BOOK SYMPOSIUM Reflections from a Political Scientist Richard Arnold* Muskingum University, New Concord, Ohio, USA *Corresponding author. Email: rarnold@muskingum.edu Protest in Putin’s Russia, by Mischa Gabowitsch, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2017, $72.95 (hardcover), ISBN 9780745696256, $26.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780745696263 In Protest in Putin’s Russia, Mischa Gabowitsch has written an authoritative and erudite book that will stand the test of time as one of the best commentaries on the protest wave which shook Russia from 2011–2013. It is truly “an historical book” (12), both in the sense of one that chronicles contemporary events and one to which scholars and analysts will refer for a long time. The book takes seriously the experiences and perceptions of its participants (as well as the whole range of research on them across disciplines) and goes beyond reductionist and misleading narratives about a confrontation between regime and opposition, civil and uncivil society, cosmopolitan Moscow and apathetic provincial Russia, or a conservative majority and a liberal urban middle class. (12) Using an impressive array of data, including his own PEPS (Protest Events, Photos and Slogans) database, as well as interviews, photographs. video material, and field observations, Gabowitsch brings out the variety of experiences that constituted the 2011–2013 protests. The book helps us understand this wave of protests, their implications for the future, and in a manner that has implications for the study of protest across social science disciplines. First, Gabowitsch’s work will surely become one of (if not the) most authoritative works on the protests that reverberated across Russia in the early 21st century for the understanding of such events that they generate. Taking aim at the narrative that depicted the protests as “middle class,” the author goes beyond the stylized representations in newspapers, which were predominantly concentrated on Moscow, and brings out the richness of the experience across the other Russian regions as well. The analytical framework he uses to do so is the sociological notion of “regimes of engagement” (21), each of which constitutes a social and political grammar that allows certain claims to be expressed while selecting against others. The three regimes or grammars in his work are the “liberal grammar,” the “grammar of personal affinity,” and “the regime of exploration” (21–26). These grammars roughly translate to whether claims are made presupposing abstract general values on which rational beings would agree, particular emotional attachments to specific objects, or a present-oriented approach that is based on excitement. Using his extensive experience in Russia as well as intricate knowledge of the culture, Gabowitsch uses these analytical tools to differentiate the causes that brought protestors onto the streets to protest in the manner that they did. Nothing before 2011 had triggered such mass protests, but the vote-rigging drew the ire of the “many people in Russia who were no longer prepared to sacrifice status-independent rules and respect for individuals in return for a questionable stability” (104). Yet far from all people who came out to join the protests did so for the sake of those liberal values, and Gabowitsch himself identifies many cases where—especially in the Russian regions—the grammar of personal attachment was in evidence as people came out to protest local concerns. It was in the crucible of activism that the © Association for the Study of Nationalities 2020. Nationalities Papers (2020), 48: 2, 404–406 doi:10.1017/nps.2019.128