SUMMARY:

What ideas and practices do ordinary Russians draw upon to mobilize public opinion in the struggle against the corrupt “system” (sistema) of police officials? In this article, I consider a case of social contention in Novosibirsk in 2013–14, which followed the death of a young woman in an accident involving a traffic police officer. The dynamics of contention I attend to suggest that Russia today has the social conditions for politically efficacious publics. In my analysis, I identify several strategies of “public-making” that take these conditions into account, to conjure a collective subject and “call out” to the constituencies that could give this subject legitimacy. The communicative styles I attend to are embedded in local histories of activism, and resonate with what we know about protest dynamics in Russia today. Drawing on literature that has urged thinking outside normative paradigms of the public sphere, I consider these “technologies of persuasion” as indicative of neither “liberal” nor “illiberal” regimes of textual circulation. Instead, I suggest, that as in the liberal models of stranger sociability, public-making in Novosibirsk presupposed a moral common sense, joint attention to a space of common discourse, and openness to potential strangers. However, it also required a different kind of political work. In addition to addressing potential strangers, activists had to persuade the potentially immoral “them” to set aside particular social interests, and recognize their shared footing with “us” with respect to self-evident actualities.