Abstract
In this chapter, I examine one local protest against the construction of a church in a Moscow park and reflect on the political meanings of the visions of a good city and being an ethical subject in that context. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with protesters, their opponents and other actors on a local and city scale, and long- term ethnographic participant observation (2015–2017). In the context of the wide- ranging literature on urban social movements, there are powerful frameworks to contextualize such protests and their political potentials toward a more just city. The wave of local protests in Moscow is directed against an authoritarian government and a conservative, religious social backlash, and it exhibits many of the features of protests that are usually theorized in rather optimistic and emphatic terms of the “right to the city” or “urban commons” or, on the other hand, through a critique of NIMBY activism. However, I argue that they and their role in social and political processes cannot satisfactorily be described in these terms and typologies. Instead, these protests and the emergence of
mestnyj zhitel’ [local residents] and prostoj mestnyj žitel’ [ordinary local resident] as speaker positions and cultural- political figures should primarily be understood in the context of a contradictory conjuncture5 in the present historical moment, particularly in Russia, rather than exemplifying an overarching political force.
Reznikova, Olga