Conference session

This presentation will attempt to shed light on the contest between democracy and autocracy in the 21st-century, through an examination of that contestation in the early 20th-century Russian empire. Attacks on democratic norms have become more explicit in Trump’s second term - intersecting with a racially-charged anti-immigrant campaign led by a well-financed Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), which has emerged as the front-line of a state-directed challenge to both immigrants and the rule of law. In Trump’s first term, there was considerable discussion about democracy’s “guardrails” with a focus on the institutions of the state. But arguably more significant have been the social movement guardrails emerging from civil society - that liminal space between the individual citizen and the state. In 2020, we witnessed the massive protests against the killing of George Floyd; in Trump’s second term, the “No Kings” demonstrations and “Whistle Against ICE”. In the Russian Empire, the story of social movements as guardrails protecting democracy has been largely ignored. The history books have been dominated by a “communist-capitalist” binary. But between the Tsarist autocracy, which fell in February-March 1917, and the communist autocracy, which was consolidated in 1922, there was in fact a flowering of civil-society-based social movements. This presentation will bring those social movements into focus and argue that, if we properly understand the dynamics of that era, we will have to substantially revise our understanding of that moment in history and rethink how we understand the defence of democracy in the 21st-century.