Authors

Discussion

When it comes to discussing the legal repression of Russian protesters, experts often make charges with protest-related administrative offences – the famous “administrativki” – part of an important but separate conversation. This is partly due to the systematic avoidance of hearings on administrative offences by activists themselves up until the mid-2010s and the relatively low stakes involved (fines instead of real prison time). Together these factors resulted in the invisibilization of this type of legal punishment in the existing scholarship in favor of criminal prosecutions. This paper seeks to consider these two types of post-protest legal treatment of protesters – quick mass justice for administrative offences and long and high-stakes criminal prosecutions – side by side, as they constitute the two sides of the government response to the opposition protests. How does being charged with a protest-related administrative offense play out in the legal trajectory of protesters in the short and the long run? Drawing on interviews with protesters and their defenders, and observations of court hearings, this paper zooms in on several protesters’ trajectories from the street to the courthouse. It shows the intertwining of the two tracks of legal processing and demonstrates protesters’ inventiveness in managing the multiplicity of legal constraints on the ground.