Massive protests have erupted after Russia’s December 4 elections, in which Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev’s United Russia party received a reported 49 percent of the popular vote and 77 seats in the Duma, the lower house of the Russian legislature. Following cries of election fraud and violations of electoral law, and in reaction to Putin’s announcement that he will return to the presidency in March 2012 for what could be another 12 years, thousands of Russians have hit the streets, demonstrating in public squares against the president’s increasing domination of Russian politics.
The country's artists have reacted to the growing unrest as well. Just as posters, photojournalism, and performances have given a face to the Occupy protests in the United States, Russia’s creative community has defined the election protests with a series of powerful images and media projects.
Much of the protest’s agitprop takes Putin directly to task for his transgressions on Russian democracy, appropriating the leader’s image into a series of mocking political satires and Photoshop cartoons. One of the most visible (and timely) mashups saw an anonymous artist putting Putin’s face (from his 2007 Time "man of the year" cover, no less) on Muammar Gaddafi’s body, drawing a direct line from the recently killed Libyan dictator to the Russian president.
One protest poster takes from classic Soviet graphic design, showing a stiff-lipped Putin with the words “They stole our vote!” emblazoned down his forehead, the exclamation point over his lips like a silencing finger. Another visual protest meme is a poster that plays on the extension of Putin’s reign, showing an artificially aged portrait of the president with “2050” in the bottom right-hand corner (if 2024, why not longer?). “NET!” reads the poster’s top — “No!” in Russian.
Russian artists, known for their absurdist political disruption tactics, are also participating in the protests, albeit in a quieter, subtler way than painting a penis on a St. Petersburg bridge. Art collective Chto Delat (Russian for “what is to be done”) is gathering coverage of the protests on their Web site, chtodelat news, part of an activist media platform that the collective maintains. They practice aggregation as protest, publishing news clips, videos, and photos that have been ignored by Russian press at the behest of the government. Anarchist art collective Voina has also been using their blog to agitate for the protests, recently publishing a post about human rights activist and election protest participant Philip Kostenko, who is being held illegally beyond the 15-day period of administrative arrest.
There is a particular media aesthetic to the protests, as well. The photo documentation of the election rallies is dominated by shots of road-cramming crowds, exploding flares, and the yellow-and-white traditional flags of Russian nationalists who have supported the rallies. Some of these images have been created by the crowds themselves — a Russian Web site called Abyss has published aerial photos of the protests taken from a homemade helicopter-mounted camera, which, they note, was shot at several times by police.
Protest art rock has even gone viral with Russian punk band Rabfak’s anthem “Our Madhouse is Voting for Putin,” a driving rock song with a video that sees average Russians flailing around with the beat in a collection of bizarre clips, a cigarette-smoking grandma swinging along to the lyrics, and a riot police dance-off. On the The words to the song say that the band would be happy to have Putin — he would fit right in to the “madhouse.”
For a more cynical take on the Russian political scene (and the state of humanity as a whole), Russians are looking to a series of YouTube cartoon videos under the title of “Mr. Freeman.” The sketchy, black-and-white animation is an adult, anarchist version of late-'90s cartoon "Invader Zim," with a single humanoid figure (Mr. Freeman himself?) acting out a satire of oppressive politics and dictatorship, ruminating over how the public has given up their basic freedoms willingly. “Freedom today is the ability to change thousands of channels, freely download porn, and just do anything without consequences. That’s it. And the herd has complied with this,” the figure says, grinning. The Russian-only “Mr. Freeman, part 1,” uploaded on October 11 of this year, already has over 1.4 million views.
While citizens still protest in the streets, the fight for freedom in Russia is also being carried out online and in print, with a clash between images and visual symbolism. On one side, the profusion of satirical art, posters, and videos created by those fighting to keep their voices heard, while on the other, as of yet, only riot police and silence.
To see a selection of Russian protest art, click here or on view slideshow.