contributors

Articles by Oksana Shmulyar Gréen & Andrea Spehar

1. Introduction. To be or not to be? Russian civil society under repression

   This special issue contributes to the ongoing analysis of the transformations Russian society has undergone since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Tthe contributions examine acts of resistance within professional communities, as well as specific identity-based and issue-based forms of activism, including decolonial, feminist, climate, and environmental initiatives. The issue seeks to offer a bird’s introduction eye perspective on the transformation of activist initiatives over the past four years.

2. TRANSFORMATION OF CIVIC ENGAGEMENT IN RUSSIA AFTER 2022

   This article examines the transformation of civic engagement in Russia after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Drawing on more than a hundred interviews with civic and political activists across several Russian regions, the article traces how anti-war and oppositional initiatives transformed under conditions of escalating repression. Using a micro-sociological approach, the article foregrounds emotions and strategic dilemmas as key (dis)enables of civic engagement alongside with the political opportunity structures. It argues that Russian civil society has not collapsed, but has moved through several stages of the initial moral shock and immediate mobilization, towards fragmentation and cautious re-mobilization. By 2026 civic engagement persists primarily through informal and low-visibility forms, using strategic depolitization as a tactic to survive.

3. Lessons of unfreedom: “People live in a kind of limbo, where rules are both rigid and arbitrary”

   This is an interview with an anonymous Russian researcher recorded in the winter of 2023, in response to events taking place in the Russian Federation. In this interview the role of dissidents and the civil society in exile is discussed. Life under the current regime is compared with life during the Soviet-period: there are similiarities and differences in the repressive apparatus and the methods and strategies for resistance.

4. Is civil society in Russia really dead? Changing landscape of Russian civic activism amidst the war with Ukraine

   abstract This article examines the transformation of Russian civil society since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in […]

5. MEDIA REALISM Conceptual insights from research on digital feminisms in and beyond Russia

   This article introduces the concept of media realism to theorize the political sensibility that emerges from feminists’ engagement with digital media in contemporary Russia and beyond. Drawing on empirical data and insights from the FEMCORUS research project, the article explores how activists and media professionals navigate the contradictory affordances of digital media ecosystems that simultaneously enable oppositional political expression and practices and impose significant structural constraints. In this context, media realism refers to the experience of digital media as flawed, yet without alternatives. Thus, the concept captures the affective and ethical (dis)orientation of activists who recognize the problematic underpinnings of existing ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) architectures yet continue to rely on them for visibility, mobilization, and resistance. Through empirical case studies, the article demonstrates how feminist actors adapt their tactical repertoires and renegotiate their ethics due to a media environment shaped by both authoritarian repression and neoliberal media logic. Ultimately, media realism offers a grounded, non-reductionist framework for understanding the ambivalences of digital activism under constraints and invites further inquiry into how political subjectivities are shaped by the ICTs infrastructures they inhabit.

6. Anti-war movements from Russia’s national republics Intersections of gender, sexuality, and decoloniality

   Since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, various ethnic protest and anti-war movements from Russia’s national republics have called for decolonization. While the focus of these initiatives lies in regional politics and ethnic and Indigenous rights, the movements also address women’s and LGBTQ rights. Based on content analysis of seven ethnic anti-war initiatives, this article examines the themes and frameworks through which questions related to gender and sexuality are addressed within the activist agendas of these initiatives. The analysis shows that while these questions play only a minor role in the ethnic anti-war activism, they are used to articulate systemic oppression and the harmful impact of Russian state policies on people in the national republics. Taken together, the ways in which gender and sexuality are discussed bring out the activists’ search for a discursive position between Russian and Western political and discursive regimes.

7. “We comply but do not obey” Everyday resistance in contemporary Russian schools

   Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, education has become a central arena in Russia for the consolidation of an authoritarian state project. This article examines how history and social studies teachers navigate the intensified ideological control in everyday school practice. Drawing on ten in-depth interviews conducted in late 2024, the study analyses subtle, non-heroic forms of resistance, conceptualized through James C. Scott’s notion of the “weapons of the weak”. The guiding research question is: What forms does resistance take when open confrontation becomes too costly, and how should such practices be interpreted politically? The authors identify two principal scenarios of resistance: a collective one, which they term the “besieged fortress,” and an individual one – “a stranger among one’s own”; suggesting an ambivalent character of quiet resistance in authoritarian contexts — simultaneously protective, adaptive, and potentially erosive of the regime’s normative authority.

8. PROFESSIONAL as POLITICAL Physicians – challengers of the Russian health care system

   This paper aims to analyze how health professionals in Russia perceive their profession as a political issue and how the war has shaped this perception. The study focuses on healthcare providers whose narratives express explicit dissatisfaction with the Russian healthcare system, sustained criticism of it, and efforts to bring about change. Drawing on the strategic action field approach, we define these actors as challengers – that is, professionals who seek to alter the organizational field of healthcare and broader societal power relations. Medical professionals are generally considered as a politically neutral group and typically do not identify them selves as challengers of the social system. However, we reveal that at critical moments of war and migration, they explicitly connect their professional positions with issues of political power and political engagement. The paper draws on in-depth interviews with healthcare providers who left Russia shortly after February 2022. The analysis suggests that in the context of an authoritarian state, healthcare professionals challenge not only the organizational field but also the political order itself, thereby relinquishing claims to political neutrality in pursuit of systemic change.

9. FROM ADAPTATION TO RESISTANCE Divergence of environmental activism in wartime Russia

   This article analyses how environmental activism in Russia has been reshaped under wartime authoritarianism following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Drawing on 34 semi-structured interviews with representatives of environmental organizations and initiatives conducted between 2022 and 2025, it examines how repression, co-optation, and nationalist politicization have transformed the field of environmental engagement. The article argues that the Russian state has reorganized the environmental field through the expansion of government-organized non-governmental organizations (GONGOs) and the promotion of sovereignty-centered narratives such as sovereign ecology” and green patriotism. While repression remains the main driver of depoliticization, GONGOs redefine the boundaries of legitimate environmental engagement by embedding ecological discourse within narratives of national sovereignty. Independent NGOs and grassroots initiatives have responded differently. These dynamics reveal how wartime authoritarianism restructures environmental activism.

10. WAR’S EFFECT Contentious climate activism in Russia before and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine

    Based on a holistic case study of a climate movement in Russia that emerged several years before and dissolved shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this article explores the war’s impact on civil society activism. Drawing on in-depth interviews with key participants conducted both before and after the war, the study identifies three typical activist career paths which shape engagement with and disengagement from the movement. The analysis of these career paths shows that the war did not introduce entirely new conditions but rather intensified problems the movement had already been struggling with. Moreover, it further raised the risks of protest participation and shifted activists’ attention from climate change to more urgent wartime concerns. The article contributes to understanding the Russo- Ukrainian war’s effect on Russian civil society. It also contributes to the literature on disengagement and demobilization in social movements by promoting a career approach and addressing the broader question of how a large-scale political event can lead to the demobilization of a social movement.

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