Protest Slogans of the Snow Revolution in Russia (2011–2012) as an Expression of Peaceful Resistance against the Authorities

Abstract

The expression of resistance against the authorities during the street protests of the so-called snow revolution in the years 2011-2012 reached a level of mass creativity and visuality previously and since unrecorded in Russian social life and, despite its lack of success, it is worth attention due to its openness and intensity. During the snow revolution a certain corpus of texts (slogans) was shaped, with repeatability typical for folklore – it was a recurrence of themes, motifs, characters, linguistic tricks, images, textual models. The aim of analyzing selected protest slogans is to showcase contexts that constitute the source of oppositional expression on the textual (slogan on a poster), visual (image on a poster) and object (artifacts) level. The examples of the protest creativity presented in the article prove that verbal, visual and material ways of resistance realized functions typical for political folklore, such as integrating the rebels, mocking the stronger enemy as a defense strategy, unmasking the crimes of the government, and expressing the expectations of the protesters.

Keywords

• political folklore
• Russia
• Putin
• social resistance
• street performance
• poster