Environmental Protests in Russia: Agenda, Symbolic Representation and Functional Constraints (2010-2019)

This work is devoted to the study of the actualization of environmental protest in Russia. The specific features of symbolic representation which exist in the protest agenda are considered as key mechanisms of influencing the two main aspects of protest actualization: mass character and publicity. There is a visible contradiction in the field of environmental protests in Russia: there is a lack of consolidated national protest potential on environmental issues but local environmental protests are able to successfully actualize and expand their significance beyond the local agenda. This paper examines the impact of protest symbols on public consciousness and provides a qualitative analysis of 4 heterogeneous protest cases to juxtapose the typology of the dominant symbols with the most prominent aspect of actualization for each case. As data sources we use news reports (approximately 450 units) about protest actions collected with the news aggregator "Yandex Novosti", the method used is qualitative content analysis. The main assumption of the work is that one type of symbols can contribute more to the growth of the mass character of protest and another to the growth of the publicity of the protest. Moreover, different types of symbols can influence the diversity of the repertoire of the protest action differently.