ABSTRACT
The vacuum that is emerging within the regime will be filled by those who are inclined to do so if Russian nationalists prefer to scream at opposition rallies, that means that someone else will come to power. Despite their fall from grace, members of Russkii Obraz’s inner circle quickly re-emerged as prominent actors in the media and civil society. This chapter shows how their return to the limelight was made possible by the Kremlin’s new ‘preventive counter-revolution,’ a set of measures introduced to contain two successive revolutionary challenges. The new preventive counter-revolution was a reaction to the intensifying opposition and civic activism that culminated in the mass demonstrations against election fraud in the winter of 2011 to 2012. The extra-systemic opposition’s strategy for the elections crystallised at the ‘Antiseliger’ Forum in Khimki Forest in June 2011, one month after the verdict in the Tikhonov–Khasis trial.
