ABSTRACT
LARGE-SCALE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PROTEST HAS CHARACTERISED political development in a number of post-communist and other transition countries over the last two decades. The colour revolutions in Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Ukraine, and Serbia, and, most recently, the 2013-2014 protests in Ukraine, have demonstrated the potency of mass action in toppling undemocratic or unpopular regimes, or else in forcing political change. Citizen uprisings in the Middle East had also shattered the dual myths of popular passivity and stability of authoritarian polities in the region. Yet, as Graeme Robertson (2007) rightly notes, according to ‘conventional wisdom’, until 2011-2013 Russia has remained puzzlingly immune to large-scale mass protests despite a growing tide of authoritarianism, rampant corruption, and socio-economic disparities-the cocktail of factors contributing to the recent wave of anti-authoritarian mobilisations in other parts of the world. The mass protests that took place following the December 2011 elections to the Russian
Duma appear to have caught both domestic and external observers by surprise. It has been estimated that electoral fraud in these elections enabled the ruling United Russia party (Edinaya Rossiya-UR) to claim 15 million extra votes, raising its estimated actual support from 34% to 49%. The respected GOLOS electoral monitoring organisation reported nearly 8,000 violations documented by observers at various polling stations (Lyubarev 2012, p. 2). In an unprecedented show of solidarity, tens of thousands of protesters of various political persuasions and socio-economic backgrounds took to the streets to protest against the many instances of electoral fraud. In Moscow, as many as 100,000 protesters were reported to have taken to the streets in
just one rally in December 2011 (Najibullah & Whitmore 2011). Following Vladimir Putin’s victory in the first round of the March 2012 presidential elections mass demonstrations continued, albeit on a smaller scale. At the height of the protests, a Levada Centre public opinion poll conducted on 16-20 December 2011 revealed that nearly 45% of respondents were prepared to support street protests against electoral violations, while We are grateful to the LSE’s International Relation’s Department and to the LSE Suntory and Toyota International Centers for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD) for providing generous funding for this research. We are also very grateful to Elizabeth Teague and Nikolai Petrov for providing useful advice on
15% indicated that they would Digest 2012). Nevertheless, between the March 2012 presidential elections and the July 2013 wave of
protests-which followed the arrest and sentencing of the popular opposition blogger, lawyer, anti-corruption campaigner, and candidate for the September 2013 Moscow City mayoral elections, Aleksei Naval’nyi-there was an apparent decline in protest activity. A drop in numbers of people willing to join street rallies, as revealed in public opinion surveys, as well as general public disillusionment with the opposition, its leadership, its credibility, and potential to deliver political and socio-economic change underlined the declining trend during this time period. The five-year jail sentence for Naval’nyi, widely believed to be based on trumped-up charges of abuse of power in his capacity as adviser to the Governor of Kirov region, led to the July 2013 mass protests in Moscow, St Petersburg, and a number of other Russian cities. The question then for Russia-watchers, who have been debating the likelihood of an Arab
Uprising type scenario, is as follows: do the 2011-2013 protest events widely reported in the media represent isolated phenomena in Russia’s authoritarian political landscape or are they part of a long-term trend that scholars ought to carefully observe in order to assess the protests’ potential to contribute to citizen implosions? We argue that the neglect of the regional dimension of protests obscures important trends
in protest dynamics, which may incrementally contribute to systemic political change. This essay explores the deeper regional and temporal protest trends, transcending protests in Moscow or St Petersburg that normally dominate media headlines. By analysing the findings of our newly assembled dataset, we make a first attempt at clarifying the spatial, temporal, and issue dimensions of general protest trends across Russia. The data gathering and analysis complement the important work by Graeme Robertson (2007, 2011, 2013), who assembled Russian regional protest data from alternative sources (the Institute of Collective Action and the Russian Ministry of Interior).1 Our essay is structured as follows. In the next section, we set out the theoretical
underpinnings which contextualise protest events across Russian regions. The subsequent section describes in detail our dataset and data sources. We then discuss our motivation for offering comparative analysis of our data using economic divisions. Next, we analyse trends for data disaggregated by constituent regions of the Russian Federation, which we follow with a discussion of the temporal dimensions of regional protest and the analysis of regional protest suppression trends. We conclude with general observations about the captured trends and their implication for analysis of political processes in Russia.
