Extreme Soviet
I have not done any kind of ethnographic work with the Citizens, and cannot claim to have unmediated access to their story; instead, careful attention to the ways that the Citizens have been positioned in the media and framed by experts can tell a story of its own. As fascinating as the Citizens of the USSR are on their own terms, the reactions to them have been at least as significant.
While it is easy to follow the lead of blogger Ilya Varlamov and dismiss the majority of the Citizens as "freaks who are nostalgic for the Soviet Union ("просто фрики, ностальгирующие по Совку") (“‘Граждане СССР’ остались без президента и без страны."), their presentation in the media tends to grab the audience's attention with some of their more bizarre beliefs or activities before eventually sounding the alarm about the danger the Citizens allegedly pose. [1] The only thing that stops the media coverage of the Citizens from turning into a full-fledged moral panic is how limited that coverage has been so far.
There does seem to be a concerted effort to turn the Citizens into the kind of threat that must be confronted by the power of the state that the movement itself rejects. Since Putin's return to the presidency in 2012, the state and the media have marshaled their considerable might for the purpose of suppressing what liberal politicians have long called "civil society": the non-governmental organizations and formations that have long been the mainstays of liberal democracies. In the 1990s, when the experience of the Soviet Union and a tendency to look toward the West made the proliferation of independent institutions generally appear to be a good thing, such organizations experienced rapid growth. For example, George Soros, now uniformly depicted in the Russian media as the country's enemy, funded a variety of organizations in support of education reform, international exchange, and the growth of democratic institutions. The current state approach to independent organizations seems predicated on defining them as competitive threats to the country's sovereignty. Volunteerism is generally viewed as suspicious, unless it is associated with state or church structures.
In 2008, President Dmitry Medvedev signed an order creating the Center for Combating Extremism (commonly known as the "Center E"), officially mandated to fight extremism and terrorism. But Center E agents are reliable attendees of all manner of political rallies, and have been at the forefront of a battle that the Russian State began in the late 1990s: the fight against so-called "sects" (i.e., "cults"), often categorized as "totalitarian" or "destructive." The 1997 Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations defined Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, and "Christianity" (i.e., Russian Orthodoxy) as "traditional religions" in Russia, and established a registration regime for all other religious groups effective December 31, 1999. This law, in combination with subsequent legislation aimed at NGOs and "extremism," has facilitated the criminalization and demonization of a wide range of religious organizations, most notably the Jehovah's Witnesses.
The Citizens of the USSR would find themselves demonized as both a secular extremist movement and a dangerous cult. In a political situation where the boundaries between Church and State are being brazenly ignored, the Citizens are a perfect folk devil.