Tumult in the Land of Managed Democracy: An Introduction

These three authors also address the particular role played by the idea of democracy in the mobilization of the protesters—in its different modifications, from an idealized “fair representative democracy” to the direct democracy of assemblies. To generalize this in more theoretical terms, the conditions and hidden antagonisms of the “managed democracy” regime have radically transfigured the banal and routine procedures of elections, which, after being distorted and falsified by obedient functionaries, have finally become overdetermined, to use an Althusserian term. Thus, this oth- erwise flat technical procedure has concentrated in itself, as in a huge lens, not only some general modern problems of political representation but also disgusting, outrageous social and economic inequalities, a multiplicity of informal and coercive power relations, and all sorts of everyday violence, fraud, and humiliation common in this concrete society of post-Soviet cap- italism. In addition to having general structural problems, by being cynically “managed” from above, Russian representative democracy has become an exact symptom, a cryptogram, or a hieroglyph of real democracy. That is why managed democracy exploded, and this, probably, marks both the spe- cific position of the current Russian political conjuncture in the global pro- tests and its universal meaning.

And that is also why “managed democracy” should not be exoticized as something peculiarly “Russian,” as it often is by international journalists, scholars, and intellectuals. In just two decades, the “transition to democ- racy” transformed a huge country with a society that once proclaimed equal- ity as a universal communist project (in reality, of course, Soviet society was only relatively equal, since many privileges went only to the “nomenklatura” and since oppressive and anti-democratic limitations constrained the popu- lation) into the most unequal country in the world.2 Although this paradoxi- cal “achievement” of the transition is rather hidden, it is symbolic. A “case” like that of Russian managed democracy—in which such a level of inequality was kept within such a huge and diverse country without political explosion for such a long, albeit limited, amount of time—is indeed impossible without an exceptional, devious, and truly inhuman “management.” But in the age of biopolitical governmentality in which we live, any “really existing democ- racy” (to play on the unforgettable label of Soviet “really existing socialism”) is “managed” in this or that manner, whether more openly, shamelessly, and cynically or in more sophisticated, sly, and hypocritical modalities. For this reason, the “Russian case” reveals something genuine, important, and uni- versal in our contemporaneity. This paradigm clearly demonstrates that any of today’s “really existing democracies” within global capitalism has its own limits of manageability. And that at some point beyond this limit a whole new global political reality can come into being.

Beyond the dense and intelligent content of the presented essays, it is worth emphasizing the singular epistemological-political conditions under which they were produced. Though they are written rather post factum, in a distanced and “cold” analytical style, all the authors themselves were and still are active and passionate participants in and/or commentators on the movement. A couple of stories and personal trajectories should be added to highlight some moments of this participation—to give the reader more affective insight into the “genuine political event” (Matveev) of the protests and the subjective assumptions of these essays.

In October 2011, two months before the December explosion, Budraits- kis, a longtime spokesperson for the Russian Socialist Movement, one of the most visible organizations of the radical Left, organized a discussion at a bookstore. Inspired, as many of us were at the time, by Occupy Wall Street and the indignados in the United States and Europe, Budraitskis and his fel- low organizers dedicated the event to the question, “Is it possible to occupy Moscow?” A different balance of possible and impossible marked this moment, and the attempts to organize small-scale occupations that followed this meeting were not successful. Indeed, they seemed unrealistic. A good American friend of ours, active at OWS and in Moscow at the time, was also skeptical, given the general level of depoliticization in Russian society and the dispersed and unorganized state of the local leftist scene. Biblically refer- ring to the “several generations of activists” whose work made possible the occupation of Zuccotti Park, he was surprised and glad to be proven wrong only several months later in December 2011, when rallies of one hundred thousand citizens became a political reality in Moscow. Matveev, also an activist in the Russian Socialist Movement, joined the self-organized collec- tive Research in Politicization, which was formed as an alternative to the lib- eral sociological mainstream and which produced an important empirical body of knowledge during the mass rallies that followed.

Chehonadskih, working as a theorist and critic in the field of contempo- rary art, cofounded the Union of Cultural Workers in May 2011, which for the first time raised the question of precarity and drew attention to the urgency of self-organization in the post-Soviet cultural scene. She helped organize artist interventions within the big protest rallies that began in December 2011, including the production of posters, banners, and small human-microphone sessions and assemblies. On my balcony I still keep a protest poster from the Angry Sandwich People performance by the Chto Delat group in 2005. The performance was based on a poem by Bertolt Brecht, and made in memory of the centennial anniversary of the first Russian revolution of 1905. At that time, our dreams about the repoliticization of society seemed a marginal artistic and intellectual extravagance. The memorial sandwich banner of 2005 was finally reused in this intervention in the mass of one hundred thousand indignant politicized citizens rallying at the end of 2011.

In February 2012, at a big rally in the -25–degree Russian winter, I was one of many people carrying the long red banner devised and manufactured by the Union of Cultural Workers. The banner stated, “Are cultural and edu- cational workers middle class? Working day = 24 hours, average income = payment for renting an apartment! We are not middle class!” Another two slogans, created in this mass laboratory, were no less symbolic and impor- tant. “Democracy has become unmanageable!” This sarcastic challenge to Putin’s notorious managed democracy was a true diagnosis of that moment. “You cannot even imagine/represent us!” (“Vy nas dazhe ne predstavlyaete!”) was another slogan, coined by a radical Saint Petersburg student and artist group around the same time. Playing on the Russian verb with the double meaning of both “to imagine” (“you—those in power—don’t know who we are and what we are capable of!”) and “to represent” (“you—those in power— don’t represent us at all!”), it has become widespread as the most striking expression of the radical part of the movement.

Finally, in May 2012, abruptly, the impossible became possible. Half a year after those pessimistic responses to the question, “Is it possible to occupy Moscow?” we staged our occupation of a square in the center of the Russian capital—actually, the first occupation in post-Soviet history. Together with many friends, including all the contributors to this section, we became a part of Occupy Abai, one vibrant week of encampment, of continual meet- ings of hundreds of people, of mass assemblies and seminars, of the produc- tion of informational letters and leaflets, of doing so many other things that constituted this short-lived, round-the-clock commune. The camp survived for just one week before it was brutally evicted by riot police and became nomadic and dispersed, but it still continued at several spots around the city for a couple of weeks. This month became a true school of the possible for us all—an overwhelming autonomous temporality, a production of subjec- tivity, an absolute democracy! Joy, astonishment, and new knowledge mixed. At least for this brief moment, they became not just another constellation of highbrow philosophical concepts but a living collective reality and practice, a glimpse of a different future.

Notes

On behalf of the “Moscow part” of this publication project, I would like to express our enor- mous gratitude to our American friends and colleagues, Marijeta Bozovic and Katharine Holt, for their substantial work editing and commenting on the contributions that constitute this section, as well as translating Ilya Budraitskis’s article, and for their unfailing support, understanding, and solidarity.

1. 1  The scale was unprecedented—for many years previously, a protest meeting could be considered “very successful” if it gathered a couple thousand.
2. 2  More precisely, the level of inequality in the distribution of national wealth in Russia has become the second in the world, after the Caribbean islands, according to the Credit Suisse “Global Wealth Report 2012”: “Excluding small Caribbean nations with resident billionaires, wealth inequality in Russia is the highest in the world. Worldwide there is