population of Taganka, I draw on research that the Institute of Sociology of Russian Academy of Sciences conducted at Taganka in 1998 (Dridze and Akimkin, 2004), much of findings thereof could still be regarded as valid during the study period and even now. Local people are in very modest circumstances and reside in decaying apartment blocks depressed by their miserable pensions and destruction of their normal living environment. Their living space is shrinking, forcing them to leave the area; the last remnants of the greenery are destroyed; and the district undergoes rapid changes, often associated with the fact that Taganka has been in-filled with new buildings. In place of the aboriginals arrive culturally unrelated to Moscow “new Russians.” The typical view of a “new Russian” is that with their arrival, the place is only better off, and they advise those with a small gain to resettle from the Centre.
People are depressed about their helplessness and inability to have any control over their situation. Many people are unaware of their rights, while strenuous effort is needed in order to get hold of what is a person’s due. There are certain categories of Taganka people (especially elderly and handicapped people) who depend on the living conditions to such a degree that any changes therein can become a threat to their very survival. However, the majority of respondents prioritize their personal troubles and often unaware of what is about to be built fast beside their doors. Other people (mostly retired people and young women with children) start to coordinate their actions in order to defend their territorial and environmental interests. According to them, almost every plot of the greenery that is left in the Centre either has already had its dramatic history of public resistance or is going to acquire such a history in the nearest future, or it is all to be lost. Numerous initiative groups make futile efforts to avoid this. Obtaining real protection for a particular green area implies that local residents need to receive approvals from many levels in the chain of bureaucratic command, attract independent legal and environmental expertise, and develop their own knowledge base, which is something that requires time, effort, and money that not many groups can afford. Many of these groups do not achieve their original goal, disband, and get out of sight (Dridze and Akimkin, 2004; Dridze et al., 2004). Forthwith, I choose a methodology whereby I demonstrate, inter alia, how and why some of them persist.
Research methodology
My research object is “Taganka 3” (T3), a Moscow-based protest group, and my aim is to make sense of their motivations for defending common-use territories, especially green commons. My narrower task is to examine whether there exist possibilities to act for challenging groups—that is how far, through their framing, such groups can be successful.
I combine structural and interpretative–cultural perspectives that have been the keystone of political process theory (Johnston, 2014). Using framing theory as an analytical tool explaining how Russian activists connect “diagnosis” and “prognosis,” I follow Shemtov (1999) and look for indicators of “problem ownership” expressed in the language of “responsibility” or “moral burden” (motivation) to become experts in order to influence authorities (diagnosis) and provide solutions to problems by implementing them directly (prognosis). I posit that a group committing to additional goals alongside the pursuit of their initial aim can be regarded as owners of a social problem.
Goal expansion is an organizational phenomenon and, therefore, requires organizational data for its assessment. One methodological feature of this article is qualitative reconstruction of events on the basis of electronic communications among activists, and its main source of first-hand information (such as speeches, writings, statements, and ideological pronouncements by activists) on T3 was their website and Livejournal blog. 2 I start from the supposition that opinions expressed in T3 Livejournal should be considered as first-hand information, given that they are unmediated due to activists’ belief that otherwise it would affect the group’s perceived democracy level. A reliability check is provided by references to reports in the mass media that forum participants supported their portrayal of events. Using the blogging record also enabled me tracing the development of T3’s opposition chronologically.
This article’s another trait is its micro-level perspective to examine how a local group persists in adverse conditions, and whether framing facilitates it. My study covers the period of April 2005 to October 2008 with several follow-ups in 2010, 2013, and 2015. My choice of research object was done from 12 randomly selected Moscow localities that had been in the news because of anti-infilling protests. Eventually, I found that new buildings had already been built and protest groups disbanded in all these localities, except “Taganka 3.” Focusing on T3, I spent February–March 2007 and June 2008 in Moscow conducting participant observation and interviews with its members (four semistructured) as well as with uninvolved local residents (seven unstructured interviews). The semistructured interviewees were following the same series of questions on their relationships with the authorities, forms of communication, and cooperation among activists, group’s sympathizers, other groups, and uninvolved Muscovites. The uninvolved interviewees were asked on their attitude to the activists, their work, events at Taganka, and reasons behind their own non-involvement. I use quotes from these anonymous interviews interchangeably with those from the blog.
I found that the intensity and cyclicality of T3’s activities could be assessed via T3’s Internet blogging intensity that parallels their real engagement. However, it seems that subjective qualitative assessment is the only reasonable approach in this case, given that the events in question are highly heterogeneous and do not allow the application of a numerical measure. A city referendum, a protest meeting, or a get-together of residents can be counted as events, but they can hardly be quantified and compared to each other, because different inputs are required to prepare each of them.
Methodological barriers to getting to social movements in Russia include problems in locating and contacting respondents, their reluctance and apprehension to contribute to research, and negative attitudes toward foreigners (Uhlin, 2006). For this and other reasons, Russian grassroots have remained unrecognized and untheorized, even though they have been a major force in key social processes over recent years. There were also problems in avoiding such (habitual in the West but uncommon in Russia) concepts as “neighborhood community,” applying certain cultural concepts (“collective identity” and “frame”), and using such structural concepts as POS and “social networks” (Goodwin and Jasper, 2006; Henderson, 2002; Yanitsky, 2011; Zdravomyslova, 1993).
Taganka case description
In this section, the selected methodology is applied to ongoing movement mobilization and dynamics. On considering the case, I structure this section following the subdivision of the social movement concept into such basic dimensions of social life as (1) the structural–organizational sphere and (2) shared ideational and interpretative elements (Johnston, 2014) and address their respective role in T3’s activism. Accentuating the latter dimension, I consider mechanisms whereby citizens can attempt to exercise their influence and how effective or otherwise they appear to be.
The chronicle of events: Public garden, park, other targets
Troubles of Taganka 3 public garden started in June 2003, when the Moscow Vice-Mayor signed documents, authorizing the felling of the trees and the erection in its place of a new “public, office and shopping center.” In 2005, rumors of this plan reached residents of Taganka, and several people applied their individual efforts to clarify the issue with local officials, but in vain. Overnight in April 2005, the public garden was cleared of its trees and became a construction site. From this moment begins collective action of Taganka residents who formed T3. They started by approaching various municipal offices, writing petitions (to the Moscow Mayor, the Public Prosecutor General’s Office, and the Russian Federation (RF) Presidential Administration), and submitting many statements for initiation of criminal cases. They collected 2000 signatures of Taganka residents who opposed the construction, and by their efforts, some people joined T3, while others (an RF State Duma deputy, journalists, lawyers, and ecologists) helped them in a variety of ways. Their direct actions, at time involving radical leftist groups, were publicized in the mass media. Later, they began litigating against both the developer and the authorities—such as with regard the suspect tree-felling permit, the public garden’s status as the territory of the monument of history and culture forbidden for construction, and the orders on land allocation for this construction that had not been officially published and, therefore, should be regarded as invalid.
The “chronic conflict” (Yanitsky, 2002) was the case whenever the unwelcome development project was canceled, then reinstated, depending on the political context; court decisions favorable to activists were overruled by courts of superior jurisdiction; under pressure from T3, government and technical supervision bodies were passing various instructions and interdictions that were not followed either by government stakeholders or by developers. Nonetheless, the developer incurred high additional costs, received unwanted publicity, and had to temporarily discontinue the construction for lengthy periods (such as withholding of the construction permit from June 2006 to January 2007). At a later stage of the 3-year struggle to save the public garden, T3 were invited to meet with high-ranked officials (such as the Moscow Vice-Mayor), and on their insistence, a governmental commission as well as an authorities–residents “round table” were created to discuss city planning issues. Despite all the efforts, the main building operations phase of the shopping centre at Taganka 3 was over by mid-Autumn 2007, and T3 switched all their efforts to the protection of the Children’s Park and other issues.
The rumors on the pending commercial swimming pool in the Park appeared in May 2005, and from this time, T3 were closely following the situation there. T3 knew that, under the pretext of reconstruction, felling had been planned of more than 30 mature trees including a huge 250-year-old oak, and that this reconstruction was necessary to build the swimming pool. T3 claimed that the relevance and necessity for such reconstruction should be discussed with residents of Taganka District, while, in fact, the residents’ opinion had been disregarded. Taganka residents remembered that, several years earlier, a large part of the Children’s Park had been used to accommodate a new office and business center. They also suspected that the swimming pool, if constructed, would later be expanded with other facilities.
By the time of the active opposition in the Children’s Park in August 2006, the initiative developed in several directions. The group established contacts with the mass media and in environmental, monument protection, and legal spheres of expertise. T3 had defended in court the territorial limits of the Park from the Government of Moscow, who wished to reduce them, and then strived to consolidate this achievement—for example, they prepared an integrated research statement about the Park surroundings proposing to recognize it as an ensemble and initiated a campaign to give the oak the status of nature sanctuary that would make any construction in its vicinity illegal. In early Spring 2009, after a series of meetings with the authorities (on the initiative of the latter), T3 reported on the final cancelation of the swimming pool project and finally achieved the cancelation of the swimming pool project by a court decision in May 2009.
Even though all the other activities which T3 engaged in were mostly extensions of their two principal foci, these efforts enabled T3 to widen the infilling issue from a local dispute to one with citywide dimensions. Quite early, T3 started defending Taganka’s public cultural establishments, such as the “Boyan” orchestra and the “Center for Slavic Music at Taganka,” both of which risked losing their premises to business enterprises. They offered their help to other protest groups from Taganka and elsewhere in Moscow—especially in the sphere of housing and communal services—and became part of a newly formed activist network as well as several citywide associations and committees. T3 activists themselves organized a citywide meeting against “arbitrariness in realization of city-planning policy,” in November 2006. The Moscow referendum that the group initiated in December 2007 was meant by them to transfer “tenancy in common” 3 rights in Moscow lands to the city community and thus give them a decisive voice in passing city planning decisions.
Movement dynamics
Following Yanitsky’s lead, 4 I discern in both major campaigns a preparatory phase, a mobilization phase, and a phase of subsequent actions, on and off. The preparatory phase was absent in the public garden case (due to the sudden start of the conflict, with the group taking shape only after the event) and was very visible in the Children’s Park case, as this problem became evident when T3 were an established group and were already “sadder but wiser” to start preparing for future active opposition in the Park. The phase of mobilization and discussions in both cases consisted of collective efforts by T3 as well as allied groups and organizations. Initially, mobilization was aiming at attracting public attention, changing the political context (scandals, resounding direct actions, materials in the press, and liaison with major political forces); later, mobilization was designed as generation of support networks at Taganka and elsewhere in Moscow (such as “Association for self-defence of the rights of Muscovites”). In both cases, there were collisions with the developer and the authorities. Major distinctions between the two cases concerned domination of mobilization over discussion in the public garden case; the initiative was with the authorities and developers in the public garden case (where activists frequently acted reactively and, hence, frequently recoursed to direct action), and in the Park—with T3, acting proactively and constructively. Thus, T3 never attracted radical leftists to their work in the Park, where they largely eschewed negative protest but strived to obtain legally binding decisions and engaged in environmental research. The phase of subsequent actions was almost completely absent in the struggle for the public garden, where the principal target of T3 was not achieved—in this case, the phase of subsequent actions in T3 agenda was replaced with the preparatory phase of the Children’s Park campaign.
The analysis of intensity and cyclicality of activism show the factors that either triggered or slowed down the collective action of T3 and bring me nearer to an understanding of what was keeping them alive as a group. Concerning the online activity, T3 website started its operation immediately after the group began its collective action; during the active mobilization phase in 2005–2007, the Taganka website was visited daily from about 50 unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses; later on, its popularity subsided to 10–20 visitors per day. From measures of the website’s popularity, throughout the period under review (April 2005–October 2008), the online activity of T3 correlated to their “offline” activities and seldom correlated to major political processes and events in Moscow and Russia.
The same concerns the real activity—even though, on many occasions, T3 were assessing the prospects of their common cause and their specific actions (such as court appeals etc.) vis-à-vis political events, there is no evidence that they tied the former to the latter. To give a notion of their real engagement, activists said in their interviews, for example, that over 2 years and 6 months they have spent almost every day participating in court proceedings, and for 3 months it took 2–6 hours each day. “Many hours were also spent in militia enquiry rooms and detention cells.” There is plenty of evidence that the intensity of activities depended on the availability of their leader, as the group generally slowed down when he departed the group in the beginning of 2009. After the study period and for quite a long time afterward, the group decreased its visible activism. However, in May 2012, T3 activists became members of the authorities-masterminded public committee to supervise Taganka parks. The most recent evidence (May 2015) indicates that the group is alive, acts as a community “watchdog,” and monitors the situation in the area.
Resources
Concerning the structural–organizational sphere of resources (Johnston, 2014), four characteristics predominated: (1) stabilized membership with a narrow circle of active members and (2) internal structuration with charismatic leadership—both standing for intangible resources compensating for (3) limited tangible resources, mostly represented by (4) informational resources of the Internet.
Eschewing a less relevant Olson’s (1965) approach whereby group size determines mobilization, with smaller groups considered more likely to act collectively because of proportionally greater payoffs and lower organizational costs for individual members, I specify T3’ s human resources by their own numerical strength as well as outside manpower, their own and attracted intellectual potential, and ability to contribute time. In addition, their internal structuration and bureaucracy level is also a resource, contributing to the stabilization of the group and defined elsewhere (Gamson, 1975) by presence of a constitutive document, a formal list of members, and levels of internal division. For T3, the only constitutive document which formally held the group together was a notarially certified power of attorney for protection of their interests, which also indicated the group’s structuration. T3 considered their membership to result from giving to their leader a power of attorney and paying for his labor—12 June 2008. The time resources that they contributed are mentioned in the previous section.
Members of T3 are local people of various ages who over the decades made more habitable and personalized this area, surrounded by industry and transport networks—by planting trees, shrubbery, and even laying out the small public garden, which eventually became one of the apples of discord. Aside from what I mention elsewhere in terms of the attracted manpower (city councillors, ecologists, leftist groups, etc.), a major external specialist is the leader of the group Yuri Padalko. Having taken part in an occasional protest meeting against the construction project at Taganka 3 in May 2005, he was right away employed by T3 as their public defender and became their unquestionable leader. Originating from Eastern Siberia, where he started defending civil rights, he was repeatedly jailed on accusations of slander with regard to state officials and hooliganism. On one occasion, the Human Rights Watch helped him out and, on another, journalist Anna Politkovskaya gave him a hand. Padalko is known in Moscow as a dedicated human rights advocate, public expert on radio and television programs, and a talented and prolific blogger. Due to his legal competence and personal courage, he is considered effective as a public defender and disseminator of legal skills concerning housing issues. Given that the idea of local civil self-government reform faces bureaucratic and legislative obstacles, proponents of these goals, such as Padalko, inevitably become involved in protest activism.
Since both T3 and its constituents are people of modest social and material status, the group’s material resources are limited (but money to pay Padalko were collected, even though not regularly). A permanent problem for the group is the lack of a proper meeting venue. During the study period, the landline phone was their main means of communication, and “sitting on the telephone” was the most frequently used method of mustering public support. E-mail as well as other computer and Internet technologies were not accessible to each and everyone in T3 and were mostly used by younger members.
Unlike what has often been reported on the use of the Internet as a major instrument of mass mobilization and accumulation of resources (Gladarev and Lonkila, 2012; Yanitsky, 2013), attitudes toward the Internet were not unanimous at Taganka: Some activists assessed it as something very practical and used it frequently, while others disbelieved in its usefulness and did not use it at all. Considering the Internet as the activists’ own media, although T3 used it in quite a few ways, computer-mediated communication generally remained restricted to that of an additional communication tool. It is obvious that, later on, inexpensive and quick communications have made it possible for T3 and such like local groups to use it more actively—inter alia, in order to “adapt rather than to disappear” (Falk, 2003: 434).
POS
Turning to the structural–organizational sphere of POS (Johnston, 2014), I am wondering why Russian activists, supposedly rational calculators expected “to lie low” in a repressive setting, still choose to engage. What matters is not just objective POS but activists’ ability to recognize and to use potential opportunities (Henry, 2006).
Again, T3’s protest intensity and cyclicality measurement have shown few evidence that T3 significantly modified their offline activities with regard to the changing POS. However, T3 periodically assessed and discussed their prospects with regard to changing POS, and differentiated periods, to include electoral cycles. There were instances when T3 were waiting for a more favorable opportunity and those where they were more proactive. Given the closed character of the political system, elections are rare windows of opportunity, where Moscow activists can be proactive; however, even outside elections, activists regarded themselves as a factor of political life. Thus, in May 2006, T3 forum discussed President Putin’s recent promise to punish officials engaged in illegal personal enrichment—and activists linked it to a subsequent arrest of three corrupt judges and a change of the RF Public Prosecutor General. Activists noticed that, on the same day as the previous Prosecutor General’s resignation, the local authorities were holding a meeting dedicated to the problem of Taganka 3—activists believed that as well as for other reasons their initiative group had become a factor of this change. In August 2006, activists explained their recent victory in court by the current situation in Moscow favorable to citizens’ claims, that despite “all of them [we]re temporizers and blabbers, …some of them blabber[ed] in a weather-wise manner … And in this case—[activists had] a six-o’clock wind to back [them],” directly referring to their belief in their ability to influence POS.
T3 differentiated periods when, typically after public pronouncements by higher officials, lower-level officials were expected to mitigate or reconsider their rent-seeking behavior, such as after another “thundering” speech in February 2007. There were other periods, as in June 2007, when activists were depressed by the news that Mayor Luzhkov had been retained in his office by President Putin; they traced a direct linkage between this news and reinvigorated construction activities at Taganka 3 and concluded: “So, as we approach the 2007/2008 [Presidential] elections, make your mind, fellow citizens!” Given that the electoral cycle is a key feature in the POS, I give it a special emphasis. Sometimes, as in August 2005, T3 considered elections “expectantly”:
So far, neither officials nor the court seem to care, but …, at the time of elections, all of them will become “unselfish”—both the court and officials. Then, I think, they will make a spectacular sacrifice of [the developer] that will ensure our victory … So the elections can make our protest a cert.
However, more often, election cycles provided them an opportunity to bring Taganka issues to public attention and to the attention of the authorities. Eventually, T3 approached the idea of their direct involvement with politics via elections; as, in August 2006, a member of T3 remarked, “We think that we should propose [member of T3] to become a people”s deputy from our election district.” Overall, resources and POS appear as mobilization incentives of lesser importance to T3 compared to the framing.
Frames
Approaching shared ideational and interpretative elements (Johnston, 2014), I consider the use of frames in bridging the emotions–rationality divide. I use Snow and Benford’s (1988: 1992) heuristic to separate T3’s organizational discourses into three parts: (a) describing problems and assigning blame (diagnoses), (b) advocating for certain types of action to solve problems (prognoses), and (c) characterizing the community (motivation). Taganka activists (mostly intuitively) employed these framing types’ major subdivisions—injustice, agency, and identity frames—as crucial elements of their mobilization potential, as if realizing that collective action was otherwise almost impossible.
Diagnostic frames: Internal versus external attribution of guilt
Given that diagnostic frames not only indicate a problem that needs to be addressed but also express local groups’ vision of their lived spaces ideal state (Martin, 2003), I specify themes that resonated throughout the collective action. These mostly concerned the physical condition of Taganka surroundings and lawlessness. Thus, a principal object of contention was the disappearance of green spaces occasioned by developers and resistance to expropriation of common-use areas. Infrastructure topics were dominated by inexpensive shops and groceries. Quality of life issues included technogenic risks, noise, and so on. A theme of preservation of the cultural and historical heritage highlighted the perceived uniqueness of the area, and the fact that any development was destructive to the built and social fabric of Taganka. All-pervading was concern with social justice and legality.
Regarding the diagnosis of the problem based on these themes, even though the blame for unpopular planning decisions as well as their social and environmental consequences in Moscow was commonly attributed to their originators, T3 also made internal attributions, diagnosing themselves as part of the wider problem, because “the majority of Russian ‘slaves/masters’ wants to have more for working less. Or—not working at all but still to have.” This repentant stance was articulated in a variety of ways—from a radio broadcast for all Russia to hear (interview by Padalko with “Mayak” Radio) to a confession by a member of T3 to a much narrower circle of Taganka Internet forum participants (“I repent in that I understand all the danger of what is going on at Taganka only because it interferes with my personal interests, while it was necessary to start acting much earlier”). The difference between framing predilections of many Moscow activists, on the one hand, and T3, on the other hand, was not circumscribed by their respective injustice frames and diagnoses but also concerned their agency frames and prognoses.
Prognostic frames
Taganka activists applied efforts to acquire and increase a sense of agency or confidence in their ability to act and suppress apathy, fear, and other demobilizing emotions (Goodwin and Jasper, 2006). As well as diagnosing themselves as part of the problem, T3 saw themselves as part of the solution: “I assure you that in our lawful self-defense not only of our rights but also of our history, of our common memory, of our culture—any positive changes in Russia will start from below, from the people.” The winning formula by T3 that they also proposed to other protest groups included a provision that “people can achieve their goals if they believe in their victory.” In interviews with uninvolved Muscovites, T3 personified a split from the predominant psychology of “sheep … silent onlookers who prefer not to interfere with anything in order to preserve their integrity and safety, and not to be slaughtered earlier than their neighbor.” T3 used similar expressions, “It is pleasant to realize that, in spite of what we usually hear and see, our people is not an apathetic herd of cattle, that we have our point of view, and that we are ready to defend it.” Keeping in mind their diagnosis concerning, above all, physical surroundings and lawlessness, I turn to their strategies and tactics.
Strategy and tactics: “The courtroom” and “the street”
Saving me the trouble of formulating their aims, Taganka activists were able to abstract from their routine work and discussed the higher meaning of their collective action, why should they fight for the public garden and the Park, which resulted in their understanding that fighting for the fresh air and their ancestors memory (the public garden was once a cemetery where Muscovites were buried during the plague in 1654, etc.) should be the group’s tactic (to imply proximate goals), while the strategic aim should be restoring a system of civic local self-government in Russia. Thus, I consider T3’s efforts as being strategic whenever it concerned attempts to introduce elements of self-administration and public control and to achieve a shift from expert-driven and authority-masterminded to participatory planning. Following Gamson’s (1975) take on the choice of action repertoire as a cognitive exercise, I assess how rationally were activists searching for effective practical approaches and whether they had emotional loyalties to their tactics and strategy. I am doing this by considering how various factors (expectations about potential targets, repressions, resources, and internal dynamic; values, norms, and past experiences) changed their decisions about how to act (Freeman, 1999).
Given their initial hopes to redress the injustices with the help of the authorities, they practiced petitioning and “camping on the doorsteps” of various offices. When officials themselves became protest targets, activists adapted more dramatic repertoire. They generally eschewed using violence fearing it would encourage authorities to repress them, and their mostly non-violent direct action repertoire included picketing, sending delegations to planning board and city hall meetings (typically 20–30 protesters) and protest meetings (up to 150 participants), periodic blocking the access road to “Taganka 3” construction site, and such one-off sorties as occupying the Visitors Receiving Office under the Moscow Mayor and later—that under the RF Presidential Administration.
Keeping in mind T3’s stake on human resources, their attitude toward working with Taganka residents changed from the time when activists were collecting signatures. At some point, they understood that the local population was inert and decided that they had better try to attract the most active residents and stabilize their membership at a level sufficient to collect money to pay a lawyer. By the time the active opposition to the destruction of the Children’s Park emerged, activists had gained contacts among environmental and legal experts and the mass media that were essential in shaping their new repertoire featuring litigation and research.
T3 opposed using violence also due to their norms and values because activists thought using violence would be inconsistent with their tactical and strategic goals. Thus, although some members of T3 advocated violent (“realistic”) approaches, others argued that despite violent actions were sometimes useful, they kept local residents from the group and thus—from expressing their opinion. They also thought that non-violent actions made it easier for like-minded people to find each other and cooperate in activities. For this reason, even though T3 activists admitted that public road blockage was good for attracting attention, they limited themselves to blocking the entrance to the construction site at Taganka 3. Eventually, T3 mastered a new kind of direct action as activity that they considered to be “constructive efforts”; one example of this was the decision to build protective fencing around the oak tree in the Children’s Park in October 2008.
Activists kept reflecting on the events and what they had learned from them. They acknowledged as mistake their early focusing on fighting the development project by means of signature collection against the construction, writing petitions to city officials, and “camping on the doorsteps” of their offices. When activists discussed the advantages and disadvantages of petitions and road blocking, they doubted their effectiveness, given the ease with which the authorities could ignore them. By their own admission, “for the authorities, … signatures st[oo]d for nothing.” Furthermore, activists “were camping on doorsteps of all thinkable structures of the state power—none of them wishe[d] to see obvious infringements.” Following their new approach, in August 2005, T3 began looking for a lawyer. Herewith, they started suing their antagonists in court.
Activists pointed out that when T3 relied primarily upon litigation, they were more successful than when they concentrated upon direct actions, even though some opponents argued for the need for “an adequate response to lawlessness instead of pettifogging in obviously sold-out courts.” They also realized that this approach also had some limitations because the judges had a bias in favor of the developer, unless activists were able to attract public and media attention to their court cases. They also hoped to gain recognition from the public as being true Russian citizens, Muscovites and Taganka patriots, rather than people who simply did not want a new development sited in their locality.
Again, a mature tactical choice by T3 was its engagement in independent environmental research that concerned the natural and human-made environment of Taganka, with the goal of keeping its historic attributes intact. On initial success in getting the court to preserve the Park in its established borders, the T3 group consolidated this achievement by preparing an integrated research statement about the Park’s surroundings, proposing it should be recognized as a historical and architectural ensemble which should be preserved intact. Afterward, they worked to obtain binding legal decisions, such as in the case of their campaign to give the oak the status of a nature sanctuary.
In terms of political action, activists regularly strived to attract the help of people’s deputies, candidates to the city legislature prior to elections, and of various political forces, but they were always aware of a threat to their independence emanating from such forces and were constantly on the alert not to be co-opted by the authorities. When participating in the electoral process in May 2006, Taganka residents started to consider taking immediate control of the situation around “Taganka 3” construction site and made efforts to gain access to the decision-making process, such as by attempting to introduce public representatives into a governmental commission established to check the legality of city planning decisions in Moscow. They came closest to attaining their strategic goal when they were partially successful in their attempt to initiate a citywide referendum in December 2007. Even though they started this process, it never took place because of bureaucratic opposition.
Summing up, T3’s action repertoire included petitioning, physical resistance, litigation, research, and lobbying. The recurrent choice of T3 between the “street” and the “courtroom” was essentially between non-institutionalized or institutionalized forms of action, and most often made in favor of the latter. Their prognostic frames advocated moderate methods of activity and shifting attitudes following a greater likelihood of success. Overall, these choices displayed procedural rationality but simultaneously its abnegation, given their “emotional loyalty” to the tactics of “fighting for the fresh air and ancestors” memory” (in itself highly emotional) and contributing to the non-rational or even irrational “public control” strategy (in essence, striving to achieve the impossible, given the Russian realities). Looking for a way to reconcile the conflicting evidence, I approach motivation.
Motivational frames
T3 motivational framing task concerned the motives of activists and mobilisation of supporters, and they did “extensive rhetorical work to transform emotional raw materials into specific beliefs and suggestions for action” (Goodwin and Jasper, 2006: 620). I am unable to explain T3’s activism as a product of socialization and developmental processes related to their family socialization or exposure to parents’ volunteer activities as described by Yanitsky (1993b). T3 explain it by the personal factor: “if people have a civic stand, and if they want that their opinion is considered then, necessarily, they should express this opinion.” In line with Perry et al. (2008), Taganka people perceive their activism, service to others, and the way they live as highly integrated.
My studies reveal life-changing events (Perry, 2000: 480) as resulted in moral shocks (Goodwin and Jasper, 2006) triggering activism at Taganka. For T3 as well as for many other Muscovites and Russia’s citizens, such life-changing events become their first dramatic encounters with state power that lead these people with an essentially Soviet mindset to severe disillusionment in its functions of social protection; having such dramatic events and incorporating them in personal and group experience make activists different from much more numerous Muscovites without such incorporated experience (Clément, 2008). The latter category of people—as activists said—“has not received real kicks from the authorities and … have not felt all the hopelessness of … situation resulting from imperious lawlessness.” However, a sense of outrage was only the initial impulse, even though sufficient for a person to become “inclined” to action, “whether or not the person has acquaintances in the movement” (Goodwin and Jasper, 2006). It involved some further framing efforts on the part of the group in order to help a person find common ground with them and engage in collective action.
Identity
Quite in agreement with a view that group identity has been a prerequisite for collective action, through their daily interactions, T3 developed identities on which to base mobilization appeals. They employed both a territorial conception of identity (Martin, 2003) emphasizing the surrounding physical landscape (“we are Taganka people”) and a civic identity (Martin, 2003) emphasizing social characteristics of residents (“we are native Muscovites and true Russians”) to support their activities.
Self-designation of T3 is an identity frame defining this group as acting together in a particular place and in a certain way. Noteworthy, how the changing group’s name illustrated this group’s dynamics and development and eventually has been reduced to the mere two words “Taganka 3,” which, by that time, have become widely known and self-explanatory (described in Ivanou, 2013). In addition, T3 provided some contrasting examples in order to reinforce their own image; and in this regard, another Moscow group with its telling name “Let us alone!” (“Ostav’te nas v pokoe!”) became a certain “cherry-pie” for T3 because it did not take a stretch of imagination for them to present such a title to mean: “Dear power-wielding cannibals! Please, let us alone! Do not eat us! Then we do not mind you eating others.”
“Moral duty”
Members of T3 accepted the moral “burden” (or motivation) to solve problems at Taganka and elsewhere—starting with the task of monitoring and cautioning authorities at Taganka; proceeding with a duty to protect other residents; and ending by addressing problems at their root—by assuming “the moral duty of citizens, concerned about the future of their Motherland, to prepare conditions for restoration of freely competitive politics.” Similar to what Yanitsky (1993b) writes on Russian environmental activists, considering their work as doing for the public good but burdensome for themselves, T3 never hide that their moral authority troubles them. In December 2005, T3 admitted that their moral duty was burdensome: discussing collective actions by so-called “deceived housing co-investors,” T3 noted that the task of “housing co-investors” was simplified because of their numerical superiority and, especially, due to the fact that they were very naturally motivated to fight for their own apartments, while it took desperate idealists to fight for a small public garden. In effect, Taganka activists implied that the co-investors had rational grounds, while they themselves were lacking such grounds.
“Self-interest”
Along with “emotional,” “selfish” is often used pejoratively to refer to localized opposition to proposed development projects (Burningham et al., 2006). Interviews with members of T3 revealed that activists felt uncomfortable about the hypothetical presence in their agenda of “an egoistic issue of defending a place for you to walk and breathe some air.” Activists acknowledged that their opposition to the new development might be seen as a selfish attempt to preserve their own residential environment and that such a position would provide insufficient grounds for their opposition. As evident from T3 Internet communication, Moscow authorities repeatedly presented T3 in the way, which activists themselves summarized as follows: “in Soviet time…, some egoistic Muscovites have got used to living in luxury, using the land adjacent to their apartment blocks to include free car parking lots, children’s playgrounds, and other recreational areas.”
T3 learned the importance of challenging antagonists’ portrayal of them as selfish and applied efforts to ridding themselves of such tags, especially after the group underwent a series of attacks by Taganka Internet forum discussants whereby activists defending Taganka green zones were accused of promoting some unspecified commercial interests (because there was no evident rational motivation for them to do it), and even T3’s own unselfish image was considered suspicious when a blog visitor called not to trust such people because their material disinterest was suspicious—because “there is no unselfishness in … Moscow anymore.” Activists replied to the effect that unselfishness and a penchant for “mutually advantageous mutual help” should be separated from a desire to receive freebies, that it is important to act independently in protection of the historical heritage and the environment of the place where you live and that it is necessary not only to protect your own but also to help others. Gradually, they developed a more pro-environmental and socially justified basis for their objections by focusing on the need to conserve objects of historical, cultural, and natural heritage in “that the case of Taganka 3 [wa]s not a private issue of a narrow group of individuals but a struggle of Russian citizens for their rights.”
Ownership frame
Even upon demonstrating how “group boundaries are reinforced, enemies demonized, insiders praised, and symbols promulgated” (Goodwin and Jasper, 2006: 628), it is still not clear “why then the community had given up the fight but by claiming that ‘our issue was dead’ appears to be accepting that the fight was now to take place around other issues” (Robinson, 1999: 355). I now turn to how cognitive liberation (McAdam, 1982) connects diagnosis and prognosis, and how contention via “social appropriation” (Johnston, 2006) changes perceived threats and opportunities in favor of the latter, thus stimulating actions.
A conceptual “assembly point” of frames by T3 is their problem ownership frame (Johnston, 2006; Shemtov, 1999). This does not mean that their other frames and other motivating factors are replaced with the more expansive one, but they combine following an awareness of the local concerns merging extralocal problems (Robinson, 1999). Activists’ accounts are replete with expressions “our land,” and they are actually after recognition of their tenancy in common in their common-use territories, but their idea of “ownership” bears a more ideational and outreaching interpretation. This ownership empowers T3 to make a diagnosis of a social problem, and also it empowers them to “own” the prognosis of a social problem.
Earlier, I posited that T3’s committing to additional goals is tantamount to their assuming the role of owners of a social problem (Shemtov, 1999). It is most evident in their switching to the Children Park before (and eventually—without) achieving their original goal of saving the public garden. It is also manifested in other aspects, wherever T3 expressed their concern over urban planning and called it their responsibility to be involved in issues that threaten Taganka and Moscow at large.
Members of the group are involved in broader activities, not solely or specifically related to keeping infilling projects away from Taganka. They direct their engagement in the statutory planning process and speak of an obligation to assume a “watching brief” to guard against further inappropriate development. Their identity as unselfish active people with their moral obligation to provide solutions to problems that go beyond the area of their immediate residential concern results in their assuming a moral authority to diagnose and solve broader societal and environmental problems. In turn, the problem ownership frame produces changes in motivational as well as cognitive spheres of T3 and influences their goal setting.
Epitomizing the motivational disposition, induced by the ownership frame, is the following passage from Taganka Livejournal, where a member of T3 replies a visitor (“A mere resident”):
And what are you crying over?! Our initiative group consists of the same “mere residents” but, for whom, it is not “all the same” what is going on next to their houses. And there is no difference whether it is a public garden, a common use territory next to or apartment blocks themselves, or something else. The difference is that we began to act.
The ownership frame invests T3 with moral authority and reinforces their spirits. “To speak with credibility about social problems and their solutions” (Shemtov, 1999: 92) presupposes possessing necessary knowledge, and it makes T3 build up necessary expertise and effectuates their cognitive liberation (McAdam, 1982). Thus, T3 became initiators of a proposal to give the oak the status of nature sanctuary, and they prepared an integrated research statement about the Park surroundings where, using their own words, they “not only set out facts” of infringements (diagnosis) but also “propose[d] possible actions that [could] ensure the real protection of the Park” (prognosis). Ultimately, that this frame has resulted in actual change of opportunities and made it a self-fulfilling prophecy concerns connecting rationality and emotions in collective action.
Outcomes
Given that outcomes is an indispensable part of any writing on mobilization and that the complexity of the causal relationship between mobilization incentives and its outcomes directly concerns rationality issues (Opp, 2009), I finally address outcomes by T3 by considering their own viewpoint, conveyed through their responses to criticisms and as self-assessment.
Achievements of T3 were repeatedly subject to outside criticism addressing the group’s efficiency in its struggle as well as the value of resisting the dominant model of economic rationality. Forum visitors questioned the achievements of T3 and explained its inability to stop the construction at Taganka 3 by its resistance to economic rationality (that “necessarily triumphs”). Members of T3 rejected this point on the grounds that neither economic power nor the same rationality represented an exceptional value that could substitute other values and rejected the very assertion about the group’s inefficiency as based on a wrong understanding of its achievement, since the final result was yet unknown, and the group continued its work (achieving a legal decision to demolish the trading centre and restore the public garden is still in T3’s plans). They stressed that there were other important achievements that have already been fulfilled, such as overcoming by Taganka residents of their initial disassociation; an ability to defend their land demonstrated by Taganka people; and a rising level of environmental consciousness, legal competence, and so on. This argument fits into a broader international public and scholarly discussion on “rational responses,” whereby local opposition is seen either as an impediment to rationally planned facility siting or as a legitimate position by citizens that may serve the public interest by highlighting failings in existing decision-making (McClymont and O’Hare, 2008; Robinson, 1999).
In their accounts, Taganka activists stressed their ability to remain active, retain independence, and do with little resources but for long time. They regarded as a major achievement the very fact that their struggle was going on in spite of all odds. It is indicative that, quite often, they used the phrase “for the first time”: in August 2005, “for the first time in Moscow,” their group “demonstrate[d] an example of the legally competent and consolidated work”; in August 2005, “for the first time in Moscow, an initiative group fighting against an illegal infilling project, operate[d] for such a long time and preserve[d] a harmony among its members”; in the end of 2005, “for the first time in Moscow,” T3 (“a non-political association of citizens”) organized “not only protest meetings and get-togethers in their own locality and next to the construction site but also direct actions, intended to draw public attention to the lawlessness at Taganka”; in January 2006, “for the first time in Russian history,” a member of T3 (“a mere citizen”) accused a judge in the Court of Justice; “for the first time in Moscow,” a lawsuit with regard to a, supposedly, illegal construction project was considered in the RF Supreme Court on 1 February 2006; to believe T3, they were the only protest group in Moscow who temporarily discontinued an infill development project “by means of legal methods and without connections, without money”; “for the first time in Russia,” T3 were able to organize a rights self-defense action that took place without any conflicts; “for the first time in post-Soviet history,” a higher Moscow official was compelled to give explanations to a district militia officer with regard to T3’s message on her crime; “for the first time in Russian history,” a higher Moscow official was compelled to give explanations to a district militia officer with regard to T3’s message on her crime; and “for the first time in Russian history,” T3 (together with other Moscow activists) initiated a city referendum. It is easy to notice that many of the results cited by activists as unique are partial rather than definitive, that “for the first time” relates to their ownership frame and is a source of motivation, and that T3 experience is more important in creating precedents than in demonstrating actual results. T3 have no doubts that, alongside results, their work produced some consequences. From T3’s accounts, it is evident that the group gives local residents (and not only members of T3) of all income levels more influence over decisions that affect the quality of life in their communities, and their participation does produce changes in the balance of power in the city.
Conclusion
The focus of the article is the role of collective action frames in local groups’ motivation to act. I considered how activists framed their actions and how these framings enhanced their opportunities, while keeping track of their reliance either on rational reasoning or on emotions.
I find that even though the current political situation in Russia does not favor collective action, there are possibilities to act. I corroborate Pickvance’s (2001) findings that motivation can overcome an unfavorable context. What is needed is strategic use of frames and cognitive liberation (McAdam, 1982), the belief that action is possible and can lead to success. I find that motivation can actually be quite successful where it involves the social appropriation of contentious claims (Johnston, 2006)—such as in the case of the ownership frame (Shemtov, 1999) employed by a group as a master frame.
I discover a causal relationship between the ownership of problems at Taganka and the goal-setting mechanism of T3. Given that expanding goals before achieving initial ones can testify to social problem ownership, there is plenty of evidence that T3 expanded the sphere of their application to include the Children’s Park and other smaller issues long before the public garden conflict resolution. That problem ownership also stands for what holds the group for so long time—in spite of the lack of success in the public garden’s case and outside the successful resolution of the Children Park’s case.
A little effort is required to see that ownership frame, linking diagnosis and prognosis, is predicated on the interconnectivity of rational and emotional domains. Even in pursuing their emotionally formulated tactical goal and irrational (essentially unachievable in the Russian contexts) strategy, Taganka activists were instrumentally conscious and rational. Their very engagement can be considered as the rational response to the unreceptive system and inability to significantly participate in the decision-making process (McClymont and O’Hare, 2008).
Concerning the relative importance of various long-established factors in the T3’s case, resources and POS have lesser influence (even though indispensable) as mobilization incentives compared to the all-important factor of framing. My findings confirm Lyall’s (2006) claim that there is much more collective action that may occur in (semi)authoritarian regimes than rational choice and political- process scholarship would predict based on the assumed rationality of such protests. Therefore, local action should be studied using new approaches theorizing the interaction between material and symbolic practices, rationality and emotions—where frames resting on their intersection is a promising key.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Professor Chris Pickvance, University of Kent. I would like to express my appreciation to Emily Borzcik and the Institute of International Education for their timely fellowship. I am grateful to the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, CUNY for the opportunity to develop this study for publication. My special thanks go to anonymous reviewers for their consideration and to editors of Rationality & Society for their support.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.