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Politicheskie Kluby i Perestroika Rossii

Oppozition bez Dissidentstva

This is a sociological study of the Moscow political clubs of 1986-1987, their participants, political identity, their motives and values, and finally their historical role in perestroika and later political development in Russia. Carole Sigman has written an excellent book on the informal movement in Moscow and the way it changed over the course of perestroika and into post-Soviet Russia. Her focus is on clubs which initially emerged out of official organs in Moscow, often at the party raikom level, and she charts their development against the background of what she sees as the multiplication of arenas for political action in the late 1980s-early 1990s. The book is particularly useful in the way in which it illustrates the course of development of a social movement, and how that course of development was shaped by the institutional opportunity structure that unfolded under perestroika. The clubs began as autonomous actors within the official structures which were at the time the only legitimate arenas for political activity, but then when such arenas expanded, the nature of the social movement changed to take advantage of the new opportunities.