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This ethnographic approach to politics traces the small-scale social movements that, centered in everyday problems, have sprung up in the Russian city of Astrakhan. Drawing on pragmatist sociology, shifts in collective actions from the immediate environment toward the larger public sphere and politics have been analyzed. Politicization can emerge out of attachments to everyday life and joint actions for improving it. To understand the politicization of ordinary people, everyday resistance and pragmatic mobilization have to be examined to trace this down-to-earth process of politicization, which bears theoretical as well as practical lessons.