Abstract
In 2019, mass protests hit Russia’s capital: in July, August, and September people gathered on the streets dissatisfied with the electoral process in the Moscow City Duma election. Many independent candidates were barred from participation in the election and refused registration by the Electoral Commission of Moscow, citing multiple reasons including invalid signatures collected for candidates. Four of those candidates were Navalny’s associates and allies such as Ilya Yashin, Lyubov Sobol, Vladimir Milov, and Ivan Zhdanov. They used various communication instruments inspired by Navalny to gather one of the largest demonstrations of the 2010s in Russia’s capital.
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Notes
- 1.
It is worth noting here that all of the candidates to these election were presented as “independent” and self-nominated, UR did not nominate candidates on behalf of the party, instead they supported self-nominated candidates (in Russian: “samovydvizhency”). Experts connect it with a poor image of the party among Moscow residents (znak.com 2019).
- 2.
Videos posted on other channels by candidates were not considered in this selection.
- 3.
Here and later in this chapter all quotes of political outsiders are translated by the author from Russian.
- 4.
Contains obscene language in Russian.
- 5.
All data as of August 2021.
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Glazunova, S. (2022). The 2019 Moscow Municipal Election and the Communication of Political Outsiders. In: Digital Activism in Russia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93503-0_9
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