These would be significant obstacles for any opposition, let alone one operating in a political system so loaded in favour of the governing regime. Yet they don’t entirely account for the difficulties the broad anti-Putin movement has had in gathering popular support. Why haven’t its slogans and appeals resonated more widely across Russian society as a whole? Once again, much commentary on Russia blames this on the persistence of Soviet legacies – the unshakeable apathy of Homo sovieticus, who still squats in the corners of the Russian mind, putting a damper on civic action. Soviet legacies did help to stabilize the post-Soviet system, muting many forms of discontent through the 1990s and early 2000s. By the mid-2000s, though, that subsidy had begun to evaporate, as the experience of post-Soviet capitalism, rather than the memory of Communism, became the main point of reference for an increasing share of the population.
This was the context in which opposition to Putin started to emerge, and within which it needs to be understood. How and where did it develop, and what forms has it taken over time? What are its strengths and weaknesses, and what are its prospects? The answers to these questions suggest, firstly, that the 2011–12 protests were not so much the sudden coming to consciousness of a ‘new middle class’ as the culmination of several years’ worth of tentative, smaller-scale mobilizations. Secondly, there were also crucial disparities within the anti-Putin opposition, rooted in turn in divergent explanations for Russia’s ills. Thirdly, though much attention has been devoted to Aleksei Navalnyi as the figurehead of anti-Putinism, his views make him an unlikely contender for resolving the opposition’s internal rifts – if anything, he may even exacerbate them. But before addressing the challenges facing the opposition, we need a better sense of where it came from in the first place.
There was remarkably little organized opposition during Putin’s first presidential term, from 2000 to 2004. But after he easily won a second mandate in March 2004, garnering a mammoth 71 per cent of the vote, stirrings of dissent began to emerge. These developed along two distinct fronts: a political opposition, largely metropolitan and dominated to begin with by pro-market-reform liberal parties; and a more diffuse social opposition, arising in response to specific issues and often coalescing at a more local level. Both of these tendencies experienced ups and downs over the following decade, and on some occasions they combined powerfully. But the original gap between them persisted, and continues to pose a number of strategic problems even now.
The liberal parties’ shift into opposition was in large part a result of their gradual expulsion from the official political system. This began in earnest at the end of 2003, when between them the Yabloko party and the Union of Right Forces lost forty seats in the parliamentary elections, slashing their combined representation in the Duma to seven deputies. When the next Duma elections came around in 2007, they ended up with none – partly thanks to a new 7 per cent threshold that whittled the number of parties in the Duma down to four. But the liberal parties’ electoral misfortunes also reflected the tremendous discredit their embrace of the free market in the 1990s had earned them.
From this point on, liberals in Russia were for the most part peripheral to official politics, and increasingly found themselves turning to extra-parliamentary tactics. This made for some strange bedfellows: the few anti-Putin marches held in the mid-2000s were attended by a mixture of free-marketeers, human-rights advocates, and devotees of the National Bolshevik movement – a postmodern, red-brown fusion engineered by the writer Eduard Limonov that acquired a substantial youth following. This patchwork came together in 2006 in an ungainly coalition called The Other Russia, which organized a series of ‘Dissenters’ Marches’ over the next few years. These sometimes drew decent-sized crowds, by Russian standards, but outside the major cities – principally Moscow, St Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod – they had little resonance.
They were also largely disconnected from the scattered outbursts of discontent that were occurring elsewhere in Russian society. The most significant and, to many observers, surprising early instance of this trend came in the winter of 2004–05, when demonstrations took place in more than a dozen cities against the government’s attempt to monetize a series of benefits. Pensioners played a leading role in these, leading some to dub it the ‘grey’ or ‘chintz’ revolt.{3} But the demonstrations also had very broad public support, which pushed the government to soften the reform’s impact by increasing the compensation offered. Later in 2005, government moves to privatize housing and communal services – dumping the cost of capital repairs onto residents – led to the creation of local action groups in several cities, among them Moscow, St Petersburg and Yaroslavl; Izhevsk and Perm in the Urals; Tomsk, Nefteiugansk and Khanti-Mansiisk in Western Siberia.{4} Like the monetization protests, these movements did not stop the government’s plans altogether but did slow their implementation. Nonetheless, the concerns of both movements were far removed from those of the liberal opposition, which criticized the Putin administration for not forging ahead more quickly with further privatizations.
At the same time – and equally overlooked by the liberal parties – a new labour movement began to emerge. Much of Russian industry remained in a despondent, demobilized state, still reeling from the rapid deindustrialization of the 1900s. But in an ironic twist, small independent unions were being set up precisely in the new factories established in Russia by Western firms. Faced with Western corporate employers, and free to act without the say-so of the FNPR bureaucracy, these unions were much more militant than their ex-Soviet counterparts: a 2007 strike at the Ford plant in Vsevolozhsk won a significant pay rise. As Simon Pirani has observed, this was a notable development because it was an ‘offensive’ action: workers were demanding a share of the plant’s rising profits rather than struggling to defend meagre or non-existent wages, as in the 1990s. In the words of one union activist Pirani interviewed, ‘people could see: companies are coming here and making a nice profit, and they are not sharing it with their employees’.{5}
Workers at plants owned by Renault, GM, Volkswagen and Heineken created independent factory committees similar to that at Vsevolozhsk. These developments did not go unnoticed by the authorities, who clamped down harshly on union activists. Valentin Urusov, who had organized 1,000 workers at a diamond mine in Yakutia, was imprisoned for four years on trumped-up drug charges, and Aleksei Etmanov, leader of the Vsevolozhsk Ford union, was twice attacked and heavily beaten.{6} The new labour movement remained small and largely isolated, and had to operate under severe pressures; but even so, its existence was a noteworthy change.