From ‘Local‘ to ‘Urban‘: The Example of the Kaliningrad Protest Movement in 2009-2010

The most widespread kind of social mobilization in Russia since at least 2005 has been grassroots mobilization which is diffuse, local, rooted in the daily lives of its participants and seeks to address relatively concrete social problems. This paper presents a case-study of a massive protest movement in Kaliningrad 2009-2010, which inter alia achieved the dismissal of the regional Governor and which is one of the most striking examples of the dynamic process of local protests converging into a more general urban social movement.

The paper aims to demonstrate that such local initiatives can provide a good ground for successful development of quite massive social movements and that this occurs by the process of solidarizing, enlarging the scale and the scope of engagement, connecting claims and developing links and ties between people. The main research problem addressed thus is how such process of generalization and enlargement of small-scale and local initiatives may occur. The paper focuses on two stages of movement development: first, the emergence of grassroots initiatives and, second, the making of urban (citywide) social movements. The main data are in-depth interviews with leaders and ordinary activists, observations of collective actions and media accounts. Since structural – political, economic or cultural – conditions are relatively constraining for, and are not conducive to, collective action in Russia, other, more contingent social-cultural mechanisms occurring in everyday life and involving ‘ordinary people’ are needed to account for the process of movement spread. The analysis thus draws upon micro-sociological and interactionist approaches.