Tchaikovsky: the campaign report.
See here for details. We have found out that a local government in Russia wants to move a statue of a famous composer, erected by a well-respected (in his time) sculptor. It would have ended up in a park where few besides the locals could see it. And the move, it seemed, was imminent - within two months. How did we go about stopping that?
We found out that the local authority has few legal barriers to the move (as a recent monument this one isn’t one of national significance), so bringing the matter to the public’s attention was the best hope. Civil servants are the same everywhere it seems — they dislike exposure. We needed to reach the people likely to be outraged by this and get them to express their outrage.
How could one go about appealing to them? There are two big arguments against the move — the first being that Tchaikovsky just happens to be one of the most famous Russians who ever lived. The second is that moving statues from A to B is a pointless waste of taxpayers’ money.
But there are also big problems. The main one is: will anybody care? And if they care, will they speak out? Tchaikovsky might be a household name, but the sculptor is not and the sculpture is not high-profile. And are there issues that may stop people from supporting you openly, such as not wanting to upset the authorities or the Church (Tchaikovsky’s alleged homosexuality is not very popular with the latter).
The biggest problem was not knowing the reasons for which this was done or the feeling on the ground. Was it being pushed by people connected to the Trinity Cathedral, which Tchaikovsky is standing in front? Or did the local authority see a chance to replace a work of a dead sculptor with a work of one who might be a personal friend of the Mayor? Were the authorities a driving force behind the move, or were their hands being twisted by someone else? Were the locals aware of the move and did not care, or were they unaware? Knowing the answers to all these would have affected the strategies used.
What was clear is that we needed to start a petition, which was duly opened on change.org. Separately, an open letter, to be signed by ‘important people’ — typically musicians and colleagues of the sculptor — was drawn up.
The petition. The petition was opened in the evening of the 29th of October 2017. Here is the graph showing the signatures for the petition against time. We can identify four distinct phases.
Phase 1: days 1–4.
One starts with the obvious things: email all your friends and beg them to send the petition to as many people as possible. Write messages on all forums you frequent. Get in touch with all the friends and colleagues of the sculptor and get them to spread it too. The hope is that people keep passing it on and on and it reaches larger groups of people who will be interested, a journalist who might write about it or someone influential who would speak out.
The absolute best case scenario would involve an exponential growth in signatures. But, as the graph shows, after a few days the rate slowed down. Clearly, the petition was having a hard time moving beyond the ‘echo chambers’ that one’s acquaintances inhabit. People might care about Tchaikovsky in principle, but they don’t so much care about affairs of a small far-away city of which, chances are, they haven’t heard before. One started hearing comments like ‘well, this isn’t the most pressing problem in the world’ and ‘there is nothing you can do, why bother’, which was clearly a bad sign.
It is at this point that one realises how useful it is to have a lot of friends of facebook and to be an active member of many online communities. In a case like this, you can immediately reach a lot of people this way, people who might sign a petition of yours because they feel owe it to you personally.
Phase 2: days 5–8.
As phase 3 shows, there are people who are interested in this and prepared to object publicly, and quite a few of them, but how do you identify them? I looked for forums, mailing lists, facebook groups of people who might be interested — in this case this would be sculpture, classical music and politics. One big problem here is that forums nowadays typically have very strong defenses against bots (such as captchas), and so registering for each takes time — if you are trying to do several quickly it all adds up. Also, when you post on a forum a lot you know where certain types of posts belong, but when you are a new arrival you need to find those things out — this also takes time.
I tried to post the petition everywhere I could — with the exception was the local forums for Klin, which I was afraid to approach initially. I was afraid of the local authority finding out about the petition and moving the statue quickly. But then I had an idea — to look for any other campaigns in which residents of Klin are heavily involved it. As it happened there was one such. The quarry at Aleksino was recently turned into a rubbish dump for higher grade (meaning higher toxicity) refuse, and local citizens are in the process of fighting it. There is nothing like already enraged locals to to help spread the message.
Despite these efforts, the sign-ups to the petition tailed off. Perhaps, I was not doing this right and my messages were not visible enough.
Phase 3: days 9–11.
And then, more than a week in, a bigger stroke of luck. A journalist (1) writes a really stinging article in one of the main Russian papers about the actions of the local authority. And being a journalist, she can call a famous conductor and get an outraged quote about this. That reaches everyone. And now you find out that plenty of people out there really did care, and really are outraged — now that you’ve reached them. The media reaches people that you, as a private individual with no experience of running campaigns, cannot. Petition numbers shoot up higher han ever, as other media outlets (mostly, it must be said, ones highly critical of the Russian government) pick the story up as well.
Phase 4: day 12 and onwards.
But then local authority, seeing that it is on a receiving end of some criticism backtracks. It changes tack and denies it ever wanted to move anything at all. It is not a satisfactory answer: not so much because of the implicit accusation of dishonesty but mainly because this kind of answer contains no guarantees of any sort. No doubt, it’s a reprieve: nothing will happen in the foreseeable future. But it is not a victory: the petition needs to keep going until there are certain further guarantees. And now it becomes an uphill struggle to get the sign-ups, as most people think the battle won.
Now that there is media exposure, there is another danger which thankfully was not a factor here — trolling. There are always enough people willing to accuse the authors of any petition of self-interest and self-promotion — if not of making up fake news. Now that the issue has reached national news, you are at their mercy. Fortunately, the media interest very quickly disappeared in this case and the trolls never bothered.
It is important here to write clear updates explaining why the petition is being kept open and how its focus is being changed. It is surprising how difficult it is to ‘re-route’ a petition, to change its wording in a way that reflects the changed situation and yet doesn’t represent a total departure from what it was originally. One knows that one needs more guarantees for the future, but to put it into words is a lot harder.
The open letter. The other part lies in contacting important people. Reaching those is never easy, and persuading them to sign things for you harder still. Because we did not know the reasons behind this decision, people were very cautious. The authorities in Klin are not someone that people want to offend — they stage concerts at the Tchaikovsky Museum to which famous musicians are invited and have wider connections elsewhere. And if there is suspicion that the Church might be involved — objecting to an allegedly homosexual composer standing in front of a church being rebuilt — then that is a far greater problem. No one wants to offend them, and sculptors in particular heavily rely on them for commissions.
The whole process drove home just how ‘vertical’ Russian society is, with people at the top just not reachable. You have to advance in stages: first you find the sculptor’s friend who happens to be an elderly pianist, from there you move up to a more well-known pianist, from there to perhaps the head of the Conservatoire, who might know someone in the Duma who could possibly help(2), and so on. Trying to skip that strict pecking order typically does not work — your emails (say to Duma deputies whom you have known in the past) don’t get answered and phonecalls get stuck with various secretaries. This is a particular problem when time is pressing.
Eventually, certain figures in the field of sculpture and music were reached, and asked to sign. Some did, some did not: it was interesting that on the whole musicians seemed a lot more outraged, whilst sculptors, perhaps being used to statues being moved, often seemed indifferent. Eventually a list of people prepared to sign appeared, nearly all of them quite old. Once the article in the national paper was written, things became much easier, and it seemed that people became less reluctant about signing.
So there it is. This is how Tchaikovsky was (for now) saved. It needs to be highlighted just how time-consuming the whole process is. Making dozens of phonecalls — to solicitors trying to understand the legal position, to acquaintances looking for advice, to various state institutions and societies looking for support, looking for routes to reach open letter signatories — all took hours each day. This is in addition to the time taken on writing and updating the petition itself and on thinking about what to do.
It all illustrates how hard it is, even in the age of the Internet, to make your voice heard. Something like opposing the move of the statue of Tchaikovsky you would think would be straightforward, but the problems of actually reaching people who can help, or even those that care, are very significant. We were lucky in that many of the sculptor’s colleagues and friends are still alive: had he died in 1975 as opposed to 2015 the whole task would have been far harder.
(1). It transpired later that the journalist was found through personal connections, not through the online campaign.
(2). It transpired that the ‘someone in the Duma’ was never actually contacted — the chain broke down somewhere along the line. It is possible that the Klin authorities backtracted purely because of the media exposure, with no ‘encouragement’ from above.