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2.2 Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia

Since this study is limited by a number of factors, such as time, funding, and space available, the project has been narrowed down geographically. The case studies are limited to the capital cities of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia for three main reasons. Firstly, the three countries have many similarities. Secondly, despite these similarities, there are some interesting differences between the respective national opposition movements. Finally, two outside factors have pushed me to select these cases. I shall return to these shortly.

Furthermore, each case study has also been geographically limited to one or two urban public spaces, as the word limitations provided by the journal article format rarely allow for more. The choices and delimitations for each case study are discussed more thoroughly in each of the three chapters.

Similarities

Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow are the capital cities of the countries often referred to as the Slavic Triangle (see e.g. Godin 2014), a term originating from the countries’ shared history. The territories of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia each cover parts of Kievan Rus’ (pprox.. 882–1240), the Tsardom of Russia (1547–1722), and the Russian Empire (1722–1917), and they were all signatories to the Treaty of the Creation of the USSR in 1922, which was dissolved in 1991 by the collective decision of the three heads of state. In post-Soviet times, the three countries have struggled with many of the same obstacles: a brutal transition from planned to market economy, widespread corruption, autocratic leadership, popular discontent, etc. Moreover, there are strong ethnic, linguistic, cultural, political, architectural, economic, and criminal similarities and bonds between the three countries.

Figure 6: The Slavic Triangle (map)

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Map: Júlio Reis/Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en) (edited by Arve Hansen)

Differences

However, the differences between the three countries are significant, too. Ukraine was one of the countries upended by a revolution in the 2000s, as the Orange Revolution of 2004–2005 resulted in regime change. Conversely, Belarus and Russia avoided becoming part of the wave of colour revolutions.7 This tendency repeated itself in the 2010s, as protests in Minsk and Moscow at the start of the decade all ended badly for the protesters,8 whilst the latest Ukrainian revolution of 2013–2014, centred on Maidan in downtown Kyiv, led to regime change for the second time in nine years.9 Today, protests continue to exert an influence on local and regional politics.10

Moreover, whereas the opposition in Kyiv has Maidan as an urban space designated for protest, the opposition in Minsk has very limited access to the city’s urban spaces; and in Moscow, although the authorities do allow protests, they carefully select which spaces to sanction for such actions, most probably to restrict the impact of the protests.

Outside factors

This study forms part of a research group studying Russian space (broadly understood to include Belarus and Ukraine).11 I have also lived in each country for an extended period of time (in Belarus, 2006–2010; in Ukraine, the first half of 2011 and 2013–2017; in Russia, 2011–2013). I thus have first-hand knowledge of, and a network of friends and acquaintances in, each of the three cities.

2.3 Relevance

Since prehistoric times, people have related by necessity to the intricacies of physical and social space, to the associations and emotions such spaces evoke, as well as to the possibilities and obstacles they provide. Even though our environment has changed, our basic human instincts are still active and, as in the prehistoric era, people congregate to discuss, deliberate, interact, and—in times of trouble—struggle together to find a solution to the problem.

The small selection of collective actions mentioned in this chapter demonstrates that urban mass protest can be a means of changing society, used by people across the world. With the spread of social media, waves of protest can expand with increased speed, and the Internet has facilitated the extension of protest movements, such as the colour revolutions, the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and the Yellow Vests. However, although the Internet is available in and used by the majority of the world’s population, people still use physical space in order to protest. This is because the presence of a group of people assembled at a focal point of the city serves a number of purposes that are rarely served by collective online action. A physical protest shows that there is discontent in the city, and that people are willing to sacrifice time and effort to come out in support of their cause.

I do not wish to undermine the power of the Internet as a tool for mobilising people to protest. Social media outlets clearly have several qualities suitable for facilitating and/or organising mass protest (see for example Herasimenka 2016). Yet, for a collective action to be effective, it more often than not needs some form of physical manifestation. Urban protests occur where people are concentrated, and so are often hard to ignore. On one hand, citizens are forced to react to the protests as they obstruct movement and demand attention, and some might be inspired to join in. On the other, the authorities are also forced to react, and their reaction (whether by way of official statements, violence, or both) might further spread the news of discontent. Mass protest also represents a form of threat to the authorities. It might mean that people expect the authorities to change their ways, or else they will not vote for those in power again; and it might discourage others from doing so, too. It can also be a threat of violence, as a large group of discontented people has the potential of turning into a mob and removing the authorities by force.

Consequently, urban public space has both a historic and a contemporary relevance, and the ways in which people perceive and use space, especially at times of contention, still have an impact on local, regional, and global politics and society today.

How are mass protests affected by geographical urban space in modern cities? To answer this question, it is first of all necessary to consult the research literature to see whether such a spatial perspective exists. If not, how should such a model be structured?

1 This way of thinking about human nature has its roots back in the cognitive turn of the mid 1950s. At this time, sciences such as psychology, linguistics, and anthropology began distancing themselves from the traditional way of looking at the mind and body as separate entities; and the new cognitive sciences moved towards a more integrated interpretation of the human mind, which sees most aspects of the human body (and possibly the environment in which it moves) as interrelated (Miller 2003; Núñez and Cooperrider 2013; Thagard 2018).

2 The revolution erupted in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille, a symbol of monarchical oppression, and was fuelled by the poverty and sickness created in the overcrowded and unsanitary districts of Paris. Moreover, the insurgency was possible in no small part due to barricades raised in the city’s narrow and easily defendable streets and alleys (Doyle 1989, 178-191; Traugott 1993; Wilde 2018).

3 At its peak, in the 1960s and 70s, the Soviet Union covered a sixth of the planet’s landmass, controlled the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and dominated the Warsaw Pact military alliance. This alliance was created as a counterweight to NATO in May 1955 and consisted of the 15 Soviet Republics in the USSR as well as Albania (until 1968), Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. This group of republics and countries is referred to as the Eastern Bloc.

4 The Hungarian student protests turned into a revolution and triggered a Soviet military intervention the same year, resulting in “more than 3,000 dead and 13,000 injured as well as over 4,000 destroyed buildings. Actual losses were probably higher” (Hoensch 1984, 219).

5 1968 is a year famous for the amount of urban protests worldwide. In the West, public spaces were occupied by demonstrators in London, Madrid, Mexico, Paris, Rome, West Berlin and numerous other cities; and the social movements of that year showed that even seemingly stable democracies can burst into protests, riots, and even revolutions (see Kurlansky 2005.). While people in the West were largely protesting in the name of equality and socialism, the protests in the East demanded political freedoms and increased autonomy from the Soviet Union. When the Kremlin ordered the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to stop the Prague government’s new reform programme, thousands of Prague-dwellers took to the streets to protest. A number of demonstrations in support of the Czechoslovaks appeared in cities across the Soviet Union, too, including at Red Square in Moscow (Wojnowski 2018, 85; Bichof, Karner, and Ruggenthaler 2010; Kondrashova 2018).

6 In Eastern Europe, the 1990s are often known by the Russian term Likhie devianostye, which can be translated into English as the Wild Nineties. The period got this label due to the chaos that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse. The 15 newly born post-Soviet states had to reorient their economic models towards a new reality and create new political systems while struggling with severe scarcity of consumer goods and social security, explosive crime rates, rampant corruption, and uncontrolled privatisation. At the same time, wars and uprisings for independence broke out frequently in the Caucasus (notably in Abkhazia, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South-Ossetia) and in the Transnistria Region of Moldova, triggering several, often unpopular, military interventions by Russia and other countries. Just when the economic situation started to recover, the 1997 financial crisis in Asia hit the former Soviet Union hard, particularly Russia and its trade partners Ukraine and Belarus. It should be noted that the Russian authorities support the use of the term Likhie devianostye, as it focuses on the negative aspects of the unstable decade between the Soviet Union (stability) and Putin (new stability), although for many Eastern Europeans, the decade was seen as one of freedom and possibilities rather than anarchy (see for example Rusin 2016; Boldyrev 2018; Osipov-Gipsh 2019).

7 In Russia in 2000, the presidency changed from the unpopular, ageing and sickly Boris Yeltsin to the comparatively young, reasonably sober and physically very fit Vladimir Putin, who for several reasons enjoyed high levels of popularity well into the mid-to-late 2000s (9.2). In Belarus, too, the economy had been growing since the early 2000s, and mass protests were mostly ideological (driven by Belarusian nationalists) or constitutional (against the policies of President Aliaksandr Lukashėnka). Yet none of these protests resulted in a colour revolution (8.2).

8 The 2006 protests in Minsk and the 2011–2012 protest movement in Moscow were suppressed so harshly that the opposition of both countries was effectively disabled for several years to come (8.3.2, 9). In both cases, the protesters were met with violence, hundreds of demonstrators were arrested, and the leaders of the opposition received long prison sentences.

9 The revolution has greatly affected both regional and global power politics. Russia has accused the EU and US of orchestrating what they perceive to be a coup d’état, and the Ukrainian revolution became Russia’s pretext for occupying the Crimean Peninsula and supporting the separatist movements in the Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine. Thus, the revolution indirectly became one of the triggering events for the deteriorating relations between Russia and the West today.

10 Since 2014, protests in Ukraine have for the most part been aimed at the policies of President Petro Poroshenko (2013–2019) and President Volodymyr Zelenskyi (since 2019). In Belarus, little has changed, and protests are usually suppressed in much the same manner as before. In Russia, following the annexation of Crimea, a surge in patriotic sentiment led to members of the opposition being labelled traitors, and discontent has remained at low levels. Since 2016, there has been an upswing in public protests in the country. A variety of economic and social problems have motivated hundreds of thousands of Russians to participate in numerous collective actions in cities across the country (9.2.1).

11 The research group RSCPR (Russian Space: Concepts, Practices, Representations) “is engaged in a multidisciplinary study of Russian attitudes to their own and other people’s/nations’ spaces […] which can provide insights into the interdependence of Russian space and Russian identity, both at an individual and a state policy level” (UiT n.d.). Ukraine and Belarus are often (and especially in Russia) perceived as integral parts of a “Russian” world.

3 Mapping the Field

The previous chapter outlined some key aspects of space and contention. Historical and contemporary examples were cited to illustrate the important psychological and practical effects of urban space on mass actions.

The aim of the current chapter is to provide a more detailed overview of academic publications concerned with space and/or protests. Starting from this proposition, two key questions may be asked: 1) What academic literature recognises and/or relates to the links between space and protests?; and 2) What approaches and concepts can be integrated into a theoretical model which examines the causal relationship between space and protest? To facilitate reading, the body of research literature is split into three main sections: literature on protests (3.1), literature on various types of space (3.2), and then a section that sums up the findings of this chapter and outlines a gap in the research literature (3.3).

3.1 Protests

Protest is a broad subject that has been approached by scholars from a range of academic disciplines. If theories on social movements are included, the amount of literature on protests becomes even greater. A good starting point to make sense of these broad categories is sociology, which is naturally concerned with the act of protest.

In Theories of Political Protest and Social Movements by the German sociologist Karl-Dieter Opp (2009), six major theoretical perspectives on protests and social movements are defined and ealizatio. These are collective action theory (CAT), resource ealization perspective (RMP), political opportunity structure theory (POS), identity theory, framing perspective, and dynamics of contention approach (DOC). Opp describes these theories particularly with a view to the degree in which they present macro (i.e. structural) and micro (i.e. psychological) perspectives on social movements and protests, and how these are interlinked. His main point of critique is that the existing theoretical frameworks do not properly combine macro and micro factors in their attempts to explain protests (2009, 349). Opp’s proposed solution is a synthesis of the major theoretical approaches, which he calls the structure-cognitive model (SCM).1

Opp analyses these models in detail, but not one of them is shown by his analysis to give specific consideration to the spatial element of protest. I would argue that all seven models, for various reasons, would benefit from applying a spatial perspective of this type.2 The model that comes closest in nature to a such a perspective is POS theory.

The aim of POS theory, as it was first developed by the US political scientist Peter Eisinger (1973), is to understand the behaviour of protests and to calculate the chance of success of protests and social movements. To do this, the theoretical model relies on the thorough examination of the political environment (i.e. the context within which politics take place). If significant changes occur to the POS (i.e. to the factors and conditions of the political environment), reasons and opportunities for political action are created. POS theory thus strives to identify various factors in the political environment and to prove each factor’s causal effect on the chances of a given action occurring and/or succeeding. What constitutes “success” needs to be defined empirically by the researcher (Opp 2009, 162).

One part of Opp’s (2009) extensive critique of this theory is that it is virtually impossible to identify all factors in the political environment (or find the ‘correct’ ones), and thus hard to calculate the “chances of success”. Opp also argues that the theory is poorly defined and not clearly distinct from RMP and rational choice theory (RCT), and he questions why POS theory ealizatio changes in the political environment rather than just opportunities (167–171; 177–178). However, in his view, the utility of the model is that it demonstrates how the political environment may affect protest behaviour. POS could also be used to identify factors in the political environment that inhibit and/or facilitate protests, even if the causal effect of each factor is difficult to assess. (200–201.)

The political environment is relevant to a theoretical model on space and protest for two reasons: 1) As I argue throughout this book, geographical space can significantly contribute to the emergence, ealization, and impact of protests, and it should thus be considered as one of the factors in the political environment. 2) In order to understand the causal relationship between space and protests, it is necessary to identify not only the effects of space, but also the other factors and conditions that have an effect on protests (the importance of mapping such rival theories is explained more thoroughly in chapter 5, 5.6). The following three subsections survey research literature that contributes to our understanding of protest, with a particular view to spatial and non-spatial factors in the political environment that make contentious politics successful or unsuccessful.

3.1.1 Repertoires

The term repertoire of contention (ROC) was initially coined by the US sociologist Charles Tilly. The concept is used as an analytical tool by sociologists and political scientists to identify tendencies in contentious politics and to explain why people choose to act the way they do. Strategies utilised during contentious collective actions are often repeated, and social groups develop traditions for methods of protest over time, affected by social, political, and cultural factors. Such repertoires include oft-repeated forms of contentious action (e.g. sit-ins, riots, and protests), and the participants’ preferred tools of choice, which develop and change over time (Tarrow 1993). 3 The activists’ choice of urban space often becomes a part of such repertoires, and an analysis of a given space should therefore also consider whether or not it is included in any ROCs (see history of protest as a spatial element, 6.1.1).

The Italian scholars Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani have written extensively on the ROCs of social movements. In one of their books, Social Movements: An Introduction (della Porta and Diani 2006), the two authors use various theoretical approaches, such as ROC, RMP, and POS, to approach social movements4 on three levels of analysis—micro levels (e.g. feelings, identity, beliefs, values, etc.), meso levels (the ittlingion, and the social networks the movements are comprised of), and macro levels (i.e. structural factors, such as economy, political system, etc.)—and the relationship between these three levels (see figure 7 for a graphical representation). Particularly relevant to this book is the authors’ overview of the literature on the policing of protests (see policeability/defensibility as a spatial quality, 6.2.1), to which della Porta has made significant contributions (della Porta and Reiter 1998; della Porta 2013; della Porta, Peterson, and Reiter 2006).

Della Porta and Diani (2006, 197) elaborate on the act of policing protests and identify three prevailing policing strategies: coercive strategies (i.e. the use of physical force); persuasive strategies (attempts to control events through contact with activists and organisers); and informative strategies (which consist of “widespread information-gathering as a preventive feature in protest control”). While choice of strategy on the part of the police has a great impact on the outcome of protests, it is not clear which of the two first strategies is most efficient in controlling events. The authors do note a tendency of coercive (repressive) strategies increasing the risk of escalation, and thus also the proportion of radical protesters.5

In addition to the police, della Porta and Diani (2006) identify other actors in opposition to or allied with the social movements, and whose structural makeup, strength, weaknesses, and other characteristics also function as POSs. These might be institutional, such as government agencies, political parties, trade unions, foundations, religious institutions, etc. Other important actors are provocateurs, used to incite violence and legitimate coercive strategies, and social countermovements that arise “as a reaction to the successes obtained by social movements”, develop in parallel to the social movements, and often use similar strategies to those of the movements they oppose (2006, 2011).6