“Monstrations for Mocracy”: Framing Absurdity and Irony in Russia’s Youth Mobilization
Journal: Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University)
Year: 2017

The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only.-Thomas HobbesOn the freezing Eurasian taiga in Novosibirsk, students and youth activists have, since 2004, held their annual (monstratsiia) march on May 1.1 Echoing the academic spring festivities of the Novosibirsk Akademgorodok in the 1960s, and also the late Soviet practices of stiob,2 these parades were at first designed as an ironic punning on the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian May 1 parades. The first one dre