Abstract
This chapter analyses the mnemonic practices emerging within digital protest movements in modern post-Soviet Russia. In recent years this movement received institutional, economic and political support from Alexey Navalny, one of the most influential Russian political bloggers and opposition members. Focusing on his memory ecology, built on the ‘not forgetting, not forgiving’ discourse of identifying those responsible for the political malfunctioning of contemporary Russia, Moroz then turns to the analysis of youth’s participation in the creation of such discourse. The chapter concludes with the study of their original ways of constituting a digital witnessing archive filled with mediatised memory records. It also raises questions about similarities and differences between youth digital practices that help to recall barely noticeable negative political events of the recent past or even the present and thus to construct some prospective memory tasks, and memory ecology, presented by Navalny.
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Notes
- 1.
All translations by the author.
- 2.
See the description of Navalny’s aims at The public campaigns by ACF. (n.d.).
- 3.
Navalny’s presidential campaign officially ended on 25 December 2017, when the Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation refused to register Navalny as a presidential candidate, referring to the previous conviction. In response to this decision, Navalny announced the ‘boycott of the vote’, a protest against the upcoming presidential election. The main tasks were to reduce turnout and train field election observers. In March 2018, during the run, the final voter turnout was 60 per cent. One should notice it was during the campaign that Navalny launched active work with young activists and protesters, creating 81 regional headquarters. The description of the events of Navalny’s presidential campaign can be found at Navalny 2018. Alexey Navalny’s campaign platform. (n.d.) and Navalny 2018b. Navalny’s Campaign 2018. How it was. (n.d.).
- 4.
The ‘Beautiful Russia of the Future’ is one of Navalny’s favourite expressions that he occasionally uses in public speeches to describe the results of future state construction under his command. This expression received maximum fame as part of his presidential campaign. One can look through its use in the campaign discourse, while Navalny writes to his supporters. See the appeal to the future voters at Beautiful Russia of the Future (Navalny 2018. Alexey Navalny’s campaign platform. (n.d.)).
- 5.
In contrast, he is not interested in dialogue and collaboration with the oldest Russian historical and civil rights non-governmental organisation ‘Memorial’, whose historians and activists work to publicise the traumatic collective memory of political repression by, for example, demanding the disclosure of military and security service archives. These links lie at the core of the criticism levelled at Navalny by the old liberal community of the 1990s to which he is ideologically unconnected (Akunin, 2013).
- 6.
See detailed profile on Navalny at https://lenta.ru/lib/14159595/ (in Russian).
- 7.
Navalny constantly got arrested. Here are some pictures from the most ‘significant’ arrests during 2011–18: https://www.vedomosti.ru/politics/galleries/2018/09/25/781906-aresti-navalnogo#/galleries/140737494195343/normal/1 (in Russian).
- 8.
As it states in the project description, ‘using publicly available sources of information, the Anti-Corruption Foundation has analyzed the preparation for the Olympic Games and defined the main participants of this process, financing structures and costs borne. […] The identified issues altogether imply that there is a notable risk of fraud and corruption. We estimate that there is a high probability of a significant share of those US $45.8 billion was embezzled instead of being spent for the Olympics. The report below covers information on the problems of the Olympics construction projects’. See the whole report at Sochi 2014: Encyclopedia of spending. The Cost of Olympics Report by The Anti-Corruption Foundation. (n.d.).
- 9.
As indicated in the project description, it is a ‘list of civil servants who personally made politically motivated and illegal decisions (illegal refusals to register parties, injustice courts for participating in rallies, harassment of oppositionists), and also participated in these judgements’ execution. Each entry contains the name of the official, judge or prosecutor, a description of his judgement and confirmation of this information. The time will come, and a fair trial will be held in Russia. A black notebook will help not to forget those who should be in the dock’. The whole description is available at The Black Book by ACF. (n.d.).
- 10.
- 11.
See https://navalny.com/.
- 12.
See https://fbk.info/.
- 13.
For a better understanding of these discussions, it would be useful to look through the Yuri Levada Archives. Yuri Levada is one of the independent Soviet and post-Soviet sociologists who studied the relation of society to changes in the social and economic life and the bonds that tie together social stereotypes and myths about the Past and the expectations about the Present. See his articles at The Yuri Levada Archives. Documents and Papers. (n.d.).
- 14.
It is important to note that this method is not Navalny’s invention. According to such principles, the investigative journalism website Bellingcat works. Interestingly, Bellingcat data journalists actively cooperate with their Russian colleagues (e.g. from the Insider Russia) in preparing articles on Russian topics. As an example, see this article: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2018/09/14/skripal-poisoning-suspects-passport-data-shows-link-security-services/.
- 15.
As Mario Carpo (2017) mentioned in his book The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence, the ‘search, don’t sort’ principle indicates that people follow machine search principles. Carpo writes: the ‘posthuman logic is already ubiquitous in our daily lives and embedded in many technologies we use. […] Humans must do a lot of things […] in order to find things (call it classification, abstraction, formalization […]) […]. Computers […] can search without sorting’ (p. 96).
- 16.
- 17.
Eighty-one regional headquarters, from Kaliningrad to Magadan, were deployed in Navalny’s election campaign.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
For more information see Navalny 20!8. Navalny’s Campaign 2018. How it was.
- 21.
Their analyses of the cases can be found in content made by regional headquarters. Here is the example mentioned in this chapter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNuavOWc620.
- 22.
See special state-sponsored media video for the young protesters, made by the Coordination Council of Youth in Saint Petersburg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgaslbZQq3I.
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Moroz, O. (2020). ‘We Will Not Forget, We Will Not Forgive!’: Alexei Navalny, Youth Protest and the Art of Curating Digital Activism and Memory in Russia. In: Merrill, S., Keightley, E., Daphi, P. (eds) Social Movements, Cultural Memory and Digital Media. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32827-6_10
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