There were other displays of dissent, often around more specifically local issues. Starting in 2007, for example, cultural and civic activists in St Petersburg came together to oppose Gazprom’s plans for a 400-metre-high glass-and-steel skyscraper, the Okhta Tower, to serve as its new headquarters. Mobilizing a wide range of players – architects, leading cultural figures, politicians, UNESCO – the coalition managed to block construction, forcing Gazprom to move the site for the tower several miles farther from the city.[8] In 2008, at the opposite end of the country, riot police had to be sent in to Vladivostok to quell protests against a government ban on the import of right-hand-drive cars.[9]
Still, it took a sharp economic downturn before discontent became noticeable at the national level. The first tremors from the 2008 economic crisis began to be felt almost as soon as Dmitri Medvedev took office as Putin’s designated successor: oil prices dropped by two-thirds in a matter of months, going from $130 a barrel in July 2008 to $40 that December. Overall, Russia experienced the steepest drop in GDP in the G20, going from a growth rate of 8 per cent in 2007 to a contraction of 8 per cent in 2009. The recession brought a wave of factory closures, and unemployment hit 10 per cent by April 2009. By that time, almost a fifth of the population had incomes below the official subsistence level, a 25 per cent increase compared with the previous year.{7}
The downturn added new elements to the developing repertoire of protest. One was the tactic of roadblocks, a post-Soviet version of Argentina’s piqueteros. In June 2009, the people of Pikalevo, in Leningrad region, blocked the highway between St Petersburg and Moscow to protest unpaid wages at the local cement plant, on which their livelihoods depended. They succeeded in drawing Putin’s attention: in a piece of political theatre played out on TV screens across the country, the then Prime Minister publicly forced the plant’s owner, metals oligarch Oleg Deripaska, to pay back wages and keep the plant open. (Putin also made a point of taking his pen back once Deripaska had used it to sign the deal.)
Pikalevo is only one of dozens of ‘monocities’ in Russia – towns where a single enterprise accounts for the lion’s share of jobs; the largest is Togliatti, with a population of 700,000, where the government bailed out the stricken car-maker Avtovaz in March 2009. But the rescue of Pikalevo was not widely repeated, and protests in other monocities were not as successful. In Rubtsovsk in southern Siberia, for example, workers from a tractor plant held mass meetings and hunger strikes to protest the non-payment of wages and the threatened closure of the plant; the wages were paid, but the factory finally closed altogether in 2010.{8}
A second, more significant development was the emergence of movements targeting the United Russia party. In Kaliningrad in late 2009, thousands took to the streets to protest against the party’s misrule, and to demand the resignation of Georgi Boos, the regional governor. As in Vladivostok a year earlier, the protests were partly driven by a government decision to impose higher import duties: cross-border trade is crucial to Kaliningrad’s economy. By August 2010, the protesters had managed to force Governor Boos out – a rare political victory.
At around the same time, a different set of protesters also achieved a win, albeit a temporary one. An alliance of environmental activists and other groups, from Greenpeace Russia to anarchists and antifascists, had gathered in Khimki forest just outside Moscow to prevent the construction of a road. Some demonstrators occupied parts of the proposed route while others stormed local government offices. At one point a neofascist mob was set on the activists – and the police arrested the victims rather than the attackers. That summer, wildfires were tearing through forests across the country, wreathing Moscow itself in acrid smoke, which drew public attention to precisely the kinds of conservation issues the Khimki protesters were raising. Widespread public condemnation of the handling of the protests led Medvedev to decree that construction of the road be suspended.
The Khimki and Kaliningrad movements were signs of things to come: their ideological heterogeneity, their use of space and their focus on United Russia all featured strongly in protests a year later. The main catalysts for the 2011–12 demonstrations were popular anger at United Russia’s electoral fraud, and before that at the announcement of Putin’s pre-agreed job-swap with Medvedev – a ‘castling’ manoeuvre that displayed real contempt for the democratic process. But corruption was a crucial underlying grievance. A pervasive feature of the Putin system, it became increasingly prominent in public discourse – especially in unofficial media outlets and on the internet, where a wide and active network of LiveJournal blogs came to act as an ersatz fourth estate. The number of internet users in Russia grew phenomenally in the 2000s: from 1 per cent of the population in 1999 to 15 per cent in 2005 to 43 per cent in 2010.{9} In some ways, the web was partially compensating for the cultural infrastructure that had been lost in the 1990s. And as it would do for the Arab Spring in 2011, it provided a readymade platform for organizing media campaigns and protest rallies – its impact all the more striking given the atrophying of independent political parties and the pressure on NGOs and other civic organizations.
Long before 2011, then, scattered revolts had been taking place across Russia. They were numerically small, especially relative to the size of the country; and they were geographically dispersed, which made coordination and practical gestures of solidarity more difficult to pull off. For the moment, they remained politically disarticulated from each other. Yet there was a notable diversity of triggers and themes, from corruption to jobs, from the environment to architecture, which offered more potential points of contact with a wider public. They also had diverse outcomes: many defeats, but also some small and partial victories.
All of these experiences contributed to the breadth and energy of the 2011–12 demonstrations. The different strands of protest were able to converge at a rare moment of vulnerability for the ‘imitation democratic’ system. Elections remained ideologically necessary to the system’s legitimation, and they had given rise to awkward transitions and crises across the post-Soviet space. This time, Russia’s electoral calendar coincided with a gathering tide of discontent, and the 2011–12 parliamentary and presidential votes provided the first test of the system since the post-2008 economic downturn. Yet although this created a slender opening for Russia’s multiform oppositional movements, many of the basic divisions between them not only persisted through the 2011–12 protests; if anything, they deepened.
The demonstrations of late 2011 and early 2012 drew the largest crowds since the mass marches of the glasnost era. The organizers of the Moscow miting on 4 February 2012 were clearly trying to encourage such comparisons: that had also been the date of an enormous march around the capital’s Garden Ring in 1990, to protest the Communist Party’s monopoly on political representation. The city authorities got the reference and refused permission for a march along the same route, insisting it be held instead in Bolotnaya Square, on an island in the Moscow River. The square thereafter became the venue for several subsequent protests, and supplied a catch-all term for the movement, too; though it was hardly an auspicious name: boloto is the Russian word for ‘swamp’.
These protests were greeted as a ‘revolt of the middle class’ – an expression of discontent from those who had done well out of the petro-boom of the 2000s and were now anxious at being squeezed by recession. But the idea of the ‘new middle class’ was a chimera, part ideological fantasy purveyed by the state and the media, part wishful projection by the population itself. And it didn’t tally with the sociological make-up of the participants in the 2012 demonstrations. As one protester revealingly put it when interviewed, ‘I belong to the middle class, but it doesn’t exist.’{10}
8
The battles around the Gazprom building were brilliantly satirized in a Brechtian
9
A large proportion of Vladivostok residents drive Japanese cars, which have the steering wheel on the right.