Anna Colin Lebedev
Rethinking the place of personal concerns in the analysis of collective action: the case of the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia.
Introduction
One of the ideas frequently used in the analysis of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian society is the importance of interpersonal connections and networks in social regulation. Personal relationships are seen as an alternative to State or market-based official institutions. In the economic sphere, the importance of the economy of favours is emphasized (Ledeneva 1998). In the political sphere, personal relations and informal group belonging are seen as a key resource in attaining positions of power (Kryštanovskaâ 2005). As for collective action, analysts underline its weakness and point out that escape and alternative solutions are preferred to mobilization and collective protest. The lack of social frames for the protest, the vagueness of discontent, the lack of clear differentiation of interests, and the local and limited character of the protest are seen as specificities of collective action in Russia (Levada 2000).
The emphasis on the informal and interpersonal in contemporary Russian society is based on an implicit opposition between a ‘western’, ‘ordinary’, ‘classical’, and a ‘specific’, ‘Russian’ way of living in common in a society. The case of Russia challenges social science elaborated in Western societies, as it questions the universality of its concepts. This paper will try to avoid both to declare the specificity of the Russian case, and to adapt major mobilization and protest concepts to a form of action that does not perfectly fit.
The case studied here is the Committee of Soldiers Mothers of Russia[1], more precisely the way people address this organization to ask for help, and consequently the transformation of their worries into formal complaints and collective demands. The CSM is a well-known organisation, one of the oldest social movements in post-Soviet countries, which was created at the end of the 1990’s and continues in 2009. In some ways, the Committee is seen as an exception among other forms of social activism in Russia because of its grassroots nature, its institutionalisation and its reference to human rights in the Russian context where grassroots movements are rare and short-term, and the reference to human rights is not very widespread. This chapter will try to overcome the debate on the sameness or the particularity of this Russian social movement by presenting a generally valid model of collective action illustrated by the CSM’s case. The argument is based on extensive qualitative research conducted within the Moscow office of movement, between 2003 and 2006 (Colin Lebedev 2009). It combines an analysis of written requests sent to the organization[2], and a long-term observation of the activities of the association.
First, the chapter will present a critical overview of the research focusing on the Committee’s case. We will see that the conceptual tools chosen by the researchers and inspired by the Western realities constrain our understanding of the association’s action. Some important dimensions of collective action have been neglected or misunderstood because of the attempt to fit the association’s case into a classical analysis of social movement.
Then, the paper will suggest an alternative approach to this case inspired by the conceptual tools of the French Pragmatic sociological school. The point is to show how personal concerns can be used as a basis for the construction of a community that is not validated solely by reference to civic principles. The most personal and the most public cognitive schemes are here combined to form a common action. The pragmatic approach, respectful of the intentions and priorities of social actors, helps to propose another way to integrate Russian social realities into a generally valid analysis of protest and collective action.
Soldier’s mothers: a short presentation
The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia was created in 1989 in Moscow by a group of mothers whose sons were conscripts in Russian army. Conscription is compulsory in Post-Soviet Russia, as it was in Soviet Union for all men between 18 and 27. In most cases it lasted two years. The end of the 1980’s was characterised in Russia by growing openness in the society, and a possibility to criticize the political power and to protest. Violence perpetrated on conscripts and bad conditions of military service were revealed by the media these years, and alerted mothers who decided to create an organisation dedicated to the soldiers’ defence.
Mothers based their claims both on reference to human rights and on the affirmation of the right and a duty for a mother to protect her child. At the beginning of the 1990’s, these demands were heard by the political power. For example, in 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the USSR, incorporated explicitly the Committee’s demand in a decree.[3].
Nevertheless, reforms continued slowly. Other problems appeared and were revealed by the mothers who came to the Committee’s meetings: the conscription of young boys who were manifestly ill and unfit for service; the use of unprepared soldiers in armed conflicts within or outside Russia; desertions due to physical and psychological violence perpetrated on conscripts. The organisation continued to develop and branched out in two directions: assistance to individual soldiers encountering problems, and lobbying for reforms of the Russian army.
The Committee became famous during the first war in Chechnya, in 1994-1996, especially when mothers whose sons were soldiers in this conflict decided to go on their own straight into the war zone in order to retrieve their sons from the Russian army or to release them from captivity. The success of a large number of these initiatives and the support of these anonymous mothers by the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee made the organization very well-known in Russia and abroad. Since the middle of the 1990’s numerous local Committees have been created by mothers all around Russia. As the organization has gained visibility abroad, it has benefited from grants and awards from international institutions for its activity in the defence of human rights.
Nevertheless, as the situation of the conscripts in the Army remained problematic, the Committee continued to develop its activities. Since 1993 the Moscow CSM benefited from a small permanent office, where visitors could present their requests in person or send a letter. In responding to the families’ requests the Committee’s volunteers have chosen to use the specific means offered by legislation of the Russian Federation. For example, a conscript who wants to avoid military service will be advised to look for some aspect of his situation that allows a deferral or an exemption, such as his state of health or his family situation. In order to facilitate communication with military institutions concerning these cases, the Committee cooperates with some military officials, such as the Military Prosecutors [Prokurory]. This cooperation, conducted both with upper-level (Ministry of Defence officials) and with ordinary officers, does not prevent the Committee from publicly criticizing the situation in the Russian army. Opposition to the Army is often expressed in public interviews and also presented to the visitors as a principle of action.
The visible professionalisation of the movement and the persistent reference to human rights in its public discourse contrast, for an external observer, with the motherly dimension of the organization. The reference to motherhood in the Committee’s name is manifest in its everyday functioning because visitors as well as volunteers are mostly mothers of soldiers or former soldiers. The Committee volunteers address visitors as mothers, emphasizing their motherly feelings, capacities and duties. While the references to motherhood are frequent in the questions asked by journalists, they are scarce in the volunteers’ answers and in the Committee’s public discourse. This combination of motherhood and human rights in the Committee’s activities made this movement an attractive object of investigation.
Between human rights and maternal care: the Soldiers’ Mothers case as a challenge for the collective action theories
Since the middle of the 1990’s, about a dozen of researchers have studied the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers’ activities[4]. Two doctoral dissertations and a great number of articles are dedicated to the movement. This interest can be explained by the great visibility of the Committee since the war in Chechnya and by the lack of active social movements on Russian public scene during the same period. The Committee is mostly analysed from three conceptual standpoints: the research on civil society in Russia, the viewpoint of gender studies and the frame theory approach.
The civil society concept
From the first point of view, the Committee is seen as an example of an emerging civil society in post-Soviet Russia. Civil society, defined as a sphere of organized social activity independent from the State, is one of the key concepts used to describe the social evolution of this country after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Soviet ideology was based on a fusion of State and society: the former expressing, organizing and controlling the latter (Colas 2002: 31). By the middle of the 1980’s when the State control became weaker, autonomous social movements appeared (Berelowitch and Wieviorka, 1996). At the beginning of the 1990’s when the Soviet regime collapsed, these movements were seen as the main actors of social and political change and as the only institutions able to oppose the return of the monopolistic control by the State of the society and to guarantee the democratisation of society. Great attention was then paid by social science to the new-born social movements, seen as the basis of an emerging civil society in Russia. But by the middle of the 1990’s, social organizations remained weak in influence and few in number. The academic debate moved then from the affirmation of the development of civil society to seeking the reasons why it did not proceed more quickly. In this debate, the Committees of soldiers’ mothers was used most often by researchers as a counterexample against the argument that no change was occurring. Ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Committee continued to play the same role in the academic debate, although other movements that might have been expected never materialized. Looking back at this period, Zdravomyslova observed in 1999 that the Soldier’s Mothers history signified the emergence of civil society (Zdravomyslova 1999a: 180). In 2000, Vallance expressed a similar point of view, noting that Soldiers’ Mothers ‘are helping society define what it expects from government institutions, what changes must occur in these institutions to transform them to responsive and accountable institutions fitting a democratic society, and how the leaders of such institutions should address their roles in society. Civic associations such as the Soldiers' Mothers are playing a significant part in all these areas, serving both as a means to practice democracy and as a counterweight to the state.’(Vallance 2000) As late as in 2005, Zawilski writes that ‘the CSM is one of the few grassroots Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) in Moscow, and it is part of a nascent Russian Civil Society’(Zawilski 2006:229) -- which would mean that the civil society would have been ‘nascent’ for almost 15 years. More generally, the drawback of the civil society concept is not only that it is to static to follow the evolution of post-Soviet societies, but that it fails to describe the complexity of collective action. The analysis from the viewpoint of civil society emphasizes only the first dimension of the organization’s action, i.e. the defence of human rights. The second dimension, which is the reference to gender and motherhood, is most often analysed from a different theoretical standpoint, that of gender studies.
The gender studies approach
From this point of view, the Committee is also a paradoxical organization: feminine but not feminist, because its objective is not the defence of women’s rights, but the defence of their sons’ rights. The Committees, Sperling writes, ‘are devoted not so much to altering women’s status at the societal level as to supporting families and children’ (Sperling 1999: 27) The woman is not the object, but the subject of the Committee’s action. At the same time, the researchers notice that the Committee’s activists use in their public discourse a conception of mother- and womanhood defined as essentialist by Zdravomyslova: ‘Motherhood framed as biologically founded destination of women, prescribes the main responsibility for the Life per Se to women.’(Zdravomyslova 1999a)
While most analysts note the double reference of the Committee’s action, human rights and motherhood, understanding the combination of the two is a challenge for the researchers. The two dimensions are indeed quite contradictory examined from a classical point of view on social movements. On the one hand, the reference to human rights fits into a definition of a social movement composed of autonomous individuals and part of the civil society. On the other hand, an essentialist conception of motherhood, wherein a woman is supposed to enter into action because of a biological link to her son, seems to refer to pre-modern societies where personal autonomy does not exist.
Some researchers tried to overcome this contradiction in their analysis. Caiazza argues that in post-Soviet Russia, as it was in USSR, citizenship is still gendered (Caiazza 2002). The civic obligations and possibilities of action are different for men and women. While the main civic duty of women is to give birth and bring up new citizens, the civic contribution of men is military service. In this context, an essentialist vision of motherhood becomes a political resource for a group of people, expressed by the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers. Nevertheless, Caiazza’s thought-provoking analysis is based on a strategic vision of collective action whereby an interest is automatically expressed in public action whenever social conditions are favourable. The theory of protest cycles (Tarrow: 1989) is then used to explain the variations of intensity of protest in Russia. Caiazza’s analysis is in some aspects insufficient to explain the emergence of collective action. In her work the motherhood formulated by the Committee is immediately presented as a general principle suitable for collective action. This focus is understandable when one knows that Caiazza’s analysis is mainly based on interviews with the organization’s leaders who are able to express general principles of action. Nevertheless, the fieldwork in the present paper seems to contradict Caiazza’s strategic and automatic conception of citizenship directly expressed into collective action. The concerns expressed by mothers are mostly personal and concentrated on their own situation. The question of the transformation of a personal feeling into general principles and common action on public scene still remains to be explained.