In Moscow's Shadows Bonus Minipod: Rebel Russia

A mini-episode that paying Patrons heard as part of their Twelve Days of Shadowy Christmas bonuses. Forget the cliché that Russians accept power without protest, I sit down with author and analyst Anna Arutunyan to unpack a more complicated truth from her book Rebel Russia: Russia’s past is full of uprisings and dissent, yet weak social solidarity keeps those bursts of courage from becoming lasting institutions. When no stable forums exist for bargaining between citizens and the state, pressure builds, revolutions erupt, and the reset button gets slammed—often wiping out the very spaces needed for democracy to grow.

The book, Rebel Russia: Dissent and Protest from the Tsars to Navalny, was published last year by Polity Press, in both hardback and e-book formats.

The podcast's corporate partner and sponsor is Conducttr, which provides software for innovative and immersive crisis exercises in hybrid warfare, counter-terrorism, civil affairs and similar situations.

You can also follow my blog, In Moscow's Shadows, and become one of the podcast's supporting Patrons and gain question-asking rights and access to exclusive extra materials including the (almost-) weekly Govorit Moskva news briefing right here. 

Transcript

Bonus Mini Introduction

MG 0:00

Yes, it's another bonus mini podcast drawn from the twelve days of Shadowy Christmas that were presented before my noble paying patrons. This time it's an interview with the author Anna Arutunian about her excellent book, Rebel Russia: Descent and Protest from the Tsars to Navalny, which came out last year from Polity Press, and which essentially advances the thesis wholly convincingly, I would say, not only that Russia's history is not one that has been marked by submission to the state, but rather resistance, but that precisely it has been a lack of social solidarity that has ensured that this resistance has not only been unable to shape the state, but that also when it is able to do so, it does so in such a violent and thus counterproductive way that in some ways it ends up just simply replicating the same kind of structures as the state. Anyway, there's a lot more to it than that. But listen on and hear my conversation with Anna. So for the 11th of the 12 Days of Shadowy Christmas 2025 to 2026, which is being released to patrons on the 2nd of January 2026, and we'll then probably go out into sort of general release about it in about a month's time. Well, we have an interview. And in this case, I'm interviewing, and some people would regard this as shameful partisanship. But anyway, Anna Arutunian, the author of the recent, the new book from Polity Press, Rebel Russia: Dissent and Protest from the Tsars to Navalny. An excellent book, and you don't have to take my word for it. All sorts of luminaries have contributed their fine encomia to it. The fact that it happens to be written by my wife is entirely incidental. After all, this is her fifth book. She did cover Russian politics very much from the inside over two decades as a journalist, particularly at the Moscow News, where she rose to become editor, and then also as the senior Russia analyst for International Crisis Group. Anyway, so we have about 25-ish minute conversation about her book and about the sometimes interestingly counterintuitive findings about the nature of Russia, the real problem as to why revolutions haven't necessarily worked, and an element of optimism at the end about how some kind of progress not just can happen in Russia, but is happening in Russia. So listen on. Okay, let me start with in what is in some ways a mirror imaging of the usual sort of a convention of these kind of chats, which is instead of asking you the question, so what's this book about? Let me tell you what I thought the book was about when I when I read it. The first was a full-throated rejection of this idea that Russians are naturally slavish lumps who just simply wish to be bossed around and they they frankly prefer to have a firm hand and such like, but instead that in fact Russia's story is one of riot and rebellion, of constant resistance by people who quite rightly feel that they're being screwed over by those above them, whether we're talking about medieval princes, czars, general secretaries, or presidents. However, at the same time, there is a distinct lack of social solidarities within and between, I don't know if you necessarily call them classes, but social groups and such like. So that in some ways there's no one who can negotiate with the state and with whom the state can negotiate. So there's no real chance at reaching some kind of proper social consensus except in the very sort of crude um sort of bargains that are struck, as as Putin did in his first couple of presidential terms, which is basically your life will get better, you'll have more stuff in the fridge, you can feel confident that your kids are going to have an even better life than you as long as you stay out of politics. But that kind of beyond that very, very simple kind of social contract, there's not much scope for anything more nuanced, and therefore that can build the institutions that bind a society together. And as a result of that, the third element is therefore actually the state is terrified. It's constantly terrified of its own people because it has no real way to bind them to it, except for these very sort of crude, you know, propaganda ideology, religion, sort of um wholesale type options. And that helps explain just why it's so oppressive and so violent, because it feels it really has nothing else in order to maintain its control over society. So tell me how I'm wrong.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

Wow, gosh, you know, uh unfortunately you said it better than I could.

MG 5:34

So well, hardly.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

It's like, no, no, I know, but you usually the the you know, it is the benefit of these types of uh asking a question like this is usually when somebody um uh asks us, I can always find something where they were wrong, and you're not wrong anywhere, uh unfortunately. I was really searching for places where I could pick apart. No, no, no, you didn't you didn't get it. Or no, that's not true. Uh no, you're absolutely right. But you know, seriously, uh when uh I was uh asked to write this book, uh this was a completely different Russia. And the way I was envisaging it then was precisely this interplay between um the rebels, the oppositionist, the dissidents on the one hand, and the state on the other on the other. So, in other words, I was already challenging back then this notion that uh there's this ever-heroic resistance against a bad Leviathan. I thought this is a chance to describe a situation that's far more complicated than that, um, but also to give some more agency to the state in this process in defining the rebel and to the rebel in defining the state. Uh so, in other words, the working title was uh The Dance of the Rebel in the Tsar uh early on. But then later, after uh as I was writing this, I found myself challenging a lot of my own assumptions. And one of them was precisely this notion of learned helplessness, that uh it was sometimes tempting for me as a Russian to just kind of descend into this very depressive notion that there's nothing we can do, and there's nothing to be done, and this is always a losing battle. Um, and going through the history of uh preparing for this book, researching the history uh of rebellions in Russia, and then asking myself why didn't they work? Uh, this really disavowed that me of that notion, but also raised some you know more interesting points about okay, there is this culture of resistance. It's very powerful, it's very, it's probably more robust than I would say in arguably in in uh some Western countries. Why then does it seem like uh there is no progress? And that that too, I think, is an illusion. I think there is progress. It's not just not the kind that is expected. And that is uh precisely because we're talking really about an alienation between the people and the government, uh ensuring that the government is ever afraid of its own people and the people are ever afraid of its own of their own government.

MG 8:25

Okay, a couple of things that actually come out from that. I mean, first of all, just in terms of this business about learned helplessness, I mean, after all, if one thinks of Russia's 20th century, 1905 revolution, two revolutions in 1917, and another kind of revolution from above in 1991, um, and all sorts of protests and repressions in between. And, you know, a state doesn't repress unless it feels it needs to repress. Um so again, it does absolutely speak to that. I I wanted to pick up on this point you made about progress, but not the progress that's expected. So that's the first question. Could could you elaborate on that? And the second one is again this this point about well, why does nothing seem to change? Particularly at the moment, we're in an era in which so much of certainly the more liberal Russian opposition is actually now outside the country. It's fled, it's in you know emigrated to Berlin or wherever. And within that, there is this very common trope that whether they're willing to actually frame it in these terms or not, essentially is of intellectual radical protest uh dissenters blaming the Russian people for, well, why aren't they rising up as they sip their cappuccinos in a cafe in Berlin? Why are the Russian people, you know, taking, swallowing all this propaganda and and so forth? And almost this sense that they have been let down by the people they were meant to represent. I mean, that seems, I don't know if you'd agree, but seemed to me again quite a common motif, unfortunately.

Is There Real Progress?

SPEAKER_01 10:13

Ah, I completely agree. And that was uh in fact, as as you probably know because you've read the book, it's a very uh persistent motif in rebel Russia in every era of uh revolution. There is this divide between the liberal, so-called liberal progressive and the the people that they uh then blame for their failures to achieve whatever it is they wanted to achieve. But back to, and I think this is really, you know, this this this is why I think it's very relevant to go back to this idea of why is there seemingly not any progress? And this is the word seemingly is is key here. There is progress, it's just not the kind that um in very many cases is envisaged by those same progressive revolutionaries. And this again goes back to the notion that, and we're seeing this playing out uh with regards to the uh to the emigrate, to the liberal emigration Russian opposition, is that the vision of Russia that they the kind of progress that they expect to have is very very much based on the Western European European model of progress. They have these notions of what Europe is like, of what uh America is like, especially America. And um, they think that that is normal. In other words, they're kind of projecting their own Europeanness without actually fully, but but also kind of in some ways being outsiders. They think that this is the normal path. We don't have it in Russia, therefore we must overthrow the regime and install somebody, you know, who will achieve this for us. This never works because uh the history of European democracy is one in which it's an inside it's itself is a constant struggle between the people and the state as they make compromises, as they work out uh institutions that bind them together rather than you know being in constant opposition to one another. It's it's a it's in some ways a different um trajectory, but one that has enough similarities to where uh the Western-looking liberals in Russia uh believe that this is exactly what we need here. But Russia's a different country. Every country is a different country, every country is its own country with you know a lot of its own paths. And when this doesn't work out exactly as they read in in Western books, exactly as they read in uh Marx and in Engels and in Gramsci and in okay, Gramsci, I'll I'll put that aside. Um, you know, when it when it doesn't work out like that, because this is a different environment, they become desperate, they become angry, they become uh they start to blame the people that they've already lost touch with in the first place.

MG 13:18

Yeah, at first I was wondering if you were going to sort of become a born-again Slavophile, um, talking about the sort of you know, Russia's unique route to democracy. But then again, you you did redeem yourself by saying that every country has has a unique route. But on the other hand, I'm worried about that, yeah. That that does raise this point, though, that you make in the book, which is in some ways that actually revolutions that we think of as the break glass in case of emergency, sort of final response to particularly bad regimes and bad situations, but that actually revolutions can slow progress. And in some ways, that's been Russia's problem. Not enough, it's not that this problem has been not enough revolutions, its problem has been its revolutions. What would progress um look like? How how can you improve the chances of Russia developing along this track towards something more democratic?

Western Templates And Russian Reality

SPEAKER_01 14:18

Um, you know, uh, as a uh possibly uh self-loathing Russian myself who always looks to the West for examples, um, and I say this with a lot of irony because I'm not saying that's the right thing to do, but I I've been, you know, I've been reading the history of the uh English uh civil war, and I came across something that to me was just absolutely tantalizing was that in the uh 16 the 16th and 17th century, uh as the this foment was brewing, the question was, was it uh what when when when when was part when when was when did parliament happen? And nobody really knew the answer to this question. Nobody knew did parliament give the right to the kings or did kings give the rights to the parliament, you know, and this this is part of the debate that kind of led to um the schisms that uh you know eventually uh erupted in in in in the civil war. Um but uh I think that this is precisely it, uh that revolutions are a symptom of a lack of uh democracy, but they are not a means to democracy. Um I think that uh when uh these are the methods that uh people turn to when more efficient and peaceful ways of interacting and uh working with your government have failed. Uh, and because these things in Russia fail on a cyclical basis, precisely because there is such a wide divide between various classes due to distance, geography, whatever, um the there are the the these these mechanisms, these these long-standing institutional mechanisms don't really have a chance to develop. This is precisely why there is this temptation to turn to let's just sweep everything away and start over. The trouble is when you start over, you you you're uh precisely destroying those very institutions that could serve as uh the basis of democracy.

MG 16:42

I'm minded of obviously Alexei Navalny as being a rather different kind of, I don't know, dissident, rebel, revolutionary, call him what you will, particularly because he did seem to be making very serious efforts to assemble what I was calling the coalition of the fed up. In other words, to not just to reach out beyond the metropolitan middle class sort of protest set, but to reach out to budgetniki people, you know petty civil servants who are not being paid proper salaries, and disgruntled trade unionists and all these other groups around the country. In other words, precisely trying to form those kind of ties, which maybe made him difficult. So let me ask you, just to sort of towards the end, if you can see your way to giving us a sense of how Navalny fits within this. But also putting him aside, you can't choose him. Um who would you say emerged as the hero of your book? Who is it who, when you were writing, because after all, this is a book that spans the wider historical epochs, not just looking at modern Russia, who emerged that you found yourself, perhaps unexpectedly, feeling particularly sim particular sympathy for?

SPEAKER_01 18:00

Um, well, the the first thing about Navalny is that uh, and again, I think that I was challenging a very widespread notion here when I initially undertook to write this book, and as I was writing it, because the thing about Navalny, and I've been watching him from his rise as a blogger to uh a candidate for the mayoral elections in Moscow.

MG 18:24

Yeah, you you met him and uh I've met him, I've spoken to him, yeah.

Revolutions As Setbacks

SPEAKER_01 18:28

Um, and the thing is that what struck me about Navalny and his movement was that he was not about uh revolution and deposing this regime, he was about rule of law, he was about taking the law of the Russian Federation as a lawyer into his own hands and using it to restore justice where necessary. In other words, the point wasn't who is in the Kremlin, as much as the point was we are uh a European country, we are just like everybody else, we are completely normal, we need to, you know, basically work on our self-esteem, and by doing so, take the laws back into our own hands and make them work for us. So when I spoke to uh one of his uh campaign managers back in 2018, 2017, uh, I uh I think it was, um uh he told me that uh look, the the point isn't right now so much protest as it is creating a network uh and uh implementing basically cells across the country. This is grassroots institutional growth. And I think that this is what really Navalny represented. Uh, now that he is no longer with us, there is this temptation to um lionize him as potentially this could be this could have been Russia's leader. Possibly he could have been Russia's leader, and maybe there are a lot of people who would have liked that. Um, but that's really, I think, not so much the point. The point is he introduced a way of activism, a way of doing things that uh lays laid the groundwork for true progressive change. And the thing about that kind of change is that it's very gradual. It's not necessarily newsworthy, it's gonna take generations, but it's there and it's still there now. Even in this um one of Russia's as Russia once again kind of descends into uh repression. It's still there and it will emerge again once there is a thaw, and that thaw will come from above as it usually does. But that doesn't mean that these grassroots networks, this institutional change has not already started.

MG 20:51

Well, that's that's a very optimistic take. So let's stick with that. But your hero.

Navalny’s Rule‑Of‑Law Strategy

SPEAKER_01 20:56

My hero, yes. So my hero was uh probably this is gonna sound a little uh uh weird and possibly, but no, it was the little person. Not the little person, I think this is this is the the the the big person. You know, my hero was the the people hanging out of their balconies in uh uh Astrachen when I came there with the uh the the the snow the protesters of the snow revolution who were uh protesting vote rigging by the United Russia Party. And the people hanging out of their balconies and and they were telling us, go home, we don't need you here. Now, one might think that that I'm again uh you know flirting with uh Putinism and you know exactly and repeating the the the Kremlin's uh the Kremlin's uh talking points, but the reason they're my heroes is because uh it's not that they're necessarily pro Putin. It's not that they don't care, it's that they are worried about their own lives and they just don't believe that what they're Seeing outside of their windows is actually going to change them in any meaningful way. You know, we don't know. I mean, the the the people I spoke to, and I I've I've I did a lot of uh in-depth interviews with uh just average folks who would either come out to protest the protesters or who would join the protests on you know on both sides. Um, and you know, these are not by any means your um uh passive, slavish, propaganda ridden or brainwashed people. None of that. They don't believe what they see on television, uh, but nor do they believe that the that some kind of uh you know Navalny with with with his great big smile on is gonna ride in on a white horse like Václav Havel and change their lives. These are some of the most uh cynical and I mean in a good sense skeptical and hardworking people I've ever met. And I think that gradually they are going to be uh at the forefront of change. And uh I believe that that they again they're they're far more educated than um the Russian chattering class gives them credit for. Uh they're smarter, they're savier, and they are Russia's future.

MG 23:21

And it's interesting, again, now it's my time to uh channel slavophilism. But you know, if you think how many of these revolutions which failed, it's worth noting, have precisely been inspired by an attempt to take a template from abroad. Whether it's the Decemberists who are all thinking, oh, la Belle France, that's that's where we should be going, whether it's the Bolsheviks who are trying to sort of adopt a philosophy that was devised by Germans spending much of their time in the UK and was precisely built around notions of the West European industrial proletariat, which just didn't exist in Russia, or indeed if one looks at the 1990s, when there was a revolution that was uh more than anything else economic. But again, it was taking some almost caricature of what they thought that Western and above all American capitalism looked like, and thinking, well, we just slap that onto Russia and and it'll solve all our problems. Um, in it's almost like a response and a resistance to that, that they sort of, again, if I sound awfully patronizing, but sort of salt of the earth folk of Astrakhan and all the other sort of you know cities of Russia can can find their own path.

The Unsung “Little Person” As Hero

SPEAKER_01 24:39

Um yeah, I think that uh I mean there because there has to be a resistance to this notion of exported uh revolution. Uh so of course there's you know, because in many ways they are exported, and in many ways uh they are often, it is the the the Russian government itself which imposes these Western norms on a population that doesn't really want them. Um, now again, not to veer into uh Slavophilism, because this is not, it's it I I don't think it's a binary like that. I don't think that there is this unique path of Russia versus the the decadent West or whatever. Um, I think that uh Russia simply straddles so many different cultures that it can be both European um and Eurasian and uh you know many things in between. It can be an empire and a nation, and this is, I think, one of the problems it's grappling with uh right now. None of these things necessarily have to be either bad or good. Uh, it just means working out what works in your particular circumstance. And if I, you know, if we look at these uh, you know, what you said the assault of the earth, I'm not necessarily talking about the hardcore uh you know nationalist factory workers of Ural Vagunzavod or the Valdastanov and his bikers who you know went to Crimea as volunteers to fight for, you know, fight for Putin. Um there, they they there's you know, in the wider sense, they that is that is some of that, but I'm talking mainly, you know, people who are intelligent enough to be able to hold several points of view in their minds, um, and uh who uh basically are too busy, you know, working with their lives, building their own futures, uh collectively building their own futures. And this is increasingly a thing where you know the the levels of uh distrust and the levels of you know, the one interesting statistic is that um volunteerism, uh Russia, like 20 years ago, Russia was uh uh statistically at the bottom of this, and now that that's no longer the case. Russia's Russians like to volunteer, they like to take part in their communities. These things are starting to change. And that is really where community and then grassroots institutionalism starts to starts to grow.

MG 27:16

Well, that's a wonderfully positive note to end a book which, as you'd expect from something called Rebel Russia, dissent and protests from the Tsars to Navalny, out from polity, often ends up having to talk about miserable repression and and failure. But still, there is grounds for optimism in the future. Anna, thanks very much indeed.

SPEAKER_01 27:37

Thank you. Thank you, and thank you for your wonderful questions.