Based on the empirical research of the Public Sociology Laboratory and following a Gramscian approach to analyzing civil society, I will scrutinize the dynamics of civil society in Russia in 2011-2025. After the revolutionary “For Fair Elections” protests (2011-2012), Russia’s major cities saw an explosive growth of anti-Putin urban and local activism. This activism was part of a democratic movement that institutionalized contentious collective action after the end of the protests of 2011-2012 but failed to create its own positive agenda and to engage broad masses of Russian citizens in politics. In response, Putin’s regime was transforming from repressive-technocratic to counterrevolutionary and militaristic. After the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war, it began to rely partially on pro-war and near-war civil society to assist the front and refugees. Interestingly, the social profile of volunteers and activists of both the first, anti-Putin and the second, loyal civil society partially coincide. The agendas also overlap: “normal” life, improvement, well-functioning bureaucracy, etc. I describe this dynamic as a mutual “escalation of normality,” which occurs under conditions of what Gramsci called the crisis of hegemony.
Oleg Zhuravlev is a sociologist. He is a researcher with Public Sociology Laboratory, Center for Independent Social Research (Russia) and a researcher at TU Dresden. He received his PhD in Social Sciences from the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). His research is focused on social movements, the sociology of knowledge, Marxism, pragmatic sociology.