Stirring culture: Moral batteries and public characters in the battle over Moscow’s renovation

Just as scholars used culture to ‘fill in’ our understanding of what was happening inside structural processes, so emotions can fill in many cultural concepts deployed in theories of social movement recruitment, decision-making, and impacts. Looking at the controversy around Moscow’s Renovation, a giant urban renewal project launched in 2017, we describe how both sides tried to recruit and persuade others. We analyze two examples of carriers of cultural meaning that are often described in idealistic, cognitive fashion, to reveal the emotions that give them their power to move people. Moral batteries are pairs of emotions, one positive and the other negative, which draw people toward one pole as they repel them from the other. In particular, we discuss binaries based on time, before-and-after contrasts, which have not previously been adequately recognized. In addition to moral batteries, we look at public characters, especially villains who get blamed and minions who are ridiculed; these are often contrasted with good characters such as victims or heroes. Characters can be applied to public figures such as politicians or take the form of group stereotypes. Like moral batteries, characters fuse cognitive elements, such as words and images, with the emotions that are supposed to accompany them. Energized by the recent inclusion of emotions, cultural theory still has something new to offer to explanations of social movements.