Youth Politics in Putin's Russia by Julie Hemment

Author:Julie Hemment
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2015-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

Portrait of a Participant II: Alisa, the Accidental Activist

Alisa was a fourth-year sociology student I met in the spring of 2010. She had joined the research team in the fall of 2009. Indeed, she emerged as a key player who helped us recruit and run one of the focus groups and organized interviews with activists when I came. Alisa had attended Seliger 2009, and like Igor, she was planning to attend Seliger 2010 in an organizer’s capacity – to lead the Tver’ international session. However, she was very much an accidental activist.

Alisa had no prior involvement in state-run projects; she had never attended any Nashi events, nor had she been involved in any of the preparatory events of the spring. She explained that she had attended Seliger 2009 purely by chance. Her girlfriend called and asked, “What are you doing on such-and-such a date?” and she decided to go on a whim. Despite the strict requirements listed on the site, she had no problem being accepted and went without a project. In the end, Alisa attended two sessions of Seliger: “Tolerance” and “Technologies of Kindness.” She had gone to the first with her girlfriend, but decided to stay on when she became romantically involved with one of the instructors at the Tolerance session.

Unlike Igor, Alisa returned to the university from Seliger not disgusted by the contrast it presented, but newly energized to continue with her studies. Alisa told me that Seliger had a huge influence on her life, had really turned it around. She hadn’t been a particularly good student before she went, she told me, but now she was getting top marks. It was neither the technologies nor the vertical connections that captivated her and effected this transformation – sure, she appreciated what she had learned about project design, she told me, but this same technology was repeated in the other sessions and she wasn’t all that interested in voluntarism in any case. Rather, it was the “horizontal” connections that mattered to her, the peers she had met. Beyond her romantic connection, she had encountered impressively goal-oriented smart people there; they had inspired her and their enthusiasm was contagious. She was applying herself to her studies now, she told me. Indeed, in another moment of curious congruence between our research and the state-run youth project, it was in the glow of this post-Seliger inspiration that she first made contact with Valentina and joined our team.

Alisa observed, “I think that Seliger really gives a lot of people, including those who came by chance [sluchaino], a boost of energy. That is, people understand that they have support, that they have like-minded people, that they can do something. But then they go home, see the same walls, and everything goes back to normal. That’s why I think that it’s important to have some kind of system of support for it. In order that it doesn’t die out, but keeps going. I was really lucky to meet my boyfriend, someone who was really active.

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