State–society relations in contemporary Russia: new forms of political and social contention (original) (raw)

Civil Society in Russia: Bearing the Unbearable in the Name of the State

In the fall of 1999, Russia suffered a series of high-profile terrorist attacks. Two hundred ninety-three people died as a result of explosions in residential buildings in Buinaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk. These incidents served as a prologue to the second Chechen war, the death of thousands of people, public consolidation under the banner and rhetoric of a "fight against terrorism," and the subsequent process of what some call stabilization. Today, few people still remember the 1999 terrorist attacks in Russia. At the same time, just as the world changed after September 11, 2001, it is fair to say that Russia changed after September 1999. It crossed an important and tragic threshold as Russian society was forced to recognize the extent of the terrorist threat to which it was exposed, a threat whose origins still remain unclear. In the meantime, it also found what it had long sought-the rule of an iron fist. As society fell more and more under government control, not many Russians noticed the changes taking place-the curtailing of media freedoms, the gradual marginalization of the opposition, and the undermining of regional governors' authority, to name a few. Subtle transformations usually occur in the course of natural evolution. However, these changes were different: whereas evolution, in the traditional meaning of the term, signifies a movement forward, these "reforms" would take Russia back to a time in which civil society was a subject to the will of the state. Unfortunately, these.changes are here to stay, and they are informing the future. We can trace these transformations from the collapse of the Soviet Union up to the present day. In the 1990s, Russian society suffered through deep crises penetrating all spheres of public life. The old political and economic values came crashing

‘The Foreign Within’: State–Civil Society Relations in Russia

Europe-Asia Studies

The development of Russian civil society is linked to authoritarian government, fear of 'colour revolutions' and the 'sovereign democracy' that legitimises state control of civil society. This article acknowledges the narrowing room for manoeuvre of contemporary Russian civil society and discusses NGOs' practices in the context of government pressures, the politicisation of transnational connections and the increasing geopolitical tension surrounding Russia. It describes the localisation and depoliticisation of Russian NGOs as well as their disruptive practices, and explains how narrowing civil society identities inform the selfgoverning of NGOs. Finally, it argues that seeing Russian civil society in simple dichotomies further narrows these identities. THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE EMERGING FROM RUSSIA'S POST-SOVIET experience continues to be dominated by the state. An important part of this new landscape is nonetheless a renewed organisational and civic life. Since the early 1990s, many of the newly formed post-Soviet civil society organisations in Russia were invigorated by transnational connections through which they received new ideas and financing, as well as prescriptions about what projects and thus what kind of NGO work was valuable (Henderson 2002; Hemment 2004; Sundstrom 2005). As is now widely known, such connections have become in the last decade the target of the Russian government. With the introduction of the 'foreign agent' legislation in 2012, stipulating that NGOs that receive funding from abroad and that are politically active in Russian politics must enlist as 'foreign agents', a boundary between 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' civil society was enforced in Russia. 1 In the literature, this governing of Russian civil society is connected to the authoritarian tendencies of the Russian state (Gel'man & Ryzhenkov 2011, p. 450), the elite's fear of the contagion of 'colour revolutions' and the Russian state-building concept of 'sovereign