How does one unpack a revolution? That was essentially the research task I faced in trying to analyze the burgeoning tide of mobilization that brought about the collapse of the Soviet state. The glasnost' era in the USSR was a highly compact and stormy period of history--as I call it in my forthcoming book Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge University Press, 2002)--a period of "thickened history," when events multiply with great rapidity and take on a significant causal role of their own. Indeed, as a result of the onslaught of these events, the unimaginable--the break-up of the Soviet state--was transformed into the inevitable, and a world once accepted as immutable was turned upside down. My efforts to recreate these waves of mobilization through a set of event databases began in 1988 as a comparative study of protest among multiple nationalities within a single country; it ended as a cross-national study of nationalist mobilization within fifteen countries (or more, depending on who does the counting).
Over a six-year period with grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Council for Soviet and East European Research, a research team and I collected systematic information on 6,663 protest demonstrations and 2,177 mass violent events that occurred throughout the former Soviet Union from January 1987 through December 1992. Demonstrations constituted only one dimension of the multiple forms by which groups challenged the Soviet state during these years. Nevertheless, as the most prevalent and politically salient form of protest activity during this period, they reflect well the changing relationship between the state and its challengers. I confined my study to demonstrations with a hundred or more participants, largely because press coverage of demonstrations of smaller size was uneven. In addition, information was collected for strike activity, but this proved considerably less accurate and added little that was not apparent through the analysis of demonstrations. Mass violence was also a significant dimension of mobilization during this period that was of research interest in terms of understanding the factors shaping violent and non-violent manifestations of nationalism and that tended to receive considerable attention in news sources, making for a reasonably accurate sampling of events.
The databases were created from a multiple-source media sample. Over 150 different news sources (60 in their full press runs) were examined by myself and a team of assistants for accounts of these events. The sources included not only Western newspaper, wire service, and U.S. government sources, but also a wide variety émigré publications, central and local Soviet newspapers, and unofficial samizdat sources, including Russian-language newspapers of opposition political movements throughout the former Soviet Union, source material drawn from unofficial libraries and archives in Moscow, unofficial wire services, and source material drawn from Radio Liberty's Arkhiv samizdata in Munich. The Soviet Union under glasnost' was a transitional society; the shift from repression to contestation, which involved an explosion in the possibilities of public expression, made it impossible to base an analysis of mobilization on any single press source or set of sources, as critical sources of information emerged and died over the course of the mobilizational cycle. Moreover, multiple accounts of a large portion of the events allowed for in-depth coding along a number of critical variables often overlooked in protest event data, including protest demands and the number of participants in demonstrations.
Obviously, as is true of any event analysis, coverage of the actual number of protest demonstrations that took place is incomplete. Nevertheless, the coverage is quite substantial. For example, according to published police statistics in 1989 there were 5,300 demonstrations of all sizes throughout the entire Soviet Union. The databases include information on 1,496 of these, or 28 percent of those reported by the police. Considering that the police statistics also included demonstrations with less than a hundred participants, the coverage of databases can be said to be extensive--and certainly well beyond the normal standards of protest-event analysis.
The databases are available to researchers in two files in Excel worksheet format. For those interested in further information, contact Mark R. Beissinger, Department of Political Science, 110 North Hall, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706 (tel.: 608-263-6351, email: mbeissin@facstaff.wisc.edu).
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