Russia's Vigilante YouTube Stars. Digital Entrepreneurship and Heroic Masculinity in the Service of Flexible Authoritarianism

Anna Schwenck

Europe-Asia Studies, 2022, vol. 74, issue 7, 1166-1189

Abstract: Combating illegal parking and drinking in public is the raison d’être of Russia's best-known law-and-order youth initiatives, StopKham and Lev Protiv. These initiatives enforce and promote neotraditional morals amongst young people by challenging alleged offenders on camera and uploading the entertaining, humorous and often violent video clips to YouTube. I argue that their practices encapsulate flexible authoritarianism, in which the regime incentivises citizens to take initiative while expanding repressive measures against dissenters. Not only do these enterprises reflect the regime's goals back at itself, they also popularise a new ideal of heroic masculinity that fuses patriotism with entrepreneurialism.

Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2022.2110217

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