“Too immature for politics?” Political agency in the eyes of Russian adolescent protesters, 2011–20

This paper bridges empirical research on children’s political participation and theoretical debates on the concept of agency in Childhood studies. It takes insights from the internal criticism of the essentialist conception of agency in Childhood studies and develops it further. Based on an analysis of in-depth interviews with adolescent participants of anti-regime protests in two periods of recent Russian history—i.e., 2011–13 and 2017–20—it compares how these two cohorts of politically active children constructed their political agency. It suggests that the authoritarian and depoliticized context of Russian society affects the construction of agency by child activists in ways we do not see in Western democracies. It thus challenges the main concepts of agency in Childhood studies, including the “critical” ones.

were relatively young, they were not children in any way. Yet it was children who became the heroes of the public discussion on the eve of the protests and after it.
As soon as the first rally in support of the recently detained Navalny was announced by the opposition in January 2021, the state-controlled media started to alert parents and concerned citizens about the alleged efforts of "pro-Western" opposition leaders to use "our kids" to create necessary crowds at "their" protest. Similar alerts were spread via informal channels, for example, by teachers sending messages to their pupils' parents in social media chats. Professionally designed leaflets with sad children at rallies and quotes from the Russian law about the legal consequences of participation in "illegal" rallies (those that are not authorized from the government-in practice, all oppositional rallies since 2019) were spread via parents' chats as well. "Children have a right to childhood and not to a protest!"-said one of these leaflets (author's archive). According to the statecontrolled media, "immature children" represented substantial part of protesters: they came to the rallies because it is "fashionable" and "cool." Thus, the dominant pro-state narrative presented the whole protest as the "immoral" efforts of adult leaders to lure "naïve children" onto the streets. Even older protesters were compared to these "naïve" and "silly" children.
Although the opposition's narrative was not focused on adolescents to a similar extent, it still often referred to young people and minors as key political actors. Adolescents were depicted as those who are naturally impervious to lies, who always seek the truth, and whose desire to protest is, again, a natural reaction to the lies of the state-controlled media and authorities in power in general. When addressing concerned parents on Facebook and explaining why their children want to join the protest rallies, Leonid Volkov, the closest ally of Alexey Navalny, said: "Children see this parade of hypocrisy and are sensitive to it. Children are less cynical. It is easier for them to evaluate the facts […]. They have an honest and open view of the world. […] They know how to understand when people lie to their faces" (Leonid Volkov's Facebook post, January 27 th , 2021). Thus, the oppositional narrative depicted children as figures of hope in the protest and as more "natural" critics of Putin.
These two opposing narratives-state-controlled and oppositional-shared an important similarity: they imbued children with certain characteristics as political actors and used these characteristics to promote an image of the whole protest as either "morally wrong" or "morally superior." That the focus of public discussion on the 2021 oppositional protests was on children's participation, although the actual number of minors involved was quite low (Arkhipova et al., 2021), can be partly explained by the fact that young people's sympathies and loyalty are important both for the regime and for the opposition. But there is more to it than that. Historically and culturally, politics in western societies (meaning Western Modernity in a broad sense) is seen as an adult business. Childhood is associated with pureness, while politics is considered to be something "dirty." Children are portrayed as not fully developed, while participation in contemporary political systems is cast as requiring "mature" cognitive abilities. When children participate in politics, they create an "extraordinary" situation. This extraordinariness is used then by more conservative actors to delegitimize such kind of politics and by more liberal actors to romanticize it, as happened in the case of 2021 oppositional protests in Russia. At the same time, the actual voices of children participating in protest politics were rarely heard either in public or academic discussions in Russia in 2021.
Interestingly though, these two opposing narratives which co-exist in Russian public discussion mirror the analytical opposition introduced by early Childhood studies. Indeed, according to early Childhood Studies authors, children should be considered (by scholars and practitioners) as creative social actors and the theorization of childhood as a supplementary, transitional period that exists only as an object of adult care should be condemned (Alanen, 1992;Bartlett, 2005;Ennew, 1994;Prout and James 1997;Qvortrup et al., 2009). Even though this simplistic opposition has been criticized within the discipline itself, it often continues to affect research on children and childhood. By giving the floor to children practicing politics outside of Western democracies, this paper shows how young protesters, contrary to the aspirations of adult observers, neither demonize nor romanticize their political agency. It also compares two ways of children's selfpresentation in Russian politics and explains why children may construct their agency differently. It thus contributes to the internal critique of a widespread assumption about children's agency as simply derived from the "true nature" of children and childhood.

Children's agency in childhood studies and beyond
Childhood studies developed in 1980s in response to social scientists' alleged disregard of children's perspectives. In short, when childhood was studied, it was approached from an adult perspective, the founders of Childhood studies claimed (e.g., Prout and James 1997). Early Childhood studies therefore called for acknowledging children's agency and for always considering children as social actors, creators, and subjects of their own lives (e.g., Alanen, 1992;Bartlett, 2005;Ennew, 1994;Prout and James, 1997;Qvortrup et al., 2009). According to some authors, specific childlike characteristics, like creativity, openmindedness, or imagination may even make children "better" social actors than adults (e.g., Glaser, 2018). Researchers of civil society and protests in particular were criticized for either ignoring children altogether or presenting them as the active citizens of the future, instead of considering children as active citizens and (political) actors here and now (e.g., Lister, 2007). Even though this early assumption about the a priori character of children's agency was partly rethought within the discipline itself (see below), it still appears in relatively recent seminal works in Childhood studies. For example, in the handbook titled Key Concepts in Childhood Studies published in 2012, James and James (2012, p. 22) write: "The idea that children can be seen as independent social actors is core to the development of the new paradigm of the study of children and young people." Along with the development of Childhood studies as a discipline, internal criticisms of initial assumptions about children's agency started to develop. Scholars have pointed out that "recognition and focusing on children and young people's agency, and the valuing of children and young people's voices, experiences and/or participation" became uncritically reproduced mantras in the discipline (Tisdall and Punch, 2012: p. 251). This early conception of children's agency is accused of being de-historicized and de-socialized (Esser et al., 2016;Baader, 2016). Furthermore, it valorizes the subjectivity of children at the very time when social theory in general was trying to decenter the subject (Prout, 2005). It is also seen as normatively charged and advocating Western-specific values of autonomy/rights as universal (Lancy, 2012;Coffey and Farrugia, 2014;Tisdall and Punch, 2012). On this view, agency is narrowly conceptualized as the agency of autonomous and self-sufficient subjects who "resist" power structures, thus ignoring that the subject can be produced by power relations and that agency can be collective, relational, arising from a complex web of interdependencies "accomplished through the combination of various interconnected persons and things" (Raithelhuber, 2016, p. 136;Prout, 2005;Prout, 2011;Coffey and Farrugia, 2014). Moreover, other scholars point out that children's agency should not be seen by researchers as something positive by definition and desired by all children. Children should "be able to choose not to assert their agency" (Tisdall and Punch, 2012: p. 256;Bordonaro and Payne, 2012).
Children's political participation seems to be a phenomenon in which children's political agency-i.e., the ability of children to affect the world around them, whether individually or as part of a collective-is revealed and valued (by children) almost by default. Indeed, if children take part in political action, do they not desire to be active participants of society? However, the empirical research on children's political participation shows children discursively construct their agency in different ways-and may even (often strategically) deprive themselves of agency.
Sometimes politically active children "share" the assumption of early Childhood studies and present themselves as agents by default, or even as "better" political actors than adults. The "Fridays for Future" international climate movement is a well-known example of such rhetoric (Holmberg and Alvinius, 2020;Han andAhn, 2020, Erpyleva, 2020); or, to give another example, Kurdish children who took part in protest demonstrations against the Turkish government in 2006 and 2008 and imbued their "childness" with positive political meanings associated with the radicalism that adults lack (Darıcı, 2013). Often though, politically active children resist the romanticization of their actions by adults. Teenage female activists in Americas even when emphasizing their innovativeness and open-mindedness, insisted that their political involvement is not "cute," and they are not "exceptional young people"-they just do the same work adults activist do (Taft 2011). Similarly, the white middle-class teenage activists from Portland, US in Hava Gordon's (2010) research focused on presenting themselves not as "better" but as powerful adult political actors in their own right. Furthermore, the schoolchildren movement in West Germany advertised its "youthfulness" in the mid-1960s, but modified its rhetoric after 1969: the adolescents started to present their fight as a "mature" fight and part of a broader adult politics (Kazakov 2010). Child activists may also rely on a "relational" conception of agency. Thus, the Peruvian "Movement of Working Children" took as a premise the perception of children as capable of political agency but not possessing it "by nature"-the newcomers, according to the movement, need adults' or older children's help to develop collective political agency (Taft, 2019). Similarly, the "Youth Power" teenage movement in the US "built a collective understanding of youth empowerment that rested upon youth leadership with the support of adult allies, rather than youth autonomy from adult allies" (Gordon, 2010, p. 105).
However, politically active children may deprive themselves of (some) agency-often, but not always, strategically. High-school activists fighting against school budget cuts in the US sometimes did not resist the media's infantilizing image of their struggles. By constructing their agency as coming from a childlike innocence (children are sad because their education is being taken away), they garnered more sympathy from adult politicians (Gordon, 2010). Niall Nance-Carroll (2021) calls such types of child activists "child enforcers"-they aim at preserving children's unique status by arguing that children are owed special protection. Children may be politically active and conform to adultestablished norms at the same time. For example, children's most common way to participate in school parliaments in Brazil was so-called conservative participation, that is, submitting to teachers' demands and acting as "good pupils" (De Castro, 2012). In the US, while high school-aged volunteers from middle-class families considered themselves as agents of political change, child volunteers from poor families presented themselves as a "social problem" they helped adults to solve (Eliasoph, 2011).
Thus, as the empirical research on children's political participation shows, the ways child activists construct their agency vary significantly: agency appears as a characteristic of autonomous individuals, as resulting from a web of interdependencies between children and adults, and even as something child activists lack. Even in the sphere of political participation children's agency is far from being assumed by default by child activists. However, these different ways of discursive agency construction are rarely compared with each other and the question why different child activists rely on one rather than another is rarely asked (as an exception, see Gordon 2010or Eliasoph 2011 show how class factors influence children's self-presentation in politics). Moreover, this body of literature rarely intervenes directly in the discussion on children's agency in Childhood studies reviewed in the beginning of this section. Similarly, texts within this discussion are more theoretical and rarely turn to the data on how children themselves see their agency. Finally, both bodies of literature are mostly based on insights from Western and Latin American democracies, while evidence from non-democratic countries is lacking. This paper fills these gaps.
The paper bridges the empirical studies of children's political participation and theoretical debates on the concept of agency in Childhood studies reviewed above. It takes insights from the internal criticism of the "agency mantra" (Tisdall and Punch, 2012) in Childhood studies and develops it further. However, it departs from Tisdall and Punch's (2012) thesis that agency is not inherently positive in the eyes of children and that children should have the right not to assert agency. It investigates empirically the political participation of children in non-democratic Russia as a phenomenon in which children's agency is the most expected, but where we end up struggling to find it-at least when we "listen to children's voices." Based on qualitative interviews with adolescent activists, I compare their participation in two waves of oppositional protests in authoritarian Russia, in 2011-13 and 2017-20. In both cases, I do not try to conceptualize what kind of agency they practice as an outside observer but rather look at how and why children themselves discursively construct their agency (e.g., their role in affecting social and political change) in interviews in one or another way. I show how child activists deprive themselves of agency and how their self-presentation becomes more "agentic" along with the politicization of Russian society, although children as a group continued to be described as too immature for politics. I explain how the construction of agency by young protesters is affected by the authoritarian and patriarchal political context and by the gradual politicization of a depoliticized society. In this way, the Russian case helps me to develop a critical view of the "agency mantra" in childhood studies via empirical explorations of how, in what sense, and under what circumstances children may choose not to assert their agency. Furthermore, it pushes us to think how to conceptualize children's agency in situations when politically active children involved in risky activism against an authoritarian state at the same time deprive themselves of agency.

Oppositional protests in authoritarian Russia: context
In December 2011 thousands of people took to the streets of big Russian cities to protest against the falsified parliamentary election results. Most of these people had never taken part in protests before, and the movement itself-the so-called For Fair Election (FFE) movement-became the biggest mass mobilization in Russia since the early 1990s. The protesters demanded the election results be revised, and later for President Putin's resignation. The FFE rallies took place throughout 2012 and slowly came to an end in 2013. While not accomplishing its explicit goals, the movement still changed civil society and politics in Russia (Zhuravlev et al., 2020). For example, it made oppositional politics a more familiar genre to people, but it also led to increased repression toward activists.
Another consequence of the FFE movement was the growing popular recognition of the oppositional politician Alexey Navalny. In December 2016 Navalny announced his intention to run as a candidate in the upcoming presidential election of 2018, and dozens of regional headquarters promoting his campaign were opened throughout the country in 2017-18. Although he was never registered as a candidate for the election, the headquarters continued to develop anti-regime and local politics in many Russian cities. In March 2017, the "Anti-corruption Foundation" (established by Navalny in 2011) released a video that accused Dmitry Medvedev, then acting prime minister, of corruption. The video immediately went viral, and soon after Navalny called upon the Russian people to protest against state officials' corruption. The series of anti-corruption rallies happened in 2017-18 and became a second mass nationwide anti-regime mobilization in Russia. Both in the FFE movement of 2011-13 and the anti-corruption rallies of 2017-18, minors (people under 18 who legally do not yet have adult status) represented a small part of the protesters (Khasov-Kasia, 2019). However, it was only during the anti-corruption rallies that the media spotted them and they became symbols of the protests. The whole movement was even called by its opponents a "protest of school children." Various anti-regime rallies and mobilizations around local problems with anti-regime claims occurred in 2018, 2019, and 2020 in different Russian cities until peaking in 2021 as the third nationwide wave of mass anti-regime protests. This last wave was fueled by the arrest of Alexey Navalny when he crossed a Russian border returning from medical treatment in Germany after alleged Russian secret service officers' effort to poison him earlier in 2020. At this time, as I showed in the introduction to this paper, the adolescent protesters were heroes in public discussion already on the eve of the protests. Meanwhile, the number of non-adult participants had not changed much since 2011, representing between 1.5 and 5% of protesters at different rallies in 2021 (Arkhipova et al., 2021).
The decade in Russia between 2011 and 2021 was also characterized by the strengthening of the regime's authoritarian nature and the worsening repressions toward civil society. 1 Moreover, between 2012 and 2020, the government enacted more than 50 laws that violated human rights and contradicted the Russian constitution (Vorozheykina, 2018). Among them, there were laws specifically aiming at preventing minors' participation in anti-regime politics and forming their loyalty to the state. For example, in 2018 a new amendment to the Code of Administrative offenses was adopted that introduced a penalty for the "involvement of minors in participation in unauthorized gathering, rally, demonstration, or picketing." 2 With the regime becoming more authoritarian, the state rhetoric on children and childhood became more conservative: children, their well-being, education, and loyalty were presented as crucial for the state. Unsurprisingly, this narrative emphasized society's need to "protect" children rather than children's right to express their "own" attitudes. This narrative was the context in which politically active adolescents protested against the regime.

Methodology and data
This paper is based on in-depth biographical interviews with adolescents participating in the anti-regime protests in Russia from 2011 to 2020. I collected the data in two different periods: in 2011-13, with those who took part in the FFE movement; and in 2017-20, with those who participated in the anti-corruption protests and other oppositional rallies of recent years.
Eleven interviews were collected with FFE adolescent participants, mainly in St Petersburg (only one interview was conducted in Moscow), with nine boys and two girls. Thirty-five interviews were collected with the adolescent anti-regime protesters of 2017-20, mainly in St Petersburg (15), Tyumen (10), and Chelyabinsk (6). One interview was conducted in each of the following cities: Moscow, Novosibirsk, Perm, Arkhangelsk. There were 22 boys and 13 girls among this cohort of young protesters.
The search for the informants was organized in two ways. First, messages with the description of the research and an invitation to participate in the interview were sent to all members under 18 of several groups devoted to particular anti-regime rallies during the period in question on the V Kontakte social network (the Russian version of "Facebook"). Those who replied to the messages and agreed to participate in the research were interviewed. Second, I used my contacts with (adult) activists and asked them to recommend adolescent protesters for possible interviews (the "snowball" method). All my informants were under the age of majority (18 in Russia) at the time of their protest participation (but they could be older at the time of an interview) and had taken part at least in one anti-regime protest rally.
The interview guide consisted of two parts: a biographical section and a section about political participation. Both sections began with opening questions asking the informant to relate the story of his or her life from childhood (first part) as well as his or her politicization and political participation (second part). All research participants were fully informed about the research goals, the methods of data anonymization used in the project, and how the research results would be distributed. While previously it was common in sociology and anthropology to receive informed consent from parents when studying children, today this practice is seen as problematic in the academic community because parents may deny children the opportunities to participate, or, on the contrary, force them to participate (Kirk, 2007). As my research subjects were political activists in their late adolescence, I considered them competent to give their informed consent to participate in the research.
The guiding approach during the data collection stage was on the specific character of my informants' political agency compared to an adult one. The first interviews were coded inductively: all excerpts related to the informants' representation of their political participation were collected and analyzed. After that, I came up with several particular thematic codes (e.g., practices of protest participation, presentation of personal roles and agency, legitimization of personal participation in the "adult" protests, perception of adolescents' political rights, and agency in general) and recoded all the interviews. The results of the analysis are presented below.

"Immature kids"
The FFE movement protests in 2011-12 burst unexpectedly into the public sphere in Russia both for its participants, who even a month earlier were not planning on protesting, and for outside political analysts. Most of the protesters were newcomers to protest politics. While most protest participants were between 18 and 39 years old, 3 people under 18 took part in the movement as well, averaging at about 4-6% (Sokolova et al., 2014).
As I have shown elsewhere (Erpyleva, 2018(Erpyleva, , 2021, many adolescent participants of the FFE movement acted out traditional "children's" roles compared to adult protesters. Some of them followed rallies online, obeying their parents' requests not to participate physically in protests. Others preferred going to the rallies with authoritative adults "to support" their opinion. They mostly believed that their roles with the movement were to help adults when and if the latter needed such help-which, again, reminds us of the traditional perception of children as "helpers" rather than full-fledged participants in social interactions. For example, in response to a question about what exactly he did within a local group of FFE protesters, one of the informants said that he took up "small things" because "big things" were out of his age competence (W., male, 16, St Petersburg, May 2012). Another informant told me that during the protest rallies, he would always collect all the activist newspapers and leaflets spread around. "Did you read them?"-I asked in response. "Well, no, I did not, I handed them to my parents, my grandma, my mom" (N., m., 17, St Petersburg, January 2013).
One of my two female informants, O., told a story of how she made a T-shirt with a line from a famous song by the Russian band Leningrad and wore this T-shirt whenever she would go out. The line is familiar to many Russian citizens, and it makes fun of the unfairness of Russia's electoral process. However, when explaining this decision in the interview with an adult interviewer, she presented it as an immature act, as "childish" behavior: "Well, I came up with this phrase back in the summer, it seemed to me that it would be funny, you know, it was youthful... kitsch, maybe.
I heard similar phrasing in the interviews with the adolescent FFE participants quite often: "I'm a small person and I have less experience" (R., m, 16, St Petersburg, October 2012); "I always attended the rallies together with my parents-first of all, because of my youth" (O., f, 17, St Petersburg, February 2013); "adolescents are more silly" [than adults] (M., m., 16, St Petersburg, January 2013).
My interview guide included a series of questions on the informants' perception of adolescents' political agency in general. One of the questions was direct and asked whether the informant thought that adolescents could be full-fledged political actors. I expected the answers to be positive (because I spoke with those who already exercised their agency!) and was interested in how the informants justified adolescents' rights to political agency. My expectations were proved wrong. Most FFE participants I interviewed said that from their point of view, adolescents are not mature enough to be fully involved in politics. As N. put it, "an underage person doesn't have any particular point of view, and he just follows a mob" (N., m, 17, St Petersburg, January 2017). At the same time, the biographical sections of the interviews revealed that the informants were far from considering themselves "not mature enough" in general. Quite to the contrary, they spoke a lot about their agency concerning private life decisions-changing schools, choosing a profession, dating, and so on. They complained that an adult society does not recognize them as adults even though they are fully capable of governing their own lives. Only when our conversation switched to political participation did they start to present themselves as "immature kids."

"Psychologically adult"
Although the number of children in oppositional protests did not grow in 2017 and later, the character of their participation and how they constructed their political agency changed substantially. To begin with, the adolescent participants of the 2017-20 antiregime rallies did not present their contribution through the narrative of helping adults; the activities they were involved in were not different from adults' activities. The informants visited rallies alone, with parents, or with friends, and some even contributed to the local protest's preparation-importantly, not as "helpers" of adult organizers but, in their own words, as their comrades. Some informants spoke at the rallies, some did single-person picketing, and some became members of political organizations, such as Navalny's headquarters or the Vesna (Spring) youth opposition movement. Informants emphasized personal decision-making when speaking about their political involvement in interviews, unlike their counterparts during the FFE movement. Their narratives were full of "I" pronouns connected with verbs, as the following quotation illustrates: "I started watching videos, I started watching investigations [made by Navalny's team], I came to Navalny's headquarters, I took stickers, I signed up as a volunteer, and already in May, there was my first agitation campaign" (A., m, 18, St. Petersburg, March 2019). Similarly to adult protesters, some of my informants were arrested at the rallies or for other anti-regime political activities. Some of them got used to talking with journalists as representatives of the "young" protest generation.
Many informants were able to influence their parents' political preferences and make them more critical of the Russian political regime. Some even convinced their parents to participate in the protest rallies. It is telling that even when the informants' initial interest in politics emerged under the influence of authoritative adults, they continued to develop it independently or in communication with their peers. For example, M., who started to follow Navalny's activity after his parents introduced him to Navalny's investigation video about the prime ministers' corruption (titled "He Is Not Dimon to You"), told his story of politicization in the following way: School teachers' and administrators' prohibitions and concerns also rarely became the reasons for these adolescents to stop participating in protest politics. P. recounted a story of how the police once came to her school to question her, and then she had a conversation with a school social worker about her behavior: "She [the social worker] said, like, think about yourself, think about this and that … She did not say-'Never go [to the protests].' She said-'Think whether you need it or you don't need it.' I gave it a thought and I understood that I need it" (P., 15, f, Perm, November 2020).
The interview guide for adolescent participants of the 2017-20 anti-regime rallies included the same series of questions about the informants' perception of adolescents' rights and capability of political agency. When explicitly answering these questions, unlike their counterparts in 2011-13 they said that minors can definitely be full-fledged political actors because the level of political maturity does not directly depend on individuals' biological age. The excerpts similar to those cited below emerged almost in every interview: "I don't think when I turn 18 something will change radically. I think those who want to protest should protest .… If a person doesn't like something in a society, she should speak up" (S., f, 17, St. Petersburg, March 2019).
"There are many school children who are more politicized and have a deeper understanding of the political situation in our country than some adults. Therefore, I believe that dismissing the participation of schoolchildren, as if it is something bad, is absolute nonsense" (S., m, 17, Chelyabinsk, August 2020).
If the adolescent FFE protesters saw age restrictions as necessary for politics (although not for private life issues), their counterparts from the 2017-20 anti-regime rallies were often annoyed by these restrictions. They pointed out that minors have more freedom in their private life than they do in politics. For example, E. referred to the age of consent (16 in Russia) to justify the unfairness of having voting right only from 18: "[I should be allowed to vote] from 16. Like, the age of consent, like you, if you can already easily choose who you sleep with, who to trust your virginity, well, for a girl, for example, this is the one and only thing, it goes to the one and only person, the same should be with a vote. Well, if you have a political life and if you have [political] views, you should be able to choose the president, because the president, in turn, well, he influences education, the education system, or the introduction of a school uniform, thanks to Putin for this, by the way" (E., f, 15, Tyumen, November 18).
Although the adolescent participants of the 2017-20 oppositional rallies in Russia presented themselves as genuine political subjects, as agents of political change they did not imbue "youthfulness" and "childness" with positive meanings. In their own eyes, they were not more sincere, "naïve" (in a positive sense), radical or open-minded than adult activists. Moreover, similar to their counterparts from the FFE movement, and contrary to their explicit statements about adolescents' political agency, they often did not consider "children" as proper political actors. It became clear when they talked about their actual experience of dealing with other adolescents in politics. For example, D. reasoned about schoolchildren he observed at the protest rallies: "There are two types of pupils who participate in these rallies. There are thoughtful people, who just happened to be school-aged but despite that, they are capable of social analysis, and they are pushed [to political participation] by a real desire to change things. And there are pupils who visit rallies just because it is cool, they are pushed [to political participation] by some flow, this is cool for them, this oppositional flow, and they are like-'why not?'" (D., m, 18, Tyumen, November 2018). He assumed that "thoughtful people" "just happened" to be pupils-in a way, something unusual, while "normal" pupils come to the rallies because "it is cool." Thus, the above-cited excerpts from interviews about adolescents having full rights for political participation should be read with an important addition-when these adolescents happened to be like adults. In other words, to make their participation in "adult" politics legitimate, the 2017-20 adolescent protesters presented themselves as precocious children, as those who matured earlier and were "psychologically adults." The 15-year-old E.'s words are telling: "The school social worker somehow got my photo from the rally. And she called me for the conversation. She tried to convince me that this was not right, that I shouldn't been doing it, that this is adult business, and I'm too little for that. And I told her: you always tell us that we are grown-ups already, ok, I act like a grown-up, you saw my psychological traits, you know that I'm older than others psychologically, so I can make such [political] decisions" (E., f, 15, Tyumen, November 2018).
As we can see, E. explained to her school social worker and to me-that she participated in the protests because she was "older than others psychologically." Another informant remarked: "From time to time, some people at the protest noticed that I was somehow too young, but I simply answered that I aged well" (J., m, 18, St Petersburg, June 2020). In other words, this young man preferred to look no different than adult protesters. Thus, the adolescent protesters in 2017-20 presented themselves and other minors as full-fledged political actors thanks to their ability to act and think as adults. Instead of using either "bad" (like the FFE adolescent protesters) or "good" (like the Fridays for Future movement or Kurdish child protesters) childlike qualities, opposing themselves to adults, they constructed their agency as full-fledged and an adultlike.
*** Why do child activists perform and narrate their agency differently? Gordon (2010) and Eliasoph (2011) show how class factors contribute to the discursive production of youth agency in the USA. My research sheds light on other factors that explain differences in self-presentation of adolescents in politics in authoritarian Russia.
First, the change in Russia's political context after the FFE movement affected the political socialization of the new cohort of adolescents, transforming the ways they participated in anti-regime politics and narrated their agency. The adolescent FFE protesters were socialized in quite a depoliticized context typical for non-democracies, and, as biographical interviews show, "politics" was new and unfamiliar to them when they suddenly mobilized to protest. Unsurprisingly, they distanced themselves from "politics" by taking up childlike roles. Their counterparts from the 2017-20 rallies socialized themselves in a more politicized, post-FFE context and had started to explore the political realm online at least several years before their actual protest participation. As I show elsewhere (X3), in their early teens, they heard about protests, revolutions, annexations of country's territories, and other "big" (geo)political events happening around them which provided them with a feeling that (protest) politics is something "normal." Later many of them started to follow popular trends on YouTube where oppositional leader Alexey Navalny criticized corruption and youth bloggers made jokes about politics. They "went deeper into this stuff" and were shocked by corruption and injustice in Russia-and then turned to protest politics more seriously. By the time they took the streets, they felt like "experts" in the field of anti-regime politics compared to many adults and peers, and they presented themselves as such.
Second, unlike their counterparts in 2011-13, the leaders of the 2017-20 protests (mostly, but not only, Navalny and his allies) used a rhetoric more familiar and recognizable to the young protesters when framing the protest demands (Moroz, 2020). This rhetoric helped them to feel the power and the ability to actually influence things, despite their age. As a result, the adolescent protest participants in 2017-20 found themselves in more welcoming political context compared to the teenagers protesting at the FFE movement 6 years earlier.

Conclusion and discussion
In this paper, I compared how adolescent protesters in authoritarian Russian constructed their agency during two periods of recent Russian political history, in 2011-13 and 2017-20. The first cohort of teenage activists presented themselves similarly to how state propaganda depicted them in 2021 Russia-as "more silly" and less mature in politics than adults, as "helpers" rather than full-fledged protesters. The more politicized context the second cohort of adolescents grew up in, together with the more youth-oriented language of oppositional politics in Russia in 2017-20 made its youngest participants feel like a legitimate part of the anti-regime movement. However, contrary to the image of child protesters drawn by adult sympathizers of the opposition in Russia, the adolescent protest participants in 2017-20 did not imbue themselves with child-specific positive characteristics, such as open-mindedness, intolerance to lies, or organic truth-seeking. They saw themselves as no different from adult activists. Their case illuminates contradictions embedded in the categories of childhood: these are often former children, that is, adults, who romanticize specific childlike agency while children may strive to be children-no-more to enjoy full-fledged, adultlike rights and opportunities. In some respects, Russian anti-regime politics have not changed since the first wave of mass nationwide oppositional protests in 2011-13. It continues to be culturally perceived as "adult business," which is why the figure of the child protester functions as a strong rhetorical instrument to morally de/legitimize protests in Russia.
Authoritarian and depoliticized contexts affect the ways child protesters construct their agency. Children who took the streets in 2011-13 grew up in a society where political participation as a practice was seen as something culturally abnormal even for adults and especially for children. Consequently, even when the "For Fair Election" movement suddenly brought to the streets thousands of political newcomers-including children-the child activists, paradoxically, continued to reproduce perceptions they grew up with: politics is strange, scary, complicated, and not a proper place for children like them. After the 2011-13 wave of protests, Russian society started to become more politicized, but the authoritarian rule began to strengthen as well. Consequently, in relation to how children and childhood are seen, two opposing tendencies developed. First, children and young people became symbols and engines of change for the opposition. Second, children and childhood was perceived as under danger and in need of protection by the state. Adolescent protesters in 2017-20 were affected by both of them. Protest politics was a part of their socialization and as a result, they did not feel alienated from it. Thus, unlike their counterparts in 2011-13, they presented themselves as full-fledged activists and actors. At the same time, they saw themselves as exceptional children-children in general were still perceived by them as too immature for politics and requiring protection rather than being responsible for change. Thus, affected by oppositely directed tendencies, they continued to deprive children of agency but made an exception for themselves. The case of non-democratic Russia shows that the political regime and political culture internalized via socialization processes are important factors to be considered as affecting the ways child activists construct their agency. Thus, as some scholars already claimed (e.g., Esser et al., 2016), agency should always be situated in social and historical contexts and seen as a "social fact" rather than an individual quality.