The German version of this book owes its existence to Katharina Raabe, the editors’ editor if ever there was one. She persuaded both its author and its original publisher, Suhrkamp, of its usefulness, kept me on track through near-weekly meetings and untiringly dispensed reassurance, advice and real-time copy-editing. At Polity Press, I thank John Thompson, Clare Ansell, Elliott Karstadt and especially George Owers for their unflinching patience with the slow pace of the translation and revisions, which contrasted unfavourably with the impressive speed with which they organized the production process. Ian Tuttle was the ideal copy-editor – eagle-eyed yet laid-back. My great regret is that Jim Clark did not live to read the English manuscript. Jim was an exceptionally sunny and unpresumptuous man who was always willing to place his expertise and experience from an outstanding fifty-year career as an editor of social science books at the service of budding authors. He died days before I completed the German text.

Nor would I have been able to produce either version of this book without the unqualified support of my colleagues at the Einstein Forum, unmatched by anything I have previously experienced at workplaces in six countries. Working with Dominic Bonfiglio, Matthias Kroß, Susan Neiman, Martin Schaad, Andreas Schulz, Goor Zankl and Rüdiger Zill is a constant source of intellectual pleasure rivalled only by the efficiency of Antonia Angold, Gabriele Karl and Liane Marz. Special thanks are due to Susan Neiman, whose long-standing encouragement and backing has been crucial to all my intellectual endeavours for a decade, and to Goor Zankl, who put in countless hours to help with PEPS.

The German edition owed a great deal to the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and the Berlin Colloquia on Contemporary History, and in particular Bettina Greiner, Bernd Greiner and Martin Bauer, who let me try out some of my ideas in various settings. Similarly, this revised edition benefitted in numerous ways from the support of the Research Centre for East European Studies at Bremen University and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which covered the costs of several workshops and meetings with Russian colleagues. I also wish to thank colleagues at universities and other institutions in Basel, Berlin, Bremen, Bucharest, Frankfurt (Oder), Hamburg, Lyon, Minden, Moscow, Paris, Potsdam, Saint Petersburg, Tübingen, Vienna and Zurich for letting me present some of my ideas at seminars, conferences or in public lectures as I was preparing the English manuscript. Special thanks are due to participants in panels and workshops on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of slogans and protest events that I organized in Berlin (2012), Boston (2013) and Moscow (2014), the latter with invaluable help from Yulia Skokova, who also commented on portions of the manuscript, as did Laurent Thévenot, whose intellectual support has been one of the great blessings of my life as a sociologist. I am also deeply grateful to three anonymous reviewers, who read the whole manuscript, for their nuanced comments and helpful criticism.

For comments and advice on various points, in person or in writing, I thank Alexandra Arkhipova, Joseph Boyle, Olga Bronnikova, Karine Clément, Donatella della Porta, Jan Matti Dollbaum, Yekaterina Khodzhayeva, Ivan Klimov, Alexey Kozlov, Björn Kunter, Alexey Levinson, Andrey Makarychev, Nikolay Mitrokhin, Zara Murtazaliyeva, Olga Nikolaeva, Asmik Novikova and Irina Soboleva. Helena Flam and Jan Plamper provided valuable suggestions on uses of the history and sociology of emotions. Ansgar Gilster and Jan Philipp Fiedler created the map of Moscow used in this book. Olga Rosenblum provided a constant stream of new material on protest events in Moscow in particular, and conducted additional interviews based on my guide. Olga Sveshnikova, at Bremen University, has been my most important collaborator in building and maintaining PEPS, and a team of assistants, above all Manarsha Isayeva, made vital contributions to data collection. Felix Hermann helped transfer the database to an online format.

An invitation by the Centre for Cultural History at South Ural State University enabled me to carry out fieldwork in Chelyabinsk. For helpful information on politics and protest in the Chelyabinsk region, I thank Anton Artemov, Rozaliya Cherepanova, Kirill Gontsov, Daniil Maltsev, Igor Sibiryakov, Natalya Zaretskaya and Konstantin Zharinov.

Engaging in the study of protest in Russia provided welcome opportunities to continue years of stimulating conversations with Alexander Bikbov. Alexander and several other members of the Independent Initiative for the Study of Protest generously exchanged interviews and observations with me. So did members of the Collective for the Study of Politicization and the Laboratory for Public Sociology (Ksenia Ermoshina, Anna Kadnikova, Maxim Kulayev, Artemy Magun, Ilya Matveev, Andrei Nevskii, Olga Nikolaeva, Natalia Savelieva, Natalia Sherstneva, Inna Silova, Maria Turovets, Dilyara Valeyeva, Svetlana Yerpyleva, Anna Zhelnina, Oleg Zhuravlev) and several members of the Folklore of the Snow Revolution research group. Andrey Semenov as well as several other members of the Centre for Comparative History and Political Studies in Perm provided a constant stream of references and ideas, as did Olessia Lobanova, in Tyumen, the main contributor to protestrussia.net.Several members of the iDecembrists also provided help at crucial stages of my work.

I also wish to thank my colleagues from ten years as editor of NZ, Laboratorium and kultura, as well as their authors, whose work contributed in countless ways to my background knowledge about Russian society.

Last but not least, I owe a debt of gratitude to the many protest participants who agreed to be interviewed for this book, either in person or by various means of electronic communication, as well as the numerous assistants who helped transcribe the interviews.

My greatest debt, however, is to my family. Jacob’s enthusiasm, encouragement and patience have been far more important than he suspects. Nestor has provided comic relief at crucial moments, but remains blissfully unaware of this book’s subject matter even though he has regularly attended protest events since before his birth. Without Dascha’s angelic disposition, I would have been crushed by the pressures of the academic life; she makes me happier than words can express.

The first edition of this book was published in May 2013. Written in German at the request of my publisher, Suhrkamp, it was the first booklength study, in any language, of the 2011–13 wave of protests in Russia. It was also the first overview that discussed political, social and artistic protest under Putin under one heading, and the first scholarly book to analyse Pussy Riot.

Since then, numerous studies of various aspects of protest in Russia have appeared in a number of languages. Reflecting a variety of disciplinary approaches, some of them have made crucial contributions to understanding the subject. To do full justice to them would have required writing a new book. However, I have done my best to refer to them in this edition, just as I had previously drawn on many of the excellent case studies carried out by colleagues in Russia and abroad. The intense and unselfish collaboration between many scholars of protest in Russia has been one of the great pleasures in writing and revising this book. My website protestrussia. net offers additional resources relevant to the scholarly study of protest in Russia, and access to some of the data from PEPS, the database of Protest Events, Photos and Slogans that was a major source for this book.

Suhrkamp asked me to make the book accessible to a general audience. To do so without sacrificing rigour, I decided to start each chapter with a narrative profile of an actor involved in (or observing from afar) the ‘March of Millions’ in Moscow on 6 May 2012, in many ways the central event of the protest wave – a device I adapted from the book by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson on the US Tea Party (2012). I have decided to retain this structure in the English edition, if only because the self-perpetuating media narrative of the protest wave as merely a revolt of a Muscovite ‘creative’ or middle class has proven impervious to the results of empirical study. Perhaps a more individualized presentation might help counter this reductionist view. Generally, the book is written with both scholars of Russia and non-specialists in mind and provides historical, cultural and political context where necessary. Theoretical and methodological discussion is largely restricted to the first chapter.

This is a thoroughly revised and updated version of the original German book; all chapters have been partly or entirely rewritten or at least updated. Two chapters – on non-violence in Russian protest and on state repression against protesters and the security apparatus – had to be omitted for reasons of space even though they had been at the heart of my interest in the topic. As a result, the book now focuses almost entirely on the logic, meanings and internal tensions of protest itself, rather than the state’s response to it or interaction between protesters and the police. This is in no way to diminish the fundamental importance of state actors for the dynamics of protest in Russia, and I hope to publish my research on these topics in English in due course. However, from a top-down perspective at least, excellent English-language studies already exist of the security apparatus (Taylor 2011) and the role of political elites in structuring protest (Robertson 2011).

All Russian quotes were translated directly from the original sources.

The transliteration largely follows the BGN/PCGN standard. Outside of references to sources, spellings are sometimes simplified for readability (Navalny instead of Naval’nyy). I use people’s preferred Latin spellings of their names whenever I am aware of such preferences.