When cynical distance and ironic posturing have become the prevalent means of relating to public life, political humour is no longer considered subversive. It has been argued that both in Russia and the United States, ideology has co-opted satire, meaning that citizens can consume outrage passively through various satirical media products, thereby displacing outrage and abstaining from more active forms of resistance. This articles explores the twenty-first century potential of irony and cynicism to disrupt and subvert through parody, be it in the form of political satire or ironic protest, examining how similar paradigms are expressed across different geographical contexts.

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The Class Composition of Russia’s Anti-Putin Movement

Political satire and its disruptive potential: irony and cynicism in Russia and the US

This thesis investigates national identification by applying psychosocial methodology to
discourses produced in Russia during the era of ‘Putinism’ (2000- ). Existing literature on
post-Soviet Russia frequently claims that at the heart of the nation lies an absence of
symbolic functions or subjective formations with which Russians could identify. At the
same time, there has been relatively little empirical work that seeks to examine national
identification using a psychosocial approach. The study fills this lacuna by looking for
moments of identification across different texts, such as interviews, surveys and media
representations. Using as its starting point the conditions of possibility of post-2000
Russia, the study pays attention to societal shifts and disjunctures, examining how they
are reflected in discursive patterns and formations.
The dissertation’s empirical element consists of two parts. Through the analysis of
interviews and open-ended surveys, the first part documents respondents’ ambivalent
relationship with Russia and Russianness, which is characterized by splitting and
disavowal. In the second part, the study deploys a case study approach. The first case
study focuses on discourses of rejection and (dis)identification as featured in the Russian
public’s responses to Pussy Riot. It concludes that in their policing of Russianness and
the demarcation of features deemed undesirable as embodied by the group, participants
in the debate have found ways of both shifting the threat Pussy Riot represents, and also
of once again ‘enjoying the nation’. The second case study examines discourses that seek
to elicit identification in the populace via representational mechanisms around the figure
of Vladimir Putin. It is argued that the various strategies employed to activate leader love,
ranging from hypermasculinity to hyperrealism, seem to indicate a void at the heart of
the Russian president’s persona and, by extension, his national project, making them
profoundly unstable.
Overall, the thesis provides a rare empirical contribution to the psychosocial study of
national identification. It addresses the interrelation between imaginary and symbolic
identification and the pivotal role of fantasmatic processes therein. The identifications I
locate in the thesis are precarious and fleeting, speaking of the loss of a fantasy of
national greatness, and of an internalization of images and scenes borrowed from
literature and history. The study also offers a consideration of the implications of such
attachments for Russian society, thus providing further illustration of the
interdependence of the psychic and the social.

Moments of Russianness : locating national identification in discourse

The paper explores the role of resources in LGBT activism in Russia. Russian LGBT activism emerged and developed after the fall of the Soviet Union with activists engaging in various activities suc...

Resource mobilisation and Russian LGBT activism

Russian reactions to Pussy Riot’s performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012 indicated that a collective nerve had been hit. This article seeks to explain the surge of public outrage following Pussy Riot’s ‘punk prayer’ through a psychosocial analysis of Russian media debates surrounding the case. By focusing on the negative responses, the following discussion investigates what such a ‘resistance to resistance’ might signify, and how it can point to latent forms of identification. It examines the public’s fixation with the group’s name, as well as the prevalence of fantasmatic enactments of violence in media discussions. Results suggest that in their rejection of the group’s performance, participants in the debate found ways of both shifting the threat Pussy Riot represents, and of once again ‘enjoying the nation’.

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A psychosocial analysis of reactions to Pussy Riot: Velvet Revolution or Frenzied Uteri

Russian reactions to Pussy Riot's performance in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012 indicated that a collective nerve had been hit. This article seeks to explain the surge of public outrage following Pussy Riot's 'punk prayer' through a psychosocial analysis of Russian media debates surrounding the case. By focusing on the negative responses, the following discussion investigates what such a 'resistance to resistance' might signify, and how it can point to latent forms of identification. It examines the public's fixation with the group's name, as well as the prevalence of fan- tasmatic enactments of violence in media discussions. Results suggest that in their rejection of the group's performance, participants in the debate found ways of both shifting the threat Pussy Riot represents, and of once again 'enjoying the nation'. Subjectivity (2016) 9, 126-144. doi:10.1057/sub.2016.5; published online 7 April 2016

A psychosocial analysis of reactions to Pussy Riot: Velvet Revolution or

This article considers some methodological problems that arose while studying the street protest movement in Russia in 2011–2012. This research was conducted from December 2011 on by the Independent Research Initiative  NII mitingov , whose members interviewed participants of street actions such as demonstrations, marches, and street camps. The article engages with a number of key issues in research on mass-scale street activism. The “double engagement” position of the researcher and research group, who must negotiate their positionalities between academic and activist logics, is discussed and problematized. I also discuss whether in situ interviewing during a protest is an acceptable methodology. Additionally, the article problematizes media interpretations of the social make-up and the political homogeneity of protestors, which have formed the “instantaneous” horizon of meaning for subsequent sociological inquiries; considers questions of the legality of street actions and the apposite issue of demonstrators’ compliance with the law; lays the groundwork for an analytical model of the emotional dynamics of the protest, where anger and irony emerge not as instances of spontaneous affect on the part of participants but rather as parts of a sequence generated through practices of virtual communication. Finally, I brieﬂy consider the possibilities for further analysis of street activism, including its less evident social consequences beyond the domain of electoral practices.  In Russian, extended summary in English.

https://ecsocman.hse.ru/data/2012/11/01/1251370158/30_Sum_Bikbov_ENG.pdf

The Class Composition of Russia’s Anti-Putin Movement

Citations

Political satire and its disruptive potential: irony and cynicism in Russia and the US

Moments of Russianness : locating national identification in discourse

Resource mobilisation and Russian LGBT activism

A psychosocial analysis of reactions to Pussy Riot: Velvet Revolution or Frenzied Uteri

A psychosocial analysis of reactions to Pussy Riot: Velvet Revolution or

References

The Methodology of Studying “Spontaneous” Street Activism (Russian Protests and Street Camps, December 2011–July 2012)

From One Election to Another: Breakthroughs and Deadlocks of the Anti-Putin Movement in Russia