Street Activism (written 10 September 2007)

On Saturday, September 8, the third of three large demonstrations this year took place in St. Petersburg, Russia. A locally produced online newspaper put the number of demonstrators at 1500; the few Western media outlets who gave the demonstration brief coverage had numbers that ranged from 2000 to 4000. The organizers had expected more than 5000 people. As has happened before, Russian observers of the demonstration have concluded that smaller-than-expected numbers mean that the causes represented by the demonstrators have little resonance with the public at large.

The most prominent of the “causes” is opposition to the proposed skyscraper that would be headquarters for the Gazprom corporation. The skyscraper was announced in summer 2006 and Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller awarded design rights to a British firm in early December 2006; the struggle between proponents and opponents has continued since then. Opponents have appealed to native Petersburgers’ love of their historical city center and horizontal skyline. After all, this is the city where the first large demonstration against Soviet policy took place in the late 1980s over a proposal to demolish a building where a beloved nineteenth-century poet once lived (just a friend of the more famous Pushkin); this was a key moment in the glasnost movement in St. Petersburg. Those who want to use the Gazprom issue to whip up local sentiment can’t be blamed for thinking they could recapture some of that spirit. Prominent city architects, art historians, local politicians, and even the renowned film director Alexander Sokurov have spoken out against the skyscraper. Those who favor the project say that they want to see Petersburg become a modern, vibrant city; those who oppose it fear that the city will lose its UNESCO status as a World Heritage Site in particular, and in general, lose its soul. But Gazprom isn’t even the main issue.

The Gazprom skyscraper indeed raises some serious questions about how things are happening in the city. We don’t hear much about the transportation problems that the skyscraper would create, in a city where underground parking is often prohibitively expensive or inadvisable due to underground rivers and marshy ground. Depending on your taste, it is just the wrong building to help Petersburg take a big step into the 21st century. But even Russian politicians who think they can unite democratic opposition behind the opposition to Gazprom are missing the real story of grassroots civil society development.

First, there’s transportation. The city wants the building to make St. Petersburg more vibrant and modern, but it hasn’t succeeded in building its ringroad highway around the entire city; the “ring” only serves the eastern side, and suffers from chronic traffic jams caused largely by inefficient insurance regulations. Even more importantly, Gazprom has become a convenient rallying point for city residents of all ages who are frustrated with nontransparent construction practices that have destroyed neighborhood parks and in some areas tried to make residents responsible for the bill to demolish their own buildings so that new, more expensive housing can be built in their place.

The Gazprom issue has been such a tempting one for would-be political organizers in St. Petersburg because it represents so many neighborhood-level problems writ large. The very same challenges with inadequate infrastructure or nontransparent resettlements and transactions have brought together residents in many different districts of the city – usually into small, isolated bands of people who are upset enough to spend their time studying city code, writing letters, speaking to reporters, and attempting to get their story out. When they can, they try to attend each other’s demonstrations (which usually must remain small, due to recent requirements that any public demonstration that does not first obtain a permit must not exceed five people). Sometimes, when I interviewed activists from different districts in fall 2006, I was the first person to pass along phone numbers and put them in contact with each other.

It is tricky right now to evaluate phenomena of Russian “civil society.” Those who participate do not look like successful American protesters or political activists, and so perhaps prominent American commentators are reluctant to throw their lot in with them. The demonstrators who make it into photographs tend to be senior citizens – this allows both Russian and Western observers to conclude that the demonstrations are just the last gasp of a generation that was used to the paternalism of the Soviet regime, and just can’t handle capitalism.

In fact there are many young people involved, and middle-aged people as well – if you measure the validity of a civil society movement by age, then activism in St. Petersburg qualifies. It is also quite hard-working, creative, and pragmatic in many cases. The Gazprom issue is a sexy stand-in for more prosaic challenges faced by residents of the city in numerous neighborhoods – the most notable being what they call “in-fill,” or construction that attempts to take advantage of existing (and overstressed) service infrastructure in spite of city regulations to the contrary. Residents of many neighborhoods have lost their parks, or part of a park, or the green space that they came to use as a park, or a multi-story building is projected in a place where it would block any sunlight from falling on a school (which is measured by city regulations).