The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes: Managing Dissent in Post-Communist Russia

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

Since the end of the Cold War, more and more countries feature polit-ical regimes that are neither liberal democracies nor closed authoritar-ian systems. Most research on these hybrid regimes focuses on how elites manipulate elections to stay in offi ce, but in places as diverse as Bolivia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia, Thailand, Ukraine, and Venezuela, protest in the streets has been at least as important as elections in deter-mining the fate of governments. The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes builds on previously unpublished data and extensive fi eldwork in Russia to show how one high-profi le hybrid regime manages political competi-tion in the workplace and in the streets. More generally, the book devel-ops a theory of how the nature of organizations in society, state strategies for mobilizing supporters, and elite competition shape political protest in hybrid regimes.

Graeme B. Robertson is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on labor, social movements, political protest, and the problems of gov-ernance in authoritarian regimes. He has published articles in the American Political Science Review , Comparative Politics , the Slavic Review , Communist and Post-Communist Studies , Pro et Contra , and the Journal of Democracy .

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

Managing Dissent in Post-Communist Russia

GRAEME B. ROBERTSON University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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© Graeme B. Robertson 2011

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Robertson, Graeme B., 1969– The politics of protest in hybrid regimes : managing dissent in post-communist

Russia / Graeme B. Robertson. p. cm. isbn 978-0-521-11875-0 (hardback) 1. Dissenters – Russia (Federation) 2. Protest movements – Russia (Federation)

3. Russia (Federation) – Politics and government – 1991– I. Title. dk510.763.r63 2010 322.40947–dc22 2010031357

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To George and Ena Robertson,

for their example, encouragement, and unconditional love.

“[a scholar] begins timidly, moderately, he begins by asking a most modest question: ‘is it not from here? Does not a certain country derive its name from that particular place? … He immediately quotes such and such ancient writers, and as soon as he detects some kind of a hint, or something that he believes to be a hint, he at once becomes emboldened and self-confi dent, talks to the writers of antiquity like an old friend, puts questions to them and supplies the answers himself, forgetting completely that he has begun with a timid supposition; he already believes that he can see it all, that everything is clear and his argument is concluded with the words: “So that is how it was …’. Then he proclaims it ex cathedra , for all to hear, and the newly discovered truth is sent traveling all over the world, gathering followers and disciples.”

–Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

vii

List of Tables page xi

List of Figures xiii

Acknowledgments xv

Introduction 1 Hybrid Regimes 4 Russian Lessons and a Theory of Protest in Hybrids 6 Theoretical Implications 8

Literature on Contentious Politics and Social Movements 8 Industrial Confl ict 11 Hybrid Regimes and Repression 11

Politics in Russia through the Lens of Protest 13 Structure of the Book 16

1 Protest and Regimes: Organizational Ecology, Mobilization Strategies, and Elite Competition 18 How Regimes Affect Contention 19

Protest in Democracies 19 Protest in Closed Autocracies 20 Protest in Hybrid Regimes 22

Organizational Ecology 24 State Mobilizing Strategies 30 Elite Competition 34 Summary of Regime Effects on Contention 35 How Contention Affects Regimes 38

2 Protest and Regime in Russia 40 Post-Communism and Protest 42 Data on Protest 44 What, Who, and Why 49

Protest Repertoires 51

Contents

viii Contents

Protest Participants 55 Nature of the Demands Made 59

Conclusion: Protests without Movements 62

3 The Geography of Strikes 67 Strike Patterns 69 The Ecology of Organizations and Protest 72

Labor: Trading Cooperation for Survival 73 Social Partnership at the Regional Level 75

Mobilization Strategies, Elite Competition, and Strike Patterns 79 Hypotheses and Measures 81

Political Power 81 Other Resources 82 Capacity 83 Alternative Explanations: Business Cycles, Information, and Hardship 84

Strike Data 87 Models and Results 88 Other Forms of Protest 94 Organizational Realities and Hybrid Regimes 97

4 A Time for Trouble 100 Protest and Time 101 Demonetization, Wage Arrears, and Protest 105 Center-Periphery Confl ict Over Rules and Resources 109 Primakov’s Appointment and Protest Dynamics 112 Conclusion 123

5 Elections and the Decline of Protest 124 Political Protest and the Paradox of the 1999 Elections 126 Theories of Protest Decline 130 Putin’s Political Strategy and Protest Decline 132 Parallel Elections and the Separation of the National and the Local 137

Denationalizing Protest 141 Conclusion: Bandwagons, Protest, and Regime 145

6 Vladimir Putin and Defeat-Proofi ng the System 147 Incorporating Labor into the “Vertical” 149 Enlisting the Regional Political Machines 151 Defeat-Proofi ng the Electoral System 155

A New Electoral Party of Power 156 Political Product Differentiation: Sponsored Parties 157 The Insertion of Veto Points 160

Potential Problems, Sources of Weakness 164

ixContents

7 Protest, Repression, and Order from Below 167 Managing Contention in Hybrids 170 Putin, Protest, and Print Dresses 174 The Response: Coercion and Channeling 178

Coercion 179 Channeling 179

After the Revolution: The New Politics of the Streets 183 Coercion in Russia: Brezhnev and Putin 188 Channeling under Putin 190

Licensing Civil Society 192 Filling the Organizational Space: Ersatz Social Movements 194

Russian Repression in the Broader Context 197

8 Implications for Russia and Elsewhere 200 Implications for Other Cases 202 Social Movements, Political Opportunities and Repression in Hybrids 207 Implications for Russian Politics 210 Democratization from the Ground Up? 212

Bibliography 219

Appendix 1 Event Protocol 237

Appendix 2 Sectoral and Seasonal Strike Patterns 269

Appendix 3 A Statistical Approach to Political Relations 275

Index 279

xi

1.1. Summary of Regimes and Their Contention page 36

1.2. Organizational Ecology, State Mobilizing Strategies, and Elite Competition in Post-Communist Russia 37

2.1. Repertoires of Protest in Russia, 1997–2000 54

3.1. Variation in Working Days Lost to Strikes by Region, 1997–2000 70

3.2. Summary of Hypotheses and Measures 86

3.3. Working Days per Month Lost to Strikes in Non-Mining Sectors 89

3.4. Determinants of Non-Strike Protest Events 95

4.1. Protest Mobilization in Russian Regions: Strikes 114

4.2. Determinants of Participation in First Protest Wave (1997) –Logistic Regression 115

4.3. Determinants of Participation in Second Protest Wave (1998–1999) – Logistic Regression 122

5.1. Effect of Putin’s Popularity on Protest Events 135

5.2. Weekly Event Diffusion, January 1997–June 1999 143

5.3. Weekly Event Diffusion in July–December 1999: Geography and Politics 144

8.1. Varieties of Contention in Hybrid Regimes 204

A2.1. Sectoral Breakdown of Working Days Lost to Strikes 270

A2.2. Breakdown of Strikes Outside of Education, Health, and Mining 270

A2.3. Industrial Strikes 271

A2.4. Service Sector Strikes Outside Health and Education 272

A2.5. Strikes in the Budget and Non-Budget Sectors 273

A3.1. Determinants of the MKF Renaissance Index of Governors’ Relations with Moscow 276

Tables

xiii

Figures

2.1. MVD and Goskomstat estimates of working days lost to strikes, 1997–2000 page 48

2.2. International strike comparisons, 1997–2000 50

2.3. Participants in protest events, 1997–2000 56

2.4. Workers protests by sector, 1997–2000 56

2.5. Participants in protest events excluding workers, 1997–2000 57

2.6. Categories of demands made at protest events in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000 61

2.7. Demands other than for payment of legal obligations made at protest events in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000 61

2.8. Scope of demands made at protest events in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000 62

2.9. Scope of demands excluding payment of legal obligations made at protest events in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000 63

2.10. Number of demonstrators in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000 64

3.1. Regional variation in strike intensity in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000 71

4.1. Working days lost to strikes in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000 102

4.2. Patterns of days lost to strikes and hunger strikes in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000 103

4.3. Patterns of protest events in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000 104

xiv Figures

4.4. Temporal patterns of strikes and wage arrears in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000 107

4.5. Strikes in 1998–1999 wave regions only 116

4.6. Strikes and wage arrears in 1998–1999 wave 121

5.1. Temporal patterns of protest in the Russian Federation, 1999–2000 128

5.2. Working days lost to strikes in the Russian Federation, 1999–2000 129

A2.1. Seasonal patterns outside of education 273

xv

In writing this book, I have benefi ted enormously from the advice and support of colleagues, teachers, friends, and family on three continents. The book began as a dissertation project at Columbia University, and both the book and my approach to the study of politics, more generally, were profoundly shaped by the people with whom I had the great fortune to work there. Columbia was a perfect environment for a graduate student of catholic tastes, with a faculty spanning a broad range of approaches in political science, sociology, history, and baseball. Although I learned a lot from many people there, I owe particular thanks to several: Steven Solnick, who helped me think about both the project and the profession in the earliest stages, Robert Amdur, Chuck Cameron, Ira Katznelson, Mark Kesselman, Bob Legvold, Nolan McCarty, Andy Nathan, Bob Shapiro, and Greg Wawro. Institutionally within Columbia, the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy provided invaluable resources, offi ce space, and intellectual encouragement. I am particularly grateful to Peter Berman for his energy and support, and to my dear friend Bill McAllister for his generosity, kindness, and extraordinary ability to see the big picture and the details at the same time.

Like so many others, I owe an enormous debt to the great Chuck Tilly whose infl uence will be obvious to all who read the text and even more to those who knew the man. It was an exceptional privilege to have a chance to learn from Chuck and to have the opportunity to try to follow his example. At Columbia, I was also privileged to have another extraordinary mentor, Al Stepan. Al is rightly famous for his energy, curiosity, and amazing breadth of knowledge. In addition, he achieves the barely credible feat of making politi-cal science seem glamorous.

In developing the book since my time at Columbia, I have been enormously assisted by colleagues at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University, at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) in Mexico City, at the Kellogg Institute at Notre Dame University, and at my principal home for the last six years, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At each of these institutions, I have enjoyed the gift of great

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgmentsxvi

friendship and support, not to mention terrifi c advice on political science. In addition to many others, I owe thanks to Chris Achen, Larry Bartels, Dawn Brancati, Shigeo Hirano, Keena Lipsitz, Nolan McCarty (again), Grigore Pop-Eleches, Diane Price, and Josh Tucker at Princeton; to Fabrice Lehoucq, Covadonga Meseguer, and Andreas Schedler at CIDE; and to Robert Fishman, Debra Javeline, Scott Mainwaring, and Samuel Valenzuela at Notre Dame. UNC at Chapel Hill has been a wonderful place to work, and I am indebted to the many colleagues and friends there who have helped with the book and everything else. I am especially indebted to my colleagues in the Political Science Department and at The Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Research for their friendship and collegiality.

Financial assistance for the research was provided by Columbia University, the Center for Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University, the Spray-Randleigh Foundation at the University of North Carolina, and the National Science Foundation (Award Number 0136980). I am grateful to Sam Greene, Henry Hale, Jonathan Hartlyn, Tom Kenyon, and Charlie Kurzman for insightful reading of parts of the manuscript, and to Milada Vachudova for her invaluable contributions over several readings. Two anonymous reviewers also provided very helpful suggestions. Heather Sullivan provided excellent research assistance.

I thank Lew Bateman and Anne Lovering Rounds at Cambridge University Press and Jayashree Prabhu at Newgen for their encouragement and patience. Parts of Chapter 3 and Chapter 7 were previously published in the American Political Science Review and the Slavic Review . I thank Cambridge and the Slavic Review for permission to use this material here.

In Russia, I owe too many debts over too long a time to remember them all. In Moscow, I am particularly grateful to Tatiana Gorbacheva, Sergei Khramov and the people at Sotsprof, Frank Hoffer, Vladimir Lazerev, Irena Perova, Sergei Roshin, Alan Rousso, Evgenii Siderov, Irene Stevenson, and Aleksei Titkov. I also thank Simon and Geraldine for their hospitality, which made coming back from Siberia such fun. In Irkutsk, I thank Vladimir Kazarenko, Aleksandr Obolkin, Evgenii Pavlov, Anna Turchaninova, Sergei Zaderaka, and “Madame” and her family. In Novosibirsk, I thank Pavel Taletskii, German Vinokurov, and espe-cially Maksim and Nastia. In Vladivostok, Mikhail Alekseev and Katya Burns helped me meet the right people and get oriented, and Viktor Babykin, Aleftena Grigorievna, Viktor Kaurov, Petr Kerasov, Ivan Rogovoi, Aliona Sokolova, and the journalists of Vladivostok News , Vladimir Utinko, Tamara Vadileva, Elena Vankina, and Oleg Zhurusov all provided assistance. More recently, I am deeply indebted to Sarah Lindemann-Komarova, to Vanya, and to everyone at Vozrozhdenie in the Altai Republic. I am also extremely grateful to Stewart Griffi n for his energy, enthusiasm, support, and photographs all across Siberia and the Far East, not to mention the twenty years of friendship. I cannot recom-mend anyone better for a visit to Nogliki or Swansea.

Much of the fi eldwork was done and much of my time in Russia has been spent in St. Petersburg. I am particularly grateful to Andrei Dmitriev, Ol’ga

Acknowledgments xvii

Kurnosova, and Maksim Reznik for their repeated help and insights and especially to Mikhail Druzhininskii for his exceptional generosity of spirit, his time, and his amazing archive. The highlight of any visit to St. Petersburg is, of course, the “Quiet River Bed and Breakfast.” I thank Deniska, Anya, Aliosha, and my dear, dear friend Olik for the fun, cultural programs, and general prelest’ over the years. According to Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, “General prelest’ is forgetting and not noticing one’s sinfulness.” Sounds about right.

Most of the second half of the book was written in Mexico City, where I am grateful for the love and care of my friends and my extraordinary fam-ily: Ceci and Alec, Lore and Hugh, Rafa and Lourdes, and the Palacios. I thank Roberto for many interesting early-morning conversations about the book and other topics, and for the hospitality (and unusual entertainment) he and Daniela provided.

This book, of course, has been longer in gestation than even the years in which I was consciously working on it. I owe a great debt to a number of early teachers, most prominently, Vic Hadcroft who taught me Latin, Greek, and the subversive value of education; Dr. Robert Currie who taught a generation of students the crucial (and eternal) lesson that “it’s tough at the top in the Soviet Union”; and Dr Mary McAuley who made me want to understand what happened after the Soviet experiment. Less directly but more importantly, I am grateful to my family. My grandmother, Polly Beacom, did more to shape my thinking than she could ever have imagined (or perhaps wished). I am grateful to Murray, Keith, and Lesley for their love over the years, and to my parents, to whom this book is dedicated, for everything.

I am grateful both for and to Tomás, whose arrival gave me a wonderful reason to get this book fi nished. Finally, and most of all, I thank my wife, Cecilia Martínez Gallardo. In addition to being the sunshine of my life, she also thought about and read so many drafts of every chapter of this book (including these acknowledgments) that she can recite pieces by heart. Her intellectual contributions to the book were enormous, but not even a tiny part of what she does for me and shares with me every day. Tqt.

1

Introduction

“[Maria] ‘Under Soviet power we were surrounded by illusions. But now the world has become real and knowable. Understand?’

‘It’s hard to say,’ Serdyuk replied gloomily. I don’t agree that it’s real. But as for it being knowable, I guessed that for myself a long time ago. From the smell.”

– Viktor Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger

“We know no mercy and do not ask for any.” So goes the motto of the Russian Interior Ministry’s elite riot police, the legendary OMON, and so it must have seemed to opposition demonstrators in Nizhny Novgorod on March 24, 2007 . 1 Russia’s third-largest city, 250 miles or so east of Moscow, had been chosen as the site for one in a series of “Dissenters’ Marches ,” in which those unhappy with Vladimir Putin’s growing, self-confi dent, but repressive Russia would express themselves. Faced with some 20,000 OMON and other troops brought into the city under a plan code-named Operation Fortress, fewer than twenty protesters actually made it to Gorky Square, where they had planned to gather. Those that did make it, and some innocent pensioners passing by, were thoroughly beaten for their trouble. How many had attempted to march is unknown, since police across Russia had worked hard the week before to round up opposition activists and any-one else they thought might attend. 2

A riot policeman’s lot is a varied one in Russia, however, and the next day some 3,000 OMONovtsy were gathered in Moscow to provide security for a march of a different sort. There, under the benevolent gaze of the OMON, about 15,000 “commissars” of the youth movement Nashi (“Ours”) paraded

1 OMON is an acronym for Otryad Militsii Osobogo Naznacheniya , or Special Purpose Police Unit.

2 For a series of articles on the events in Nizhny Novgorod on which this account is based, see Johnson’s Russia List # 71, March 25, 2007 ; and #72, March 26, 2007. See also International Herald Tribune Round Up of the Russian Press, March 26, 2007 at http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/26/europe/web.0326russiapress.php

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes2

through central streets of the capital, including Prospekt Sakharova, named for the great Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov. The “Nashisty” were dressed in their signature red-and-white hats, wore identical white coats, and handed out copies of their glossy booklet, “The President’s Messenger.” The message was simple: Putin’s opponents are fascists or traitors; Russia’s enemies are the United States and Russian liberals; Russia’s friend is Vladimir Putin. 3 Clearly, although the Russian Constitution guarantees that “Citizens of the Russian Federation shall have the right to gather peacefully, without weapons, and to hold meetings, rallies, demonstrations, marches and pickets,” as a prac-tical matter, different kinds of Russians have very different experiences when they try to exercise this right. 4

As I show in this book, the contrasting experiences of the “Dissenters” and Nashi in March 2007 capture well the nature of political protest in contempo-rary Russia and other regimes that mix elements of political competition and elements of authoritarianism. Protest takes place, but it is heavily managed by elites. Opposition demonstrations are frequently repressed (often preemp-tively) and are matched by government-organized pro-incumbent mobiliza-tions. Spontaneous, bottom-up or wildcat-style protests do occur, but they tend to be one-off events that are rarely coordinated over time and space. The relative calm, however, is vulnerable to splits in the ruling elite, and elite com-petition can quickly be translated into mass mobilizations in the streets.

This was not the way it was supposed to turn out when in August 1991, Boris Yeltsin climbed on a tank to face down coup plotters. But the heady dreams of the early 1990s have gone and, nearly two decades later, it is not democ-racy that has triumphed in Russia but pseudo democracy. Elections continue to be held, but their outcome is rarely in doubt. Some opposition parties and candidates run and win seats, but others are marginalized or excluded. News and current affairs programs are dominated by the views of the ruling group. Critics of the government can be seen on television, but the coverage is partial and slanted. Political debate can be read in the newspapers and heard on the radio, but intimidation and self-censorship are facts of life for journalists. In fact, Russia has become a paradigmatic case of a hybrid political regime, where political competition is offi cially legal but heavily skewed by the strength of authoritarian institutions and the weakness of independent organizations.

Political regimes that mix some elements of competition with elements of authoritarianism have long existed. 5 However, the number of regimes that are not explicit or closed authoritarian regimes but also are not full-blown liberal democracies has increased dramatically since the end of the Cold War. This growth is in large part because the would-be authoritarian today faces a different

3 Igor Romanov and Aleksandr Samarina, “Don’t Oversleep the Country. Young People Stand Up Against the Rotten West,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta , March 26, 2007.

4 Section 1, Chapter 2 , Article 31. 5 For simplicity, in this book I use the term authoritarian regime to cover all non-democracies. This

approach differs from that of Linz ( 2000 ), who defi nes authoritarian regimes to be one element in the subset of non-democracies.

Introduction 3

set of problems than his or her twentieth-century predecessors. A world that is more integrated than before means information is harder to control, and so iso-lating the country from the outside world is both more diffi cult and more costly. In addition, the death of Communism has robbed leftists and anti-Communist strongmen alike of a story to legitimize anti-democratic practices. Consequently, in more and more places, rulers are compelled to justify their practices as dem-ocratic both to domestic and to international audiences.

Hence, although there are still a number of closed, highly repressive regimes, such as Turkmenistan under Saparmurat Nyazov or North Korea under Kim Jong Il, such regimes feel increasingly like a remnant of the late, unlamented totalitarianism of the twentieth century. Instead, many (if not most) contem-porary authoritarians expend signifi cant effort participating in elections in which there is some real sense of political competition, even if the probability of the incumbents losing is small. One of the new skills needed by today’s post-modern authoritarians is managing and winning elections, preferably without cheating to the point of getting caught. However, competition is not limited to elections. In places as diverse as Bolivia , Ecuador , Georgia , Kyrgyzstan , Ukraine , and Venezuela , protest politics in the streets and workplaces has also played a key role in determining the fate of governments. Consequently, where some political competition is permitted, governments and leaders are realizing that successful authoritarianism means managing politics on both levels: in elections and in the streets.

Although much has been written about authoritarian elections and the tech-niques used to manipulate them, less is known about how the combination of political competition and authoritarian control affects the second level: politics in the streets. 6 In this book, I explore protest in contemporary hybrid regimes. Although elections make regular appearances in my account, I focus primar-ily on politics outside of elections and look specifi cally at how people express themselves through acts of protest in the factories and streets. The task is both to look at how the hybrid nature of contemporary authoritarianism affects patterns of protest and, at the same time, to assess how protest affects the regime and the ways in which control is maintained in today’s hybrids.

In doing so, I build on existing work on protest in democracies and authori-tarian states to develop an original theory of protest politics in hybrid regimes.

6 Schedler ( 2002 ), for example, examined the “menu of manipulation” and demonstrated how the voice of the people can be silenced in elections. Schedler ( 2006 ) also looked at the ways in which authoritarian elections affect regime and opposition dynamics, at the role of different domestic actors in authoritarian elections, and at the effect of international factors. Lust-Okar ( 2005 ) showed how different Arab regimes operate a policy of divide-and-rule to ensure a “loyal” oppo-sition participates in elections, whereas Magaloni ( 2006 ) took the analysis a step further by showing how a combination of carefully crafted systems of vote buying, “punishment regimes” for defectors, and coordination problems facing oppositionists can allow authoritarians to win elections even without large-scale resort to manipulation. Focusing on the long-lived PRI regime in Mexico, Magaloni was able to show how authoritarians can turn elections from a threat to their regimes into a means for strengthening control.


I argue that hybrid regimes tend to feature hybrid protest in which the isolated, direct action style of protest that characterizes authoritarian regimes is mixed with the more symbolic protest patterns of democracies. 7 I further argue that a lot of protest in hybrids is managed ; that is, permitted, controlled, and inte-grated into the broader political strategies of elites. These patterns of either isolated direct action or managed integration are compatible with both high levels of protest or a high degree of social peace: That a regime is hybrid does not tell us straightforwardly what level of protest to expect. Instead the quan-tity and kind of protest we see depends on three factors: (1) the organizational ecology of hybrids, by which I mean the nature of existing organizations and the environment that they inhabit; (2) state mobilization strategies ; and (3) pat-terns of elite political competitio n.

However, the relationship between regime and contention is not unidirec-tional; patterns of contention affect how regimes develop too. The analysis illustrates that large numbers of protesters in the streets are usually the result of fi ssures in the incumbent elite coalition but are not necessarily a sign of the kind of civil society organization that promotes longer-term democratic development. The long-term effect of crowds depends on the organizations that underlie them. Where independent organizations capable of holding elites and the state accountable emerge in the process of contention, movement in the direction of democracy is more likely. However, neither spontaneous wild-cat protests nor elite-managed demonstrations often leave behind strong, inde-pendent organizations, so we can see a lot of protest without much progress toward democratization.

Given the importance of elite unity for regime stability, I argue that contem-porary regimes that lie between democracy and closed authoritarianism are very fl uid and the site of much institutional and organizational innovation on the part of leaders seeking to hold together the elite coalitions that keep them in power. Political protest threatens to undermine elite cohesion and can lead authoritarians to experiment with new institutional and organizational strate-gies to manage and contain competition. These experiments, in turn, can have unanticipated effects on regime development. I show how this has worked in Russia as Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin responded to popular protest, both within the country and outside, to fashion a new governing system that in many ways refl ects the “state of the art” in authoritarian regime design.

Hybrid Regimes

One of the central premises of this book is that the nature of authoritarianism is changing with the end of the Cold War and with the processes of technological change and the globalization of ideas that have accompanied it. Fewer authori-tarian regimes appeal to non-democratic principles of legitimation and more speak the language of liberal democracy without fully adopting its practices.

7 For a discussion of regime types and protest patterns, see Tilly ( 2004 ).

Introduction 5

Such states, in which authoritarian control coexists with legally sanctioned, if limited, competition for political offi ce, are hybrid regimes.

Hybrids are many. According to a survey by the political scientist Larry Diamond in 2002 , only seventy-three states, or 38 percent of states in the world, could be considered liberal democracies in the sense of providing high standards of both political and civil rights. A further thirty-one, or 16.1 percent of countries, did pretty well on political rights but had signifi cant problems safeguarding civil rights. At the other end of the spectrum, Diamond consid-ered only some twenty-fi ve countries, or 13 percent of the total, to be com-pletely politically closed in the sense of being extremely repressive of both political and civil rights (Diamond 2002 ). This leaves somewhere between a quarter and a third of the countries in the world – roughly forty-fi ve to sixty-fi ve countries – in what Marina Ottaway ( 2003 ) calls “a vast gray zone that occupies the space between authoritarianism at one end and consolidated democracy at the other” (7).

Importantly, hybrids are not only many, but varied. As Levitsky and Way (2010: 20) point out, there are many ways to be hybrid. Estonia in the 1990s, for example, might be thought of as a hybrid because it was a democracy for ethnic Estonians, but political participation for ethnic Russians was strictly lim-ited. 8 Iran , by contrast, is a hybrid in that political authority is divided between elected and non-elected bodies. At the end of 2001, Diamond listed places as diverse as Colombia, Venezuela , Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, Iran, Pakistan, Kuwait, Indonesia, Malaysia , Singapore, Azerbaijan , Russia, and Ukraine (Diamond 2002 : 30–31) as being neither democratic nor closed authoritarian. Like unhappy families, it seems, each hybrid regime is hybrid in its own way. These differences across hybrids, I argue, are highly consequential for the pat-terns of protest that we observe .

Hybrids are not only varied but also rapidly changing and, as I show, are the site of major innovation. This makes them hard to divide into subcatego-ries that are both durable and analytically useful. The early lists of hybrid regimes tended to rely heavily on grouping states according to their scores on democracy indicators, with hybrids belonging to the “middle category,” whether broadly or narrowly defi ned (Diamond 2002 , Schedler 2006 ). More

8 Estonia became a full member of the European Union on May 1, 2004, having fulfi lled EU requirements on minority rights. Estonia has been given Freedom House’s highest score of 1 (on a 1–7 scale) for the quality of its political rights since 1996 and a 1 on civil rights since 2004. Nevertheless, Amnesty International, the Council of Europe, and the UN Committee Against Torture continue to express reservations about Estonia’s treatment of its Russian-speaking minor-ity, who number some 420,000 people, or approximately 30 percent of the population. About one-quarter of the Russian speakers – slightly more than 8 percent of the Estonian population – remain classifi ed as stateless and are disqualifi ed from voting in national elections. This repre-sents progress from the 32 percent who were noncitizens in 1992. See Arch Puddington Aili Piano, Camille Eiss and Tyler Roylance, Freedom House (2007). Freedom in the World: The Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties . (Rowman & Littlefi eld). p. 248. See also Europe and Central Asia: Summary of Amnesty International’s Concerns in the Region, July-December 2007 . Available at: http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/EUR01/001/2008/en


recently, scholars have sought to categorize regimes in the middle according to the way in which power is organized. For example, Balzer ( 2003 ) analyzes the politics of “managed pluralism” whereas Hadenius and Teorrell ( 2007 ) distinguish between “dominant” and “restricted multi-party systems” within the population of hybrids.

An additional term commonly used for the kinds of regimes of interest here is “illiberal democracies.” The implication is that these regimes, though not living up to full democratic standards, are nonetheless “democracies” – a term that carries with it important normative implications. By contrast, Levitsky and Way ( 2002 , 2010 ) refer to a subset of hybrids they term “com-petitive authoritarian,” refl ecting their view that competition is a feature that authoritarians would rather squeeze out of the system. Using subcategories like these can be a treacherous business, however, since regimes in the middle are quite dynamic and can be subject to apparent liberalizations and deliber-alizations as the balance of competitive and authoritarian elements changes over time, without fundamentally affecting the operation of the system (Hale 2005 ).

Consequently, instead of trying to defi ne subcategories, I use the generic term “hybrid regimes.” My argument covers a broad range of regimes in which at least some legitimate and public political competition coexists with an orga-nizational and institutional playing fi eld that renders this competition unfair. I argue that within these kinds of regimes, variations in protest patterns are likely to be driven by three key variables: organizational ecology , state mobili-zation strategies , and elite competition . Focusing on these underlying variables, rather than reifying different kinds of hybrid, is a more useful approach in a world in which real, existing regimes can change rapidly without turning into either full-blown democracies or closed authoritarian regimes.

Russian Lessons and a Theory of Protest in Hybrids

To illustrate my argument, I look in detail at one such regime, Russia. Analysts are divided as to whether in the Yeltsin era Russia was a weak democracy, a weak post-totalitarian regime, or a regime in a state of collapse. Similarly, in the Putin era there is some debate over the extent to which Russia has returned to “authoritarian ways.” 9 These are matters of judgment about which reason-able people can, and do, disagree. Fortunately, whether Russia lies on one side or the other of an imaginary regime line is not important for this book. Even though the Yeltsin and Putin eras are radically different in ways that I describe here, they share a characteristic central to my analysis: Some legitimate and public political competition coexists with an organizational and institutional playing fi eld that renders this competition unfair.

9 For the Yeltsin era, see, among many others, Cohen ( 2000 ), Colton ( 1995 ), Shleifer and Treisman ( 2004 ), Wedel (2001), Weiler (2004). For the Putin era, see, also among many others, Lindemann-Komarova and Javeline (2010), McFaul and Stoner-Weiss ( 2008 ), and Pravda ( 2005 ).

Introduction 7

Russia is an interesting case in part because of its size and political impor-tance in the Eurasian region. However, from a methodological perspective, the Russian experience is also particularly useful to the study of protest because there is considerable variation in both the volume and quality of protest between the Yeltsin and Putin eras and within the Putin era itself. I analyze protest in terms of three different periods that correspond roughly to the late Yeltsin era (1997– 2000 ), the fi rst Putin term (2000–2004) and the second Putin term (2005–2008). Under Yeltsin, as I will show, protest levels were high. By contrast, in Putin’s fi rst term protest levels were very low and the protest that did occur was politically marginalized. In Putin’s second term, however, pro-test in the streets reemerged as a signifi cant political issue, increasingly framed around a regime/opposition divide. This in turn led to signifi cant changes in the way the Russian polity is managed.

Across these three periods, we also see considerable variation in the under-lying variables that, I argue, condition the nature of protest politics. The fi rst variable is the ecology of organizations : the general environment in which organizations are born, live, and (perhaps) die; the kinds of organizations one is likely to fi nd there; and the nature of the interaction between them (Carroll and Hannan 2000 , Hannan and Freeman 1977 ). In Russia, the ecology of orga-nizations has largely been dominated by top-down, elite-focused groups. As we will see, however, since about 2005, there have been important changes in the emergence of a lively and more coherent, if still small, set of opposition forces trying to mobilize popular protest. This change in the organizational ecology has had major implications both for the kind of contention taking place and for the way in which that contention is managed by the state.

The periods also differ with regard to the second variable, state mobilization strategies . For much of the Yeltsin era, the key action was at the regional level where some regional elites sought to mobilize protesters as part of political bargaining with the center, whereas others sought to demobilize protest. This led to high levels of protest in a small number of places and low levels else-where, despite a generalized economic crisis. In the fi rst Putin term, regional governors stopped using protest as a tactic against the center but instead com-peted among themselves to show loyalty to the new incumbents in Moscow. This led to a generalized demobilization of protest.

Since 2005, however, the central Russian state has taken a much more active approach to mobilization, consciously seeking to mobilize the public in support of regime objectives, and at the same time working much harder to repress unsanctioned protesters. As a result, large numbers of pro-government marchers are visible on Russia’s streets for the fi rst time since the collapse of Communism. However, the apparent strength of the incumbent regime has driven formerly competing factions of the opposition to form alliances, result-ing in a more harried but more active and coherent opposition.

Finally, the periods also differ considerably with respect to the third vari-able: the extent of elite competition . Under Yeltsin, the elite was divided, and incentives existed to mobilize protest in the places and at the times I identify


in Chapters 3 and 4 . In sharp contrast, under Putin the elite has become dra-matically more cohesive, and regional leaders have had strong incentives to try to prevent protest from taking place. These incentives come from institutional changes made by the Putin administration, from elite perceptions that Putin’s regime will be long-lived and from changes in the economic environment. The apparent elite unity has meant that, in the fi rst Putin term in particular, levels of public protest have been very low compared to the Yeltsin era .

In addition to the variation over time on key dimensions, the Russian case is particularly interesting because it provides an excellent opportunity to study a post-modern authoritarian regime in the making, where the imperatives of domestic and international legitimacy and a desire for domestic control have produced much experimentation in the techniques of management of a hybrid regime. This means moving from looking at protest as the dependent variable to looking at how protest in turn affects the type of political regime. Through this analysis, I hope to illuminate how politics and protest have interacted to produce the contemporary, “state-of-the-art” authoritarian regime in Russia, from which others, particularly in the post-Soviet space, are learning (Silitski 2006 ).

Theoretical Implications

The analysis of protest in this book has implications for a number of different literatures in political science and sociology. Most importantly, the theory of protest presented here contributes a different perspective to the literature on contentious politics, presenting an analysis of how contention works in hybrid regimes. The argument also has implications for literature on social movements, for the literature in economics, political science and sociology on industrial con-fl ict, and for understanding the nature of repression in contemporary hybrids.

In addition to its theoretical implications, my argument covers a broad range of cases. At one extreme are highly repressive authoritarian states where opposition candidates organize and compete, but where this is very diffi cult and often downright dangerous. Belarus under Aleksandr Lukashenko is an example of one such place that seems to be at the boundary between a hybrid and a closed authoritarian regime. There protest is most likely to be isolated and limited given the weakness of independent organizations and a unifi ed elite following demobilizing strategies. At the other extreme is a case like Venezuela where strong opposition organizations, a sharply divided elite, and major pro- and anti-regime mobilizations have led to high levels of mobilization closely tied to elite confl icts but drawing in many different grassroots organizations too. In between lie a broad range of regimes in places like Kyrgyzstan, Georgia , Serbia , Indonesia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Colombia. I return to the issue of places other than Russia in the concluding chapter.

Literature on Contentious Politics and Social Movements Scholarship on contention has demonstrated a strong relationship between pat-terns of contention and the nature of the political regime in which contention

Introduction 9

takes place (Tilly 2004 , Davenport 2005 , 2007 ). I build on this literature by looking at how contention and regime are related in the hybrid regimes that have emerged as the largest group of nondemocratic states in the post–Cold War era. The goal is twofold: to propose a characterization of the nature of protest and to explain the dynamics that underlie protest patterns.

The literature on contentious politics poses a sharp contrast between protest in democracies and protest in authoritarian regimes. Simplifying somewhat, democracies are thought to be full of open, organized contention, in which usually nonviolent demonstrations of worthiness, unity, numbers, and com-mitment on the part of social movements are a central element of mainstream politics. So mainstream has contention become, in fact, that many see the long-standing democracies as increasingly becoming “movement societies” (Meyer and Tarrow 1998 ).

By contrast, contention in closed autocracies is heavily repressed and public protest is rare, dangerous, and often violent. Actions are often direct in nature rather than symbolic, geographically and politically isolated, spontaneous, and largely without the coordination of organized social movements (Tilly 2004 ). Given this characterization, a key question is how protest in hybrids is likely to compare with patterns in democracies and closed authoritarian regimes, both in terms of the amount of protest we should see and in terms of the kind or repertoires of protest that we should expect.

As far as levels of protest are concerned, we will see that one of the lessons of the Russian case is that identifying a regime as “hybrid” does not actually tell us much about what levels of political protest to expect. It is neither the case that protest increases linearly as we move from closed authoritarianism toward democracy, nor the case that the relationship is curvilinear, with higher levels of protest in between democracy and autocracy. In fact, I show that hybridity is compatible with both highly mobilized protest politics and a high degree of social and political peace. The level and kind of protest depend on the nature of organizations in society and in particular on the balance between state-controlled and autonomous organizations (organizational ecology), the levels and kinds of state efforts to mobilize supporters in the streets (state mobilization), and the nature of elite competition.

In terms of the repertoires of protest we are likely to see, Chapter 2 sug-gests that hybrid regimes, perhaps unsurprisingly, exhibit hybrid patterns of protest. As in authoritarian regimes, protesters in hybrids are often likely to resort to direct actions and attempts at moral shaming through actions like hunger strikes. These actions are typical of prisoners and others who lack open, recognized political channels to process their demands. However, protest also includes the peaceful displays of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment like marches, demonstrations, and strikes that we associate with democracy.

Whatever their form, however, I show that contentious actions often take place without the creation of dense, durable social networks to coordinate and sustain action of the kind we associate with social movements. Local, material, and narrowly framed claims and identities tend to inhibit aggregation. When


combined with a repressive state and a lack of a preexisting autonomous orga-nizational infrastructure, it is extremely diffi cult to develop the broad, sus-tained campaigns common in democracies.

I also show that we cannot simply “apply” the standard models of social movement analysis, what McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly call the “classic social movement agenda” ( 2001 ), to understanding contention in hybrid regimes. The existing models rely heavily on the existence of autonomous social move-ments to organize, frame, and direct contention, but the underlying social movement organizations of this model cannot be taken for granted. Where there is a strong, organized, and autonomous “opposition” in place, protest in hybrids will look like that in democracies. To the extent that such opposition organizations are missing, however, protest patterns will be more like authori-tarian regimes. The nature of the organizational world – what I call the organi-zational ecology – is therefore a variable, and different organizational ecologies will produce different patterns of contention .

Nevertheless, other features of the classic model remain very important, if in need of adaptation to the hybrid context. For example, political opportunities are central to the classic social movement agenda and remain crucial in hybrids. Elite divisions – a staple of traditional social movement analysis – are, as I show, powerfully associated with protest in hybrids. Nevertheless, even here there are some wrinkles. The usual metaphor used when discussing political opportuni-ties is of a regime opening and closing and so creating or eliminating opportuni-ties for protesters. This image is misleading in a number of ways.

First, a more accurate image is one in which elite competition not merely creates opportunities but also directly drives who mobilizes and when through the organizational capacity at the disposal of key leaders. When elites have the capacity to mobilize signifi cant publics, the structure of elite confl ict shapes not just the amount of protest we see (rising with elite divisions), but also the iden-tity of protesters and the geography of where protest takes place.

Second, as I show, the opening of elite competition does not straightfor-wardly lead to the diffusion of protest. Protest diffusion is only likely to take place when national and local political competition and elite cleavages coin-cide and national contests are repeated at the local level. By contrast, when elite cleavages at the national and local level are orthogonal to one another, protest is much less likely to diffuse.

Third, because elite incentives – and so patterns of elite competition – are shaped by both formal and informal institutions, institutional rules and prac-tices are likely to have a direct infl uence on protest in ways that scholars have tended to neglect. For example, formal rules governing arenas of elite compe-tition like elections will have, as we will see, an effect on patterns of protest. Broader systems of institutions, such as programs of bargaining between labor, employers, and the state, will also affect protest patterns. Moreover, the effects of institutions on protest, as on other political phenomena, will often be unex-pected or unintentional (Hall and Taylor 1996 , Pierson 2000 ). This is because the effect of institutions on protest depends not just on the rules or institutions

Introduction 11

themselves but also on the nature of the organizations working within (or around) the rules .

Industrial Confl ict One of the largest literatures in the social sciences is on industrial confl ict and strikes. Each of the main disciplines in the social sciences – anthropology, economics, sociology, and political science – has had something to say about strikes. Consequently, we know a lot about what determines strike patterns in the advanced industrial democracies and in places with large and vibrant labor movements, where strikes have often played a major role in bringing about political regime change.

Where independent unions are weak or absent, however, we know little about strike patterns. Moreover, our existing sets of theories, which relate strikes to the nature of the bargaining environment or to the relative strength of employers and unions, have little to say about industrial confl ict in places where unions are part of a state apparatus of control rather than representa-tion. As a result, we know little about patterns of industrial confl ict in hybrids where hierarchical unions are common.

By contrast, the focus in this book on organizational ecology, elite mobiliz-ing strategies, and elite competition provides insight into patterns of indus-trial confl ict in precisely those cases where workers are in an environment dominated by organizations meant to control them rather than represent them. What we see are workers sometimes striking within the framework of elite political competition and sometimes outside of it. Where elites have an inter-est in organizing strikes, namely where they lack other forms of bargaining power, we see high levels of strike action, usually with the blessing of the offi -cial unions. By contrast, where elites try to demobilize workers, strikes emerge in a wildcat, uncoordinated fashion, responding to the most extreme hardships and moral outrage .

Hybrid Regimes and Repression Through the analysis of protest, this book also adds a unique perspective to the growing literature on the politics of hybrid regimes. The central question in most this literature is how hybrids are able to maintain stability even in the pres-ence of regularized elections that, both in principle and in practice, create the potential for regime vulnerability. 10 The focus on protest, however, points our attention in a somewhat different direction, reminding us that contemporary authoritarians not only need to fi nd ways to defeat-proof elections; they also need to defeat-proof the streets.

In fact, the politics of elections and the politics of the street are connected. Challenges from outside of the elite in the form of protest or contention can signal the weakness of incumbents and encourage potential alternative elites

10 See, for example, Brownlee ( 2007 ), Bunce and Wolchik ( 2009 ), Howard and Roessler ( 2006 ), Levitsky and Way ( 2010 ), Lindberg ( 2006 , 2009 ), Lust-Okar ( 2005 ), Schedler ( 2006 ).


to unite and make an electoral challenge. Similarly, a weak performance in the elections themselves can bring crowds onto the streets to try to force the incumbents out. As many authoritarians have found out in recent years, it is one thing to falsify an election, but it can be quite a different matter to maintain control in the streets afterwards. This is, in part, because managing contention is more diffi cult in some ways than managing elections. Whereas elections are single, focused events that require large numbers of people and intensive coor-dination to pose a challenge, small numbers of committed opponents in the streets can create enough of an impression of weakness to constitute a problem. Moreover, rulers in hybrids face this challenge in a more acute form than their counterparts in closed authoritarian regimes. Leaders in contemporary hybrids by defi nition allow at least some public displays of opposition and are without the full-blown repressive apparatus of closed authoritarians. Consequently, I argue, repression is harder in hybrids, which are therefore likely to be more unstable than closed authoritarian regimes. It is no coincidence that leaders in hybrids seem to be so frequently brought down by street demonstrations.

Nevertheless, some of these leaders are aware of their vulnerability and have recognized the need to take a broad approach to stabilizing the regime. This means mobilizing people to create an impression of dominance and elite unity, just as much as it means using repression. In this book, we will see how subna-tional appointments, the incorporation of unions, licensing of interest groups and NGOs, and fi lling the organizational space with pro-regime ersatz social movements have all become part of the arsenal for ensuring stability and elite cohesion.

The importance for authoritarian stability of maintaining elite unity also suggests that the standard model of thinking about non-democratic regimes in terms of a “regime” on the one hand and “opposition” on the other (even if subdivided into hardliners and softliners) can be very misleading. Most schol-ars analyze authoritarian regime stability in terms of state strength and oppo-sition strength (Levitsky and Way 2010 ). As I show, however, there is often a very fl uid boundary between the two. Politicians and their followers switch sides frequently and the switching both affects, and is affected by, protest pol-itics. Protesters signal to political leaders the potential benefi ts of changing allegiances, and elite defections or alliances signal to protesters the effective-ness (or futility) of protesting. In such cases, regime strength and opposition strength are not best thought of as being independent variables, but instead are often codetermined.

In this view, hybridity is neither the result of unsuccessful authoritarians who fail to impose a closed regime (Way 2002 ), nor a trick adopted in order to create uncertainty in the eyes of people trying to evaluate the regime (Ottaway 2003 ). Nor are hybrid regimes necessarily the result of an unfi nished struggle between an authoritarian state and a democratic opposition. Instead, hybrid regimes can be deliberately designed to extract the benefi ts of competition while minimizing the likelihood of loss of control. Hybridity may actually be preferred by incumbents as a way to manage the disunity and disorder that

Introduction 13

threaten all authoritarian political regimes. Competition may be less some-thing that authoritarians have failed to eliminate than something that they consciously allow and try to control.

Hybridity offers a range of tools for authoritarian rulers to demonstrate sup-port, strength, and manage elite ambitions. For example, legitimizing political competition can mitigate the most severe diffi culty that authoritarian regimes typically have: the problem of succession. Without regularized and accepted ways of adjudicating between rival claimants, authoritarian regimes often suc-cumb to the crisis and infi ghting that accompanies succession. However, by preserving a legitimate sphere of competition for the succession, the ruling group can help institutionalize and shape the process of succession, stabilize expectations, and limit the battles among would-be contenders. As we will see in Chapter 5 , a good example of this is the way the Duma elections in 1999 helped stabilize the politics of succession in Russia as Boris Yeltsin approached the end of his second term. 11 Other examples discussed here include tech-niques to license civil society and manage NGOs in ways that provide the state with information while limiting the capacity of groups to organize opposi-tion . Managing competition, however, is a diffi cult and ever-changing chal-lenge that requires frequent political and institutional innovation on the part of incumbents.

Finally, this book demonstrates that in general we need to be more careful to understand the organizational basis of crowds on the streets. Not all pro-testers demonstrating under (or even against) authoritarian rule are democrats pushing for liberal revolutions. As we discovered in Kyrgyzstan in 2005, you can see big crowds without it meaning that there is real pressure from below for reform or democratization (Heathershaw 2007 , Radnitz 2006 ). Not every “revolution” is a democratic revolution. A fi rst step in trying to identify those that are, and those that are not, is to examine carefully the organizational apparatus behind the crowds we see.

Politics in Russia through the Lens of Protest

In addition to laying a theoretical foundation for the study of protest in hybrid regimes, this book offers a different vantage point from which to view Russian politics in the post-Communist period. The end of Communism in the former Soviet bloc, and in Russia in particular, witnessed the greatest single trans-fer of property rights in history. Analysts, scholars, and international institu-tions consequently spent countless hours and millions of dollars on the task of understanding and developing frameworks for the creation of effective prop-erty owners and effi cient (and occasionally equitable) capital markets. 12 Other

11 On the historical diffi culties of succession in Russia, see Ra’anan ( 2006 ). 12 For an annotated bibliography of the voluminous literature on the economics of the transi-

tion, and of privatization and corporate governance issues in general, see World Bank ( 2002 ). For political analyses, see especially Appel ( 2004 ), Boycko, Shliefer, and Vishny ( 1995 ), Bunce ( 1999 ), Fish ( 1998 ), Orenstein ( 2001 ), Roland ( 2000 ), and Shleifer and Treisman ( 2000 ).


scholars of the region leapt at the chance to study the emerging representa-tive institutions that Russia’s third revolution brought into being. This meant focusing on elite politics, the presidency, parliaments, political parties, elec-tions, electoral laws, the constitution, and the emerging news and information media. 13

By contrast, in this book, I look at Russian politics through the lens of politi-cal protest and think about how elites, political institutions, and the broader public interact in the factories, streets, and squares of Russia. I look at how Russians are organized collectively and what this means for how they act polit-ically. At the same time, I consider what these actions mean for the character of the regime in which they live.

In putting protest at the center of the analysis, I provide a new perspective that overturns important parts of the conventional wisdom on the post-Soviet era. While most analysts have seen Russians as largely passive in the face of the trans-formations taking place in their country, I demonstrate that this is a very mislead-ing picture of what actually has taken place. 14 In fact, I show that Russians have sometimes been very active participants in protest. There have, however, also been times and places in which Russians have indeed been extremely passive. The key challenge is to understand how both protest and passivity are produced by, and interact with, organizations, the state, and elites’ politics.

Mobilization was high between 1997 and 1999, and although a broad spectrum of Russian society was involved, protest was dominated by workers who were marching, striking, and hunger-striking in pursuit of unpaid wages. Despite a broad economic and social crisis, however, protest was concentrated in a small number of very highly mobilized regions. I demonstrate that this mobilization was only partly driven from below. Regional governors antipa-thetic to the Kremlin exploited weak control over fi nancing, the absence of the rule of law, and an organizational ecology that put inherited labor organiza-tions largely at the governors’ disposal to put large numbers of protesters on the streets. In very few cases did these protests lead to the creation of inde-pendent organizations for the long-term pursuit of interests, and more rarely still did they amount to a nationally organized, independent social movement. Instead, elite manipulation and a national labor leadership dependent upon the state served to inhibit the development of autonomous and representative organizations and so closed off a key potential source of pressure for the con-solidation of democracy.

13 The literature on electoral politics and elected institutions is vast. For a brief sample on elec-tions, see Colton ( 2000 ), on federalism, Filipov, Ordeshook, and Shvetsova ( 2004 ), on parties, Hale ( 2006b ), on candidates and political strategy, Smyth ( 2006 ), on the media, Oates ( 2006 ), on the Duma, Smith and Remington ( 2001 ), on elite politics, Shevtsova ( 1999 ) and ( 2003 ), and on economic voting, Tucker ( 2006 ).

14 For work on passivity, see Ashwin ( 1999 ), Clarke et al. ( 1995 ), Connor ( 1996 ), Cook ( 1997 ), Crowley ( 1997 ), Davis ( 2001 ), Javeline ( 2003 ), Kubicek ( 2002 ), and Mandel ( 2001 ). Christensen ( 1999 ) takes a different approach, stressing the activism of workers and their sidelining by polit-ical leaders. For a more detailed discussion of these issues, see Chapter 2 .

Introduction 15

To show this, I look at a range of groups and organizations including the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR), old-age pension-ers’ groups, mothers, veterans of the Chernobyl cleanup, and the National Bolshevik Party, as well as isolated shipyard workers on hunger strike and people who end their own lives as a last act of desperation.

My focus on the relationship between organizations, the state, elites, and protest not only tells a different story but also shows Russian politics in the post-Communist period in a new interpretive light. The prevailing view out-side of Russia now is to see the Yeltsin era as one of nascent democracy, or at least pluralism, marked by the “normal” defects one would expect to see in a middle-income country (Shleifer and Treisman 2004 ). However, the tensions, political confl ict, and disintegration of the state evident from the data and analysis presented here show that “desperate” and “chaotic” are more appro-priate adjectives for the Yeltsin era than “normal.” On this evidence, Russia under Yeltsin was not a pluralistic protodemocracy, but rather a hybrid regime in which citizens lacked the organizational capacity to make their interests felt and instead had to rely on hierarchical political relationships that subordinated rather than represented them.

As for the Putin era, the conventional wisdom has it that the control of the center and the Federal government has increased dramatically, at the expense of Russia’s prospects for democratization (McFaul and Stoner-Weiss 2008 ). In part, studying protest adds additional data to this conventional view. There indeed has been an expansion of central control, with considerable innovation in creating new ways of ensuring elite loyalty while repressing and managing politics in the streets. I show how some of the key changes of the Putin years – from the appointment of regional governors to the creation of pro- regime youth organizations – have their roots in protest politics. Throughout his presi-dency, Vladimir Putin has worked to co-opt organizations with the potential to mobilize large numbers, starting with the labor unions and moving on to the political machines of the regional governors. I also argue that the Kremlin undertook a second major redesign of the regime after 2005 in response to the shock of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and mass mobilization in cit-ies across Russia. To head off the potential political power of protest in the streets and avert threats to the unity of his coalition, Putin poured resources and political capital into shaping the organizational context in such a way as to allow competition while coming close to defeat-proofi ng the system.

However, the lens of contentious politics also provides a different perspec-tive on the political innovations of the Putin era and raises some new potential paradoxes. Order is a constantly moving target for rulers in hybrid regimes, and the Kremlin’s efforts to create a political system in which competition is allowed but defeat is highly improbable is full of inherent tensions. One key paradox is that trying to defeat-proof politics severely limits the extent of polit-ical contestation, reducing the incentives of marginal groups to play within the system and increasing their incentives to mobilize outside of permitted politics. This dynamic increases the likelihood of instability “out of nowhere” (Kuran


1991 , Kurzman 2004 ). To combat this tendency, the Kremlin has introduced further political innovations in an attempt to create institutions that gener-ate nonelectoral paths to political participation. Over time, these nonelectoral institutions may actually tend to empower civil society groups outside of the regime and so, ironically, the very attempt to control politics might have unin-tended pro-democratic consequences .

Structure of the Book

The book is structured as follows. Chapter 1 lays out a conceptual framework that ties together the more detailed theoretical arguments developed in each subsequent chapter. I explain how the ecology of organizations , state mobi-lization strategies , and elite competition differ in hybrids from either closed authoritarian regimes or liberal democracies, and so have a distinctively strong effect both on the nature of protest in hybrid regimes and, in turn, on the nature of the regime itself.

In Chapter 2 , I take a close look at contention in Russia in the latter part of the 1990s, as seen through the lens of daily Interior Ministry (MVD ) security reports on the sociopolitical situation. I show that the conventional wisdom of a passive Russia is very misleading; many people in many places in Russia were in fact highly mobilized during this period. I also show that the hybrid nature of the political regime is refl ected in the hybrid nature of protest.

In Chapter 3 , I develop further the argument about the effect of organiza-tional ecology, state mobilization strategies, and elite competition on protests. I narrow the focus to the largest single element of protest in Russia – strikes – and set out a theory of strikes in which authoritarian institutions created to control labor mobilization continue to have signifi cant effects in the post- Communist era, forming an organizational ecology in which strike patterns depend heavily on when regional elites want to see mobilization. Theorizing about state mobilizing strategies and elite competition in this context, I posit that politically isolated elites with few other resources are likely to encourage mobilization in their regions, whereas strong and well-connected elites try to prevent mobilization. As I show, this takes us a long way to understanding the wide variation across regions in the incidence of strikes.

In Chapter 4 , I show how elite competition affects the temporal dynamics of protest. The years 1997 through 1999 constituted a turbulent period featuring major waves of strikes, hunger-strikes, marches, and demonstrations. I show that acute confl ict over fundamental rules of the political game among the Moscow elite and between Moscow and the regions led to very high levels of protest. I demonstrate that although the economic crisis undoubtedly played a role, signifi cant changes took place in the identity of protesters over time as a function of elite-level political confl ict.

In Chapter 5 , I address the issue of protest decline. Using a model that com-bines political signaling with the structural effects of formal rules, I show that it was not the measures taken directly by Putin that brought an end to the pro-test wave as much as the political signal sent to elites by Putin’s rapid political

Introduction 17

ascent. I also argue that the institutional character of the 1999 parliamentary election, in which national and local offi cials competed in separate parts of the ballot, also helped insulate the elections from mass mobilization.

In the closing chapters of the book, I turn from looking at how regimes affect protest to thinking about how protest has infl uenced the design of the regime during the Presidency of Vladimir Putin. In Chapter 6 , I look at the institu-tional changes through which elites and voters were encouraged to bandwagon with the regime even in the absence of a hegemonic political party with a deep network of organizations across the country. 15

In Chapter 7 , I look at the problem of order “from below” and at efforts to prevent challenges to the regime from outside of the elite in hybrid regimes. I argue that incumbents in hybrids are more vulnerable to street protest than incumbents in other kinds of political regime. I also recount in detail the fi rst major challenge to Putin’s supremacy with the so-called Pensioners’ Revolt of January 2005 and show how this challenge pushed the Kremlin into high gear in devising a system for managing challenges from outside of the ruling elite. To achieve this, the Putin administration has both revived elements of the repertoire of repression established in the Brezhnev era and innovated in creat-ing a system for licensing civil society and fi lling the organizational space with ersatz social movements. This has put Russia at the cutting edge of postmodern authoritarian regime design.

In the fi nal chapter, I put the Russian experience explicitly back in compara-tive perspective. I detail the conditions under which other cases are likely to resemble Russia and when they are likely to be different, as well as pointing to the broader implications of this book for literatures on industrial confl ict, social movements, and hybrid regimes. I conclude with thoughts on what my analysis suggests about regime dynamics in Russia and in other hybrid regimes. Specifi cally, I argue that a so-called colored revolution in Russia is unlikely without a major split in the elite. Although such a split seems implausible in the short term, it is clearly possible, and my analysis suggests that splits among important elite factions would be quickly extended to the streets. 16 I end by considering what the book implies for the prospects for democracy in Russia. What I show is that intermediate organizations linking citizens to the state matter enormously. Protests mobilized by sparring elites alone are unlikely to lead to democratization in the absence of strong grassroots organizations that can hold leaders accountable. Nevertheless, I point to some potentially signifi -cant changes under Putin that are likely to infl uence the development of inde-pendent organizations in the longer term and that may prove to be signifi cant for democratization. Thus, I argue, Vladimir Putin, albeit unintentionally, may leave Russia in better shape for democracy than he found it.

15 The hegemonic nature of the political party United Russia was not fully established until the last months of the Putin Presidency during the December 2007 Duma election campaign.

16 For enthusiastic appraisals of the so-called colored revolutions, see Aslund and McFaul ( 2006 ), and Karatnycky and Ackerman ( 2005 ). For a more skeptical analysis, see Beissinger ( 2006 ), Hale ( 2006a ), and Kalandadze and Orenstein ( 2009 ).

18

1

Protest and Regimes

Organizational Ecology, Mobilization Strategies, and Elite Competition

“Yeltsin-schmeltsin. What do I care so long as they don’t go smashing my face against a table .”

Viktor Pelevin, Generation P .

The main subject of this book is political protest: a range of actions, including strikes, hunger strikes, sit-ins, blockades, occupations, marches, and other actions used by groups of people from time to time to make demands on the state or on other private people whose behavior can be infl uenced by the state. These are the kinds of actions known to social scientists as contentious politics . 1 As Charles Tilly ( 2004 ) and others have shown, what kinds of contention we see in a given place depends to a signifi cant extent on the nature of the political regime in which pro-test takes place, and in particular on whether the country in question is democratic and provides a high degree of legal protection for protest, or is authoritarian and does not. Protest in turn often has signifi cant effects on the nature of the broader political regime and usually plays a major role in both transitions to democracy and in transitions away from democracy (Collier 1999 , Bermeo 2003 ).

However, in the contemporary world, many political regimes do not fi t neatly within this picture of democracies that permit protest and autocracies that repress it. Instead, there are a great many countries that possess some attributes of democracy and some of autocracy; places in which protest is often allowed, but in which the state goes to considerable lengths to control, manip-ulate, and channel it in ways not consistent with democratic principles. These regimes, which I call hybrids, present a challenge for our understanding of political protest and how it interacts with different political systems. What kind of protest should we expect and under what conditions? In this chapter, I set out my theory of contention in hybrid regimes. I argue that we should in

1 In the interests of simplicity, I use the terms “protest,” “political protest,” “protest politics,” “con-tention,” and “contentious politics” synonymously, though technically “protest” is a subset of “contentious politics,” which also includes civil wars, rebellions, riots, and so on. For a defi nition of contention, see Tarrow ( 2003 ).

Protest and Regimes 19

fact expect to see a variety of levels and kinds of protest depending upon three key variables: (1) the ecology of organizations present, (2) state mobilizing strategies, and (3) elite competition.

I begin this chapter by discussing how the existing literature characterizes protest under different kinds of political regimes: democracy, closed autocra-cies, and hybrids. I then discuss each of the three key variables in turn, ana-lyzing their role and setting out how they can be operationalized. I close by discussing how protest is not only shaped by regime type but also can shape the nature of the political regime itself.

How Regimes Affect Contention

In considering the effects of regimes on contention, I distinguish between three types of regime: closed autocracies, in which public expressions of discontent are either de jure or de facto outlawed; liberal democracies, in which contention is a regular, everyday part of the political process; and regimes that lie somewhere in between, which I call “hybrid regimes.” Among political scientists and sociolo-gists, there is a considerable degree of consensus on what kinds of contention to expect at the extremes of the regime spectrum. In the middle, however, there is a lot of debate. In this section, I outline the consensus on the extremes and the debate in the middle. I argue that much of the debate is a result of the fact that conditions affecting protest vary considerably across different hybrid regimes. This variation explains, for example, the disagreement among scholars about how much contention to expect. Moreover, conditions are also likely to vary considerably within one kind of regime at different times. Consequently, what we should in fact observe is a variety of outcomes across hybrid regimes.

Protest in Democracies There is a vast and long-standing literature in political science, sociology, and other academic disciplines on the forms and role of protest in long-standing democracies, refl ecting the fact that protest in democracies is both a normal and a frequent element of political life. In fact, so frequent and normal is pro-test in democracies that Meyer and Tarrow ( 1998 ) consider contemporary liberal democracies to be “movement” societies in which the diffusion, insti-tutionalization, and professionalization of protest have turned formerly con-troversial acts by the politically excluded into part of the standard repertoire of political participation for many ordinary citizens. Goldstone ( 2004 ) makes a similar claim, pointing out that even the basic distinction between institu-tionalized and non-institutionalized political participation that had formerly distinguished the study of protest politics from other kinds of politics no longer makes sense in democracies. Protest has become simply one political strategy and is generally complementary to, rather than separate from, institutionalized forms of political participation.

Even though protest has moved to the mainstream of liberal democracy, there is still, of course, variation in the extent to which we observe protest in


different countries and the degree to which that protest is seen as legitimate. The “contentious French ,” to use Tilly’s term (1986), for example, still appear to lead in the frequency and political acceptability of protest in Western Europe. Similarly, post-revolutionary Portuguese power holders seem to welcome the voices of protesters more than their neighbors in Spain , who lived through a brokered transition to democracy (Fishman 2009 ). These differences, notwith-standing the integration of protest into institutionalized democratic politics, tend to create a shared desire on the part of protesters for positive attention and so has led to widespread respect for the general norms of democratic political participation. Together, these effects tend to limit the extent to which protest in liberal democracies threatens either people or property. Consequently, although violence and terrorism do take place and capture much of the media attention, the vast majority of protest in these regimes tends to be both moderate and public, and more likely to involve making claims, verbalizing challenges, and demonstrating worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment than about taking direct action (McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001 : 269).

The mellowing effects of democracy on protest are paralleled by, and related to, the effects of democracy on repression. State-sponsored repression – that is, violations of civil rights and/or the physical integrity of citizens – has consis-tently been shown to be lower in democracies than in non-democracies. 2 There is variation, of course. Davenport ( 2007 ) shows the effect of democracy on repression to be stronger for physical integrity violations than for civil rights. McPhail and McCarthy ( 2005 ) show that within a given democracy (the United States), the extent and nature of repression depends on the location in which protest takes place, the training of the police involved, and the actions of police elsewhere. Moreover, these caveats only concern obvious, observable repres-sion by state agents. Other forms such as channeling of discontent (Oberschall 1973 ), the use of non-state agents to carry out repression, and the use of covert repression (Earl 2003 ) are common, if largely unmeasured, even in democracies. Nevertheless, compared to autocracy, the evidence for what Christian Davenport calls “the domestic democratic peace” is strong (Davenport 2007 ) .

Protest in Closed Autocracies In sharp contrast to democracies, classical closed authoritarian regimes usually try to ban or prevent virtually all forms of public protest. For example, in the strict authoritarian conditions of a place like contemporary Burma, public pro-test is both rare and dangerous. In the most extreme case, totalitarian regimes attempt to establish a monopoly of all public participation, often criminal-izing and harshly punishing any form of non-sanctioned activity (Linz 2000 , Freidrich and Brzezinski 1956 ). Such ambitious efforts at social control are, or course, never entirely successful, but they do have a dramatic effect on the volume and nature of contention.

2 See, among others, Cingranelli and Richards ( 1999 ), Hibbs ( 1973 ), Regan and Henderson ( 2002 ).


As a result, in highly repressive regimes, the most pervasive forms of “pro-test” are likely to consist of “everyday forms of resistance” that are largely sub rosa or disguised to avoid creating a direct challenge to the authorities (Scott 1985 ). Protest that is public tends to be centered around offi cial events like state funerals or offi cial holidays, which offer both the excuse to gather together and the space for challenges to the regime, whether large or small (Tilly 2004 , 30). Beyond this, protest in authoritarian regimes often takes the form of direct action, ranging from limited and local acts of violence or property seizure to large-scale armed insurrections against the incumbent regime (Wood 2000 ). As Tilly ( 2004 ) puts it, protest “either … adopts forbidden clandestine attacks on offi cials or it crowds into the relatively protected spaces of authorized public gatherings such as funerals, holidays, and civic ceremonies” (30).

This is well illustrated by looking at political protest under Communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe regimes that constituted the archetype for think-ing about totalitarian and post-totalitarian states. In these states, the monop-oly on political activity claimed by the Communist Party meant that public demonstrations of dissent, though technically legal, were extremely dangerous and generally avoided.

This of course did not mean that there was no dissent. In fact, the opening of the Soviet archives suggests that mass protests were considerably more common than had previously been thought. Under Stalin , for example, resistance to the collectivization of agriculture was widespread and took a range of forms from gossip and “counter-revolutionary” rumor (what the Bolsheviks described as “kulak agitprop”) to acts of destruction, assassination of Communist offi cials, and militarized resistance (Viola 1996 ). Strikes and uprisings also took place, on a more limited basis, in urban areas in response to price rises and changes in working conditions (Viola 2002 ). After Stalin, violent protest continued to break out from time to time as a result of the strains of industrialization and the tensions created by the massive population movements that characterized the postwar USSR (Kozlov 2002 ). Whereas such actions in the USSR were rarely, if ever, framed in anti-regime terms, protest in Communist states outside of the USSR often had an overtly anti-Soviet character, with the armed uprising in Hungary in 1956 being only the most obvious example. But whether framed in antisystem or anti-Soviet terms or not, protests in the postwar period were regularly met with militarized violence and heavy repression on the part of the state (Touraine 1983 ).

This broad distinction between authoritarianism and democracy, of course, is an ideal type, and reality is much more complex. For example, Solidarity in Poland and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia both illustrated how highly visible, nonviolent demonstrations and petitions (democratic-style contention) can be effective tools even in the most repressive of situations. 3 In a different context,

3 Though the contents of Charter 77 were repressed by the Czechoslovak authorities, the existence of the Charter was widely publicized by the government itself as part of an anti-Charter cam-paign. See Kraus ( 2007 ).


O’Brien and Li ( 2006 ) describe tolerated protest in Communist China, where “rightful rebels” exploit political promises and divisions within the state to make collective claims. Similarly, Chen (forthcoming) shows how the Chinese Communist Party’s ideological commitment to mass politics has led it to toler-ate protest at levels quite unimaginable within the framework of the literature on totalitarianism or post-totalitarianism.

Nevertheless, though such protests are often tolerated and on occasion effec-tive, a key feature of contention in strict authoritarian contexts is the diffi culty of creating and maintaining the kind of social movements or organizations that are so commonly associated with protest politics in democracies. Even in those authoritarian regimes where protest is tolerated, independent organization out-side of the party-state is either completely forbidden or greatly circumscribed. The effect is to make contention localized, to inhibit “scaling-up,” to make it diffi cult to sustain protest over time, and to limit the framing of demands to terms that are comprehensible and not too threatening to the authorities .

By the same token, organizational life in democracies is neither as egalitar-ian, nor as comprehensive as the ideal-type would suggest, but rather tends to refl ect social inequalities and prejudices that make the playing fi eld very uneven for different individuals and groups. In reality, some groups, and especially new entrants to the polity, often have to resort to quite disruptive forms of activity to have their voices heard (Guidry and Sawyer 2003 ). Moreover, the relatively broad realm of what is considered acceptable in democracies can also be used to facilitate repression by legitimizing exclusion of protests that step outside of prevailing social norms (Koopmans 1997 ). Nevertheless, with such caveats in mind, broad qualitative and quantitative differences between protest under democracy and closed authoritarianism hold quite well.

Protest in Hybrid Regimes With the end of the Cold War, however, this analytic distinction between stable democracies and closed authoritarian regimes has become less useful. Consequently, there has been increasing interest in contentious politics in hybrid regimes but little consensus on the patterns we should expect to see.

There is agreement on one, more or less obvious, point: We should see more protest in hybrids than in closed authoritarian regimes. Since protest is, by defi nition, permitted in hybrid regimes and has, offi cially at least, a legitimate role to play in political life, massive repression is not expected as the state’s fi rst reaction to manifestations of dissent. Moreover, the state does not claim a monopoly of political action or organization, and social movements and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are permitted to operate. In general, therefore, we should expect to see higher levels of political protest in hybrid regimes than we would in closed authoritarian regimes, and greater resort to public displays of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment than to the sub rosa or direct action typical in closed regimes.

However, on the question of how protest in hybrids should compare to protest in democracies, existing studies are either ambiguous or contradictory. There is


one school of thought that draws analogies to hybrid regimes from the literature on political opportunity structure initially developed for the analysis of protest in advanced industrial democracies. Eisinger ( 1973 ) and Tarrow ( 1998 ) argued that we should see a curvilinear relationship between protest and the openness of political institutions to infl uence from outside. When access to political insti-tutions is very limited, protest levels are low because there is little possibility of infl uence to encourage protesters. When access to institutions is high, there is also little incentive to protest because politics works largely through institutions. In the middle, however, where there is some access, there are substantial incen-tives to invest in protest both to infl uence specifi c decisions and to expand access. Hence middle levels of openness are associated with the highest levels of protest. The analogy to regime types goes as follows; we might expect low levels of pro-test in authoritarian regimes and higher levels in democracies, but we should see the highest levels in hybrids, where there is some access to political institutions but much remaining frustration with institutionalized politics.

Support for using this political opportunity structure argument to think about hybrid regimes can be drawn from a series of recent studies of democra-tization. The democratization process in the post-Communist states of Eastern and Central Europe and the former USSR involved massive demonstrations, widespread strikes, and other forms of collective protest as the regimes began to open up to political expression and competition (Beissinger 2002 , Kuran 1991 ). However, the period after Communism in these countries, many have argued, was marked by demobilization as politics left the streets and moved into formal institutions (Hipsher 1996, Kamenitsa 1998 ). In other words, protest patterns showed a curvilinear relationship: As highly repressive closed regimes fi rst liberalized and then democratized, protest levels rose and then fell.

If this is the picture drawn from the experience of the post-Communist states, studies of democratization in other parts of the world add another interesting twist. Guillermo Trejo’s analysis of protest and democratization in Mexico demonstrates clearly the role of peaceful protest in the democratiza-tion of Mexico, but also focuses heavily on violent insurgency (Trejo forthcom-ing). Indeed, Trejo argues that violent protest is most likely to occur in regimes that are authoritarian but where there is also open political competition – in other words, in what I call hybrid regimes. 4

However, we should be careful in drawing an analogy from political oppor-tunity structure arguments to hybrid regimes. First, there are good theoretical and empirical reasons to think that increases in democracy actually bring with them more protest. For example, in From Mobilization to Revolution ( 1978 ), Charles Tilly drew attention to the link between the legal protection necessary for the conduct of electoral politics and the emergence and growth of the mass demonstration as a key element of the repertoire of collective action in Western Europe. Legal protections for elections, Tilly showed, also

4 On violence and democratization, see also Wood ( 2000 ) on the role of insurgency in democrati-zation in El Salvador and South Africa.


provided cover for nonelectoral collective action, and so, peaceful collective action grew as legal protections for elections grew. If this is correct, then we should expect authoritarian regimes that feature a legal opposition to have greater protection for electoral participation, and hence to have higher levels of peaceful protest than other kinds of authoritarian regime. Moreover, fol-lowing Tilly, we should observe peaceful protest growing as legal protections grow. If this is the case, full-blown liberal democracies would have the high-est levels of protection and the highest levels of peaceful protest.

More recently, Goldstone ( 2004 ) has made a similar claim, arguing that because protest is generally a complement to, rather than a substitute for, institutional strategies for infl uencing policy in democracies, we are likely to see protest increase as institutional access increases. If this is so – Goldstone argues – then increases in democracy throughout the world should lead to cor-responding increases in protest.

Second, even if the political opportunity structure analogy were relevant to states undergoing liberalization followed by democratization, it is less clear that it applies to hybrid regimes that show few signs of liberalizing or democra-tizing further. Periods of extreme crisis, such as in the USSR between 1987 and 1991 or Eastern Europe in 1989, are probably quite different from “politics as usual” in hybrid regimes like contemporary Azerbaijan , Russia, or Venezuela . If this is true, then it seems plausible that stable hybrids are more likely to fi t the linear view of protest and levels of democracy than they are to fi t the curvi-linear view. Consequently, in thinking about protest, it is important to be able to distinguish between the highly fl uid, highly confl ictual context of regimes that are collapsing and/or moving quickly toward democratization and those that are relatively stable.

So which is correct? Does protest rise in a linear fashion as we move from closed to more open types of regime, or is the relationship more like a curve in which hybrid regimes witness the highest levels of protest? The answer, I argue, is neither. There is no simple relationship between the quantity of protest and the degree of regime openness. Instead what we need is a theory that will allow us to understand protest patterns in different hybrids at different points in time and at different stages in their politics. In this book, I propose such a theory. I argue that hybridity is not simply a midpoint between democracy and closed authoritarianism, nor does a simple analogy to political opportunity structures get us far. Instead, both the quality and quantity of protest will vary among different kinds of hybrid regimes depending on the ecology of organizations in a particular state, the mobilization strategies adopted by the state, and the extent and nature of competition among elites. I discuss each of these factors in more detail below .

Organizational Ecology

The starting point for understanding protest patterns in different kinds of states is to think about the nature of the civic and social movement organizations that


are present, the extent of their development, and the conditions under which they operate. In closed authoritarian regimes, as I have argued, organization outside of the state is generally either forbidden or very closely controlled. In democracies, by contrast, there are myriad independent groups that organize people and interests and seek to infl uence the state. In hybrid regimes, the pic-ture is more diverse. The degree of de jure and de facto freedom to organize independent groups will vary, as will the degree to which independent groups have actually developed. On the other side of the coin, the extent to which the state organizes or incorporates groups and interests is also likely to vary. In this section, I argue that these factors, which I refer to as the organizational ecology of a given state, are crucial in determining both the amount and the nature of protest that we are likely to observe in a hybrid regime.

In developing the analysis, I draw upon a broad literature on organizational ecology within sociology that focuses on the interactions between existing and new organizations, and on the role of variables that capture aspects of the population of organizations as a whole. The organizational ecology literature is very broad (Hannan, Pólos, and Carroll 2007 : 18) and only a small part of it has been concerned with social movement organizations. Moreover, in general, scholars in this subfi eld have worked primarily in long-standing democracies, so I modify the approach considerably in what follows.

The existing literature on the ecology of social movement organizations looks at three main issues. One is “density dependence”: the tendency for the formation of new organizations to be helped by the presence of existing orga-nizations when organizations are few on the ground. By contrast, when a large number of organizations is already in existence, existing organizations tend to inhibit new organization formation (Hannan and Freeman 1977 ). A second, related set of issues concerns the effect of existing groups or practices in either legitimating new ones or crowding them out through competition. Again here the legitimation effect tends to dominate when there are few groups already in place, and crowding out occurs when there are many (Olzak and Uhrig 2001 ). A third issue relates not so much to the interactions between groups as to aspects of the general environment that affect the population as whole. These are, of course, quite varied, ranging from the capacity of the state to provide a stable context within which groups can fl ourish (Ingram and Simons 2000 ), to the dynamics of a protest cycle, the incumbent leadership, and the avail-ability of fi nancing (Minkoff 1999 ), to the structure of discursive opportunities (Koopmans and Olzak 2004 ) . 5

5 In a similar vein, Goldstone ( 2004 ) uses the term “external relational fi eld” to try to capture all of the different elements that may infl uence social movement emergence, a number of which con-stitute elements of the organizational ecology. Goldstone lists: (1) other movements and counter-movements, (2) political and economic institutions, (3) various levels of state authorities and political actors, (4) various elites, (5) various publics, (6) symbolic and value orientations, and (7) critical events, all of which are clearly important in infl uencing not just movement emergence, but movement tactics, successes, and failures.


In this book, I take a somewhat different approach to the idea of organi-zational ecology in order to focus on those elements that are most of interest in the context of hybrid regimes. I focus on three: the extent to which organi-zation outside of the state is de jure and de facto permitted; the number and nature of state-supported/sponsored organizations; and the number and nature of independent or non-state-supported organizations. In addition, in charac-terizing the organizational ecology, we need to take into account that hybrid forms of organization that are part state, part non-state are not only possible but common. Moreover, organizations interact with one another and can infl u-ence, as we will see, each other’s behavior and development. Understanding each of these elements and how they interact will, I am wagering, lead us quite far down the road of understanding the nature of protest in a given state. 6

Although I focus here on variations in the organizational ecology within hybrid regimes, the analysis can be applied to all regimes. For example, in long-standing liberal democracies, there are extensive de jure and effective de facto rights to organize outside of the state, a broad array of independent organiza-tions and groups capable of aggregating interests and mobilizing constituen-cies, and relatively few state sponsored organizations .

At the other extreme, in classical authoritarian regimes, the aggregation and mobilization of interests are functions concentrated in a single, suppos-edly coherent regime. Organization outside of offi cially sanctioned contexts is severely constricted, if not de jure then certainly de facto, which means that dissidents are organizationally isolated and have an extremely hard time creat-ing organizations that can sustain a movement beyond narrow personal circles. In other words, the sort of dense interpersonal and organizational ties essential to turning isolated protests into a social movement are extremely diffi cult to establish .

Hybrid regimes, by defi nition, allow some organization outside of the offi cial realm, but they also, again by defi nition, include limits on civil rights. Variation in the balance between these two means that hybrids vary enormously in the extent of possibilities to organize. In most hybrids, extensive constitutional and legislative provisions exist providing for freedom of association, organization, and assembly. However, a typical feature of hybrids is that these rights are hedged around with legal restrictions that in practice limit organizing activ-ity not sanctioned by the state. Laws requiring state registration and moni-toring of organizations, dense bureaucratic restrictions that allow authorities to arbitrarily shut down organizations, or extensive sets of rules that favor state-supported organizations over independent, bottom-up organizations are extremely common in hybrids. Such barriers to organization are generally

6 At various points, I also consider such issues as institutional rules, the effect of other or previous protest actions, and the character of the incumbents. Whereas these are elements often included within the issues of interest to scholars of organizational ecology, they are also commonly ana-lyzed by mainstream scholars of protest in terms of political opportunities. In the interests of avoiding conceptual stretching, I treat these variables separately from organizational ecology.


targeted at potential political opponents of the regime and often at the rela-tionship between potential opponents and foreign countries. Legal, fi nancial, and organizational barriers to organization are also particularly targeted at labor unions. 7

Hybrids vary too not only in the legal framework that governs their activity but in the de facto observance of rights to organize. As we will see, even where the constitution and laws provide for freedoms, these can be extensively abridged in practice. Various forms of coercion, including arrests, beatings (often carried out by unknown assailants), threats, and harassment, are commonly used to limit the extent to which regime opponents are able to organize.

Beyond the de jure and de facto capacity to organize, there are a number of other factors that produce variation in the organizational ecology in hybrids. A key issue is the extent to which organizations inherited from a previous regime affect organizing possibilities. Most hybrids do not start with a blank slate of organizations, but instead have either an authoritarian history or a history of democratic decay that continues to play a signifi cant role in everyday life. Consequently, the organizational ecology of hybrid regimes frequently refl ects the continued infl uence of organizations created by previous authoritarians for both mobilizing and demobilizing the public, workers in particular. Examples include the Central Council of Trade Unions in the former USSR, which has become the Federation of Independent Trade Unions (FNPR) , elements of the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM) in Mexico , and offi cial unions in Malaysia’s electronics sector.

Authoritarian organizations that “survive” liberalization are likely to fi nd themselves in possession of signifi cant organizational and often fi nancial resources that can constitute an important fi rst-mover advantage in the com-petitive politics of the post-liberalization era. If the fi rst-mover advantage is large, existing organizations can inhibit the development of new organizations. In other words, to the extent that existing organizations have material advan-tages and political connections, they can make life diffi cult for potential com-petitors. This creates a vicious cycle since, if survivor organizations are not subject to competition (or the threat of competition), they are more likely to retain existing relationships rather than seek new constituencies. Where exist-ing relationships are with powerful state offi cials, the state will act to protect survivor organizations, strengthening them further. This cycle of protection and lack of competition means that it is diffi cult to develop the autonomous organizational capacity or institutional support for civil society that we see in long-standing democracies .

In addition to state-supported holdover organizations, there may be other groups that look like social movements but that enjoy close association with, and sponsorship of, the state or important offi cials. Such organizations are ersatz social movements that campaign and mobilize like social movements but act as political vehicles for the state or for projects sponsored by important

7 Many long-standing democracies also have similar restrictions on labor.


individuals. Examples include mobilizational neighborhood associations and the Comando Maisanta that coordinated “electoral battle units” (UBEs) in support of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 2005. According to some reports, up to 4 percent of the Venezuelan population were involved in such units. 8 Another example is the ersatz social movements established by the presi-dent of the Russian railroads and conservative politician Vladimir Yakunin . Yakunin started several conservative, patriotic NGOs, such as the Center for the National Glory of Russia, which celebrate Russian achievements in World War II and perform “services” like parading holy relics. Such movements are designed, at least in part, to use state and private funds to generate a sense of unique national history and patriotism, while at the same time promoting sup-port for the state and a national political base for Yakunin . 9

If the problem of survivor organizations and state-sponsored ersatz social movements inhibiting the development of new organizations is quite general in hybrids, there are additional reasons to think that the conditions for inde-pendent organizing are particularly bad in post-Communist hybrids. Howard ( 2003 ) argues that a history of repression of autonomous organization, the vibrancy of private as opposed to public networks, and disappointment with the fruits of reform have made civil society participation particularly low in post-Communist states.

Despite the unpromising environment, hybrid regimes are nevertheless likely to contain at least some independent organizations that infl uence the nature of protest and politics. Sometimes, like Solidarity in Poland, they emerge under a closed regime and help bring it down. Sometimes, like Allianza Civica in Mexico , they arise later as a result of increasing levels of pluralism and push for further improvements in the quality of political competition. Some groups, such as the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers and the Veterans of Chernobyl in Russia, emerge in response to particularly severe and concentrated forms of hardship. Other groups emerge in response to shared opportunities. For example, in the labor sector, Russian air traffi c controllers, miners , and dock-ers have taken advantage of strategic locations in the industrial supply chain to create strong independent unions. However they come into being, the extent to which such groups exist is likely to vary widely across different hybrids and over time, with signifi cant consequences for patterns of protest.

Life for independent groups is often diffi cult. Pressure from the state and, relatedly, the paucity of domestic sources of fi nancing can make all but the most high-profi le organizations hard to sustain over time and space. In these con-ditions, foreign funding might help build independent organizations, though groups that rely on foreign money often become more responsive to the needs and desires of those funders than of domestic constituents (Evans et al. 2005 , Sundstrom 2006 ).

8 http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1390 9 Center for Strategic and International Studies, www.csis.org , May 3, 2007, Event Summary: Is

Vladimir Yakunin Tracking for the Kremlin?


A good illustration of the environmental diffi culties faced by independent organizations in hybrids is the “great extinction” of independent organiza-tions that took place in the early post-Soviet period . Beginning in 1988, there emerged in the USSR a vast array of informal groups and associations. In Russia alone, there were “hundreds if not thousands of informal groups” (Brovkin 1990 : 233). These groups reached the peak of their infl uence in 1990–1 when they came together as the organization Democratic Russia to elect Boris Yeltsin to the Russian Presidency on June 12, 1991. Brovkin was certainly not alone in seeing the emergence of these groups as “a great historical turning point in Russian culture” (1990: 253).

However, this turning point proved illusory. Although some of the new groups became political parties that led the independence movements in places like Lithuania and Georgia , and others like Memorial (an organization dedi-cated to research on the victims of the Communist era) continue to enjoy a high profi le today, the vast majority disappeared in the economic crisis and political disappointment of the fi rst years of independence or were coopted by the overwhelming strength of the state and elite-led organizations. Democratic Russia itself dissolved into a range of “state and state-affi liated movements … as the emergence of separate elite movements … made use of the fi eld opened up by the democratic movement” (Flikke 2004 : 1208).

Over time, the number and nature of independent social groups may expand, but the process is slow. The result is that organized, sustained, national politi-cal campaigns emerging from groups outside of the state are relatively rare. Where “protest from below” does emerge, it is likely to be based on local groups that rely more on dense personal networks than on established organi-zations or institutions. Consequently, small, hardcore, ideologically committed groups tend to proliferate, making protest hard to scale up and very diffi cult to sustain over time (Lyall 2007 ).

The relative strength of independent organizations and state-supported elements will, of course, vary across cases, and this variation will have impor-tant implications for protest patterns in different hybrid regimes. For exam-ple, by 2004 in Ukraine , signifi cant independent groups had emerged that could mobilize large numbers of young people in opposition to the Kuchma regime. These groups had a major effect on protest when they united with important elite-driven organizations from Kiev and western Ukraine. This contrasts with Russia at the same time, where effective independent opposi-tion groups were slow to emerge (though, as I will show, this is changing).

As an empirical matter, there are a number of different indicators to con-sider in analyzing the organizational ecology of different regimes. The number and variety of organizations and the extent of competition between them will matter, as will the history of key organizations. As I have suggested, organiza-tions that are holdovers from a previous authoritarian regime, and especially holdovers that formerly had been responsible for containing mass participa-tion, are very likely to have strong state links. Another indicator to consider is the leadership of key organizations, the identity and track record of the people


involved. Clearly of importance too is looking at sources of organizational funding, whether they are state controlled or infl uenced, concentrated in the hands of a small number of private donors, or whether funds are raised from a broad range of contributors. Dependence on the state might cover not just an organization’s funding, but its very right to exist or its particular role in negotiations or policy making. In most states, there is at least some minimum requirement for organizations to register with the authorities, and as we will see below, the details can affect both the state’s relationship with particular organizations and the general opportunities for new organizations to emerge .

In the chapters that follow, I look at specifi c organizations in Russia that exemplify the variety of organizations we are likely to fi nd in hybrids. I fi rst look at workers, who dominated protest in Russia in the 1990s. Most workers are either not organized at all or are in holdover unions intended to subordi-nate and control rather than represent them. This means that protest patterns are quite different from what we would expect if independent unions were strong.

I also look at the emergence of independent groups, focusing on pension-ers’ and youth movements. Pensioners’ protests in 2005 marked the fi rst truly independent mass mobilization of the Putin era, and were soon followed by a proliferation of youth activism, inspired both by the pensioners and by the example of the so-called “colored revolutions” in Georgia , Ukraine , and else-where. Since the pensioners’ revolt, Russia has seen a proliferation of activism, much of it genuinely independent and strongly oppositional in fl avor.

Finally, in managing protest, the Russian government has adopted an approach that deliberately blurs the line between state and civil society groups and creates new organizations and institutions designed to mix the two. I look at an example of an ersatz social movement, Nashi , put together by Russian authorities in response to the pensioners and youth protests. I also show how the strategy for managing dissent combines old-fashioned repression with new techniques involving not only the large-scale mobilization of pro-regime move-ments, but also the creation of institutional mechanisms for the cooptation of civil society at large.

State Mobilizing Strategies

Another key variable for understanding contentious politics in contemporary hybrid regimes is the extent of active mobilizing measures undertaken by the regime itself. Much of the literature on protest in nondemocratic states focuses on the decision of the state to repress or not to repress opponents and protest-ers. However, the menu of choices available to states is broader than that and includes not just repression but also mobilization.

Authoritarian mobilization is not new. In fact, Juan Linz ( 2000 ) made the extent to which non-democratic regimes resorted to mass mobilization a key variable in distinguishing totalitarian regimes from “merely” authoritarian ones. For Linz, totalitarian regimes, such as the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany


and Communist regimes in China and the USSR, were distinguished by their use of mass mobilization in pursuit of regime goals. By contrast, according to Linz, authoritarian regimes like Franco’s Spain primarily sought to demobilize the population, focusing on repression and cooptation. Contemporary authori-tarians in hybrid regimes, however, differ from both of these. Competition in elections and on the streets means that contemporary authoritarians are likely to seek not just to repress opponents, but also to mobilize their own support-ers. However, since they lack the political monopoly enjoyed by their totalitar-ian predecessors, rulers in contemporary hybrids have to be creative in order to fi nd ways to mobilize support in a competitive environment.

Unlike Linz’s authoritarians, elites in today’s hybrid regimes face at least some open political competition. Perhaps most signifi cantly, rulers in hybrid regimes usually need to win elections, which requires a range of skills, includ-ing mobilizing supporters to come out and vote. This is particularly clear if we think of elections as being more than just a day of voting, but as consisting of a multistage political challenge that begins with campaigning, continues with the election itself, and ends with a process of counting the votes and ratifying the results. Potentially important information about the unity of the regime and the strength of opposition forces can be revealed at any of these stages. Consequently, in order to pass the political test elections provide, the ability of the incumbents to mobilize large numbers of supporters on the streets will be crucial.

Mobilization is not just about voting, however. An authoritarian regime’s survival requires demonstrating the power and strength of incumbents and the weakness of their opponents outside of elections too in order to discourage potential challengers. If elections constitute a “war of maneuver” in which election period tactics are crucial, long-term stability depends on a “war of position” continuously waged on the streets and in the media (Gramsci 1996 ). The problem is less that popular protest directly threatens to overthrow authoritarian incumbents, though in some cases this may be true. More likely, the danger of allowing demonstrations of opposition strength on the streets is that it might signal to regime insiders the possibility that a challenge to incum-bent rulers could succeed. This may encourage important players in the exist-ing regime to throw their lot in with the opposition. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine is a key example of the successful overthrow of incumbent elites by a former regime insider who joined up with opposition protesters he had previously repressed. In this case, street protests helped encourage a former Prime Minister, Viktor Iushenko, whose political trajectory looked to be turn-ing down to revive his career by mounting a challenge to the incumbents. Indeed, as Collier and Mahoney ( 1997 ) argue, as a general matter, elite splits and mass mobilization on the streets are usually connected with one another. This means that rulers in hybrids are likely to resort to a variety of ways of repressing opposition demonstrations. However, the desire to show strength not only involves repression but can also lead to active efforts to demonstrate support.


That said, leaders in contemporary hybrids have weaker tools for mobilizing support than their counterparts in totalitarian or closed authoritarian regimes. Most importantly, closed authoritarians and totalitarians had the huge advan-tage of maintaining a monopoly of legitimate political organization. Moreover, this monopoly was usually exercised in the context of socialist economies, or at least under import substituting industrialization (ISI) strategies, that gave the state tremendous infl uence over fl ows of economic and fi nancial resources. This not only allowed leaders to dictate which organizations were permitted, but also to channel resources and would-be members in their direction. By con-trast, leaders in contemporary hybrids generally do not enjoy an organizational monopoly. Organization outside of the state is usually allowed. Furthermore, many contemporary hybrids now operate in much more market-oriented econ-omies than their predecessors, which limits the extent to which the state can link participation in approved organizations with economic advantage, mak-ing it harder to mobilize supporters. 10

Taken together, the absence of an organizational monopoly and more lim-ited state control over the economy have radically reduced the extent to which economic and social advancement are tied to participation in state-approved organizations. A link still exists, of course, but it is more attenuated than before. As a result, rulers in contemporary hybrid regimes have had to be creative and experimental in adapting their mobilizational strategies to these changed realities.

In this book, we will see two different examples of cases in which mobiliza-tion was attractive for at least some state offi ce holders. In the Yeltsin era, in a context of economic crisis and a scramble for resources and power, mobilization of workers and others was a bargaining strategy employed by some regional-level elites in negotiations with the center. To do this, they took advantage of survivor organizations, and in particular labor unions, to mobilize people to put pressure on the center for transfers. As I will show, however, mass mobilization can be dangerous, and so this was a preferred strategy only for a minority of elites who had reason to expect that they would not do well in quiet intraelite bargaining. This led to great regional variation in the patterns of protest, with some regions being highly mobilized and others being mostly quiet .

In the Putin era, we see a different kind of state mobilization in which it was not regional leaders but the central state that actively tried to mobilize support to create the impression of dominance and invincibility. In doing so, the center enjoyed the benefi t of uneven access to state resources. However, in the absence of the organizational monopoly of the Communist period, real competition for adherents exists, and genuine alternatives can and do draw signifi cant numbers into nonsanctioned or even anti-regime activity. As a result, the Kremlin had to be creative. As we will see, a range of competing projects were set up, each

10 President Carlos Salinas’ adoption of market orthodoxy in Mexico, for example, was a sig-nifi cant nail in the coffi n of the PRI as a hegemonic and mobilizing party (Magaloni 2006 ). I address these issues in more detail in Chapter 7 .


charged with the task of gathering support, particularly of the young, for the Kremlin. Through a process of trial and error, Nashi , Molodaya Gvardia , and other, shadier organizations were used to take physical control of the streets and to demonstrate support to television viewers. The effect on the nature of contention in Russia has been dramatic. In terms of sheer numbers, marchers on the street in Russia in 2007 were more likely to be demonstrating support for the regime and for national-patriotic projects than criticizing the govern-ment or calling for change.

The task of these ersatz social movements is not only to dominate the streets, but also to seize the political initiative away from so-called “Orangist forces” and to build support for an agenda of national renewal, independence, and Russian uniqueness, a project sometimes known as “sovereign democ-racy.” Patterns in Russia are being widely imitated in other parts of the former Soviet Union (Boykewich 2007 ) and elsewhere. For example, in Venezuela , President Hugo Chavez has engaged broad swathes of the population in citi-zens groups in an attempt to fortify his regime against forces he sees as bent on its destruction .

State mobilization strategies like these not only affect pro-government mobilization but also affect the nature of anti-government contention. In fact, in Russia, anti-government protesters have been in some ways emboldened and invigorated by the creation of ersatz social movements to oppose them. As I will show, the opposition has expanded its repertoire in response to massive pro-government mobilization: Direct actions still play a role, but the range of actions and the vocabulary of symbolic protest appear to have expanded considerably.

It could be objected that the activities of ersatz social movements bear some resemblance to the roles states play in mobilizing participation even in liberal democracies, and to a certain extent this point is well taken. In democratic states, and perhaps particularly in the United States, political parties and other groups associated with the state play a major role in mobilization. Often these mobilizations seek to appear to be bottom-up, or “grassroots,” giving rise to the idea of “Astroturf” groups, or fake grassroots organizations. Nevertheless, such mobilizations are far rarer and less obviously centrally choreographed by the incumbent rulers than the patterns I describe here .

Consequently, we might think of state mobilization strategies as existing on some sort of continuum. At the one end are closed authoritarian states like North Korea that try very hard to manipulate and choreograph all public polit-ical participation. At the other end are contemporary democracies in which political parties and governments engage in limited mobilization of supporters. In the middle are hybrids, with regimes that actively try to create and control ersatz social movements and that organize demonstrations of public support using state resources as a frequent part of their political repertoires, but where independent action beyond state control is also possible. By looking at how actively different states attempt to control and produce public mobilization, we should be able to place most countries somewhere on this spectrum.


Elite competition

A third factor that interacts with organizational ecology and state mobilizing strategies is the degree of competition among elites. Under certain conditions, elites actively mobilize broader publics as part of elite competition and, other things being equal, where there is vigorous competition among elites, we see higher levels of protest and mobilization than where competition among elites is muted. Consequently, factors that affect the propensity of elites to com-pete openly among themselves or, conversely, to unite behind a single leader or party will have an impact on both the quality and quantity of contention that we see in hybrids. The degree of elite competition is, of course, a variable, and in much of this book, I focus on the different strategic choices that elites are likely to make that will determine the degree of competition.

The role of political competition in determining political outcomes has been much discussed, especially in the context of the post-Communist states. The emergence of real competition among different political parties, for example, has been shown to be one of the keys to success for states democratizing after Communism (Grzymala-Busse 2006 , Vachudova 2005 ). In the context of hybrid regimes, however, competition is not necessarily due to the emergence of strong political parties, but instead may be related to changes in the per-ception of the popularity and durability of the incumbent leadership (Hale 2005 ). Put simply, levels of elite competition are likely to be higher when the central leadership is weak or control is uncertain. In particular, when elites are divided not just about who gets what and when, but about the fundamental rules of political competition, levels of competition and protest are likely to be very high. In contrast, when the incumbent leadership is vigorous, strong, and thought likely to be in offi ce for some time, competition among elites is usu-ally lower, with the effect that political protest is likely to be rarer and more politically isolated.

Levels of competition do not linearly translate into protest on the streets. The effect of elite competition is modifi ed by the strategic choices of elites over whether or not mobilization is an attractive strategy. Not all elites will reach out to broader publics in competing to bolster their position. Mobilizing public protest around an issue is a risky strategy for incumbent elites, since it attracts public attention, bringing into the picture a wider group of players who might have different preferences. Moreover, encouraging mobilization can create the potential for instability and provides people with experience in collective action that may make them more independent later. Consequently, as we will see, this kind of voice tends to be disproportionately exercised by elites who lack other forms of leverage in the struggle for resources.

As an empirical matter, identifying the extent of elite divisions is relatively straightforward because what we are concerned with here is not the degree of behind-the-scenes infi ghting, which is probably high in most regimes, but rather the degree of public political competition among elites. In democratic regimes, where elites challenge publicly for power on a daily basis, the degree of


public elite political competition is high. At the other end, in closed authoritar-ian regimes, the vast majority of politics takes place in private, and public divi-sions among the leadership tend to be very limited indeed. Dissident factions in the elite are either crushed or silenced, or the regime starts to change.

In hybrid regimes, either a high degree of public elite cohesion or a high degree of public competition is possible. Competition is usually highest when incumbent elites split over elections and run genuinely competing candidates with real chances to win. As we will see further in the book, this was the case in Russia around the parliamentary elections of 1999. Alternatively, the elections can proceed with most major regime players united behind a single candidate or set of candidates, as in the presidential elections of 2008 .

Summary of Regime Effects on Contention

Table 1.1 presents a summary of the arguments that I have made about contention in different regimes and the factors (organizational ecology, state mobilization strategies, and elite competition) likely to affect them. As the table shows, though I focus primarily on explaining patterns of contention in hybrid regimes, the variables of organizational ecology, state mobilization strategies, and public elite competition can also be used to understand contention within democracies and closed authoritarian regimes. Democratic and closed authoritarian regimes will tend to come out at the extreme ends of each of the variables. In democracies, there are usually many vibrant independent organizations that dominate the fi eld, the state has relatively little deliberate involvement in popular mobiliza-tion (outside of military mobilization at least), and public elite competition is almost always high. This results in high levels of contention consisting primarily of demonstrations of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment (WUNC). Closed autocracies are at the opposite extreme; state-sponsored organizations dominate the fi eld of organizations, seek a monopoly or close to a monopoly of mobilization, and open competition among elites tends to be low. In this case, protest levels are generally low and open protest is rare, but where it does occur it often involves violence or direct actions.

In hybrids, as I have argued, we have a mix of state-sponsored and indepen-dent organizations, along with ersatz organizations that mix state and indepen-dent elements. The state often plays an active role in mobilization, and public competition among elites can be high or low. As a result, we see a combination of peaceful demonstrations of WUNC that are often, though not always, highly choreographed by elite players, and more direct, more confrontational action that is frequently unsanctioned or illegal in nature. As far as levels of conten-tion are concerned, as we will see, the number and type of actions will vary enormously over time and are very closely connected to the dynamics of elite politics.

Table 1.2 illustrates how the combination of variables has played out in one hybrid, Russia. The table summarizes the three different periods I consider: the late Yeltsin era (1997– 2000 ) and the fi rst and second Putin terms (2000–4 and

36

Table 1.1. Summary of Regimes and Their Contention

Regime Type Organizational Ecology State Mobilization Strategy

Public Elite Competition

Contention

Democratic Independent organizations dominant

Low levels of state mobilization

High Nature: Mostly peaceful demonstrations of WUNC

Level: High Hybrid State/ersatz organizations

dominant, but independent organizations exist

Mix of state and independent mobilization

Either High or Low Nature: Some managed and mostly peaceful. Other isolated, and confrontational

Level: Varies Closed

AuthoritarianState-sponsored organizations

monopolyState mobilizational

monopolyLow Nature: Hidden, violent, direct

action Level: Low


2005–8). Across these three periods, we see considerable variation in the under-lying variables that condition the nature of protest politics. Simplifying consider-ably, in the late Yeltsin period, the organizational ecology was state-dominated, regional-level elites were active in mobilizing supporters, and competition among elites was high. This contributed to large-scale elite-sponsored mobilizations in some places, as well as isolated pockets of direct action outside of elite control. By 2000, however, elite competition was low and the state was focused on demobiliz-ing protest, leading to very low levels of public protest. From 2005, the emergence of a nascent opposition with the ability to put signifi cant numbers of people in the streets stimulated central state authorities to mobilize counter-displays of regime support. The opposition, however, failed to make inroads into key elites, and pub-lic competition among elites has remained low. As a result, we see frequent, and often large, state-sponsored rallies combined with frequent but usually small, and often repressed, demonstrations of dissent from the opposition.

So far, I have discussed regime types as though they are stable and largely unchanging. This is a simplifi cation useful for theorizing about what protest looks

Table 1.2. Organizational Ecology, State Mobilizing Strategies, and Elite Competition in Post-Communist Russia

Period Organizational Ecology

State Mobilization Strategy


Contention

Russia 1997–2000

State dominated Regional mobilizing

High Nature: Large scale, elite-sponsored mobilizations, isolated pockets of direct action and extreme protest

Level: High in places, low in others

Russia 2000–2004

State dominated Demobilizing Low Nature: Isolated direct actions

Level: Low

Russia 2005–2008

State dominated, but emergent opposition

Central state mobilizing

Low Nature: Large scale state-sponsored rallies, frequent but repressed opposition protests

Level: Moderate


like, but one that allows us to see only part of the picture. In the rest of the chapter, I describe what this book has to contribute to our understanding of the other part of the picture: how protest can affect the nature of the political regime.

How Contention Affects Regimes

Political protest has long been associated with democratization. Analysis of the development of democracy in long-standing democracies has repeatedly pointed to the role of protest in expanding the franchise and consolidating the liberal rights associated with democracy. Charles Tilly ( 2004 ), for example, demonstrated the closely intertwined relationship between contention and democratization in Europe over the long run, going as far as to argue that “almost all of the crucial democracy-promoting causal mechanisms involve popular contention … as cor-relates, causes and effects” (7). Tilly’s general argument is supported by a range of work looking at democratization in different historical time periods (Collier 1999 ). Moreover, work on Latin America and elsewhere demonstrates how con-tention has contributed to the deepening of democracy and the strengthening of economic and civil rights outside the North-West quadrant of the world. 11

However, both Nancy Bermeo ( 2003 ) and Charles Tilly ( 2004 ) also dem-onstrated that contention has been closely associated with major periods of de-democratization too. Looking at the collapse of European democracies in the interwar years and at Latin American cases of de-democratization, Bermeo shows how contention often plays a key part in changing perceptions of poli-tics in ways that can damage democracy, even if underlying political prefer-ences are largely unchanged.

In a somewhat similar vein to Tilly and Bermeo, I demonstrate that even though protest in Russia has profoundly affected the nature of the regime, it has not led in any clear way toward democratization. Instead, contention has played a crucial and little discussed part in the construction and stabilization of the semiauthoritarian hybrid regime in Russia. I document how the ruling coa-lition has learned from the challenges it has faced in the streets and factories. In the Yeltsin era, widespread unrest refl ected intraelite competition and challenges to the center from regional governors. This taught Moscow the value of enlist-ing region-level political machines and led the Putin administration to focus on bringing regional governors under control. I also show that the role played by labor in unrest prompted the Putin administration to pass new legislation that signifi cantly strengthened the position of Communist successor labor unions in return for solidifying their cooperation with the regime. Finally, I show how the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and spontaneous unrest in the streets of major cities in Russia itself led Putin’s Kremlin to launch a new strategy with respect to social organizations that created a permitted licensed sector and a new set of mobilizational institutions while further isolating genuinely oppositionist forces.

11 See, for example, Alvarez, Dagnino and Escobar 1998 , Bayat 1997 , Chalmers 1997 , Collier and Collier 2002 , Oxhorn 1995 , Stokes 1995 , Wignaraja 1993 .


This system of controlled interest intermediation has become perhaps the central feature of how politics is organized in post-2000 Russia.

In the short to medium term, the regime has been heavily shaped by its expe-riences with contention and the methods it has devised to manage it. However, the overall effect of these changes on democratization over the longer term is extremely hard to predict. Most commentators have focused on the narrowing of the sphere for public participation that Putin’s innovations have undoubt-edly brought about. They have interpreted the changes as being unambiguously negative for democratization. As I will show, as regards the reforms to bring governors to heel and the new Labor Code of 2001, it is diffi cult to disagree with the conventional analysis.

These commentators neglect, however, two other effects of the reforms that might, in the longer term, have a positive impact on democratization. First, as I demonstrate in Chapter 7 , increased cohesion among the elite has led to enhanced cooperation among oppositionists. Although the genuine opposition remains small, bonds have been forged across boundaries that previously would have seemed impossible to bridge. The second effect of the new approach to regulating organizations has been to create a much more institutionalized role for civil society in policy making, especially at the local level. If it is true that democracy is built from below rather than from above, these new points of access for civic actors might well have positive, longer-term implications for democratization in Russia.

The analysis of the effects of contention on the regime in Russia, however, also illustrates a more general argument about the dynamics of hybrid regimes. Instead of thinking about hybrids as being the result of an unfi nished contest between pro-regime and anti-regime forces, the focus on the particular orga-nizational ecology of hybrids, on state mobilization strategies, and on elite competition leads us to see hybrid regimes as a set of rules designed for the management of competition among elites and for managing pressure from below that might otherwise fracture elite coalitions. This set of rules is modifi ed and adapted over time to deal with pressures and challenges, leading to appar-ent openings and closings in the nature of the regime, though without neces-sarily heading decisively in a more democratic or more authoritarian direction. Where the underlying ecology of organizations does not support strong and truly independent organizations, and where authoritarians are able to innovate organizationally and institutionally to head off emergent instability, as those in Russia have done, hybrids are not only likely to survive but also provide an attractive template for elites in neighboring states. I return to these broad comparative considerations in the conclusion to the book .

40

2

Protest and Regime in Russia

“The world was changed all right, and quite noticeably … the people walking past him were gradually transformed from devoted disciples of global evil into its victims.”

Viktor Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger .

On October 30, 1997, at the initiative of the Primorskii Krai Federation of Trade Unions, more than 250,000 protesters took part in marches in Vladivostok , Nakhodka, Ussuriysk, Arsenev, and other cities in the Far Eastern region of Primorskii Krai. The marchers demanded payment of wage arrears amount-ing to 1.37 billion rubles ($236 million at the then prevailing exchange rate) and an end to economic reforms that protest organizers claimed had forced 80 percent of the region’s population below the poverty level. The demonstrations brought together miners , energy sector workers, teachers , physicians, fi sher-men, and workers of the municipal housing complex, many of whom were engaged in strikes and lawsuits in addition to the main protest action. 1

Later that year, on November 13, 1997, the Vladivostok News reported on further demonstrations at which similar demands were expressed:

[H]undreds marched, waving red banners, in honor of the Revolution of November 7. Strikers in Vladivostok said the government owes an estimated $233 million in late sal-aries in the Primorye region. They are desperate at the prospect of facing another winter without money to pay for heating bills, they said. Demonstrators fi lled Vladivostok’s central square, many of them doctors, teachers, and construction workers whose patience had run out.

However, not all the protesters felt that the action was likely to work. The newspaper went on to cite one participant:

“I don’t think the strike will help, because the authorities don’t pay any attention to us,” said Alexei Osharov, a pensioner. “They are waiting for us to take up guns.” 2

1 IEWS Russian Regional Report Vol. 2, No. 37, October 30, 1997. http://www.isn.ethz.ch/researchpub/publihouse/rrr/docs/rrr971030.pdf

2 Vladivostok News , November 13, 1997, Issue No. 154.

Protest and Regime in Russia 41

Short of taking up guns, others nevertheless did take more direct action designed to address their own specifi c problems, if not the broader economic course of the Russian government. On November 3, 1997, growing increasingly des-perate over the absence of the child support payments to which the law enti-tled them, three women from the town of Arsenev, home of one of the Soviet Union’s most celebrated military aircraft plants, announced a hunger strike. By November 6, the number of hunger strikers in Arsenev had reached twenty. On November 18, the pressure seemed to bear fruit, and representatives of the Krai agreed with the hunger strikers to make the child support payments. 3

These actions were part of a broad range of coordinated and uncoordi-nated events that took place throughout Primorskii Krai in 1997. The Interior Ministry (MVD ) reported eighty-four different acts of protest in the region, including twenty-three protest marches, twenty-eight strikes, twenty-seven hunger strikes, one railroad blockade, and four road blockades, the latter including one large-scale event in which 2,500 workers from the “Zvezda ” submarine repair plant blocked the main Vladivostok-Nakhodka highway. In addition, the MVD reported that on August 7, 1997, in the town of Luchegorsk, N. P. Mikhailiuk blew himself up near the Primorskii hydroelectric power sta-tion. His suicide note explained that he had not received his salary since the previous March. 4

The list of protests in Primorskii Krai represents in microcosm the range of strikes, protests, hunger strikes, and other actions in which Russians partici-pated in the post-Soviet period. This chapter looks in detail at these actions, at who was protesting and why, linking the answers to these questions to the new regime in Russia where, for almost the fi rst time, elections played an important political role in determining access to offi ce.

I show that the stereotype of Russians as a patient people with an almost infi nite capacity to bear hardship without protest is very misleading. Instead, as the country’s economy sank in the second half of the 1990s, Russians began protesting in larger and larger numbers, generating a wave of strikes, demon-strations, hunger strikes, and blockades that was among the largest in the post-Communist world. The extent of this protest wave has been largely neglected by academic writers on contemporary Russia, with the result that we have not properly understood the politics of this period.

I correct the empirical record and present new data that both provide a different perspective on the extent of protest and allow us to analyze in detail many of its characteristics. I look closely in turn at the repertoires employed by protesters, at the identities of protest participants, and at the claims that pro-testers made. In doing so, I demonstrate that the majority of protest refl ected less an enjoyment on the part of Russians of new freedoms, and more a deep sense of frustration at the incapacity of citizens to improve their lives through

3 Apparently the administration reneged on this agreement, and a small number of women renewed the action on November 21. Further details are not available. MVD dataset. See below for description of the dataset.

4 MVD dataset.


institutional politics. Much of the protest, I argue, bore a strong resemblance to protest techniques that Russians and others have used under highly repressive, closed authoritarian regimes.

I also show, however, that a signifi cant part of protest politics was made up of the sort of marches and strike actions that we normally associate with long-standing democracies. Nevertheless, even if these actions look superfi -cially like the kind of protest we would expect in democracies, the vast major-ity of events took place without the creation of the kind of social movements that sustain and coordinate campaigns in democracies over time and across space. Instead of reaching across localities and using broad frames to appeal to inclusive identities, we see protest that was primarily local in nature, based on narrowly conceived notions of identity, and making demands that are largely material, exclusive, and conservative or defensive in nature.

Protest patterns therefore are neither like those in closed authoritarian regimes, in which open demonstrative protests like marches are rare, nor like patterns in democracies, where protest and social movement organizations tend to be closely associated with each other. Instead, Russian patterns of pro-test refl ected Russia’s hybrid political regime and in particular were heavily infl uenced by an organizational ecology, in which independent organizations capable of defending and representing a broad range of social interests are relatively few and weak . 5

The chapter proceeds as follows: I begin by analyzing the conventional wis-dom on protest in the post-Communism space in general and in Russia in par-ticular. The common perception is that protest has been surprisingly low, but I argue that the empirical basis on which these claims are made is quite thin. I then introduce a new data set on protest in Russia that offers us a fi rmer basis for analysis. These new data demonstrate that Russians have actually been much more frequent protesters than is generally understood.

In the second part of the chapter I look in detail at the nature of protest events, the identity of protesters and the demands they make. I demonstrate that the repertoire of protest spans types of protest associated with author-itarian regimes and democracies, but that in part because of the particular and local identities expressed by protesters and the narrow, material and rival nature of their demands, protest rarely was associated with the development of social movements that could unite protesters across time and space.

Post-Communism and Protest

The question of protest politics in post-Communism has generated a lot of debate among scholars seeking to resolve an apparent paradox of post-Communist

5 Sullivan ( 2006 ) shows that during Mexico’s hybrid period in 1988–2000, protesters increasingly relied on demonstrative tactics characteristic of protest in democratic regimes, rather than the direct tactics characteristic of protest in authoritarian contexts. However, she does not explore whether this shift toward demonstrative tactics was accompanied by a shift toward more coor-dinated, sustained social movements.


development. The paradox is as follows: Market reforms were thought to harm workers disproportionately because they had been relatively privileged under the previous system. At the same time, democratic reforms meant new repre-sentative institutions and the legalization of political protest. Consequently, many expected workers to use their new freedoms to protest their losses, lead-ing to frequent policy reversals and crises that would jeopardize both mar-ketization and democratization (Przeworski 1991 ). The problem, of course, is that although the expected post-Communist economic crises did happen, the concomitant political reaction apparently did not. Why not?

The economic crisis was certainly real enough. In Russia, for example, offi -cial economic output fell by approximately 50 percent, and though unemploy-ment remained surprisingly low, unpaid wages to workers in Russia amounted to some R22 billion in the fi rst quarter of 1996 (some 71 percent of the monthly wage bill) and rose to R38.7 billion (or 114 percent of the monthly wage bill) by the end of that year (Desai and Idson 2000 : 47). 6 As the decade contin-ued, the problem of unpaid wages grew even more serious. On September 29, 1999, the Executive Committee of the General Council of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions (FNPR) announced that the total debt on wages had reached more than R56 billion, with more than 17 million workers at 107,000 enterprises not being paid on time.

Nevertheless, according to most analysts, Russian workers showed extraor-dinary patience in this situation. In fact, the disjuncture between the depth of the crisis and the apparent equanimity with which it was met led analysts to wonder, “Why is there no revolt?” (Mandel 2001 ). For example, Sarah Ashwin’s ( 1999 ) extraordinary study of the labor collective in a formerly militant Siberian coal mine is subtitled, “The Anatomy of Patience,” and Paul Kubicek ( 2002 ) exam-ined the consequences for democratization of “worker passivity in the face of severe economic crisis” (618). Even the most sustained efforts to come to grips with what were in fact a variety of responses to economic crisis, Stephen Crowley’s Hot Coal Cold Steel ( 1997 ) and Debra Javeline’s ( 2003 ) Protest and the Politics of Blame, frame the discussion in terms of passivity. Javeline, for example, stresses that “only a very small percentage of affected individu-als and an even smaller percentage of the population as a whole have engaged in strikes, demonstrations, or other acts to protest the non-payment of their wages” (7). On the basis of offi cial Goskomstat strike statistics, which I show later usually give low estimates of strike activity, Javeline argues that “only 1 or 2 percent of all Russian workers as well as an extraordinarily small percentage of workers owed wages” have participated in strikes (Javeline 2003 : 37). She does, however, note that there is signifi cant regional and sectoral variation. 7 Nor was Russia alone in being seen as passive, but instead has been thought to be part of a group of “crisis-proof poor democracies” in Eastern Europe (Greskovits 1998 ).

6 Amounts are converted into new rubles for ease of comparison. 7 In Chapter 3 , I discuss regional variation in more detail.


Not all scholars, however, shared the notion that passivity was a key feature of post-Communism. Paul Christensen ( 1999 ) describes what he observed to be “the angry response of workers” to a combination of economic hardship and political “betrayal,” noting that “[w]orkers have demonstrated, picketed, walked off the job, and even gone on hunger strikes. Miners have protested by refusing to emerge from mine shafts and by blocking the Trans-Siberian rail-road” (131). Similarly, Ekiert and Kubik ( 1998 ) analyzed “rebellious civil soci-ety” in Poland where unrest grew as the revolutionary unity of 1989 weakened in the face of economic reform. So who is right? Which did we see – passivity or “angry response”?

The answer, of course, is both. While some were passive, others engaged in a very angry response. If we are simply interested in looking at national levels of protest and saying whether overall mobilization was high or low, then perhaps it is an adequate characterization to stress surprisingly low levels of protest. One or two percent, after all, does seem low. On the other hand, if we are interested in whether and how protest might have political consequences, then we need to look more carefully .

In elections, large numbers matter (depending, of course on the rules), but protest is different. Relatively small numbers of people can carry out highly consequential protests. The Bolshevik revolution, for example, was organized and executed by a relatively small group. Moreover, though the Revolution was preceded by signifi cant levels of strike activity in key cities (Haimson and Pertusha 1989 ), even then it seems unlikely that participation reached more than a few percent of the population in what was still a predominantly agri-cultural society. 8 Moreover, even when it does not lead to a great social revolu-tion, protest can still tell us a lot about the politics of interest intermediation, about political organization, and about relationships between different actors in a state. For a politically consequential understanding of protest, a focus limited to sheer numbers is clearly inadequate; the who, when, why, and how matters enormously. In the rest of this chapter, I address these issues, drawing on previously unpublished data sources that provide a new and quite different perspective.

Data on Protest

A key problem with the existing literature on post-Communist protest has been a lack of good data to answer basic descriptive questions and to test hypothe-ses about patterns. Offi cial data provide a very partial view. The Russian State Statistical agency ( Goskomstat ) only collects data on one form of protest, strikes, and even that data has few defenders. Only strikes that are legal and offi cially endorsed by the unions (which, as we will see, in practice usually means the management too) are required to be recorded. In an interview with

8 For the argument that signifi cant mobilization means at least 5 percent of the population involved in protest, see Lichbach 1998 : 17.


the author, the President of Sotsprof , one of the new “alternative” unions, esti-mated that 80 percent of the strikes organized by his union were ruled illegal. 9 Worse, the weakness of the statistical agency in the context of local economic and judicial politics is such that there is no reason to expect that even these data are gathered systematically. Without good data, it is hard to treat protest sys-tematically and even harder to make cross-national comparisons. As a result, scholars have been drawn to focusing very narrowly on one or more cases and making tentative (and sometimes contradictory) generalizations from these. 10

Although we have learned a lot from such case studies, their usefulness is limited in circumstances in which it is hard to know how the selected cases fi t into the broader population. To get a sense of the broader population, the standard approach in political science and sociology is to use carefully selected media sources to construct “event counts” that provide a strategically designed sample of actions. Newspaper sources are most often used and can be of great value, despite a tendency to focus more on large, nearby events that involve well-established political actors, to the neglect of other kinds of action (Koopmans and Rucht 2002, Myers and Caniglia 2004 ). However, the problems with newspaper event counts are particularly severe when it comes to constructing subnational-level analyses of the kind needed to understand protest patterns in which geographical variation is a central feature (as we will see it is here). As Trejo (forthcoming) shows, national-level newspapers tend to both vastly understate the quantity of protest outside the capital and also to misrepresent its character.

In this book, by contrast, I draw on a new database of strikes, hunger strikes, demonstrations, and other forms of protest that improves on both offi cially published statistics and on newspaper sources. The analysis uses data compiled from daily text reports from Interior Ministry (MVD) depart-ments in each of the localities of the Russian Federation, describing all strikes, protests, hunger strikes, and politically related crimes or other incidents that took place in the previous twenty-four-hour period. The reports, or “svodki,” are compilations of materials submitted to the Federal government by the regional MVD offi ces. Following the considerable theoretical literature on coding event data, I have compiled a database that presents all of the data consistently provided in the MVD reports. 11 This database allows the analysis of events on eight dimensions: type of event (strikes, hunger strikes, factory occupations, pogroms, etc. – 35 categories in total), location (both region and specifi c town or county), type of participants (workers, pensioners, women, students etc. – 245 categories), number of participants, economic sector (34 categories), nature of the demands made (619 categories), location of pro-test (e.g., Red Square, Trans-Siberian Railroad, etc. – 164 categories), and

9 Interview with S. V. Khramov, Moscow, November 13, 2000. 10 Crowley ( 1997 ) asks why steel workers are passive and coal miners militant, Ashwin ( 1999 )

why miners are passive. 11 See, for example, Franzosi ( 1989 ), Gerner ( 1994 ), Mueller ( 1997 ), Rucht and Koopmans ( 1999 ),

Tarrow ( 1989 ), White ( 1993 ).


duration. Using these different dimensions, it is possible to generate a more detailed and more reliable picture of the intensity and spatial distribution of protest, of repertoires and demands, as well as of the distribution across dif-ferent sectors of the economy, than either offi cial data or a newspaper-based event database would allow. 12

The major limitation of the data is that it is only available for a relatively short time period because the source data is not public and is not offi cially acknowledged to exist. I have access to data for the period from 1997 to 2000. Although the limited time period is clearly not ideal, the period for which data are available is nevertheless particularly instructive. Strikes and protests increased through 1998 when the balance of unpaid wages to Russian workers reached a peak of some R56 billion. The period also saw the August 1998 crash of the Russian stock market and currency, perhaps the most serious economic crisis Russia had seen since the stabilization of 1992–3. In 2000, following the crash and the concomitant currency devaluation , the Russian economy began to experience its strongest economic performance in decades. At the same time, protests began to decline in intensity. This period, therefore, provides signifi -cant variation on the dependent variable, as well as on economic independent variables.

There is also great variation in the political context. The period of 1997 through 1999 was one of acute elite confl ict in the run-up to the 1999 parlia-mentary elections and 2000 presidential elections, when the question of the succession to Yeltsin was being decided. Following this, 2000 was a year of great uncertainty for regional leaders as a new, more vigorous regime estab-lished itself in the Kremlin, seemingly bent on bringing regional governors to heel, at the same time as many governors faced re-election races. This context provides an excellent opportunity to assess the tools and tactics of center- region competition and of competition for supremacy among local elites. Finally, this period is of particular interest precisely because it comes after the extraor-dinary period of revolutionary politics, when the new social, economic, and political institutions had had some time to develop and take root. As such, it can provide insight into how the new politics was becoming institutionalized in Russia.

The major downside of the limited access to data is that we get only a brief glimpse of the Putin era. Nevertheless, the pattern of greatly reduced protest activity that we see in 2000 does appear to have set the tone for at least the fi rst Putin presidency. Most observers would agree protest levels were very low at least during Putin’s fi rst term. However, the limited reach of the quantitative evidence does require a shift to more qualitative sources when I analyze the Putin period in more detail in Chapters 6 and 7 .

Obviously, even within the period for which data are available, this new source does not solve all of the problems with the compilation of statistics on strikes and protests. Many of these problems, ranging from the social and

12 See Appendix 1 for the codebook of events.


technical defi nition of a strike through to establishing the number of workers involved and the amount of time lost, arise every time protest statistics are discussed. 13 Moreover, the MVD data are also subject to concerns about the political incentives and bureaucratic habits of that organization. One might worry, for example, that because the data are collected in the localities, there might be incentives for offi cials to exaggerate protest levels in order to claim larger budgetary resources. Alternatively, there is the opposite worry, namely that local offi cials will have incentives to minimize the amount of trouble they report to their superiors in order to create the impression that they have their responsibilities well in hand. Which of these countervailing biases is likely to be more signifi cant is impossible to say with certainty.

Nevertheless, there are a number of reasons to suspect that the conservative tendency in reporting is likely to be more important than the incentive to exag-gerate. First, it is a well-known regularity internationally that police estimates of the numbers of participants in protest events are almost always conservative and are certainly below the numbers estimated by protest organizers, and usu-ally below those of media observers too. Moreover, as Beissinger has argued persuasively, signifi cant underreporting is likely to have characterized offi cial police reports of protest activity in the Soviet period, and it would be no sur-prise if this tendency has survived into the post-Soviet era. 14

In fact, a comparison of the MVD police reports with opposition and scholarly reports of particular well-known incidents (the Vyborg Cellulose Plant confl ict in 1999 and the Astrakhan Gazprom blockade in 2000) suggest that the MVD is slow to report the beginning of the most confl ictual events and understates participation when events are underway. 15 Furthermore, the author’s own observation of quite mundane protest events not included in the event catalogue suggests that it is not only where contention is at its most intense that blind spots in reporting occur. For example, a protest in Moscow in December 2000 against changes in the Labor Code of around sixty peo-ple (mostly pensioners), organized by the independent labor union Sotsprof , the Communist Party (KPRF ), and Viktor Anpilov’s Trudovaya Rossiya , on a Friday evening in the snow outside the Avtozavodskaya metro station, does not appear in the MVD svodki . This was despite a small police presence and inter-national participation in the incongruous form of a young, black dreadlocked shop steward from London Underground (whose passionate speech in English thrilled the chilly, and uncomprehending, crowd). Other larger, more formal, and more heavily policed events observed by the author, such as the November 7 protests of that year, are better refl ected in the MVD data. Consequently, it seems likely that this source should be treated as a conservative guide to the underlying phenomena.

13 Knowles ( 1952 ). 14 Beissinger (1998b). 15 Coverage of the Astrakhan events can be found at www.greenleft.org.au/back/2000/420/420p2.

htm (last accessed May 26, 2009).


One means of checking the quality of the MVD data is to compare it to other published data sources to see what differences emerge. The only other source available for this period that would be directly comparable is the offi -cially published statistics on strikes, and in particular on working days lost to strikes. Figure 2.1 shows the basic pattern of protest measured in terms of the number of working days lost to strikes per month between 1997 and 2000.

There are two series: estimates of working days lost calculated from the MVD event data and the estimates from the offi cial Goskomstat data. A couple of points should be made about the comparison. First, it is striking that the basic shape of the mobilization wave is very similar in both series. This is par-ticularly interesting since the two series are based on quite different sources: the MVD on police reports, Goskomstat on monthly self-reporting by enterprises. That the basic patterns are similar from two such different sources should give us confi dence that we are indeed tracking something more than statistical imaginings.

The next thing to note is that levels of activity are signifi cantly lower in the Goskomstat data during 1998 and 1999. For 1998, for example, the MVD fi gures are almost twice as large as the published numbers, since month after month the MVD data indicate many more working days lost to strikes than Goskomstat reports. However, the offi cially published numbers are higher in the fi rst quarter of 1997 and September 1997, making the overall total of working days lost for 1997 higher in the Goskomstat data than in the MVD numbers.

Chapters 3 – 5 look in detail at differences between strike levels in differ-ent regions and use this analysis to draw important conclusions about the

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Figure 2.1. MVD and Goskomstat estimates of working days lost to strikes, 1997–2000.


institutionalization of labor and the nature of protest in Russian politics. Therefore, one important element of the reliability of the MVD dataset is that differences in reporting between regions should not be correlated with any of the factors that I later fi nd to be important in determining the regional pat-tern of strikes. Without any sense of what the “true” numbers might actually be, it is, of course, diffi cult to verify that this is indeed the case. Nevertheless, comparing the MVD data with Goskomstat’s numbers does provide us with reasons to believe that this is a reasonable assumption. There is no correlation between the differences in the MVD data and the Goskomstat data by region from year to year. 16 Nor is there a correlation been the differences in reported strike levels and political factors important to the story I tell in this book, such as the status of a region as a Republic, or the quality of relations between a regional governor and the Kremlin, the margin of victory of a governor in elec-tions, or the turnout in gubernatorial elections .

What, Who, and Why

Both the Goskomstat data and the MVD data indicate that there certainly was more protest in Russia in this period than is generally appreciated. Even according to conservative offi cial statistics, Russia had 111 working days per 1,000 workers lost to strikes in 1997 and 56.1 days lost in 1998. Figure 2.2 compares these data to a range of other countries, using data from the International Labour Organization (ILO) for the main years of the protest cycle in Russia that I analyze: 1997–2000. The chart includes Greskovits’s ( 1998 ) case, Hungary, as well as Ekiert and Kubik’s rebellious Poland and, for comparison, notoriously strike-prone France and Italy. Two Russian series are given, one the data supplied by Goskomstat and the other based on the MVD data.

Figure 2.2 illustrates a number of points rather well. First, it shows that at least as measured by per capita working days lost to strikes, levels of protest mobilization in a given country tend to vary considerably even within rela-tively short time periods. Though Hungary does indeed display the low levels of protest mobilization that Greskovits drew our attention to in the fi rst two years in the chart (0.8 and 0.2 working days lost per 1,000 employees, respec-tively), 1999 saw a substantial increase in strike activity, with 89.9 working days lost to strikes per 1,000 employees in that year and 55.1 days lost in 2000. Poland also displays some variation from one year to the next, rising from a low of 3 working days lost per 1,000 employees in 1997 to a high of 11 in 1999, though strike intensity is relatively low compared to the other countries. This is particularly surprising given Ekiert and Kubik’s ( 1998 ) fi nding that not only was Poland rebellious, but that its protest repertoire was the most strike-heavy of the countries they considered. The outlier on the high side in

16 The correlation between differences in the GKS and the MVD data by region for 1997–8 was 0.18, between 1998 and 1999 it was 0.25 and between 1997 and 1999 it was 0.005.


the post-Communist group in this period, clearly, is Russia, according both to the offi cial statistics and the MVD data.

The West-European cases of France and Italy both display very high levels of strikes. Indeed in France in 2000, 114 working days per 1,000 workers were lost to strikes, including nationwide strikes by truckers, public transportation workers, hospital workers, and many others over the introduction of a 35-hour working week. Nevertheless, these comparisons also suggest that strikes in post-Communism might not, as is generally supposed, be substantially lower than those experienced in advanced industrial states (Ekiert and Kubik 1998 ). Hungary and Russia, at different times, more than hold their own with the most famously strike-prone of the advanced industrial countries, France and Italy .

What emerges most clearly from Figure 2.2 is a series of caveats that need to be borne carefully in mind when looking at protest and protest levels and trying to assess whether protest is high or low. First, there is a clear warning against generalizing from one state without having a sense of its position in the broader population. Greskovits’s “crisis proof” Hungary turns out to be an outlier; in one direction in 1997 and 1998, and in the other direction in 1999. Second, the fi gure clearly shows the pitfalls of generalizing from one year. One of the things best-known about protest is that it moves in waves or cycles, ris-ing and falling, often very rapidly. Given this, the analyst must be careful to take into account the broader political context that will help establish which periods in which countries are genuinely comparable .

If Figure 2.2 suggests that the conventional wisdom is misleading with regard to the extent of strikes in Russia, the MVD data I examine in the rest of this

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chapter give us even more of the story. Whatever the size of the strikes in the late 1990s, they were widespread across different sectors of the economy. Most prominent in the media among the strikers of this period were the miners, who took to blocking railroads and who occupied the Gorbaty Bridge in Moscow during the summer of 1998. However, the MVD data suggest that, in terms of numbers at least, the leading role in this wave was actually taken by budget sec-tor workers such as teachers and healthcare workers who made up almost half of the days lost to strikes in 1997 and 1998. Moreover, the strike wave went considerably beyond these two most highly publicized groups, with about a quarter of all strikes taking place in (non-mining) industry and fully 16 percent in the machine-building sector, which includes the manufacture of cars, trucks, ships, industrial equipment, and the like. Moreover, strikes were less than half of more than 5,800 different acts of protest carried out in Russia between 1997 and 2000. 17 In the next section, I examine these events along three major dimen-sions: the type of events or so called repertoire of protests (“what happened”), the participants in protest events (“who”), and the nature of the demands put forward by protesters (“why”) .

Protest Repertoires The MVD dataset records 5,822 protest events between 1997 and 2000 and 96 percent of these events can be encompassed within just fi ve categories:-demonstrations, strikes, hunger strikes, and road or railroad blockades. This provides further confi rmation of Tilly’s ( 1978 ) view that “a population’s repertoire of collective action generally includes only a handful of alter natives” (156).

Following the theoretical discussion in Chapter 1 , I divide this repertoire into two broad categories: symbolic actions that involve little threat to persons and property, such as demonstrations, marches, or strikes; and direct actions that involve either the use of force on the part of participants, illegal blockades of transportation routes or occupations of buildings, or self-infl icted threats to the physical well-being of the protesters themselves. 18 As noted in Chapter 1 , symbolic actions are closely associated with the protest repertoire of long-standing democracies, and they make up more than 70 percent of the reper-toire in Russia. However, the repertoire also includes a substantial number of events that are far more direct and more associated with the kinds of things people do in highly repressive regimes (Tilly 2004 ).

17 How does this number compare to other countries? The answer, unfortunately, is that we do not know. The absence of comparable datasets makes it impossible to make strong comparative statements. Comparing the Russia data directly with either Beissinger’s ( 2002 ) protest data or with Ekiert and Kubik ( 1998 ) can tell us little because the sources used are so different. Only strike data are systematically published for a large number of countries, and even this data is spotty and collected by national authorities according to different methods. Consequently, we have no solid basis for making strong cross-national comparisons of protest size or intensity, a fact that has signifi cantly hampered cross-national work in this fi eld.

18 Clearly strikes are not merely symbolic in that they involve a cost for the employers.


Beyond these broad distinctions, how does the Russian repertoire look in comparative perspective? The best source of data for comparison is Ekiert and Kubik ( 1999 ) who gathered systematic information on protest politics in East Germany , Hungary , Poland , and Slovakia . In terms of repertoires, Ekiert and Kubik found Polish protest to be “dominated by strikes and strike threats” (1999: 188) with a ratio of demonstrations to strikes of 1.26. By contrast, Hungarians and East Germans respectively chose street demonstrations four and six times more often than strikes. In Slovakia, “the most frequently used protest strategy was letter writing” (1999: 190).

The Russian protest repertoire is clearly the most strike-dominated of the group. In this period, the ratio of demonstrations to strikes was 0.81. Moreover, the proportion of events that I refer to as direct actions seems higher in Russia than in Ekiert and Kubik’s sample. Violent assaults on persons or property con-stituted only 4.9 percent of events in Poland, 1.7 percent in Hungary, and 2.0 percent in Slovakia. East German protesters, by contrast, resorted to violence much more often, in 13.1 percent of events (Ekiert and Kubik 1999 : 129). Though direct comparisons are diffi cult, and I do not have data on casualties, arrests, or violent acts per se, the Russian repertoire does seem more extreme, if not necessarily more violent. For example, hunger strikes account for a remark-able 14.5 percent of protest events. A further 7.8 percent of events involved blockading railroads or highways. The 110 “other disruptive acts” (1.9 percent of the total) are largely riots, pogroms, brawls, and the like, and so fi t clearly into the category of violent protest.

What explains the repertoire of protest tactics in Russia, and in particular, why did Russians so disproportionately resort to strikes and hunger strikes? There are multiple factors consistent with cultural/historical, institutional, and rational/instrumental explanations.

There are good institutional and instrumental reasons for strikes, hunger strikes, and for direct actions such as blocking highways and railroads to play such a major role in the Russian protest repertoire. Since over 70 percent of protests were directly about unpaid wages or benefi ts, and the vast major-ity of these were over wage arrears, it is only logical that strike action in the workplace would be an important part of the repertoire. Interestingly though, where Poles turned increasingly from economic to political demands as pro-test increased, in Russia, there was no such shift in focus (Ekiert and Kubik 1999 : 177). This seems all the more paradoxical because the responsibility for wage arrears in this period in Russia was extremely diffi cult to pin down and seemed in most cases not merely to be the fault of enterprise manage-ment, but also the result of wider political failures on the part of the Russian state. Moreover, since the 1996 elections, when the campaign of Boris Yeltsin famously toured the country with suitcases of cash, handing out money to those who presented grievances, it was widely understood that payments for arrears would be handed out to either those governed by friends of the Kremlin or to those who were able to make the most political noise. I explore this issue in detail in Chapter 3 .


Nevertheless, strikes and demonstrations seemed to many to be a waste of time. Many of the strikes in industry came in enterprises that were not profi t-able anyway, and so cutting production did little to harm the employers. Strikes in public services such as education and health also seemed to have little effect, either because chronic underfunding meant that these institutions could no longer usefully employ all those on the payroll, or because they felt that the political authorities were not really committed to the services these workers provided. As one schoolteacher in Irkutsk put it, “Who cares if the teachers go on strike? So there will be one more idiot in the world!” 19 In this context, the high proportion of disruptive events is evidence of frustration with institutional politics and a sense that the state needed to be forced to pay attention through direct actions .

Direct actions came in two primary categories: those that infl icted costs on the state and those that infl icted costs on the protesters themselves. The former are most famously exemplifi ed in Russia by the so-called “rail wars .” During the spring and summer of 1998, the tactic of blocking major rail connections across Russia, and in particular the Trans-Siberian railroad, had become so common that on May 20, 1998, the MVD began enumerating rail blockades in a separate section of their reports (as they already did with strikes and hunger strikes). Between 1997 and 2000, the MVD reported 94 instances of railroad blockades and 356 cases of highways being blocked. In addition, there were 40 reports of buildings or factories being occupied.

Such direct actions grabbed the attention of the security forces. On May 21, 2008, the MVD reports for the fi rst time began with the remark that “during the previous 24 hours, the socio-political situation in the country remains [sic] tense.” The reports would begin with this expression for many months. The Kremlin was also clearly worried. Then-Prime Minister Kirienko dispatched Boris Nemtsov to meet with striking miners and he promised to redress their grievances. Yeltsin himself, in his autobiography, cites the “rail wars ” as one reason why devaluation of the ruble was not considered a political possibil-ity in the summer of 1998 (Yeltsin 2000 : 205), and his assistant for econom-ics Aleksandr Livshits reported that Yeltsin “felt there were limits to people’s patience” and “feared a social explosion” (Colton 2008 : 412). Whatever the size of the protests, it is clear that they were being reported to key political leaders, and that the protests were very much on their minds.

Although the “rail wars ” are most often associated with coal miners, and the miners of the western Siberian province of Kemerovo in particular, there were many different kinds of people who adopted such tactics in either a large or a small way. 20 For example, inhabitants of the remote Primorskii town of Bol’shoi Kamen ’ depended almost entirely on the Zvezda submarine repair works. The plant in turn was dependent upon state orders and, when they ran out in the middle of the 1990s, the situation in the town grew desperate.

19 Interview with the author, Irkutsk, June 2000. 20 On June 9, 1998, the MVD reports began reporting separately on the situation in the coal-

producing regions of the country.


Blockading the railway was perhaps the only way that a remote Far Eastern town could grab the government’s attention, attracting, as they did, national and even international media coverage. 21 Arranging such a large operation on the mainline of the railroad, some distance from the settlement of Bol’shoi Kamen’ itself, and coordinating the media offensive was a considerable feat, and substantial assistance in terms of security, transportation, supplies, and public relations was provided by the regional and local authorities. 22

The other common form of direct action taken by workers was to impose costs on themselves rather than on the state. Sometimes, as in the sad case of N. P. Mikhailiuk cited above, this action took the ultimate form of sui-cide. There were also reports of self-maiming. Much more common, how-ever, was the announcement of a hunger strike. Indeed hunger strikes were extremely common. The MVD recorded a remarkable 843 different hunger strikes between 1997 and 2000, constituting more than 14 percent of all pro-test events, as Table 2.1 shows. Hunger strikes were most often undertaken by relatively small groups of around ten participants, rather than by individu-als, and often the numbers of participants would fl uctuate as different people joined or left the strike. Though some hunger strikers took major risks to pro-test, others settled for a somewhat more symbolic, if still physically demanding, type of protest in which different people took “shifts” on hunger strike. In a few cases, this allowed the protests to go on for many, many months. 23

21 Interview with Ivan Rogovoi, Deputy from Bol’shoi Kamen’ in Primorskii Krai regional assem-bly, Vladivostok, June 2003.

22 Interviews with journalists, Vladivostok, June 2003. 23 Though, of course, in such cases, the very duration of the protest without demands being met

suggests the weakness of the symbolic strategy.

Table 2.1. Repertoires of Protest in Russia, 1997–2000

Type of Event Number of Events Percentage

Symbolic Actions Demonstrations 1914 32.9Marches 26 0.4Strikes 2377 40.8Selling Illegal Newspaper 32 0.5total 4349 74.7

Direct Actions Hunger-strikes 843 14.5Railroad Blockade 94 1.7Highway Blockade 356 6.1Sit-ins/Occupations 40 0.7Self-immolations/Suicides 30 0.5Other disruptive actions 110 1.9total 1473 25.3total 5822 100

Source : MVD datasets.


As with other forms of protest, those in which protesters infl ict costs upon themselves rather than directly on others can be viewed from multiple, mutually consistent angles. Punishing yourself can be a rational strategy for infl uencing political authorities in several ways. First, to the extent that the suffering of the participants is obvious and severe, such protests represent a costly signal of the seriousness and commitment of the protesters. Second, suffering can provoke emotions of anger or guilt on the part of authori-ties and other audiences that might provoke them to action. Third, suffering can change the nature of interactions, implicating authorities in causing new harms. Even if the authorities themselves are indifferent to the suffering of the protesters, they may not want to pay the political costs of being impli-cated (Biggs 2003 ) .

Interestingly, hunger strikes are also part of the repertoire of protest in contexts where the participants see themselves as repressed by the state and lacking in an offi cially recognized right to voice grievances, and they have long been a weapon of choice for those with no other means to exert pres-sure than their own moral suasion. Prisoners, for example, have often taken to hunger strikes to publicize demands for improvements in conditions, to claim political status for their incarceration, or to draw attention to broader political causes in the name of which they feel they are being jailed. This is common all over the world, but in Russia there is a strong tradition of hunger-striking prisoners that stretches at least from the Decembrists of the 1820s through Stalin’s Gulag to Brezhnev era dissidents (Applebaum 2003 : 403, 543). What is interesting is the adoption of the tactics of the incarcerated by workers across Russia. This is indicative of the sense of powerlessness and desperation felt by many, many Russians who suffered from the fi scal crisis of the Russian state and economy in the second half of the 1990s. A political regime that was seen as unresponsive to standard political tactics bred a large number of desperate acts by largely unorganized people acting outside the system .

Protest Participants It is well established that the effects of political participation depend not just on the numbers of participants, but also on who participates, on how participants conceive of themselves, and on the organizational context of participation (Berman 1997 ). In this section, I show that although a broad range of people participated in protests, most participants were acting as members of local groups with locally specifi c identities, and that they were often participating in only loosely organized wildcat protests largely independent of one another. A smaller proportion of protests were organized by broader political movements of a leftist orientation. Nationalist or ethnic groups formed a relatively small proportion of protesters, and nationalist demands were infrequently expressed. Protests around (usually local) environmental issues were also a signifi cant ele-ment. The narrow or locally conceived identities of protesters, I argue, tended to limit the extent to which protests were able to scale up into what might have been a broader social movement.


Figure 2.3 shows that Russians in this period were most often mobilized along occupational lines. Some 72 percent of protest events involved people identifi ed as “workers,” 3 percent as “pensioners,” and 1 percent either as “trade unionists” or some other occupational group. Military protests, which made up one half of one percent of all events, can also be thought of as occupational.

Figure 2.4 shows that budget sector workers were major participants in protest events, with health sector workers, municipal services, and education adding up to some 58 percent of recorded protests, the most protest-prone sector of the workforce was education. This is consistent with existing work (Gimpelson and Treisman 2002 ), though, at 45 percent of all days lost, edu-cation accounts for a much smaller proportion of protest events than is often

Workers71.7%

Pensioners2.9%

Organized politicalgroups4.8%

Others4.4%

Locals/environmental8.7%

Trade unions1.1%

Military0.4% Women

3.0%

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Figure 2.3. Participants in protest events, 1997–2000.

Industry14%

Municipal Services6%

Education45%

Health7%

Miners25%

Agriculture<.01%

Other1%Transport

2%

Figure 2.4. Workers protests by sector, 1997–2000.


assumed. 24 More surprising is the fi nding that protest in industrial sectors is only marginally lower, at 39 percent of total protest events, with fully 14 percent in industries other than mining. The strike wave was in fact a mul-tisectoral event. This would certainly come as a surprise to most analysts, because offi cial data generally indicate little or no protest in industry. The difference between the MVD data and published sources is likely due to the fact that the published data rely on self-reporting by enterprises. In this con-text, employers in the budget sector have a clear incentive to report strikes that are due to funding shortages in order to back up their claims for more resources, whereas industrial employers, especially in the private sector, may well have the opposite incentives. As a result, the offi cially published data are systematically biased against industry in favor of the budget sector.

To illustrate better who, other than workers, was active in protests in Russia in this period, Figure 2.5 presents the same data excluding workers. Here we get a much richer sense of the variety of people involved in protests. In all, the MVD dataset includes more than 240 different types of group participating in protest actions. The largest single non-occupational group consisted of local people and environmental activists protesting to express specifi c local grievances. Organized political groups were the next largest element of protest participants. Not surprisingly, the most prominent groups in this category by far were the Communists (KPRF ) and various splinter groups (Trudovaya Rossia , Mai, etc.), as well as the nationalist LDPR . Parties on the right of the political spectrum, such as the Union of Right Forces (SPS ), did organize protest events and demonstrations, but these were rela-tively infrequent.

Ethnic groups participated in a relatively small proportion of protests: 3 percent overall and 11 percent of the non-workers sample. This is in marked contrast to the massive ethnic mobilization that brought down the USSR

Pensioners10%

Local/environmental31%

Women10%

Others10%

Organized Political Groups17%

Investors3%Students

3%

Ethnic11%

Trade unions4%

Military1%

Figure 2.5. Participants in protest events excluding workers, 1997–2000.

24 Gimpelson and Treisman ( 2002 ) take offi cial data to indicate that almost all strikes take place in the education sector.


(Beissinger 1998a, 1998b, 2002). The majority of protests involving specifi c ethnic groups came, unsurprisingly, in the North Caucasus . 25 More than one-third of protest events recorded as involving a particular ethnic group took place in Karachaevo-Cherkassiia in the context of the hotly disputed election for the head of the Republican administration between the Cherkessian Mayor of the city of Cherkessk, Stanislav Derev, and the Karachai former commander of Russian ground forces, Vladimir Semenov, in May 1999. The struggle was eventually resolved, or at least moved from the streets to the corridors of power, through intensive intervention by Moscow . 26

What might we be able to tell about the ecology of organizations in Russia from this distribution of protest participants? In this period, the most active elements in protest were workers, in particular public sector workers. However, it would be a mistake to conclude from the high degree of labor protest that labor unions are vigorous, independent representatives of the more than 31 million organized workers in Russia. Instead, as we will see, organizational, political, and bureaucratic legacies from the Communist period have shaped labor unions into a very different type of organization in Russia, with a dif-ferent relationship to the state than we would expect to see in long-standing democracies. Nevertheless, given the level of protest activity on the part of workers, the role and nature of the unions needs to be better understood. This observation sets the agenda for the next chapter.

To the extent that protests were not organized by the labor unions but were “self-organized” (to use a term employed contemptuously by union offi cials), they tended to be local and unlikely to scale up across space. It is not unheard of that strike committees formed around a particular set of grievances would come to have a more permanent status as an independent trade union lead-ership. This has been the case in a range of circumstances, from a strike in a small-scale laboratory in Novosibirsk in 1990 that gave rise to a Sotsprof local, to the case of the once nationally powerful Independent Union of Miners (NPG) that emerged from strike committees in Kemerovo in the late 1980s. 27 However, it is more the exception than the rule that wildcat strikes leave a substantial organizational legacy. Most wildcat strikes were desperate acts by local people trying to fi nd a direct solution to their own immediate fi nancial problems. These events look like the ephemeral protests against extremes or abuses that have been typical in the Soviet Union and in authoritarian regimes more generally.

25 Though there are no data in this set for Chechnya, a number of events were direct spillovers from that confl ict. Spillover events do not, however, include the protests in Karachaevo-Cherkassiya.

26 RFE/RL Newsline Vol. 3, No. 208, Part 1, October 25, 1999. http://www.iwpr.net/archive/cau/cau_200004_29_03_eng.txt . Though for a while there was much talk of civil war threatening in the Republic, and a number of violent incidents took place, the crisis seemed to observers to have its roots more in dirty politics and personal ambition than in genuine ethnic tensions in this traditionally quiet North Caucasus republic (Orttung 1999 , vol. 4/17).

27 On the formation of an early Sotsprof branch in Novosibirsk , see Pavel Taletskii, Profsoyuznaya Robota Trudnoe Remeslo (Trade Union Work Is A Diffi cult Challenge), 1993.


The participation of organized political parties in protests is interesting too. Some have argued that the fact that most party involvement was on the part of far right or leftist antisystem parties is a cause for concern (Ekiert and Kubik 1999 : 126). However, the major role of the Communist Party (KPRF) in orga-nizing protests should not be overinterpreted. Although it is a broad church, including extremist and nationalist elements, the KPRF has consistently shown itself to be a party more than willing to continue to work within the system, even when it seems destined to continual defeat at the national level. Moreover, as we shall see below, the main appeals of those involved were on simple eco-nomic and subsistence issues rather than on anti-democratic or nationalist issues, with the KPRF often responding to pressure from below rather than leading it. By contrast, the prominence of local or environmental groups does suggest some grounds for optimism that by 1997–2000, grassroots political action was beginning to take root in Russia .

Nature of the Demands Made Having looked at the “who” and “what” elements of protest, we now turn to the question of “what do they want?” To analyze this, demands reported are classifi ed by answering the following two questions:

1) What would it take to satisfy the demand? (e.g., personnel change, polit-ical rearrangement, material rewards, implementation of the law, etc.)

2) Who would need to act to satisfy the demands? (e.g., regional/national government, etc.)

I will show that most demands made at protest events were status quo ori-ented or conservative in the sense that they simply demanded the upholding of the law rather than some sort of radical change. Moreover, most demands were material in nature. Consequently, given that demands were most often particular to the group making them and that satisfying demands meant pay-ing money to one group rather than another, the very nature of the demands also inhibited the scaling up of protests into a broader movement.

Before proceeding, however, it is important to remember the nature of the information that we have on the demands made by protesters. We do not have direct information from the protesters themselves in any of the cases. This means that we are limited in the extent to which we can ask questions about who the protesters themselves say they are, in whose name they are speaking, or to what extent the protesters refer to themselves as part of a wider collectivity. Nor do we have particularly detailed information on demands. Instead, for the majority of events, we have only one line written by police offi cials summarizing what single issue the police reported that the protest was about (though in some cases, more detailed information is provided). Demands are listed for 5,316 of 5,822 events, and only 374 events (7 percent) had more than one demand listed. Despite these limitations, some very clear patterns arise.

The most important point to note is the conservative nature of most of the demands expressed. Some three quarters of events were organized around a


demand for the implementation of existing legal obligations, particularly the payment of wages or other fi nancial obligations. This highlights an interesting paradox that arises in situations where the rule of law is extremely weak, as it was in Russia in this period. For most scholars, protest events represent a break in routine. Mark Beissinger ( 2002 ), for example, follows the defi nition of events derived from Hannah Arendt – “occurrences that interrupt routine pro-cesses and routine procedures” – and Michel Foucault – “the locus of chance reversal” (14–15). Standard defi nitions like these imply understanding protest events in a transformative fashion: “purposeful forms of action whose perpe-trators aim to transform rather than to reproduce, to overturn or alter that which, in the absence of the event, others would take for granted … An event is part of a larger contention, a conjuncture when those who seek to disrupt the naturalized fi nd the opportunity and will to act” (Beissinger 2002 : 14–15). For the period around the collapse of the USSR in which fi fteen new states were born and “real existing” socialism was obliterated, such an understanding of events is quite appropriate.

Yet by 1997, protesters in Russia were for the most part no longer inter-ested in transformation of this kind. They did want prevailing circumstances to change, but the transformation that they wanted to see was a return to routine processes and routine procedures. Beissinger writes, “events are distinguished from the routinized and the normal,” yet what is happening in the period stud-ied here is that people are protesting in an attempt to reestablish the routine and the normal. In great contrast to the protesters in Paris in the late 1960s, it is the very lack of routine and normality in post-Communist Russia that pushed people into desperate acts of contention.

Above all, what motivated Russian protesters in this period was a demand for the payment of wages and benefi ts owed by the state and private employers. Some 74 percent of all protest events featured this demand, as Figure 2.6 shows where demands coded “law-material” are calls for the implementation of exist-ing law as it relates to matters of material distribution. This far outweighs any other type of claim, with the next largest set – claims for more social spending or changes in its material distribution – being featured at only 6 percent of events .

To get a better view of what range of other claims were being made, Figure 2.7 shows the distribution of demands other than for the payment of legally owed obligations. In some ways, the most interesting thing about this fi gure is the diversity of claims represented. The largest set is for changes in the material distribution of resources in society. Almost one-fi fth of events, however, had a more directly political edge to them, demanding changes of personnel, almost always of state offi cials, though sometimes of enterprise management. Foreign affairs play a surprisingly large role, refl ecting in large part a vigorous cam-paign organized by the LDPR and others against the U.S. participation in the bombing of Yugoslavia . In some ways these can be seen as nationalistic (or at least pan-Slavist) demands. However, nationalist demands on other states might usefully be distinguished from ethnic or nationalist demands that relate


to the internal politics of the Russian Federation. As suggested by the data on participants in protest actions, ethnic/nationalist politics of this latter type do not play a major role. Only some 6 percent of this subset of events featured ethnic or nationalist demands being made.

However, though the data show a range of issues being raised at protest actions, Figure 2.8 presents a narrower picture of the world that is being addressed. When we analyze the demands asking at what level action would have to be taken to address them, we see that in the vast majority of cases,

Law: material74%

Law: security<1%

Social spending/materialdistribution

6%

Wages/work conditions1%

Ownership1%

Commercial/market3%

Ethnic politics1%

Criminal justice2%

Historical commemoration<1%

Environmental/NIMBY1%

Other<1%

Nationalist demands<1%

Foreign affairs3%

National festival<1%Election irregularities

1%Personnel changes

5%

Figure 2.6. Categories of demands made at protest events in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000.

Commercial/market12%

Personnel changes18% Ownership

4%Ethnic politics

5%Criminal justice

6%

Wages/workconditions

4%

Social spending/materialdistribution

23%

Law: security1%

Other2%

Electionirregularities

5%

Foreign affairs12%

Nationalist demands1%

Environmental/NIMBY

5%

National festival1%

Historicalcommemoration

2%

Figure 2.7. Demands other than for payment of legal obligations made at protest events in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000.


action at the local level is the primary issue. This is in part a product of coding demands for wage arrears as an issue of local action. As I have noted already, the issue of responsibility for wage arrears is thorny enough in each specifi c case and certainly impossible to untangle in general on the basis of the evidence at hand. Nevertheless, since the legal obligations for payment in most cases lie with a local instance, it seems reasonable to code the scope of claims on wage arrears in this way.

Once again, in order to see more clearly what else is going on aside from claims for unpaid wages and benefi ts, Figure 2.9 shows the scope of demands excluding the payment of legal obligations. Here we see a somewhat different image. Demands that could be satisfi ed by action at the local level are again a very signifi cant part of the set of claims made, more than 40 percent. However, at some 35 percent of events, claims were made that would require action at the national level. The largest single element consisted of demands for the res-ignation of President Boris Yeltin and/or his government. Bearing in mind the political cast of the participants in events discussed above, this would hardly be surprising. As we will see in Chapters 3 and 4 , it also fi ts well with the structure of politics in the period.

Conclusion: Protests without Movements

Despite all this evidence of protest mobilization, it is clear that the contention did not add up to a sustained challenge to the authorities, either in the Kremlin or elsewhere. Protests were very numerous but mostly isolated, mainly local in nature, and focused on very basic, bread-and-butter issues.

Local84%

Regional3%

National10%

Undefined3%

Figure 2.8. Scope of demands made at protest events in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000.


There were, of course, exceptions. Sometimes, different groups would come together to organize joint actions. The left-Communist party Trudovaya Rossiya and the Union of Offi cers coordinated a symbolic “March on Moscow ” in July 1997, involving about 500 participants in the cities of Ryazan’ and Tula. Regionally based organizations such as Mai in Sverdlovsk oblast’ or Yaroslavl 98 also organized protests in both Yaroslavl and Moscow in October 1998. Occasionally, there was a multiregional dimension to protest actions. On April 15, 1997, for example, some 4,000 workers in eight regions simultane-ously launched strikes demanding payment of their wages, though the extent of coordination behind these actions is unclear.

Another example of protests being shaped into a movement was the Union of Veterans of Chernobyl ( Soyuz Chernobyltsev ), which organized fi fty-one differ-ent protest events between 1997 and 2000. Roughly half of these protests were demonstrations or meetings, including one on October 26, 2000, in which ailing survivors of the operation to contain the pollution from the nuclear catastrophe discarded their medals at the statue of Marshal Zhukov in Manezh Square in central Moscow . In other attempts to gain publicity, the Chernobyltsy launched some twenty-fi ve different hunger strikes during the period. Driving the Chernobyl protests was fi rst the non-payment of the special allowances accorded them under Russian law, and later decisions by the Ministry of Labor and the State Duma to remove special privileges and reclassify the Chernobyl workers as ordinary inva-lids. The mobilization success of the Chernobyltsy resulted directly from their small numbers (most actions involved 30 or so protesters, with the largest being the 200-strong demonstration in Manezh Square), the sense of solidarity engendered by the extreme nature of their common experience, and their shared outrage at their treatment after giving their health (and ultimately their lives) for the state. 28

Regional11%

National35%

Undefined10%

Local44%

Figure 2.9. Scope of demands excluding payment of legal obligations made at protest events in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000.

28 Another example was the petition drive on the part of Russia’s environmental activists for a referendum to have the State Committee for Environmental Protection and the Federal Forestry


For the millions protesting against the non-payment of wages, these condi-tions did not apply, and coordinated campaigns, especially on a national level, were few. Only during the national protests organized by the Communist Party (usually with, but sometimes without, the labor unions) in May and October each year was coordinated action on anything like a nationwide scale achieved. However, events of this kind were short-lived, lasting no more than a single day. Consequently, their economic impact was negligible whereas their symbolic value often came down to whether or not the numbers of participants exceeded expectations. For example, during the national day of protest on October 7, 1998, organizers claimed up to two million people participated in protests to demand Yeltsin’s resignation. The MVD estimated participation at 1.3 million in 1,368 towns. Nevertheless, newspaper reports were almost unanimous in noting that, whatever the actual numbers, the turnout was disappointing. 29

Figure 2.10 illustrates each of these points. The peaks show the May and October national days of action organized by the KPRF, but no particular pat-tern in the data emerges between these months. The fl atness of the line between peaks shows the paucity of coordination of demonstrations nationally outside these two annual events.

As a result, it is diffi cult to argue that the 12.4 million working days lost to strikes, or the 5,822 protests, hunger strikes, and other events recorded

Service restored and to prevent a vote on the import of nuclear waste. Though this drive was largely unsuccessful, the movement required coordination across the Federation, and around 2.5 million signatures were collected. The Putin administration has since moved to amend the constitution to make it more diffi cult to call for referenda. See McFaul and Treyger 2004 : 169.

29 Myre 1998 ; “Will the President Hear the Voice of the People?” 1998; and Barrie 1998 .

0

200,000

400,000

600,000

800,000

1,000,000

1,200,000

1,400,000

1,600,000

1,800,000

2,000,000

Jan-

97

Mar-9

7

May-9

7

Jul-9

7

Sep-9

7

Nov-9

7

Jan-

98

Mar-9

8

May-9

8

Jul-9

8

Sep-9

8

Nov-9

8

Jan-

99

Mar-9

9

May-9

9

Jul-9

9

Sep-9

9

Nov-9

9

Jan-

00

Mar-0

0

May-0

0

Jul-0

0

Sep-0

0

Nov-0

0

Figure 2.10. Number of demonstrators in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000.


between 1997 and 2000 added up to something that could really be called a social movement. Social movement scholars “reserve [the term social move-ment] for those sequences of contentious politics that are based on underly-ing social networks and resonant collective action frames, and which develop the capacity to maintain sustained challenges against powerful opponents” (Tarrow 1998 : 2). Tilly ( 2004 ) gives a similar defi nition of a social movement as “a sustained challenge to powerholders in the name of a population living under the jurisdiction of those powerholders by means of repeated public dis-plays of that population’s worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment” (23). By this defi nition too, most of the contention discussed here does not add up to a social movement, failing to provide a sustained challenge in the name of a united community. As we have seen, in Russia in the late 1990s, there was plenty of contention, but there never emerged the underlying social networks or collective action frames to maintain sustained challenges across anything but narrow spans of space, time, or population.

As the data on demands and participants showed, in most events, the col-lectivities involved were local and based on a sense of identity embedded in the particular workplace or local community. Communities participating in pro-test were generally narrow. Demands were largely material, and conservative and defensive in orientation, calling for implementation of already established rights rather than seeking to expand the realm of rights or representation. Moreover, the nature of the grievances expressed made it inherently more dif-fi cult to organize a coordinated movement involving large numbers of people in different communities. Claims that involve the provision of goods that are non-rival public goods, at least from the perspective of the protesters, such as “civil society” or “the nation,” are easier to mobilize large populations around (Glenn 2001 ). The issue of transfers for the repayment of wage arrears is much more obviously divisive. Central funds are clearly rival in consumption; what is transferred to one enterprise or school cannot also be transferred to another. As an illustration, on May 21, 1998, railroad workers in the town of Samsk in Rostov Oblast’ demonstrated to call on miners who had blocked the railroads to desist so that the railroad workers, who were being paid, could get back to work. In these circumstances, workers have signifi cant diffi culties in coordinat-ing on a strategy for extracting resources from Moscow (Ilyin 1999 ).

As also noted earlier in this chapter, the repertoire of events included many acts of desperation, indicative of the inability of citizens to have their interests represented through either normal institutional means or the standard symbolic protests of the advanced democracies. Moreover, as I discuss in Chapters 3 – 5 , even apparently standard protests such as strikes were rather different in mean-ing than we would normally expect. Strikes were rarely really like industrial confl ict in the advanced democracies, primarily because the subject of claims was usually not really focused on the enterprise, but instead was aimed at higher instances of power. Enterprise managers and regional political author-ities often encouraged and supported strikes in the hope of attracting subven-tions from central authorities. This phenomenon is refl ected in the regional


patterns of protest, limiting the extent to which we might think of strikes as autonomous.

Finally, there was little in the way of an effective national leadership that might overcome the barriers and give the protests a national coherence. As I show in Chapter 3 , the national labor unions were heavily dependent upon state patronage for their continued survival in an unfriendly environment. They had little control over lower-level trade union organs, which in turn were gen-erally suspicious of the leadership and followed their own sectional or regional political course (Ashwin and Clarke 2003 : 48). Politically, the unions were consistently unable either to form a successful political party of their own or to unite behind an existing political party. Relations with the Communist Party – the main political opposition to the clans controlling the Kremlin – were often strained, with FNPR leader Mikhail Shmakov keen on maintaining a distance between the Communists and the unions. Moreover, the independent unions that had seemed to fl ourish in the dying days of the Soviet Union were largely marginalized by the second half of the 1990s. The result was a labor move-ment that was divided between more prosperous and less prosperous branches, between workers with a strategically important position and those without, and along regional lines, with regional unions being incorporated into the many different local regimes that characterized Russian federalism in the 1990s.

Protest in Russia in this period, then, looks neither like protest in liberal democracies nor like protest in closed authoritarian regimes. There are too many direct actions and attempts at major disruption for a liberal democracy, and too many open strikes, demonstrations, and marches for a closed authori-tarian regime. Moreover, these strikes, demonstrations, and marches are differ-ent in character from those run by the organized social movements we have come to expect in liberal democracies. In the chapters that follow, I present more evidence on these hybrid forms of protest, trying to understand how such events are actually organized and what patterns they follow .

67

3

The Geography of Strikes

“The port wine still tasted exactly the same as it had always done – one more proof that reform had not really touched the basic foundations of Russian life, but merely swept like a hurricane across the surface.”

Viktor Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger

In the preceding chapter, I showed that conventional wisdom portraying Russians as patient and long-suffering in the face of the hardships of economic transition is very misleading. Instead, people all across Russia responded to hardship with strikes, hunger strikes, marches, demonstrations, and road and rail blockades. Nevertheless, despite intense protest activity at certain times and places, many did remain passive and there was no major national protest movement. In part, as we have seen, this was the result of protest demands that tended to be framed in economic and local terms, giving them a zero-sum character; satisfying one group’s demands would mean less money to satisfy another’s, and so coordination across groups was diffi cult. However, as I will show in this chapter, deeper reasons lie not in the kinds of demands made but in the nature of organizational life in post-Communist Russia, in decisions made by state actors about mobilizing others, and in competition among the political elite for resources.

To show the effect of organizations, state mobilizing strategies and elite competition, I look in more depth at the interaction of protest and politics dur-ing the protest wave of the late 1990s. Focusing on the largest component of protest, labor strikes, I show that protest was very unevenly distributed, with some places experiencing very high levels of strikes and other places almost none. I demonstrate that this pattern results from the fact that organizations supposed to represent workers were in reality top-down, hierarchical organi-zations dominated by regional governors. Consequently, workers were either marginalized and isolated, protesting only in the most extreme situations, or they were integrated into political bargaining games between regional gover-nors and Moscow. This meant that in most places strike levels tended to be low as governors and the unions they controlled sought to demobilize rather than


organize discontent. However, where governors had poor relations with the center, and few other bargaining chips at their disposal, they actively mobilized workers and strike levels could be very high indeed.

I focus on strikes in this chapter for both substantive and methodologi-cal reasons. Substantively, strikes are not just the largest single element in the Russian protest repertoire, they are also politically the most signifi cant. Ever since the industrial revolution fi rst brought workers to politics, the strike has been a key tool not just of industrial confl ict, but also of political struggle. Strikes are used to try to infl uence the “who gets what” of everyday politics in terms of wages and salaries, and also in terms of public expenditure and taxa-tion. Strike patterns both refl ect and shape patterns of economic and political power and can tell us a lot about insiders and outsiders in systems of inter-est representation (Korpi and Shalev 1980 ). Strikes also matter for broader political stability. Strike waves have frequently brought down governments and even regimes (Collier 1999 ) and, along with other forms of protest, are inex-tricably related to processes of both democratization and de-democratization (Tilly 2004 ).

In addition to their substantive importance, focusing on strikes as a subset of protest in this case also offers two key methodological advantages. First, limiting the focus to industrial confl ict makes it easier to characterize a cen-tral theoretical variable in the argument, the ecology of organizations. The rel-evant groups, namely trade unions, are relatively easy to identify and describe. Hence, as I show, disaggregating strikes from other kinds of protest gives us a crisper set of theoretical expectations. The second advantage of looking at strikes alone is that social science has provided us with a theoretically rich set of expectations about what strike patterns ought to look like in contexts in which workers have access to labor organizations that are more or less genuinely representative in nature. Consequently, we can test hypotheses from existing explanations against expectations derived from the theory of protest developed here.

The chapter is organized as follows. I begin by demonstrating the remark-able geographical variation in strikes that this chapter will explain. I then ana-lyze the ecology of post-Communist labor organizations in Russia, on which the explanation turns. I explain how the “alternative” or “independent” labor unions that emerged in the late Communist period were marginalized and how the organizational ecology came to be dominated by large “survivor” labor unions that have very little support among, or commitment to, workers at the grassroots level, but who have very close relationships with powerful political leaders, particularly regional governors. Having established the nature of the organizational ecology, I then turn to thinking about what it means for strike patterns. In short, I argue that we should expect high strike levels in regions whose governors have bad relations with the center and who have few other means for putting pressure on the center. Other regions should have low levels of strikes even when their level of economic distress and other factors are taken into account. This explains the unusual geography of strikes. I specify and test

The Geography of Strikes 69

hypotheses derived from this theory. I then look at how the explanation of strike patterns fares when we think about non-strike protest. I conclude by putting the Russian experience in an international comparative context and specifying some conditions under which we would expect similar phenomena in other countries.

Strike Patterns

As we saw in Chapter 2 , there has been quite a cottage industry of studies look-ing at protest patterns and politics in post-Communism generally and in Russia in particular. Even though workers played a major role in the Soviet collapse (Crowley 1997 ), the academic conventional wisdom is that there has been no labor protest of note in post-Communist Russia. 1 However, as I showed in Chapter 2 , the conventional wisdom is misleading. In fact, Russians at certain times and in certain places have been very highly mobilized. Moreover, as I show here, the conventional wisdom is not only misleading in terms of under-standing recent Russian history, it is also theoretically constricting, blinding us to important variation that can be useful in the development and testing of new ideas about protest patterns.

Part of the reason that scholars have missed the extent of protest in post-Communist Russia is that the national picture masks enormous regional variation.

Table 3.1 shows the variation in the intensity of strikes. At the high end we fi nd seven regions, spread from Russia’s Far East, across Siberia, through the Ural Mountains, to southern European Russia, with more than 500,000 working days lost to strikes over four years. For example, in the Republic of Khakasiia , about 550,000 working days were lost. This meant 809 working days per thou-sand employees were lost in 1997 and 890 in 1998, roughly ten times higher than the Russian average of around 80. Primorskii Krai lost 384 working days per thousand employees in 1998, and Kemerovo Oblast lost 959 working days per thousand employees in 1997. But these regions are unusual. Nearly half of the regions (37 out of 88) reported less than 10,000 working days lost in total over the four years. 2 These are also to be found right across Russia.

Figure 3.1 presents the same data graphically using a clustering algorithm, called Fischer-Jenks natural breaks, that captures the skewed regional dis-tribution of strikes quite well. The algorithm clusters regions on the basis of similarity, letting the data determine the size of the clusters, and shows that most regions – the light areas – have relatively low levels of strikes, whereas some – the dark areas – have very high levels. Figure 3.1 also shows quite

1 David Mandel ( 2001 ) asks: “Why is there no revolt?” Sarah Ashwin ( 1999 ) analyzes “The Anatomy of Patience,” Paul Kubicek ( 2002 ) examines the “worker passivity in the face of severe economic crisis” (618) and Kaspar Richter ( 2006 ) notes “the absence of any sustained protest movement” (134).

2 It is unlikely that regions reporting zero strikes are reporting accurately, but it is safe to assume that the level of strikes in these regions is very low. No data were available for Chechnya.


Table 3.1. Variation in Working Days Lost to Strikes by Region, 1997–2000 (number of regions/days in parentheses)

No days reported(17) Mordovia, Samarskaia, Ingushetiia, Evreiskii A.O., Penzenskaia, Orlovskaia, Dagestan, Kalmykiia, Tyva

Severnaia Osetiia-Alaniia, Adygeia, Tambovskaia, Kaliningradskaia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Nenetskii A.O.

Aginskii-Buriatskii A.O., Koriakskii A.O. Less than 1000 days (10) Belgorodskaia (58),Tiumenskaia (94), Kaluzhskaia

(112), Kurskaia (126), Karachaevo-Cherkessiia (225), Moskva (557), Ust-Ordynskii Buriatskii A.O. (840), Khanty-Mansiiskii A.O. (865), Tatarstan (958), Novgorodskaia (996).

More than 1000 and less than 10 000 days (10)

Astrakhanskaia (1 070), Komi-Permiatskii A.O. (1 083), Saratovskaia (2 008), Taimyrskii A.O. (2 101), Leningradskaia (3 711), Sankt-Peterburg (4 470), Bashkortostan (4 737), Evenkiskii A.O. (4 987), Krasnodarskii Krai (5 200), Moskovskaia (9 207).

More than 10 000 and less than 100 000 days (22)

Yamalo-Nenetskii A.O. (10132), Tverskaia (10 688), Stavropol’skii Krai (10 720), Lipetskaia (11 489), Yaroslavskaia (12 041), Riazanskaia (12 724), Ul’ianovskaia (19 941), Kamchatskaia (21 700), Vladimirskaia (21 949), Voronezhskaia (23 824), Chukotskii A.O. (24 438), Tomskaia (40 610), Omskaia (41 206), Pskovskaia (45 903), Altaiskaia Respublika (51 476), Marii-El (55 346), Ivanovskaia (59 462), Kareliia (75 151), Volgogradskaia (77 800), Murmanskaia (78 886), Magadanskaia (91 274), Chuvashiia (95 226).

More than 100 000 and less than 500 000 days (22)

Novosibirskaia (103 703), Udmurtiia (105 896), Permskaia (118 516), Tul’skaia (136 756), Vologodskaia (151 043), Sakhalinskaia (155 369), Kostromskaia (157 879), Amurskaia (177 663), Nizheg’dskaia (178 171), Kirovskaia (218 689), Arkhangelskaia (255 433), Komi (269 392), Smolenskaia (275 996), Kurganskaia (284 736), Orenburgskaia (319 879), Chitinskaia (329 631), Buriatiia (346 426), Brianskaia (348 907), Irkutskaia (453 138), Altaiskii Krai (462 973), Khabarovskii Krai (464 909), Sakha (481 413).

More than 500 000 days (7) Primorskii Krai (542 287), Khakasiia (549 643), Cheliabinskaia (576 061), Rostovskaia (624 971), Sverdlovskaia (705 743), Krasnoiarskii Krai (1 058 273), Kemerovskaia (1 585 292).

Source : MVD Dataset.


nicely the geographical spread of high-strike regions. They are not all clustered in one geographical area, but instead run all the way across from Smolensk in the west and Rostov in the south to Sverdlovsk and Cheliabinsk in the Urals, Kemerovo in Western Siberia, and Primorskii Krai in the Far East. What is characteristic about the Russian experience, therefore, is not passivity but variation.

What explains the variation in strike patterns? There are a number of important clues in the existing literature. Working with individual level sur-vey data, Javeline ( 2003 ) fi nds that, whereas workers in Russia in this period generally had great diffi culty in allocating blame for their problems, those

Working Days Lost to StrikesBy Region 1997-2000

0 - 12,724

Working Days Lost

12,725 - 59,462

59,463 - 136,756

136,757 - 348,907

348,908 - 1,585,318

Figure 3.1. Regional variation in strike intensity in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000.


who were more successful in ascribing blame were more likely to participate in protest actions. Success in blame attribution is in part a function of clar-ity of enterprise ownership, but also a matter of involvement with political organizations. Moreover, she shows that those who had been solicited by a trade union or other organization to participate in a protest action were more likely to join in than those who had not. In other words, individuals are more likely to participate in a protest action if one has been organized for them to go to than if they have somehow to organize it themselves. Yet this does not tell us why an event is organized in the fi rst place. To understand this means looking at the institutional and organizational level to see why events are more often organized in some places than in others. This in turn depends on organizational ecology, state mobilizing strategies, and patterns of elite competition .

The Ecology of Organizations and Protest

A basic premise of this book is that once we move out of the context of long-standing democracies, where the vast majority of research in social move-ments and protest has been conducted, we can no longer assume that we can simply “apply” the classical political process model in which protest is associated with independent, bottom-up social movements that interact with political institutions. Not only do political institutions vary from place to place, but the nature of the organizational world is going to be very different once we move away from long-standing democracies. As we saw in Chapter 2 , is it quite possible to see a lot of protest taking place without the creation of the kind of lasting networks of trust and interaction that characterize “social movements.” Furthermore, the nature of the organizations that do exist may be quite different from organizations in democracies, even if they call themselves by similar names. Consequently, a key task for the analyst trying to understand not just the volume and kind of protest that is likely to be witnessed, but also its nature and its likely implications, is to develop a clear picture of what the fi eld of organizations actually is in the area and sector being analyzed.

Specifi cally, I have argued that in hybrid regimes we are often likely to observe organizational terrain dominated by, or at least heavily populated with, organizations that are far from the independent, bottom-up style organizations connoted by the term “social movement,” but that are instead closely tied to the priorities of elite political actors. As I noted in Chapter 1 , there are many different circumstances through which this could occur. In this book, I describe two of these. In Chapter 7 , I look at the case of new organizations created spe-cifi cally as political vehicles for state-sponsored projects. Here I consider a dif-ferent example in which holdovers from a previous closed authoritarian regime persist or “survive” into the new regime and, fi nding themselves pressured by new, challenger organizations, protect themselves by allying themselves with power holders. This has led to some quite distinctive patterns of strikes. To see


this process in action, we turn now to look at the development of unions in post-Communist Russia.

Labor: Trading Cooperation for Survival Organized labor broke onto the Soviet political scene in an unprecedented and dramatic fashion in July 1989 when 400,000 miners, from the Ukrainian Donbas, through the Karaganda coalfi elds of Kazakhstan, to the Sakhalin mines of the Russian Far East, went on strike. The 1989 strikes represented a turning point of enormous signifi cance and gave birth to a genuine grassroots work-ers’ movement in the coal fi elds of the Soviet Union. From 1989 to 1991, this movement came to play a signifi cant role in the politics of the disintegration of the USSR through an alliance struck between the miners on the one side and Boris Yeltsin on the other (Ilyin 1999 ). 3 At the height of this alliance, Yeltsin, his liberal allies, and the miners’ leaders coordinated a nationwide strike from March to May 1991 that played a critical role in the struggle between the com-peting Russian and Soviet authorities (Clarke et al. 1993 : 161–72) .

However, once control of the mines was passed from the Soviet government to that of the Russian Federation, it soon became clear that the majority of the mines simply could not survive without state support, and the interests of the miners and Yeltsin’s shock-therapists diverged (Ilyin 1999 : 252). Yeltsin teamed up with the World Bank to implement a strategy for closing mines, whereas the miners’ union, the Independent Union of Mineworkers (NPG), went on to become an important part of the independent workers’ movement (Borisov 1997 ). The coal miners’ union, however, proved to be an exception rather than an example. Workers in a few specialized and strategically impor-tant branches, such as dockers and air-traffi c controllers, were also able to cre-ate strong new unions, but by 2000, only 5 percent of union members, at most, were in alternative unions (Ashwin and Clarke 2003 : 1).

Another key part of the story of the isolation of labor in the Yeltsin era is the fall from power of Sotsprof, the other independent trade union that gained a high profi le in the early 1990s, and its replacement with representatives of the old, Communist-era unions. Unlike the miners’ union, Sotsprof was (and still is) a varied confederation representing workers in a number of sectors, but notably in the budget sector. Also unlike the miners union, it did not grow organically from the ground up, but instead grew as an offshoot of the Social Democratic Party , acting as an umbrella for locally founded strike committees. Sotsprof came to national prominence when Yeltsin gave control of the Ministry of Labor to the Social Democrats in 1991. However, the Social Democrats were a poor fi t in a Yeltsin administration dominated by neoliberals and representa-tives of industrial interests. As a result, the Social Democratic party soon disap-peared off all but the most detailed maps of the Russian political landscape, and Sotsprof began losing its positions on government-appointed bodies .

3 The origins of this alliance are the subject of some dispute. For opposing views, see Clarke, et al. 1993 : 161–2 and Crowley 1997 : 123.


By contrast, the former offi cial unions, renamed the Federation of Independent Unions of Russia (FNPR ), had considerable success in the immediate post-Soviet period in maintaining their position as the largest force in Russian labor politics and in blunting the challenge from the independent unions. As early as 1992 and 1993, Yeltsin’s administration began to coopt powerful industrial interests, and the FNPR leadership increasingly took the place of Sotsprof as the sup-posed voice of labor within the administration (Reddaway & Glinski 2001 ).

There were signifi cant advantages for the government in making the FNPR its main negotiating partner. The FNPR was the successor of the all-encompassing Soviet trade union confederation and, as such, had a broad reach into practically every workplace opened before 1991 and now subject to closure or restructuring, with the accompanying potential for unrest. Moreover, the government also held a trump card in its relations with the FNPR: the union’s considerable property hold-ings and its right to represent 31 million members, both of which it had inherited from the Soviet period, and both of which could be taken away by presidential decree. This made the FNPR an excellent negotiating partner: well organized but enormously vulnerable and dependent on the favor of the government. 4

For its part, though offi cially opposed to the government, the FNPR jealously guarded its newfound favor. In fact, with little infl uence among its members and without alliances with signifi cant opposition political parties, the FNPR had little alternative but to cultivate relations with the state. Consequently, although the FNPR occasionally participated in demonstrations and protest meetings (Clarke 2001 ), these actions often had a ritual quality to them, and the primary focus of FNPR strategy was on the creation of a system of labor relations that would guarantee the union a seat at the table and ensure its organizational survival.

The legal basis for the new system of labor relations was established in the fi rst half of the 1990s by a range of laws, presidential decrees, and decisions of the Russian government. 5 These acts set up a system of “social partnership” in which representatives of the state, employers, and workers make formal agree-ments at the Federal, branch, regional, and enterprise levels . 6

4 The property rights of the unions were confi rmed in the Law on Trade Unions 1996. 5 The most important are Presidential decree number 162 of October 26, 1991, “On the pro-

vision of the rights of labor unions in the period of transition to a market economy;” decree number 212 of November 15, 1991, “On social partnership and the resolution of labor disputes (confl icts);” the Law on “Collective Negotiations and Agreements” of March 11, 1992; and the Presidential decree, “On the foundation of the Russian Tripartite Commission for the regulation of socio-labor relations,” of July 24, 1992 (Gritsenko, Kadeikina and Makukhina 1999 : 342). It is worth noting, given the governments later approach to the unions, that much of this basic legislation was adopted during the period of Yeltsin’s close relations with the new independent unions and their occupation of important posts within the Ministry of Labor. Although social partnership later became a means for the FNPR to exclude the independents from a major role, the independents had played an important role in the system’s creation.

6 Author’s interview with Vladimir Filaretovich Lazarev, Ministry of Labor, Moscow, November, 21, 2000. Of these agreements, only the Federal and regional agreements are “three-sided” even in theory, since branch and enterprise agreements are only between employers and unions.


It has been well documented that the national and branch (and usually enterprise) level agreements have had little effect, largely due to the immense diffi culty of fi nding authoritative representatives of the employers’ side who could make deals that would actually be enforceable. 7 However, as we will see in the next section, there are important effects at the regional level.

Social Partnership at the Regional Level In the Soviet period, trade unions were organized hierarchically, with the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (VTsSPS) sitting at the top of a bureau-cratic structure that stretched through regional union committees and councils down to primary organizations in enterprises all over the Soviet Union. 8 However, the end of Soviet-era “democratic centralism,” in which lower-level organizations closely followed the diktats of higher-level organs, transformed the previously cohesive labor union apparatus into a federal organization in which the national unions lacked either the carrots or the sticks necessary to impose discipline or coherence on the activities of lower-level organs. In this decentralized context, the development of a system of social partnership at the regional level has helped foster strong communities of interest between the unions and regional governors (Ashwin and Clarke 2003 : 72).

The system evolved from discussions between the regional authorities and the trade unions in the late Soviet period. 9 On the union side were represen-tatives of the most important branches of the economy in each region and, together with the regional administration, they formed “a united front of regional labor unions with the administration in struggles with the center” (Bizyukova n.d. : 2). Starting in 1991 and 1992, the sides began signing written agreements and expanding the range of questions addressed in agreements. The model quickly spread, extending to seventy-six of Russia’s (then) eighty-nine regions by 2000. 10 Agreements varied from region to region, but in gen-eral they covered a range of items from pay and working conditions (especially minimum wages) to plans for developing the regional economy, policies on jobs, social safety nets, and the institutions of social partnership (Ashwin and Clarke 2003 : 160–61).

Over time, however, the process became bureaucratized and more con-cerned with the formulation and implementation of agreements than with the

7 See in particular, Cook 1997 : Chapter 3; Ashwin and Clarke 2003 : 132–48; Christensen 1999 : 122–5.

8 In the midst of the confl ict between Russian and Soviet authorities in the late perestroika period, a new body, the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR), was founded at a series of conferences in 1990, incorporating the VTsSPS structures on the territory of the Russian Federation. When it was established in September 1990, the FNPR claimed members in nineteen branch and seventy-fi ve regional organizations, covering 72 percent of the Russian workforce (Ashwin and Clarke 2003 : 32–3).

9 The following analysis draws on work done in a number of regions by the Institute for Comparative Labour Relations Research (ISITO), as summarized by V. Bizyukova ( n.d. ).

10 Author’s interview with offi cials at the Ministry of Labor in Moscow, November 2000. See also Ashwin and Clarke (2003: 152).


representation of real and divergent interests. This process was more marked in some regions than in others, depending upon the practical demands made on the labor departments of the regional administration. However, there was a marked tendency for agreements to become mechanical additions to previous deals instead of a refl ection of direct and real discussions between the parties. In addition, even when there is real negotiation, the conclusion of agreements tends to become a bureaucratic goal in itself, displacing the organizational and service functions of the unions. 11 As Ashwin and Clarke put it, “what is most striking about the agreements is their generality, the unenforceability of many of their provisions, the extent to which they defer, rather than initiate action, and the extent to which they reiterate, rather than extend, existing federal or regional legislation” ( 2003 : 162).

The reality is that social partnership is less about defending and promoting workers interests and more about the relationship between the unions and the regional administrations, in which each side has something to offer the other (Bizyukova n.d. : 5–8). For the unions, social partnership helps guarantee at least some union infl uence, and the unions often turn to the regional adminis-tration as an arbiter or go-between to defend them in confl icts with employers. Such support is particularly valuable because the unions lack credibility either among their members or with employers (Alasheev n.d. :1–2).

There are also good fi nancial grounds for regional unions to rely heavily on the regional authorities. The collapse of the Soviet system left regional-level union representatives in a fi nancially parlous situation. Union dues are checked off from wages automatically (1 percent of the wage) and remitted directly by employers to the primary trade union organization. The amounts to be remitted by primary organizations to the regional and central trade union organizations are decided at trade union congresses, which are dominated by representatives of the primary organizations. Being generally suspicious of the use of funds at higher levels, a minimum amount is usually transferred. Despite repeated resolutions to increase the amount remitted to higher organizational levels to 50 percent of total dues, by the mid 1990s, 80 to 85 percent was still being retained by primary organizations (Ashwin and Clarke 2003 : 88). In the situation of chronic and widespread wage nonpayment that prevailed in the 1990s, arrears in the payment of union dues and submission of dues to regional organizations were even more severe. Financial pressures, therefore, have distanced the unions from their membership and pushed them even closer to the regional authorities.

Nor were these diffi culties eliminated by the property that regional organiza-tions received as part of the settlement of assets of Soviet-era trade unions. The FNPR received properties valued in 2001 at $6 billion, generating an annual income of $300 million, almost 80 percent of which was transferred to regional

11 Sergei Alasheev, “Tendentsii Razvitiya Profsoyuznogo Dvizheniya: Byurokraticheskie Prtosedury Ili Solidarnaya Aktivnost’” (Tendencies in the Development of the Trade Union Movement: Bureaucratic Procedures or Solidary Action), ISITO. See http://www.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/complabstuds/russia/publications.htm


organizations of the FNPR (Ashwin and Clarke 2003 : 90). While much of the value of these properties was lost through a mixture of incompetence, cor-ruption, poor market conditions, and diffi culty in renovating and maintaining properties, they remained a signifi cant source of income and served to allow the regional federations some freedom from reliance on their members and membership dues. Usually housed in large buildings in the center of regional capital cities, many regional trade union federations leased much of what was formerly their headquarters to private enterprises. The success of such commer-cial activities was usually heavily dependent upon the goodwill of the regional administration, which could make life very diffi cult for the union’s tenants. As a result, commercial activities tended to reinforce rather than weaken bonds to the regional authorities .

For their part, the regional authorities also saw value in maintaining close relationships with the unions. For example, in Primorskii Krai, the regional administration saw unions as playing a vital role in managing social confl ict and in providing a link to workers. According to a regional offi cial charged with relations with the unions, it was a matter of concern to the regional administra-tion that small enterprises lacked trade unions and that in many medium-sized enterprises the unions were neglected. So the Krai administration established a unit to try to help trade unions and even helped in establishing representa-tion in Korean joint ventures in the city of Vladivostok . 12 As one offi cial put it, “Labor unions are left over from the Communist period and represent the link between the government and the people … The state is the state, after all, we have to do what we can to get people to like and respect the authorities.” 13

As a result, the unions were often used by the administration as an exten-sion of the regional administrative apparatus. In these cases, “administration-unions” were formed, closely resembling the “transmission belt” unions of Soviet times. For some unions, this role as part of the vertical chain of command in the Russian state was welcomed as an opportunity to strengthen author-ity over their own lower-level union organizations, and for building a new kind of democratic centralism (Alasheev n.d. : 11). This sometimes involved the resumption of Soviet-style activities. In 2002, the Primorskii Krai authorities became involved once more in organizing festivities to mark May Day , includ-ing the sending of letters from the governor to people congratulating them on the holiday and thanking them for their good work. Originally, the May Day marches had been protests against wage non-payment and economic condi-tions. However, with sponsorship from a regional administration interested in improving its relations with Moscow, the marches have once again become more of a local festival and parade.

12 Author’s interview with V. A. Utinko, Deputy President Primorskii Krai Federation of Trade Unions, Vladivostok, June 2003. A more cynical view of local politics might see this union’s foothold as a means for the regional administration to gain leverage over fi rms that might be more closely associated with the City administration.

13 Author’s interview with T. B. Vadileva, Primorskii Krai Administration, Vladivostok, June 2003.


The close relationships that developed between regional unions and regional governors had a direct effect on workers’ willingness and capacity to engage in protest. Not only did the dominance of the offi cial unions squeeze out more militant alternatives that might have helped organize protest, but the former Communist unions continued to have ways directly to infl uence work-ers’ behavior. This was largely due to the role the unions continued to play in providing resources and services that workers valued. Workers still depended on their unions for the provision of social benefi ts such as access to bonuses, vacations, and childcare. Moreover, in the context of economic crisis in the 1990s, connections made through the unions could be crucial in gaining access to a whole host of nonmonetary resources. Ashwin ( 1999 ) characterized the situation as “alienated collectivism” in which workers belong to the union but see it as imposed from above: “workers identifi ed with the labor collective but as supplicants rather than subjects; the labor collective was their guarantee of security but it was also the site of their subordination” (Ashwin 1999 : 14). In these circumstances, the unions acted as a safety valve for regional authorities, helping diffuse worker discontent. 14

By contrast, where it was in the governor’s interest to allow strikes that put blame on political opponents in Moscow, the unions played a more active role, stepping in to help solve collective action problems and organize protests. 15 The infl uence of governors on patterns of protest was felt in many ways. In most cases, infl uence over protest levels wass indirect, less a matter of directly organizing protests, so much as one of deciding when to permit them and when to prevent them. For example, Russian labor law sets out very complex procedures governing the legality of strikes (Maksimov 2004 : 123), creating many opportunities for strikers to be punished with legal action. Without inde-pendent courts, decisions on the legality of industrial action are subject to close political control on the part of regional offi cials, ensuring that most strikes that take place are politically acceptable to the regional political leadership.

In other cases, the use of administrative resources was more direct. To give one example, during the 1997 railroad blockade launched by submarine repair workers in the Far Eastern town of Bol’shoi Kamen’ , then Primorskii Krai governor Evgenii Nazdratenko provided buses to transport protesters the con-siderable distance to the railroad, and ensured that the police did not act to prevent the illegal blockade. Instead, police provided security for protestors.

14 The Russian experience is far from unique. For an account of similar experiences in Mexico, see Bensusán 2000 . A slightly different version, also common in hybrid regimes, is where employers, usually with the blessing of the state, take the initiative in organizing company unions designed to ensure labor discipline and prevent the emergence of representative and potentially trouble-some unions. This is the case with the offi cial unions in Malaysia’s electronics sector, and with the so-called sindicatos de protección in Mexico. In both instances, workers struggle to over-come substantial obstacles to collective action as they face the combined weight and coercive potential of employers, the state, and often of organized crime.

15 Author’s interviews with journalists in Vladivostok, June–July 2003. Such events are also referred to by Ashwin 1999 and others.


In the opinion of a highly respected local commentator, there were no real civil society organizations capable of putting an event like this together, only the labor union in association with the regional administration could have organized it. 16

Reports that people were paid to participate in protests were also wide-spread. Whatever be the truth of these reports, considerable effort was put into controlling media coverage of protests. Primorskii Krai governor Nazdratenko, for example, paid Moscow-based television companies to cover protest events in his region. 17 Although this may (or may not) be unusual, as one union offi -cial put it, “In general all protests are held on the initiative of the powers that be: regional governors, directors of enterprises” (Ashwin 1999 : 14) .

Mobilization Strategies, Elite Competition, and Strike Patterns

So what does this pattern of organizations in labor relations imply for patterns of strikes? Given the weakness of the unions, the strength of the regional gover-nors, and the elaborate institutional apparatus for coordination between them, we would expect protest patterns to refl ect the interests of regional governors, taking place where protest is rational from the governor’s perspective and not where it is not. When would this be?

The point of departure is to think about distributive politics and the poten-tial bargaining strategies available to governors in a state divided into different regions that lobby the capital for money and other resources. Broadly, gover-nors have a choice between quiet and noisy strategies. 18 Quiet strategies are defi ned as intraelite bargaining, whether through formal federal institutions or more informal political bargaining. Noisy strategies are defi ned as those which involve public political pressure, usually in the form of protest actions such as demonstrations, pickets, and strikes.

All things being equal, governors prefer quiet strategies for several reasons. First, the relative lack of public attention gives them greater fl exibility in dis-bursing monies that are transferred from the center. By contrast, noisy strate-gies widen the circle of players, bringing into the picture mass actors who are likely to be in a stronger position to demand a share of the resources gener-ated. Second, quiet strategies are less risky in terms of intraregional politics than noisy ones. Noisy strategies create the potential for political or social instability and train participants in collective action that may make them more independent later.

However, not all governors will be successful in obtaining resources from the center using only quiet strategies. In fact, governors who have bad political relations with the center and who are weak in bargaining will systematically

16 Interviews in Vladivostok, June 2003. 17 Interviews in Vladivostok, June 2003. 18 These are analogous to “loyalty” and “voice” in Hirschman ( 1970 ). There is no obvious corol-

lary for “exit” by governors.


resort more often to public pressure, including the organizing of strikes and protests.

The reason for this turns on the nature of bargaining over transfers. In any bargaining situation between regions and the center, the key issue faced by the center is to prevent the regions from coordinating their strategies. Without coordination, the center can play the regions off against each other, buying off the most powerful regions and neglecting the others. On the question of transfers and payments, preventing coordination is relatively straightforward. Assuming some sort of budget constraint, central funds are clearly rival in consumption; what is transferred to one region cannot also be transferred to another. This is different from issues such as sovereignty and autonomy where a grant to one region is likely to increase the chances of concessions to another. In the autonomy case, we are likely to see regional bandwagons. In the case of fi scal transfers, bandwagoning is unlikely. Without a credible threat of inter-regional coordination, the center will be primarily concerned with the needs of the most powerful governors, leaving weak governors to exert what pressure they can through the use of noisy strategies.

To implement this set of strategies, governors will, of course, rely on the cooperation of workers, unions, and employers; success in convincing these actors to go along will depend both on the interests of these players themselves and on the political strength of the governor. As noted above, workers will generally be inclined to support protests, particularly when action is backed by the regional administration and when there is the potential that noisy pressure might bring some concrete benefi ts. The incentives for workers to participate will be stronger the greater the economic hardship they face, especially where that hardship is considered to be unjust. Moreover, the greater the hardship, or the perception of injustice, the more likely there is to be wildcat action – that is, protest activity beyond the framework of the offi cial unions. Where depri-vation is worse, offi cial efforts to prevent protest are less likely to be success-ful. Hence we would expect workers to cooperate with governors promoting strikes but to cooperate less when economic hardship is high and governors want to demobilize strikes.

As far as unions are concerned, I have outlined above the nature of the unions’ dependency on the political support of governors. Consequently, union support will generally not be particularly problematic. However, there may be some variation depending on the extent to which FNPR unions face a chal-lenge from alternative unions. In cases where independent unions represent a real threat to the Soviet successor unions, experience elsewhere suggests that successor unions will tend be more militant (Murillo 2001 ; Robertson 2004 ). This means more willingness to cooperate in noisy strategies and less in demobilization.

What about employers? In the case of demobilizing protest, the interest of employers seems clear, but why would they be willing to participate in noisy strategies involving strikes? In brief, of course, not all will. In particular, pri-vate employers in small enterprises and new post-Communist start-ups are not


likely to play along, given that these types of companies are both far more likely to be economically profi table and almost entirely nonunionized. Outside of small enterprises and new start-ups, however, the distinction between employ-ers and the state is often hard to make in practice. In strikes involving teach-ers and healthcare workers, for example, the employer is the state. In other cases, formal legal privatization may have taken place, but many enterprises, particularly larger ones, rely heavily on state orders and so operate in a semi-marketized environment in which the state continues to play a crucial role in terms of orders and subsidies. To the extent that regions look for subventions from the center, rely on state employment, and/or face a weakly marketized economy, employers are likely to be more willing participants in regional bar-gaining coalitions .

Hypotheses and Measures

So far, I have outlined a theory that, other things being equal, would lead us to expect low levels of protest in regions where governors are powerful in intraelite bargaining and high levels where they are weak. In this section, I develop specifi c, testable hypotheses about the correlates of strikes, based on this theory. The question, of course, is what “powerful” means. I focus on two sources of power and the interaction between them: political connections and resources.

Political Power Political connections and alliances are crucial everywhere, but they are particu-larly important in a context like Russia where power is heavily concentrated in a largely unchecked executive, where the party system is weak, and where politics is more about patronage than programs. Breslauer uses the term “pat-rimonial” politics to capture the personalistic nature of political interaction in post-Communist Russia (Breslauer 1999 , 2002 ). In such an environment, having good political connections to the center is of vital importance in get-ting what you want. In terms of center-region bargaining, governors with good connections to the center get direct political access and so are likely to do better in quiet, intraelite bargaining. Governors with poor political relations, by contrast, are more likely to fi nd the doors of the Kremlin shut and instead resort to public campaigns and pressure. Hence we should expect poor politi-cal relations to mean more protest.

The quality of political relations between a President and eighty-eight regional governors is, of course, not directly observable. Although it is easy to think of a range of governors in Russia who had particularly diffi cult relations with Boris Yeltsin’s Kremlin, factors of this type are diffi cult to integrate into large-n studies. This is particularly the case where strong, durable, and distinc-tive political party labels are absent. Moreover, political relations cannot sim-ply be reduced to measures of policy because bitter political opponents might very often pursue the same policies. Instead we need a measure that combines


two elements: general perceptions in the Kremlin of the political orientation of the governors and private networks of connections that governors can draw on among important players in the Kremlin. I use a set of assessments of the regional governors for 1998 prepared by a Russian investment bank, MFK Renaissance, that covers both these elements: Governors are placed “by the judgments of Russian experts and [MFK] analysts” on a 0–100 scale accord-ing to both their general level of “reformism” and “a direct assessment of the relationship of regional authorities to the center” (MFK 1998, 58). This index refl ects precisely the sort of perceptions of political orientation that matter in the patriarchal politics of Russia as determinants of relations. 19

Other Resources However, there is more to political bargaining than the relations between play-ers. Economic and political resources matter too, and well-endowed governors are more likely than others to have their demands met by the center without resorting to public pressure. What constitutes a resource, of course, varies from one situation to another, but we might think of resources schematically as fol-lows: strategic, economic, and electoral.

First, strategically the support of some regions is more valuable than that of others. At a minimum, unrest is more costly where it threatens the state itself, or its territorial integrity. This gives leaders of politically sensitive regions more leverage. Consequently we would expect to observe capital cities and regions with special ethnic or autonomy status having lower protest levels.

Second, power also comes from the ability to put economic pressure on the center. Thus governors of the most economically productive regions are likely to be more infl uential and so these regions will have lower levels of protest.

19 Appendix 3 presents evidence that the MFK indices are indeed a good measure of pure political relations between the Kremlin and the regional governors, as opposed to being a measure of policy or a function of post-1997 strike levels. The main determinants of the MFK indicators are purely political: Communist Party membership and the change in support for Yeltsin between the referendum in 1993 and the presidential election in 1996. The principal alternative to this measure is to simply code all “Communist” governors as opponents of the Kremlin (Gimpelson and Treisman 2002 ), but this approach is inferior for a number of reasons. The MFK index pro-vides an individual evaluation for all regions, whatever the political affi liation of the governor. By contrast, all “Communist” governors are treated equally when dummies are used, despite the fact that some Communists had very good relations with Yeltsin, while some non-Communists had very bad relations. Moreover, the dummy variable approach provides essentially no infor-mation for the non-Communists, who are an even more heterogeneous group. Furthermore, the approach of using a Communist dummy assumes that Russian politics is organized on partisan lines. The extent to which this is true at the national level is questionable, and party penetration of the regions is extremely limited (Stoner-Weiss 2001 ). As a practical matter, it is often diffi cult to be clear about who belongs on what side of the dichotomy, since many different parties and groups seek to back the most likely winner in gubernatorial races regardless of ideology. Therefore, the Communist dummy approach is weak both in the sense of ignoring much con-textual information and in that it uses a decision rule that has limited theoretical leverage and is hard to apply in the Russian context.


Third, where elections play a role in determining the national leadership, the electoral resources available to a region matter too. In general, the number of voters in a region might be expected to be related to the electoral value of a region to the center. In particular, in places like Russia, where presidents are elected on the basis of a single national constituency, more populous regions will see lower levels of protest.

Note that we should expect an interaction between political power mea-sured in terms of resources on the one hand and political relations on the other. Whereas political connections might matter in general, they are likely to be of much greater consequence for regions that lack other resources. Weak regions with good relations are much more likely to have their needs met by the cen-ter without resorting to public protest than weak regions with bad relations. Hence we should see much lower protest in weak regions with good relations than in weak regions with bad relations. By contrast, there might not be much observable difference between strong regions with good relations and strong regions with bad relations, because strategically, economically, and electorally strong regions matter to the center regardless of political connections .

Capacity The capacity of regional governors to bend elites, employers, and labor unions to their interests is not likely to be uniform across all regions in all cases. Instead it will depend in part on the extent to which a particular governor is able to dominate his region politically. Less politically dominant governors will have less capacity to get others to cooperate in either preventing or supporting protest. In principle, there are at least three aspects of elite competition at the regional level that might affect a sitting governor’s capacity to resort to the tactic of strikes (or other mass protest actions) to infl uence negotiations with the center: political competition, electoral cycles, and polarization.

Most directly, governors who face strong political competition are less likely to have the capacity to infl uence strike levels as part of a negotiating strat-egy. Moreover, a governor’s capacity to infl uence other actors in the region is likely to vary with the electoral cycle. As elections near, governors in more competitive regions will face a greater chance of losing offi ce and so will have less ability to leverage in other actors. As a result, we would expect governors facing more political competition to have less capacity to use strikes as part of a bargaining process. We might also expect this difference to be especially marked in election periods. In these instances, the expectation is that strike activity will be lower.

A third aspect of political competition at the regional level that is likely to affect the ability and willingness of governors to use protest as a bargaining tool is the degree of polarization of the regional political environment. The extent to which a given polity is polarized is likely to have major implications for both policy and politics (Frye 2002 ). In particular, polarization increases the costs of losing and so makes politicians more risk-averse. Hence we would expect to see lower strike levels in highly polarized regions.


Unfortunately, polarization is generally not directly observable. Given data limitations, I measure only one form: ethnic polarization. Although this is but one of many forms of polarization (e.g., ideological, religious), it is one of the most common and divisive. To measure ethnic polarization, I use the MFK Renaissance Capital assessment of the potential for ethnic confl ict in each region, which has the advantage of assessing the extent to which ethnic divisions are actually politically salient and the degree to which this salience holds the threat of actual confl ict, rather than relying on measures of eth-nic diversity that may or may not refl ect politically relevant cleavages. The index is a 0–100 scale, with 100 representing no perceived threat of ethnic confl ict .

Alternative Explanations: Business Cycles, Information, and Hardship So far I have focused on developing a set of expectations about what patterns we should observe in terms of strikes if the only factor contributing to strikes was the interests of regional governors. In reality, of course, there are many other potential factors at work. Fortunately, there is an enormous body of theoretical and empirical work across the social sciences that gives us insight into what these alternative causes of strikes might be. Indeed a key reason for focusing on strikes as a subset of protest overall is the opportunities offered for comparing the predictions of the elite competition model with other possible causes. Existing theories of strike patterns are primarily concerned with factors that infl uence the information environment, the relative bargaining power of workers, and the degree of hardship experienced. In this section, I briefl y set out some hypotheses designed to test these theories.

The most intensive work on the causes of strikes has probably been car-ried out by economists rather than political scientists or sociologists. In part, this is because for economists strikes actually represent a deep logical puz-zle: In a strike, economic costs are usually sustained by both the strikers and the employers, and so both would gain if they could reach an agreement with-out resorting to strikes (Hicks 1932 ). If this is so, why do strikes happen at all? Since Hick’s original insight, economists have developed sophisticated models designed to answer this paradox, focusing primarily on problems in the information environment. 20 In our case, information could play directly into strikes due to uncertainty over the amount of money available for trans-fers (and so uncertainty over the center’s capacity to make concessions). The more uncertainty there is over the pool available for transfers, the more strikes we ought to observe. Hence, to the extent that the budgetary position of the central government is unclear, mistakes are more likely and strikes should be more frequent. To proxy diffi culties parties might have in estimating what the

20 These models take a range of forms. On incomplete information, see Ashenfelter and Johnson ( 1969 ), Kennan and Wilson ( 1989 ). On environmental variation, see Cousineau and Lacroix ( 1986 ), on the effects of institutions and public policies, see Card ( 1988 ), Gunderson and Melino ( 1990 ). For a review of the strike literature in advanced industrial economies, see Franzosi ( 1989 ) and ( 1995 ).


upcoming budgetary situation might be, I use the coeffi cient of variation in oil prices over three months.

For budget sector workers in particular, and others whose salaries are, at least theoretically, to be paid from local budgets, the tax base of a given region also ought to be an important determinant of mobilization. I measure the tax base of a region by looking at the proportion of enterprises that are loss making. Strike activity should be higher in regions with more loss makers. The availability of resources to the central budget is also important. Where resources are scarce, competition is likely to be more intense, so governors are more likely to resort to their full arsenal of weapons. I use oil prices to proxy public knowledge of coming changes in government resources, given the enor-mous contribution of oil revenues to the Russian budget.

Although economists’ theories are strong on information issues, they tend to be weak on issues of interest to sociologists and political scientists, nota-bly on the relationship between labor organization and strikes. Organization makes strikes shorter and larger (Shorter and Tilly 1971 ) and enables workers to strategize from strike to strike, giving purpose to losing strikes (Cohn 1993 ). Organization can make strikes rare when labor is a major force in the exercise of state power (Korpi and Shalev 1980 ). However, since the social democratic model is clearly not relevant to the situation in Russia, we are more likely to see organization leading to more rather than less mobilization in the Russian case (Cohn and Eaton 1989 , Sandoval 1993 , Snyder 1977 ), both due to the effect of independent organizing itself and to the galvanizing effect on Communist successor unions.

Measuring the capacity for self-organization of workers is diffi cult. Standard approaches using union density are useless where workers are passive members of former offi cial unions. I have made a fi rst cut at solving this problem by con-structing a list of regions in which one of the leading independent trade unions, Sotsprof , has managed to establish a real organizational presence. Since, as I noted earlier, Sotsprof tends to confederate existing local alternative unions rather than organizing itself, it provides a reasonable guide to regions where independent unions are present. I used offi cial lists of Sotsprof branches and, on the basis of interviews with Sotsprof offi cials in Moscow, eliminated regions where organizations existed only on paper.

Bargaining power, of course, is also related to business cycles . In advanced industrial economies, the expectation is that the best time to strike is when labor markets are tightening, that is, unemployment is falling and so work-ers are in shorter supply and are relatively stronger (Ashenfelter and Johnson 1969 ). Consequently, I control for changes in unemployment.

The third set of explanations that I test are related to economic hardship and grievances. The view that protest is a product of grievances is associated with theories of deprivation (Gurr 1970 ). Although such thinking has largely been superseded in the strike literature by institutional and bargaining power approaches, grievances continue to play a role in the small literature on so-called wildcat strikes – that is, strikes organized either against offi cially recognized


unions or in their absence. In his seminal work on wildcat strikes, Gouldner emphasizes the moral and emotional dimension of wildcat strikes (Gouldner 1954 : 53–64). From the workers’ perspective, such strikes are a largely sponta-neous response to situations in which conditions deteriorate to the point where workers sense that a moral, not just an economic, boundary has been crossed. In a similar vein, Brett and Goldberg ( 1979 ) fi nd that patterns of wildcat strikes in coal mines depend on management style and the atmosphere of relationships between workers and management. Zetka ( 1992 ) fi nds that it is the specifi cs

Table 3.2. Summary of Hypotheses and Measures

Hypothesis Measure

In regions with little bargaining power, strike activity will be a func-tion of governor’s relations with Moscow

MKF Renaissance Capital Index of Relations With Moscow

Status as a Republic will decrease strike activity

Republic status dummy

Capital cities will have less strike activity

Moscow and St.Petersburg dummy

Economically important regions have fewer strikes

Goskomstat Industrial Output Data

More populous regions will have less strike activity

Goskomstat Population Data

Regions with politically dominant governors will have more strike activity, especially in an election period

Margin of victory in fi rst round of guberna-torial elections. 2 months before election and election month

Ethnically polarized regions will have lower levels of strike activity

MFK Renaissance Capital index of potential for ethnic confl ict

Strike activity will be higher in regions with higher levels of urbanization

Goskomstat data on regional urbanization levels

Regions with signifi cant independent union activity will have higher strike activity

Dummy variable for signifi cant presence of alternative union confederation Sotsprof

Strike activity will be higher in regions where labor markets are tightening

Monthly change in unemployment using Goskomstat data

Strike activity will be higher when revenues are more variable

3 and 5 month coeffi cient of variation in world oil price

Strike activity will be higher in regions with higher levels of wage arrears

Goskomstat monthly data on wage arrears

Strike activity will be higher in regions where loss-making enterprises are a higher proportion of enterprises

Goskomstat monthly data on proportion of loss-making enterprises

Strike activity will be higher when total funds are available for trans-fers are lower

World oil prices: average petroleum spot index of U.K. Brent, Dubai and West Texas Intermediate. Source IMF


not just of industry but of labor processes and their effects on group solidar-ity that matter. Looking at the post–World War II U.S. auto industry, a con-text in which strikes were outlawed and heavily repressed, Zetka fi nds strikes were more likely where the work process itself required workers to coordinate their moment-by-moment activities. The likelihood of wildcat strikes, therefore, depends heavily on the details of work organization at the shop-fl oor level.

In what follows, I lack suffi ciently detailed data to test theories that depend on shop-fl oor-level variation. However, there is a useful proxy. By far the dom-inant issue affecting the living standards of Russian workers in the 1990s was the issue of unpaid wages. In fact, wage arrears fi gured in more than 98 per-cent of strikes. This had a direct economic effect on living standards, but it also created a strong sense of injustice among those who had worked but not been paid. Hence I use total wage arrears per capita as a measure of hardship that also taps the dimension that protest is more likely when expectations are dis-appointed or when people’s sense of their moral desserts is offended. Table 3.2 summarizes the hypothesis in this section and the measures used to test them .

Strike Data

The strike data are drawn from the MVD dataset introduced in Chapter 2 . I use data from all sectors except mining. Mining was excluded for a number of rea-sons. Most importantly, mining is the only large sector of the economy to have reasonably representative independent unions surviving from the strikes of the late 1980s. Though these unions also became compromised by political con-nections, the organizational ecology of miners’ unions is quite different from the rest of labor politics in Russia (Borisov 1997 ). Second, though the miners did strike, their strikes had a different underlying logic than the one I propose here (Maksimov 2004 ). In fact miners’ strikes make up about 25 percent of the working days lost to strikes, according to the MVD data, but the dynamics of miners’ strikers were more closely related to the World Bank restructuring plan for the coal industry than to center-region bargaining. A third, more technical but nonetheless important reason to exclude miners’ strikes from the analysis, is that miners’ strikes are, obviously, concentrated in mining regions and can-not take place elsewhere. Consequently, including miners’ strikes would artifi -cially skew the regional distribution analyzed here.

There are various ways of measuring strikes. I follow the classic treatment (Knowles 1952 ) in making the dependent variable the “‘composition of the strike movement” or the “severity” of strikes (total number of working days lost) given by magnitude (workers per strike), duration (working days lost per worker), and frequency (number of strikes). An alternative to working days lost would have been to measure “strikes” as a count of events. This approach is inferior in this case for a number of reasons. Most importantly there are major conceptual diffi culties in determining whether a number of events in different places are one strike or many. To do so presupposes an underlying theory of the organizational process behind the events: Are they on the same issue, are they


21 An alternative is to use the ARPOIS routine in STATA that estimates a log-linear autoregres-sive Poisson model allowing for overdispersion. All models in this chapter were also run using ARPOIS as a robustness check and the main theoretical claims were confi rmed.

22 STATA estimates a conditional fi xed effects overdispersion model, in which the “fi xed effects” do not apply to the coeffi cients on the variables but to the dispersion parameter for each region. The dispersion parameter can take on any value because it drops out in the estimation of the conditional likelihood function (Statacorp 2001 : 987–93).

23 The two-lag model was decided upon by adding additional lags and using likelihood ratio tests to identify the best model specifi cation. Changing the number of lags does not affect the main results.

organized together, is there more than one legal establishment involved, and so on. None of these issues are resolvable on the basis of the available data .

Models and Results

The test treats the dependent variable as a time-series cross-section of monthly counts of days lost, modeled using a negative binomial distribution. Despite the large size of some of the counts, the negative binomial count model is preferred to account for the discrete, non-negative nature of the dependent variable, and because it models directly overdispersion (contagion) in the observed counts (Hausman et al. 1984 , 911). 21 Instead of looking at working days lost on a per capita basis, I control for population size on the right-hand side because I am interested in testing the effect of a region’s population directly. To take into account region-specifi c effects that are not otherwise controlled for, and given that the number of time periods is relatively large, I estimate the models with fi xed effects. 22 Using random effects produces similar results.

The models presented here include two-period lagged dependent variables. There are two main reasons why it is important to include a lagged depen-dent variable. First, strikes in reality occur continuously rather than in sepa-rate observations. Consequently, strike counts in a given month are directly affected by continuing strikes from the previous month. Second, due to event-level contagion, strikes in one period will also causally affect strikes in later periods. Thus the number of working days lost to strikes at the beginning of each month will tend to be infl uenced by previous strike patterns. 23 In addition, I control for the fact that there are no teachers ’ strikes in summer.

The results of the analysis are presented in Table 3.3 . The discussion is orga-nized in terms of the broad theoretical perspectives outlined above: elite compe-tition, hardship, independent organization, business cycles, and information.

To recap, the elite competition theory has two main elements: political rela-tions and bargaining resources. Strike patterns are politically driven and are a function of political relations between regions and the center. Politics, however, is not just about political relations: “Real” resources matter too, and the effect of political relations will be more marked in weak or resource-poor regions.

Looking at Model 1, the quality of a governor’s political relations with Moscow is, as predicted, negatively related to the number of working days

Table 3.3. Working Days per Month Lost to Strikes in Non-Mining Sectors (conditional negative binomial regression with fi xed results)

(1) All Regions Percentage Change

(2) Strong Regions

Percentage Change (Strong)

(3) Weak Regions

Percentage Change (Weak)

Governor Relations with Center

−.010** (.002)

−20** .011* (.004)

22* −.020** (.003)

−38**

Republic Status .301* (.151)

35* .391 (.264)

22 − −

Capitals −1.462* (.689)

−77* −3.687** (.691)

−55** − −

Industrial Output .050** (.018)

22** −.015 (.017)

−8 .815** (.061)

20**

Population (100 000s)

−.156* (.067)

−20* −.048 (.064)

−8 −.553** (.165)

−36**

Margin −.002 (.002)

−4 .001 (.004)

2 .005 (.003)

15

Margin*Election Period .007 (.004)

−9 .000 (.007)

0 .006 (.006)

7

Ethnic Peace .035** (.009)

63** .020 (.010)

45 −.045 (.024)

−17

Urbanization .028** (.006)

40** .071** (.010)

192** .010 (.010)

8

Independent Union Activity

−.007 (.120)

−1 −.092 (.251)

−9 .400* (.168)

49*

Change in Unemployment −.022 (.038)

−2 .001 (.041)

0 .065 (.078)

5

Variation in Oil Prices −3.54** (1.113)

−12** −1.925 (1.546)

−7 −6.195** (1.596)

−20**

Wage Arrears .661** (.088)

67** .192* (.076)

21* .948** (.244)

43**

90

Loss−making Enterprises .017** (.006)

22** .013 (.009)

17 .027** (.009)

36**

World Oil Price .002 (.004)

6 .008 (.005)

36 .003 (.005)

10

Chernomyrdin .192 (.212)

21 −.278 (.291)

−24 .639* (.319)

90*

Primakov .670** (.194)

95** .366 (.262)

44 1.101** (.297)

201**

Stepashin −.668* (.271)

−49* −1.141** (.369)

−68** −.213 (.399)

−19

Putin −.374 (.318)

−32 −1.433** (.446)

−76** .103 (.441)

10

Kasianov −1.493** (.420)

−78** −2.943** (.598)

−95** −1.045 (.563)

−65

Lagged Working Days Lost (1000s)

.020** (.002)

22** .019** (.002)

23** .018** (.003)

18**

2 Month Lagged Working Days Lost (1000s)

.013** (.002)

14** .009** (.003)

10** .012** (.003)

11**

Summer −.405** (.136)

−33** −.392 (.193)

−32 −.443* (.194)

−36*

Constant −9.221** (1.124)

−11.867** (1.300)

−.527 (2.652)

Observations 2093 972 1199Number of groups 59 31 35Log−likelihood −6562** −3140** −3626**

Standard errors in parentheses. * Indicates signifi cant at p=.05, ** Indicates signifi cant at p=.01. Percentage change is calculated for a change of one standard deviation in the independent variable. For dummy variables, the calculation is for a change of state from 0 to 1.

89


lost to strikes. Governors who do not enjoy close political relations with the Kremlin authorities are, controlling for economic and social factors and the political status of the region, likely to preside over regions with more days lost to strikes than governors who enjoy better relations. Moreover, the size of this effect is substantively quite large; holding other factors constant, an improve-ment in relations by one standard deviation reduces the number of days lost to strikes by 20 percent. To illustrate this, compare one Communist and one inde-pendent region: Orel Oblast and Primorskii Krai . MFK rates relations between Moscow and the Communist governor of Orel Oblast, Egor Stroev , at 72, and relations with independent Primorskii governor Evgenii Nazdratenko at 36. Though Stroev was a Communist, he was also the speaker of the upper house of the Russian parliament and a close ally of Yeltsin. By contrast, Nazdratenko, a non-Communist, was an archenemy of Yeltsin in the period under consid-eration. The model suggests that if Primorskii had been governed by Stroev (assuming that Stroev maintained his relationship with the Kremlin), then the number of working days lost per month to strikes in Primorskii would have been fully 30 percent lower. This example also illustrates the superiority of using the MFK measure of relations over simply equating KPRF membership with opposition to the Kremlin.

However, this result assumes the effect of political relations to be the same in all regions. Our theory suggests otherwise; political relations matter most where governors lack other forms of power. To test this, I separate the regions into two groups: strong regions and weak regions. Following the theory of bargaining resources, there are two sources of “strength:” strategic political importance and economic clout. Hence regions with special constitutional sta-tus and regions with industrial output above the mean for the year are consid-ered “strong.” All remaining regions were included in the “weak” group.

The results are impressive. Model 3 shows a clear, signifi cant, and substan-tively important negative relationship between gubernatorial political relations with Moscow and the level of strikes in weak regions. Moreover, the substan-tive effect is much larger than it appeared when we analyzed weak and strong regions together. Now the effect of a one standard deviation improvement in the quality of a governor’s relationship with Moscow, while holding all other factors constant, is to reduce the number of working days lost to strikes by 38 percent. To use our previous example of Orel and Primorskii Krai (both weak regions according to our classifi cation), putting Orel’s Egor Stroev in the place of Primorskii governor Evgenii Nazdratenko would have reduced the number of working days lost to strikes in Primorskii Krai by 51 percent. These results are robust to model specifi cation, the range of controls, and variations in the defi nition of weak and strong.

Strong regions, by contrast, appear to be quite different. The effect of politi-cal relations in strong regions appears, if anything, to be in the opposite direc-tion from weak regions, though this effect is not robust to small changes in the defi nition of weak and strong (for example using monthly instead of annual mean industrial output to defi ne the groups or using the median instead of


the mean). 24 More broadly, variation in strike levels within regions that have high bargaining power seems less well explained by the model than varia-tion in regions with little bargaining power. The main factors affecting strike levels in strong regions are wage arrears, the level of urbanization, and the intertemporal effects of broader changes in the national political context (as proxied by the prime minister dummies), which appear to be more impor-tant to high-bargaining power regions than to low-bargaining power regions. Whereas weak regions are more responsive to bilateral political relations, high bargaining power regions may be more responsive to the political context at the national level.

The differences between strong and weak regions help us rule out several competing explanations. First, they provide strong evidence that strikes are a function of political relations rather than the reverse. If strikes were a pure product of the socioeconomic independent variables, or if political relations were a function of strikes, we would not expect the regressions to be differ-ent in the strong and weak regions. Instead, the sample of regions as a whole would be homogeneous. It is not. Second, we can rule out the possibility that the MFK index is actually measuring reform policies that themselves lead to low strike levels. If this were the case, the effect again ought to be the same across all regions, and it is not. Weak regions and strong regions behave dif-ferently. Third, the evidence shows that the bargaining game is more complex than simply an opposition-versus-center blame game (Gimpelson and Treisman 2002 ; Javeline 2003 ). The potential costs of noisy strategies mean that not all Kremlin opponents use strikes in bargaining, but only “weak” opponents.

There is also evidence for the importance of strategic and economic bargain-ing resources. The “capital cities” of St. Petersburg and Moscow have lower levels of strike activity even controlling for other factors. However, status as a Republic is not negatively correlated with strike levels once we control for the potential for ethnic confl ict. In fact, once ethnic tensions are controlled for, Model 1 shows a positive relationship between Republic status and strike intensity. This suggests that previous studies may have been confounding the status as a Republic with ethnic tensions, which are highly correlated with Republic status (Gimpelson and Treisman 2002 ). Ethnically polarized regions have lower strike levels, ceteris paribus . 25 There are at least two reasons for this. First, collective action problems may be harder for workers to solve in the presence of ethnic tension. However, the political bargaining perspective sug-gests a second reason: regional governors are more risk averse when the threat of ethnic confl ict is high. They are less likely to pursue noisy political strategies in bargaining with the center when this risks interacting with existing ethnic tensions.

The effects of economic resources as measured by industrial output, and of political resources as measured by population, are also interesting. Population

24 Nor was it robust to using ARPOIS instead of NEGBIN. 25 This effect is no longer signifi cant when the sample is split.


is negatively correlated with the number of working days lost to strikes, once we control for industrial output. This is as hypothesized in the political bar-gaining theory and is striking, given that we are using a measure of working days lost that is not normalized by population. By contrast, increasing indus-trial output is associated with more working days lost to strikes, at least at lower levels of industrial output, though the effect disappears in the “strong” group, where all regions have above-mean industrial production. The combi-nation of these two results suggests (consistent with the theory) that there are two effects going in opposite directions: a direct size effect that increases the number of working days lost by increasing the number of workers at risk of being on strike in any given day; and a bargaining size effect in which greater size gives you more bargaining power and so less need to resort to strikes.

The performance of measures of capacity is weak. The extent to which a governor dominates his region, as measured by electoral margins, is borderline signifi cant in weak regions but not in strong ones, and there is little evidence that margins interact with election cycles.

In terms of other major theoretical perspectives, I fi nd strong support for theories based on economic hardship. Wage arrears and the proportion of loss-making enterprises are statistically signifi cant and in the expected direction, though less so in strong regions. Despite the doubts that some have expressed (Maksimov 2004 : 122), strikes in Russia are indeed closely related to griev-ances. This supports the argument that protest among unorganized or poorly represented workers will be more responsive to economic hardship per se than protest among organized workers.

Measures of the effect of independent organizational potential are partially sup-ported. Independent union activity is only statistically related to strikes in weak regions. One source of problems with this measure is that the simple hypothesis tested does not take into account strategic behavior on the part of managers who may try to preempt strikes where genuinely independent unions are in place. Like others, I fi nd strong support for the idea that the more urban an area the more working days are lost to strikes (Haimson and Petrusha 1989 ; Javeline 2003 ).

In terms of the business cycle, there is no evidence that strikes are related to changes in unemployment. In none of the regressions presented here is the effect of changes in unemployment statistically different from zero. Information theories also fail to explain the variation. Strikes do not increase with greater volatility in the resources available for paying wages, as hypothesized. Volatility does seem to be signifi cant, but in the direction opposite to that predicted by information theories.

I deal with temporal dynamics in more detail in Chapter 4 , but this prelimi-nary set of results shows a strong connection between strike levels and political confl ict at the elite level. I use a series of dummy variables to divide the period up into the tenures of the different prime ministers holding offi ce. These peri-ods refl ect differences in the general political climate in Russia to which they broadly correspond. The reference category is Sergei Kirienko , prime minister under Yeltsin from March to August 1998.


The results show that the peak of strike intensity came under Primakov , higher than under either Kirienko or Chernomyrdin . This period was imme-diately after the collapse of the ruble, and was the period of greatest weak-ness for the Kremlin. In the aftermath of the collapse, Yeltsin fi rst fi red his sitting prime minister, Kirienko, and tried to reappoint former Prime Minister Chernomyrdin . The opposition in the Duma would not stand for this, and for the fi rst (and only) time, Yeltsin was forced to accept a compromise candidate in the shape of Evgenii Primakov . This was the period in which competition for control in Russia was at its most sharp and strike activity was at its most intense.

Strike levels fell under Sergei Stepashin , appointed by Yeltsin to replace the dangerously popular Primakov, in part as a result of Primakov’s efforts to pay back wage arrears. However, strikes fell even further when the battle to succeed Yeltsin and replace the ailing President was decided in favor of a man vigor-ous enough to exercise the vast powers inherent in the Presidency, Vladimir Putin. Open competition among elites, and especially between the regions and the center, was replaced by a more traditional (for Russia) competition to be the most enthusiastic supporter of the new leadership. The importance of the change in political focus is clear in the sharp decline in protest the regression results show under Putin’s fi rst Prime Minister, Mikhail Kasianov . However, the results show strikes were already on their way down in 1999, before Putin came into offi ce. Hence Putin alone cannot take credit for reducing protest. Reductions in wage arrears made largely by the post-crisis Primakov govern-ment were certainly part of this process. Nevertheless, the fact that no new protest wave arose through the winter of 1999 and the whole of 2000 (a trend that both offi cial strike data and anecdotal evidence suggest has continued) is surely a testament to the strong signals that Putin’s regime would be different from that of his predecessor. I analyze these trends in more detail in Chapters 4 and 5 .

In summary, the results show strong support for the idea that strike patterns in hybrid regimes will be quite different from those in long-standing democra-cies. Theories based on business cycles, independent organization, and infor-mation problems that are very successful in long-standing democracies provide little leverage in the Russian context. Instead, there is considerable support for the view that strikes are part of elite competition between the center and regions. In politically and economically weak regions, strike levels are higher where a governor’s political relations with the center are worse. Politically sen-sitive regions such as major cities and more populous regions tend to have lower levels of strikes, other things being equal. There is also considerable sup-port for a direct connection between economic hardship and strikes.

Other Forms of Protest

Table 3.4 expands the analysis to look also at forms of protest other than strikes. Following the logic of the theory presented here, we would not necessarily


Table 3.4. Determinants of Non-Strike Protest Events (conditional negative binomial regression with fi xed effects)

(1) Days of Hunger Strikes

(2) Number of Hunger Strikes

(3) Number of Other Events

Governor Relations with Center

−0.006** (0.003)

0.010 (0.029)

0.011 (0.011)

Republic Status 0.330 (0.219)

0.178 (1.546)

0.659 (1.543)

Capitals −1.175 (1.153)

− 2.203* (1.299)

Industrial Output 0.020 (0.026)

0.009 (0.028)

0.015 (0.014)


0.087 (0.117)

0.313 (0.314)

−0.292 (0.198)

Margin 0.013*** (0.003)

0.015 (0.015)

0.002 (0.009)

Margin*Election Period 0.009* (0.005)

0.005 (0.005)

0.007* (0.004)

Ethnic Peace 0.045*** (0.014)

0.112 (0.109)

−0.021 (0.045)

Urbanization 0.007 (0.010)

−0.138 (0.105)

−0.008 (0.027)

Independent Union Activity −0.070 (0.181)

−0.819 (1.589)

0.946** (0.439)

Change in Unemployment −0.058 (0.055)

0.007 (0.058)

0.030 (0.028)

Variation in Oil Prices 1.972 (1.552)

0.587 (1.651)

1.919* (1.141)

Wage Arrears 0.352*** (0.125)

0.113 (0.218)

0.116 (0.172)

Loss-making Enterprises 0.033*** (0.008)

0.015 (0.013)

0.002 (0.010)

World Oil Price −0.009* (0.005)

−0.008 (0.006)

0.009** (0.004)

Chernomyrdin −0.248 (0.242)

0.095 (0.284)

−0.828*** (0.201)

Primakov −0.529** (0.210)

−0.266 (0.225)

−0.680*** (0.165)

Stepashin −1.201*** (0.324)

−0.417 (0.368)

−0.793*** (0.247)

Putin −1.154*** (0.416)

−0.412 (0.508)

−1.776*** (0.355)

Kasianov −1.570*** (0.562)

−1.069 (0.844)

−1.596*** (0.465)

Lagged Event 0.473*** (0.125)

0.121*** (0.034)

0.067*** (0.016)

(continued)


expect other forms of protest to exhibit the same politicized patterns as strikes. The strong patterns in the strike data are a function of the ecology of organiza-tions that I analyzed there. Other forms of protest, taking in as they do a much broader range of actors, are likely to be more heterogenous than strikes.

I separate out hunger strikes and other kinds of events, because we might expect them to be rather different in their distribution. Since most hunger strikes were related to the non-payment of wages or other kinds of benefi ts, this is the category most likely to resemble the pattern of strikes. I use two mea-sures of hunger strikes: an intensity measure that looks at the number of hun-ger strike days (number of hunger strikers multiplied by the number of days the strike lasted), and an incidence measure that looks simply at the number of hunger strikes. Since hunger strikes represent a rather extreme form of action, we might expect there to be strong effects from the measures of economic hardship, such as wage arrears and the proportion of loss-making industries in a given region, whereas the political variables should have less effect.

What we fi nd, it turns out, depends on which measure we look at. Model 1, using the intensity measure, suggests that patterns are actually not that differ-ent from the strike patterns. Measures of wage arrears and loss-making enter-prises perform strongly as expected. But so do the political variables, notably the quality of a governor’s relations with Moscow, the size of the governor’s margin of victory, and quality of ethnic relations. There is also a time effect, with few hunger strikes taking place from Primakov onward, relative to the Kirienko period. By contrast, none of these variables explain the pattern in the incidence of hunger strikes. In fact, the incidence of hunger strikes is poorly predicted by a political and economic model of this kind, with only lagged hun-ger strikes being signifi cant.

Why would we observe a difference between these two measures? Although it is speculative, the reason may lie in Chapter 2 , where I noted that one unusual


(2) Number of Hunger Strikes

(3) Number of Other Events

2 Month Lagged Event 0.328 (0.201)

−0.021 (0.040)

−0.005 (0.020)

Summer −0.474** (0.184)

−0.146 (0.194)

−0.070 (0.133)

Constant −9.285*** (1.694)

−1.200 (6.208)

2.497 (3.961)

Observations 1726 527 657Number of groups 48 37 53Log-likelihood −2412.193 −507.794 −807.946

Standard errors in parentheses. * Indicates signifi cant at p=.1, ** Indicates signifi cant at p=.05, *** Indicates signifi cant at p=.01.

Table 3.4. (continued)


feature of the Russian protest repertoire was the practice of hunger striking in shifts that allow strikes to involve large numbers of people and to last over longer periods of time. These events are far more symbolic in nature than traditional hunger strikes. Consequently, symbolic hunger strikes lasting many days may be integrated into the strike repertoire in cases where there is political support from the regional governor. In this case, we would observe patterns of hunger strike intensity that look like those of strikes, but patterns of incidence that do not .

Looking at the results for “other” forms of protest, as expected, we fi nd little evidence either of the kind of regional-level politicization we saw with strikes, or of economic factors. Protest in general was highest during the peak of the devaluation crisis under Kirienko , with all other prime ministers seeing lower levels of protest in their terms. Independent union activity does seem to be related to a higher incidence of marches and demonstrations, and these forms of protest, as in other countries, tend to be more common in the capital cities. 26

Organizational Realities and Hybrid Regimes

The analysis of strike patterns presented in this chapter provides insight not only into patterns of industrial confl ict itself, but also into the way in which the organizational ecology of hybrids can evolve from a previously existing – in this case Communist – regime. It demonstrates clearly that a simple applica-tion of the political process model of contentious politics, in which workers’ organizations interact with the state and political institutions, is problematic in a hybrid regime. A basic assumption of the standard model, that social move-ment organizations enjoy relative autonomy from the state, can be misleading once we move outside of liberal democracies. Instead, as we have seen, devel-oping a working model of protest patterns requires us to look carefully at the nature of organizations and the political context that they inhabit.

A key factor in shaping the ecology of organizations is the nature of the transition from authoritarianism and its effects. The institutional structure of the old regime, and the coalitions and organizations to which it gave rise, mat-ter, and the details of how this system broke down and was reconstructed are crucial to understanding how contention is likely to evolve. In Russia, as we have seen, the new era dawned less different from the old than it appeared superfi cially. Most union leaderships were still focused more on insider politics in Moscow and regional capitals than on gaining the trust of workers in fac-tories and enterprises. 27 Regional labor unions have tended to be incorporated

26 Somewhat less straightforward to interpret is the apparent relationship between other protest and world oil prices.

27 This ought to have created incentives for independent labor leaders to attempt to organize workers. However, it seems that creating an effective organization is more diffi cult in the post-Communist era than in late Communism, when collapsing production, private management, and pervasive lawlessness make grassroots labor organizing even more diffi cult and dangerous. When independent unions are weak at the moment of liberalization, they are likely to remain so. This seems to be consistent with experience in other regions, where powerful labor movements


into the political machines of governors. In most instances, this has meant the union seeking to play a role in maintaining social peace and inhibiting the development of mass protest. In a few cases, however, unions have cooper-ated with the regional administration in helping workers solve collective action problems and in organizing major strikes and hunger strikes.

The chapter has also demonstrated that the importation of formal insti-tutions from other contexts can have quite unexpected results. In Russia, unlike in western Europe, social partnership has tended to reproduce rather than eliminate existing patterns of dependency. Creating formal institutions of social partnership has provided an institutionalized and regularized procedure for unions to play a role in politics, but this means little for workers unless the unions can somehow be turned into truly representative organizations. Social partnership, by institutionalizing relations between unions and the state, makes this less rather than more likely. The effect is to deal a double blow to the pros-pects of developing a system of genuine representation for workers. Not only are the largest unions beholden to the state at different levels, but in ensuring their own survival, they crowd out potential entrants that might over time constitute a real democratic alternative.

This case of social democratic forms fi lled with quasi-Leninist content dem-onstrates the importance of organizations for making institutions work. In western Europe, strong unions and strong employers federations made real deals with one another, contributing to labor peace, international competitive-ness, and prosperity. In Russia, the same formal institutions allow weak unions to huddle behind the skirts of an assertive state. This is a key lesson for the analysis of politics in Russia, but also for thinking about hybrid regimes more generally. Institutions that act one way in one context might well have very dif-ferent effects when the organizational environment is different.

In terms of broader applicability, the patterns of protest mobilization I ana-lyze are the product of a number of conditions common to many hybrid regimes. Strong independent organizations and institutions that are the mainstay of liberal democracy are rare. By contrast, hierarchical institutions shaped by an authori-tarian past and purpose are common. Where this is true, elite politics will play a major role in determining who mobilizes and who does not. In particular, where political machines or traditions of corporatist labor incorporation survive, there is institutional support for the manipulation of protest. I have shown how this works in Russia, where Soviet-style institutions of labor incorporation still have a signifi cant presence, but the legacies of authoritarian corporatism are likely to be felt in places like Mexico and others (Bensusán 2000 ).

If this is so, then a key issue for students of regime change is to under-stand the circumstances under which authoritarian institutions are likely to survive the introduction of more open electoral competition. To the extent that

that emerged after the end of authoritarianism are hard to fi nd. The MST in Brazil is a partial exception, though this is a peasant movement with strong links to the Labor Party and the Catholic Church, rather than a labor union.


survivor organizations are insulated from competition (or the threat of com-petition), they are more likely to retain existing relationships rather than seek new constituencies. Where existing relationships are with powerful state offi -cials, the state will act to protect survivor organizations, strengthening them further. It seems likely that we would see greater institutional longevity where the defeat of the old regime is less comprehensive, but there are also likely to be important dynamic issues related to the sequencing of economic and other reforms that merit further investigation.

The elite competition theory of strikes also has implications for the rela-tionship between protest and further democratization in hybrid regimes like Russia. As Collier ( 1999 ) and others have noted, strikes played a key role in regime change in both historical and modern democratizations. The role of protest in improving the quality of democracy is also well established (Kriesi, et al. 1995 ; Tilly 2004 ). However, “elite competition strikes” are different. Here it is not independent unions or more broadly organized political par-ties that are driving political strikes, but rather individual governors pursuing transfers from the center. If my analysis is correct, it is quite possible to witness high levels of protest without much expectation that it is evidence of real pres-sure from below that will lead to greater democratization. It cannot simply be assumed that the experience of the advanced industrial world will be replicated elsewhere. Apparently popular uprisings, as we are learning in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan , among other cases, will not necessarily lead to democratic prog-ress. Instead, it is crucial to develop theories of post-authoritarianism that take into account the organizational context in which protest happens .

100

4

A Time for Trouble

“All of us [have] been obliged to suffer the consequences of Russia’s latest attack of freedom and the lice that inevitably accompanied it.”

Viktor Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger

The Altai Krai (Altai Territory) lies in southern Siberia, along Russia’s border with Kazakhstan. The Krai has a population of around 2.6 million people and is known for its signifi cant raw material reserves including valuable metals such as manganese, bauxite, and gold. On September 1, 1997, 263 teachers at 11 schools in two different districts of Altai Krai began a strike demanding the payment of back wages. On the following day, they were joined by a further 4,802 teachers in 211 schools spread across 20 districts. The strike lasted a month and, at its peak, included nearly 6,000 teachers.

Also on September 1, in the Altai town of Zmeinogorsk, two workers at a gold prospecting enterprise “Kolyvan’” went on hunger strike demanding back pay. On September 17, in the same town, eight women with three children aged between nine and eleven broke into the administration building of the mine to demand payment of wages and to protest a decision to close the mine. The occupation lasted more than a week. Overall for the month, some 117,653 working days were lost to strikes in the Krai. The unrest lasted on and off for more than a year. In September 1998, for example, a further 101,115 working days were lost to strikes.

By January 2000, however, labor peace was returning to the Altai. The 7,560 working days lost to two large teachers’ strikes that month were the only pro-test events recorded by Interior Ministry offi cials for the entirety of that year, even though the problem of unpaid wages remained severe. Monthly totals of unpaid wages in the Krai in 2000 remained between R800 million and R900 million, or about 85 percent of the September 1997 fi gures .

Why were teachers and others in Altai striking and protesting in 1997 and 1998 and largely passive, despite substantial outstanding wage arrears, in 2000? To put the issue more generally, what is the relationship between protest and time? Why is it that similar hardships produce protest at one time and

A Time for Trouble 101

passivity at another? In Chapter 3 , I analyzed the role of hierarchical organiza-tions and elite politics in explaining why some regions and not others experi-enced high levels of strikes. In this chapter and the next, I demonstrate how the specifi c mobilizing strategies of elites at the regional level and patterns of elite competition over resources, rules, and political power at the national level and also shape protest patterns over time.

Specifi cally, I address two empirical puzzles: First, why did Boris Yeltsin’s second term see the highest levels of protest mobilization of the post-Soviet era, and in particular why did protest peak under the premiership of Evgenii Primakov in November 1998? Second, why did protest decline so rapidly toward the end of Yeltsin presidency? I consider the fi rst of these questions here and the second in Chapter 5 . Here I show that although widespread demon-etization of the economy created the potential for protest all across Russia, patterns of who actually protested and when were closely tied to the ups and downs of elite competition at the center, and changes in the political dynam-ics in Moscow led to changes in the dynamics of protest in the regions. This is further evidence of the importance of elite competition and state mobilizing strategies in a context of a hierachical organizational ecology.

In this chapter, I also show that, understood in the right way, political opportunities are a useful starting point in thinking about protest patterns in hybrid regimes. Divisions within the elite are, as is well known, strongly asso-ciated with high and rising levels of protest. However, given the organizational ecology of hybrids, political opportunity needs to be thought of in terms of the structure of competition among elites with the capacity to mobilize protest-ers, rather than being thought of, as it usually is, in terms of a single regime that opens or closes opportunities for protest from below. It is not just that elite divisions create opportunities for others to protest, but rather that elite competition often has a direct and decisive infl uence over who mobilizes and when.

Protest and Time

What are the empirical patterns I am trying to explain? Let us look fi rst at strikes and the pattern of working days lost to strikes in Figure 4.1 .

The fi rst peak of strikes comes at the very beginning of 1997, when the monthly totals lost to strikes were around 600,000–700,000 working days. 1 The totals fell off rather quickly with the onset of summer, but, come fall, the number of working days lost to strikes rose rapidly again. The second half of 1998 saw high and rising strike volume. In September 1998, imme-diately after the devaluation and fi nancial crash of August, the total number of working days lost to strikes in a single month reached some 796,000, dipped slightly in October, before rising again to 802,356 in November. In this period, the total monthly loss in working time, according to the MVD

1 This is confi rmed by the offi cial Goskomstat data.


data, exceeded even the highs of 1997. The huge strike waves of the fall and winter of 1998–99, however, marked the end of the protest cycle and the fol-lowing year saw a return of relative peace.

A similar pattern can be discerned if we look at the timing of hunger strikes. Using an analogous measure of hunger strike activity, the number of strikers multiplied by the number of days they spent on hunger strike, we see a simi-lar, if not entirely synchronous, pattern to strikes. As Figure 4.2 shows, hunger strike intensity peaks in the late summer and early fall of 1998, and then again in the late spring and early summer of 1999, following a similar pattern to strikes but about fi ve to six months behind. 2

The pattern remains the same if we look at the incidence of protest events (rather than intensity). Figure 4.3 shows the number of strikes, hunger strikes, and other acts of protest per month throughout the period. 3 The number of events of every type follows basically the same pattern. Tension was clearly building throughout 1998, as the economic and political situation worsened and the government moved toward, and then over, the brink of default and

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Figure 4.1. Working days lost to strikes in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000. Source : MVD Dataset.

2 To show both series on the same chart, the number of working days lost to strikes is divided by 100 to make the orders of magnitude comparable with hunger strikers.

3 In regression analysis, unless otherwise stated, I use the total number of working days lost to strikes as my measure of strike activity. The data on the number of strikes is a poorer measure since it is hard, especially in the education sector, to decide whether a strike at a number of dif-ferent schools is one strike or many. However, the correlation between the data on working days lost and numbers of strikes is .95.


devaluation . Protest continued to grow thereafter, peaking in the late winter/early spring of 1999. Protest of all kinds then dropped in the summer, as it had in previous years. However, in the fall of 1999 and the winter of 2000, the rises that had taken place in previous autumns were not repeated, and protest levels continued to tail off.

So what explains this pattern? I undertake the explanation in two phases. In the next chapter, I account for the decline – why did protest fall off so dramati-cally over the second half of 1999 and why did it not rebound thereafter? In this chapter, I explain the timing and changing dynamics of the high mobiliza-tion period – why was protest so high up to the spring of 1999 and how did it evolve in response to changes in the broader environment?

I begin by laying out two general conditions that facilitated high levels of protest under Yeltsin. First, the period 1997–1998 witnessed the most acute phase of Russia’s post-Communist economic crisis. The tight macroeconomic policy pursued for most of the 1990s had kept infl ation down but had not led to economic recovery. Instead, tight money led to a gradual but widespread demonetization of the economy and created abundant economic grievances and fertile ground for protest mobilization. Second, the economic crisis was taking place against the background of a political crisis in which the center and regions bargained over the structure of relations between them. In this con-text, competition among different factions of the elite was intense and weakly institutionalized and public protest was regularly used as a negotiating tactic. When these confl icts are combined with the hierarchical organization of labor,

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Figure 4.2. Patterns of days lost to strikes and hunger strikes in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000.


as analyzed in the previous chapter, it is not surprising that the Yeltsin era was one in which elite battles found a strong echo in the streets and factories of Russia.

However, the relationship between protest patterns and time is more com-plex than simply showing that protest was high in Yeltsin’s second term due to a combination of economic crisis and intense intraelite competition. In the second half of this chapter, I analyze empirically how regional-level elites’ mobilizing strategies affected not only the volume of protests over time but also the identity of the protesters. I show that who was protesting changed as the elite-level political context changed. In August of 1998, the Russian ruble collapsed and the government defaulted on its debt. The collapse temporar-ily forced President Yeltsin to appoint a government that had the support of the opposition Communists. As I show, the turnover in control of the govern-ment led to a change in the political personality of protesting regions. On the one hand, regions that were close to the left and Primakov , and which had

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Figure 4.3. Patterns of protest events in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000.


previously been in the vanguard of protest, began to demobilize. On the other hand, regions allied with the Kremlin, which had previously been very passive despite considerable wage arrears, now became involved in protest. This is an important additional test of the theory proposed in Chapter 3 .

Demonetization, Wage Arrears, and Protest

The largest single factor conditioning high levels of protest in the late 1990s undoubtedly was the prolonged economic crisis that had gripped Russia for almost a decade. The economic policy of the government, particularly since 1995, had been based on the simple orthodoxy that tight control over the money supply and a strong ruble would eliminate infl ation, generate investor confi dence, and produce economic growth. However, by 1997, despite the rosy optimism of offi cial statements on the economy, it was becoming increasingly clear not only that growth had proven elusive, but that the policy framework was unsustainable. Years of tight monetary policy had not produced industrial restructuring, but instead an economy drowning in unpaid debts. As David Woodruff ( 1999 ) put it:

Moscow was running a monetary policy that was ruinous for most Russian indus-try, since it made credit available only at the most usurious rates, while putting what consumer-purchasing power was available at the service of foreign fi rms. Moscow’s monetary policy created a monetary system in which the vast bulk of Russian industry, focused on the internal market, simply could not survive (132).

The result was that a huge majority of Russian fi rms were completely insol-vent at prevailing ruble prices. However, mass insolvency did not lead to wide-spread plant closures or mass redundancies. Instead, the insolvency was so comprehensive that no one had an interest in enforcing bankruptcies and clos-ing unprofi table companies. Insolvent enterprises were not forced to suspend operations, close down, or restructure. Instead, they – and the government – employed a range of tactics including barter, the issue of promissory notes (known as veksels ), and the accumulation of complex webs of payment arrears in order to keep operating. The Russian economy was gradually becoming demonetized. 4

The scale of the demonetization was staggering. Estimates of the proportion of industrial sales accounted for by barter transactions in 1998 range from the offi cial Goskomstat estimate of 9 percent, to the Russian Economic Barometer estimate of 51 percent. 5 Other government fi gures showed that 15 percent of sales by major taxpayers were paid for by bartering, an extraordinary fi gure for an industrial economy (Desai and Idson 2000 : 174–5). No money to pay

4 The process by which this occurred has been well documented by Woodruff and others. See Desai and Idson ( 2000 ), Gaddy and Ickes ( 2002 ), Maleva ( 2001 ), Woodruff ( 1999 ).

5 This fi gure included all non-cash deals between companies including barter in the strictest sense.


suppliers also meant no money to pay taxes. Only 16 percent of registered companies were paying all their taxes on time (Desai and Idson 2000 : 6).

Without tax revenue, the government lacked suffi cient money to pay its employees in Moscow and in the regions. Moreover, private and privatized companies also developed huge arrears in payment of wages to their employees. The government proportion of the wage arrears bill, though massive, was rarely more than about 20 percent of total wage arrears in the economy (Desai and Idson 2000 : 79). By 1998, according to the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, 64 percent of people were owed some wages, and the amount owed to currently employed workers averaged three and two-thirds months (Desai and Idson 2000 : 50). With nearly two-thirds of the country’s workers owed back wages, the potential for unrest was clear.

An additional consequence of demonetization and arrears was that fi scal rela-tions became intensely politicized, providing fertile ground for bargaining games of the kind analyzed in Chapter 3 . Cash was rarely available for the payment of taxes, and tax collectors in the regions began accepting payments in kind. This meant that remittances of taxes to the federal government were also in kind or in some form of surrogate currency. Since the ruble value of taxes in kind or sur-rogate monies was inherently subjective, this opened up a vast bargaining game among companies and across government at different levels, in which the sides negotiated with each other over the value of debts and over tax payments.

Even where mutual obligations were clear in theory, in practice, what it would take to satisfy those obligations became a matter of negotiation. Since the nominal value of the arrears was vastly greater than any amount of money creditors could realistically expect to recover, at least at prevailing exchange rates, the real value of arrears was inherently subjective and so also a matter of negotiation. Those players who negotiated most effectively could expect to profi t from the situation, whereas those who did not would lose.

To make matters worse for the Kremlin, previous experience had already shown that the threat of unrest in the regions was an effective bargaining tactic in these negotiations. In 1992, signifi cantly larger net transfers went to regions that had declared sovereignty, to those that had experienced major strikes, and to those where the vote for Yeltsin in the 1991 presidential election had been particularly low (Treisman 1999 ). To quote Daniel Treisman ( 1996 ): “Regional governors travel to Moscow to lobby the Finance Ministry for larger subsidies or more favorable deals, or try to apply pressure via sectoral ministries or the president’s staff … To sit in a regional governor’s offi ce this summer was to overhear phone calls in which the governor advised aides in Moscow on how best to ‘beat out’ money from the federal administration.” By the late 1990s, such threats were all the more credible because many of the unpaid obligations were payments of wages and benefi ts due directly to citizens, bringing these broader publics directly into the negotiations.

As we might expect, therefore, the pattern of growing arrears was clearly refl ected in high levels of protest, both through a direct effect on workers’ efforts to organize wildcat actions and through the effect on the willingness of


regional governors to risk mass mobilization to improve their bargaining posi-tion with respect to the center. As Figure 4.4 shows, wage arrears and strikes moved quite closely together, especially from the end of 1997. As Figure 4.4 also shows, both strikes and arrears peaked in September 1998.

What brought matters to a head was the currency crisis, devaluation, and debt default of August 1998. Although the collapse would ultimately have a cathartic effect on the economy, returning some balance to monetary and exchange rate policies, at the time it was perceived as a disaster. For example, in a symposium “Anatomy of a Crisis” in the East European Constitutional Review ( 1998 ), American analysts were apocalyptic in their assessment of the crisis. Steven Solnick called it “the gravest crisis that Russia has faced since Hitler invaded” (127), whereas David Woodruff thought that “the August crisis shattered the fragile institutional base of liberal capitalism in Russia” (132) .

The root of the collapse lay in a major softening in international energy prices. At the end of 1996, oil prices reached a high of $23.51 per barrel, but by June 1998, that price had fallen dramatically to $12.48. This meant a serious decline in hard currency revenues, putting even more pressure on an already unsustainable budget, and undermining confi dence in the central plank of economic policy: the strong ruble. The Central Bank’s attempts to shore up the currency meant raising interest rates. On May 28, 1998, interest rates were increased from 30 percent to 150 percent, but this further aggravated problems with debt service and the budget defi cit. Already weakened by the

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Figure 4.4. Temporal patterns of strikes and wage arrears in the Russian Federation, 1997–2000.


Asian fi nancial crisis of the fall of 1997 that undermined investor confi dence in “emerging markets” worldwide, Russia’s thin stock market fell rapidly, los-ing 60 percent of its value between October 1997 and July 1998 (Shevtsova 1999 : 247).

To deal with the budgetary crisis, the government became increasingly depen-dent upon the sale of various short-term fi nancing instruments, most famously short-term treasury bills known as GKOs ( gosudarstvennie kaznacheiskie obli-gatsii ), in order to fi ll growing gaps in its fi nances. The budget crisis interacted directly with the overvalued exchange rate, as domestic banks borrowed vast quantities of hard currency to buy GKOs, which carried with them exorbitant interest rates and allowed the foreign loans, with lower interest rates, to be repaid at a handsome profi t. In short, the day-to-day fi nancing of the Russian budget became based on a pyramid scheme. For the most part, Russian banks were willing to go along with the scheme because it was a highly effective means of making a fortune in the short run, though when a number of banks tried to get out of the market or reduce their holdings, they were strong-armed by the Central Bank to stay in.

It was only a matter of time, however, before the fi nancial system went the way of all pyramid schemes. The day of reckoning came on August 17, 1998, when the government announced a ninety-day moratorium on the payment of foreign debt, a unilateral default and restructuring of ruble- denominated debts, and the abandonment of efforts to maintain the exchange rate. Although the collapse of the ruble in the fall of 1998 saw protest peak, it also meant the end of tight money. Monetary policy was relaxed, and wage arrears began to be paid off. As a result, as Figure 4.4 shows, the intensity of strikes fell rapidly.

The bivariate correlation between arrears and strikes is high (.69). Nevertheless, even though there is general similarity in time trends at the aggregate level between arrears and protest, there are also signifi cant anoma-lies. For example, for most of the period between January 1997 and May 1998, the intensity of strikes was declining or stable, but accumulated wage arrears were rising. The sharp peak in strikes in September 1997 was not accompanied by a similar spike in arrears. Similarly, the fall in the number of working days lost to strikes was much greater than the decline in wage arrears through the spring and summer of 1999, and strikes rose again in the fall of 1999 without wage arrears increasing. By May 2000, strikes levels were extremely low, even though wage arrears remained at 80 percent of their January 1997 level .

Part of the explanation for why arrears and protest do not track more closely lies in differences due to seasonal variation in strike patterns. 6 However, part of the pattern also depends on politics and the fact that, as I will show, the correlation between arrears and strikes at the aggregate level hides tremendous variation in how different actors responded to similar levels of arrears .

6 See Appendix 2, Sectoral and Seasonal Strike Patterns.


Center-Periphery Confl ict Over Rules and Resources

If the economic crisis was problem number one facing Russia in Yeltsin’s sec-ond term, the political weakness of the center that accompanied it was not far behind. In particular, the weakness of the Kremlin’s infl uence in the regions meant that the rules governing relations between the center and the regions were poorly instutionalized and were always up for renegotiation. This created a constant tug-of-war over both resources and institutions in which regional leaders used whatever negotiating tactics they could, including “noisy” public protests.

Russia’s problems with establishing a federal political system in the shadow of Soviet pseudo-federalism have received a lot of attention from political sci-entists, not only due to interest in federalism per se, but also due to interest in the relationship between federalism, democracy, and the rule of law. 7 The key point emerging from this literature is that the manner in which Russian federalism developed meant that there were few established rules of the game dividing powers between the center and the constituent units. Instead of having a set of more or less general rules that evolve and become increasingly institu-tionalized over time, Russia has witnessed almost perpetual renegotiation of the rules, with relative power changing hands rapidly as a function of political, rather than constitutional, circumstances.

The Yeltsin constitution was drafted and adopted at a high point of Presidential power in the fall of 1993 and contained a number of key centralizing provi-sions, including a single economic and monetary space (art. 8.1), the primacy of Federal legislation (art. 4.2), and Federal control over the judicial system (art. 71) and foreign and security policies (art. 71). Nevertheless, the Constitution was, probably deliberately, vague on governance within the regions, placing questions of natural resources, state property, and taxation in a sphere of “joint compe-tence” and providing for further treaties to clarify the division of power (art. 11.3) (Nicholson 2003 : 8–9). These articles, as Erik Hoffman noted, “virtually ensure that bilateral political and economic bargaining rather than uniform con-stitutional and other federal law will be decisive in exercising ‘joint powers’” (as cited in Kahn 2002 : 136). And this is how it proved to be.

The fi rst major breach of federal symmetry was formalized on February 15, 1994, when Yeltsin signed a bilateral power-sharing agreement with Tatarstan . Yeltsin declared that “Tatarstan has taken as many powers under the treaty as it can. The rest that remain with the federal government are enough to satisfy us” (Colton 2008 : 285). Over the next fi ve years, the practice of sign-ing extraconstitutional bilateral deals became widespread and represented a massive transfer of control from the center to those regions that were in a position to drive a hard bargain. The most high-profi le challenge to central

7 A short list of recent books on the subject would include Brudny, Frankel and Hoffman ( 2004 ), Filippov et al. (2004), Herd and Aldis ( 2003 ), Kahn ( 2002 ), Ovrutskii ( 2004 ), Reddaway and Orttung ( 2004 ), Ross ( 2002 ), Stoliarov ( 2002 ).


authority came, of course, in Chechnya , where the Kremlin effectively backed down when Yeltsin signed the Khasavyurt agreements on August 31, 1996. The agreements meant that Russia had “effectively surrender[ed] in return for peace” (Lieven 1998 :142), delaying consideration of Chechnya’s constitutional status until 2001 and ensuring effective independence in the meantime. 8

At the end of October 1997, Yeltsin signed bilateral treaties on the division of powers with leaders of the Astrakhan , Kirov , Murmansk , Ul’ianovsk , and Yaroslavl oblasts, Krasnoiarsk Krai , and the Taimyr and Evenk Autonomous Okrugs , bringing to thirty-nine the total number of subjects of the Federation that had signed such agreements. On May 20, 1998, Yeltsin signed fi ve more power-sharing treaties with the Amur , Voronezh , Ivanovo , and Kostroma oblasts, and the Republic of Marii-El . Even though Yeltsin claimed that the treaties were crucial to preserving the unity and cohesion of the state, others, such as the governor of Orel and Speaker of the Federation Council, Egor Stroev , were critical of the treaties that reduced the federal system to a matter of bargaining power between the center and individual regions. This put weak regions at a disadvantage while allowing strong regions like Tatarstan to enjoy what Stroev described as virtually “confederative” relations with the center. 9

As a result, by 1998, more than half of the eighty-nine federal “subjects” had bilateral treaties governing relations with the Kremlin. On June 16 of that year, the city of Moscow also signed its own bilateral treaty with the federal government, resolving a long-standing dispute over federal compensation to the city for serving as the national capital. Not content with making deals with the Kremlin, an association of twelve regions took a further controversial step into the realm of foreign policy in May, signing an economic cooperation treaty with Belarus . Moreover, these agreements were supplemented by a vast net-work of decrees, laws, and separate – often secret – political agreements to pro-vide special ad hoc privileges such as subsidies, or special extraconstitutional exceptions. The keynote of Kremlin policy was extraconstitutionality and a lack of transparency that greatly hindered the development of federalism, democracy, and the rule of law (Kahn 2002 ).

The Kremlin’s position in this contest with the regions had also been weak-ened by changes in the procedures for appointing regional governors. Initially, regional governors had been appointed by Yeltsin himself. However, by the sum-mer of 1998, the majority of chief executives in Russia’s regions were no longer presidential appointees but had been popularly elected. This gave the governors legitimacy and independence from the Kremlin, and raised substantially the political profi le of the formerly docile upper house of the Federal Assembly, the Federation Council, where regional governors sat ex offi cio . It also made it con-siderably harder in practice for the Kremlin to remove a governor.

8 As Anatol Lieven ( 1998 ) notes, Yeltsin’s envoy, Aleksandr Lebed, reached these agreements “with absolutely no support from Yeltsin, who according to his usual pattern tried to distance himself both from the bloodshed and from the moves to end it” (142).

9 “Constitutional Watch: Russia,” East European Constitutional Review , 1998.


In this context, Yeltsin’s obvious striving, and public failure, to remove the Primorskii Krai governor, Evgenii Nazdratenko, greatly undermined Kremlin infl uence in the regions. Although Yeltsin had originally appointed Nazdratenko to the governorship in 1993, Nazdratenko became increasingly alienated from the Kremlin after 1996. To local observers, the confl ict had its roots in the desire of Moscow-based fi nancial groups to gain control over the rich natural and other resources of the region. Nazdratenko, on the other hand, was the representative of local business interests that vigorously opposed incursions from Moscow (Burns 2000 ). According to local journalists, Nazdratenko had relied for support in the Kremlin on Yeltsin advisers Aleksandr Korzhakov and Oleg Soskovets , and when they were fi red by Yeltsin in June 1996, he was left without cover in the Kremlin. 10

In early June 1997, Yeltsin issued a presidential decree ordering Nazdratenko to turn over many of his powers to the Kremlin’s representative in the region, Viktor Kondratov , previously the local chief of the Federal Security Service. On June 16, Yeltsin went further and approved a decree initiated by Anatolii Chubais and Boris Nemtsov on holding early gubernatorial elections in the region. Deprived of his insider support, Nazdratenko turned to public pres-sure to fend off Yeltsin. With Nazdratenko’s support, workers at the Zvezda submarine repair plant and the Progress aviation plant in the Primorskii Krai towns of Bol’shoi Kamen’ and Artem struck, along with doctors, teachers , and garbage workers. The strikers called on the Duma to impeach Yeltsin for treason. Nazdratenko also received the support of his fellow governors in the Federation Council, which passed a resolution in his support. After several months of unsuccessful wrestling, Yeltsin was forced to back down, at great cost to the Kremlin’s credibility among regional governors .

The weakness of Federal authority over the regions reached new depths with the response to the economic crisis in the summer of 1998, when many governors took measures that seemed to threaten the institutional and eco-nomic unity of Russia itself. Price controls on staple items were introduced in Kursk , Yaroslavl , Smolensk , and Kamchatka oblasts. The mayors of Moscow and St. Petersburg and the presidents of key republics, Sakha and Tatarstan , also announced price controls. The president of Bunyatia and the governor of Kaliningrad declared states of emergency in early September. On September 3, the infl uential Kommersant Daily wrote that Sakha and Kemerovo were forming their own gold and hard currency reserves, in violation of federal law. A number of the regions issued restrictions on the export of some essen-tial food products from their territory. 11 The disorder was well described by Vice-Governor of Primorskii Krai , Valentin Dubinin , who told mayors in the region: “There isn’t order in the country. We don’t even know who is the country’s head, for God’s sake.” As mayors from the region debated price

10 Author’s interviews, Vladivostok, June 2003. 11 Vologda Oblast, Krasnodarsky Krai, Belgorod Oblast, Kursk Oblast, and Marii El Republic.

“Constitutional Watch: Russia,” East European Constitutional Review , 1998.


ceilings for non-Primore domestic manufacturers, Dubinin advised: “Pass these measures now and we’ll sort out the details later, with the procurators and lawyers.” 12

Only when Yeltsin was forced to appoint a new prime minister from the opposition, Evgenii Primakov , was some measure of order restored. Primakov recognized it would be necessary to bring some key governors on board. On October 2, 1998, he announced the creation of an extraconstitutional “pre-sidium” of the government, inviting eight key regional leaders to participate. 13 This made for the unprecedented situation in which a select group of gover-nors were simultaneously sitting in three different branches of government: the regional executive, the Federal executive, and the Federal legislature. In addi-tion, regional governors exercised control over treasury, tax, and even Central Bank offi cials in their regions, and over state property and many large enter-prises. Many military units and branches of the federal security services were also heavily dependent on informal support from regional budgets. Together these elements show the extent to which control had slipped from Moscow to these regional potentates (Solnick 1998 ).

Consequently, though the economic crisis contributed enormously to popu-lar discontent, it was the political vacuum at the center and the disintegration of rules for dealing with disputes that made everything open to negotiation and made supporting protest an attractive option for some governors. Although Kremlin was central to the system for distributing resources, it had repeat-edly shown itself vulnerable to political pressure, both public and private. The chaos created a free-for-all environment in which regions grabbed what they could, how best they could. As I have shown, for governors like Nazdratenko, with few economic or strategic resources and few allies in the Kremlin, public pressure was the best strategy. Governors understood this, and the result was rising levels of strikes and protests .

Primakov’s Appointment and Protest Dynamics

Although the economic crisis clearly continued to dominate politics in the fall of 1998, the appointment of Evgenii Primakov to the Prime Minister’s offi ce on September 11, 1998 changed the dynamics of Moscow’s relations with the regions. As a man of Yeltsin’s generation, with close ties to Communists and others, Primakov was an alternative to Yeltsin rather than a loyal servant.

12 Vladivostok News , September 9, 1998. 13 The presidium included Prime Minister Primakov, the two First Deputy Prime Ministers, Yuri

Masliukov and Vadim Gustov, Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin, Defense Minister Igor Sergeev, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, Minister of Economy Andrei Shapovaliants, Finance Minister Mikhail Zadornov, State Property Minister Farit Gazizullin, Deputy Prime Ministers Vladimir Bulgak, Gennadiy Kulik, and Valentina Matvienko, and the Chairman of the Central Bank and the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The regional leaders were heads of the major interregional associations, Eduard Rossel of Sverdlovsk, Nikolai Merkushin, the President of Mordovia, Viktor Kress of Tomsk, Viktor Ishaev of Khabarovsk, Vladimir Yakovlev of


Consequently, the appointment of Primakov signaled to the regions a tempo-rary (Primakov was fi red on May 12, 1999) but nonetheless signifi cant change in the political identity of those in charge of the day-to-day running of the gov-ernment. Morevoer, control over the executive and much of the budget went not just to Primakov, but also to Communists and other allies he appointed to his cabinet.

Primakov’s appointment, therefore, represents an opportunity to test further the theory of protest set out in Chapter 3 . As I showed there, strike patterns were heavily infl uenced by political affi liations and relations between regions and the Kremlin. Given our previous analysis of strike patterns that turned on the nature of political connections between governors and the center, we ought to see this change in the political identity of the government refl ected in a change in the political identity of regions participating in protests. And we do. Regions led by opponents of the Kremlin began slowly but steadily to drop off the list of striking regions, whereas some pro-Yeltsin regions began to experience signifi cant strikes for the fi rst time. Given the relatively short period of Primakov’s tenure (only eight months), that this effect shows up in the data is a strong confi rmation of the degree to which elite politics infl uenced protest patterns.

In this section, I illustrate this political dynamic at work in the strike patterns of 1997–9. I break the periods of mobilization down into two separate protest waves, one under pro-Yeltsin prime ministers in 1997 and another in 1998–9 that includes the period in which Primakov and the opposition were in power. Table 4.1 shows that, as noted in Chapter 3 , more than half of the regions (forty-seven out of eighty-eight) saw no signifi cant mobilization in either of these waves, despite the economic crisis and the collapse of the ruble. 14 Of the remaining regions, just over a quarter (twenty-fi ve) were active in both strikes waves, six participated in the wave of 1997 only, and ten in the wave of 1998–9 only.

What explains these different patterns? Table 4.2 shows that politics played a key role in determining which regions participated in the 1997 strike wave. Table 4.2 uses logit analysis to examine the factors that made a difference between experiencing signifi cant mobilization during 1997 and not experienc-ing it. The independent variables are those that were found to matter con-sistently in Chapter 3 ; political relations with the center, wage arrears, and urbanization. 15 This confi rms the fi ndings in Chapter 3 , but using a different dependent variable. Again, poor political relations with the Kremlin increase

St. Petersburg, Anatoly Lisitsin of Yaroslavl, and Egor Stroev of Orel . http://www.nupi.no/cgi-win/Russland/krono.exe?2767

14 “Signifi cant mobilization” is defi ned as more than .01 working days per capita lost to strikes in any given month. Although any defi nition of “signifi cant” is somewhat arbitrary, this level is useful for our purposes since it is suffi ciently high as to isolate cases in which there had to have been signifi cant coordination of strikes across different workplaces.

15 Measures of size that were signifi cant (industrial output and population) are excluded since the dependent variable is normalized by population.


the likelihood that a region would participate in the strike wave. 16 Wage arrears matter too; regions with the fastest growing wage arrears were more likely to participate than other regions. Finally, as before, protest was much more likely in highly urbanized regions than in predominantly rural regions.

After Primakov took over the government, however, the politics of protest began to change. The changes in the structure of protest can be seen in sev-eral ways. First is the nature of the political affi liations of those regions that

Table 4.1. Protest Mobilization in Russian Regions: Strikes

Protest Mobilization Over Wage Non-Payment In Russian Regions

Regions in Neither Strike Wave Regions in Both Strike Waves Adygeia, Aginskii-Buriatskii A.O., Astrakhanskaia, Bashkortostan, Belgorodskaia, Dagestan, Evenkiskii A.O., Evreiskii A.O., Ingushetiia, Kabardino-Balkariia, Kaliningradskaia, Kalmykiia, Kaluzhskaia, Karachaevo-Cherkessiia, Khanty-Mansiiskii A.O., Komi-Permiatskii A.O., Koriakskii A.O., Krasnodarskii Krai, Kurskaia, Leningradskaia, Lipetskaia, Mordovia, Moskovskaia, Moskva, Nenetskii A.O., Nizhegorodskaia, Novgorodskaia, Omskaia, Orlovskaia, Penzenskaia, Riazanskaia, Samarskaia, Sankt-Peterburg, Saratovskaia, Severnaia Osetiia-Alaniia, Stavropol’skii Krai, Taimyrskii A.O., Tambovskaia, Tatarstan, Tverskaia, Tiumenskaia, Tyva, Ust-Ordynskii Buriatskii A.O.,Vladimirskaia, Voronezhskaia,Yamalo-Nenetskii A.O., Yaroslavskaia

Altaiskii Krai, Brianskaia, Buriatiia, Cheliabinskaia, Chitinskaia, Chukotskii A.O., Irkutskaia, Kareliia, Kemerovskaia, Khabarovskii Krai, Khakasiia, Kirovskaia, Komi, Kostromskaia, Krasnoiarskii Krai, Kurganskaia, Magadanskaia, Orenburgskaia, Primorskii Krai, Sakha, Sakhalinskaia, Smolenskaia, Sverdlovskaia, Tul’skaia, Vologodskaia

total: 47 total: 25

Regions in 1997 Strike Wave Only Regions in 1998–99 Strike Wave Only

Amurskaia, Chuvashiia, Kamchatskaia, Murmanskaia, Permskaia, Volgogradskaia

Altaiskaia Respublika, Arkhangelskaia, Ivanovskaia, Marii-El, Novosibirskaia, Pskovskaia, Rostovskaia, Tomskaia, Udmurtiia, Ul’ianovskaia

Total: 6 Total: 10

16 As before, I use a set of assessments of the regional governors prepared by a Russian investment bank, MFK Renaissance, in April 1998, that assesses relations between Moscow and regional governors. Governors are placed on a 0–100 scale according to both their general level of “reformism” and their specifi c connections with Moscow.


left the protest wave and of those that joined it for the fi rst time. Thirty-one regions experienced signifi cant mobilization in the 1997 strike wave and thir-ty-six did in the 1998–9 wave. Twenty-fi ve regions were mobilized in both periods, but both those who joined and those who left show a clear political pattern. 17 Five of the six regions that had major mobilizations in 1997 but not in 1998–9 openly identifi ed themselves as Kremlin opponents and allies of Primakov. 18 By contrast, of the ten regions experiencing major mobilization in 1998–9 but not in 1997, seven were openly affi liated with the Kremlin and only one with Primakov. 19 Moreover, as Figure 4.5 shows, all ten experienced

17 In the last chapter, we relied upon expert assessments of political relations with the Kremlin to characterize the political position of regions. This measure is misleading for the Primakov period because it does not distinguish between relations with the presidency and relations with the government. In the Primakov period, unlike the rest of Russia’s post-Communist history, this distinction is politically consequential. Hence for the Primakov period, I use a different measure to gauge relations with Primakov. I take advantage of the self-declared political alle-giances of governors in the run-up to the Duma election of 1999. Regional governors declar-ing for Fatherland-All Russia (OVR), or the Communist Party (KPRF) are considered to be pro- Primakov opposition governors. Governors who declared support for Unity, Nash Dom Rossiya, Union of Right Forces (SPS), or Zhirinovsky are considered to be in the pro-Kremlin faction for the Duma elections of 1999. A number of governors (eighteen) were either unaffi l-iated with one of the major blocs or had unclear associations. Such governors were generally those who played their cards close, awaiting clarity in the outcome before backing the winner. Regions are assigned to factions according to their announced participation in political groups. Governors are allocated to groups as given by Orttung 1999 , vol. 4/37. Though these elections take place after the period being analyzed here, in the absence of better data, the alliances are taken to refl ect longer-term political commitments.

18 Amurskaia (KPRF), Chuvashiia (All Russia), Kamchatskaia (Unity), Murmanskaia (Fatherland), Permskaia (All Russia), Volgogradskaia (KPRF). Of these, only Kamchatka Governor Vladimir Biriukov openly allied himself with the Kremlin.

19 The regions were: Altaiskaia Respublika (SPS), Arkhangelskaia (Unity), Ivanovskaia (Unity), Marii-El (SPS), Novosibirskaia (Fatherland), Pskovskaia (Zhirinovsky), Rostovskaia (Unity),

Table 4.2. Determinants of Participation in First Protest Wave (1997) – Logistic Regression

Relations with Kremlin −0.02* (0.01)

Change in Arrears 15.04** (6.24)


Constant −3.94** (1.74)

Observations 78Wald Chi2 11.38***Pseudo R2 0.28

Standard errors in parentheses. * p < 0.1, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01.


their fi rst signifi cant mobilization only after Primakov was appointed head of the government.

Nor can the emergence of strikes in these regions be explained by the sud-den appearance of wage arrears in these areas. Figure 4.6 illustrates the pattern of wage arrears and strikes in each of the “joining” regions both before and after Primakov’s appointment. As Figure 4.6 shows, all had experienced wage arrears before, and in cases such as Tomsk and Ul’ianovsk , strike mobiliza-tion came only after the peak of wage arrears had passed. In other cases, such as the Altai Republic , Ivanovo , and Novosibirsk , wage arrears continued to grow after Primakov’s appointment, perhaps indicating neglect by Primakov of unsympathetic regions, and major strikes followed.

Table 4.3 demonstrates the same point using logit analysis. Kremlin is a dummy variable indicating pro-Kremlin governors. The fi rst thing to note is that controlling for participation in the fi rst wave, changes in arrears and lev-els of urbanization are no longer important determinants of participation in the second wave. Instead, politics matters. Model 1 shows pro-Kremlin gover-nors to be more likely than opposition or unaffi liated governors to lead regions experiencing a major strike wave in late 1998–early 1999, with the effect

Strikes in Wave 2 Only Regions

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Figure 4.5. Strikes in 1998–1999 wave regions only.

Tomskaia (Unity), Udmurtiia (unknown), Ul’ianovskaia (unaffi liated). With the exception of Udmurtiia and Ul’ianovskaia, the governors of all of these regions had openly sided with the Kremlin early in the Duma election campaign.


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figure 4.6. (Continued)


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Figure 4.6 (Continued)


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Figure 4.6 (Continued)


figure 4.6. (Continued)

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Figure 4.6. Strikes and wage arrears in 1998–1999 wave.


statistically signifi cant at close to .05. Model 2 confi rms this by breaking the non-Kremlin-affi liated governors out into different groups and comparing them with the reference category of pro-Kremlin governors. Here we see that each of these groups was less likely to participate in the second wave of strikes than pro-Kremlin governors. For governors who supported Primakov’s Fatherland-All Russia party (OVR) , the effect is signifi cant at .1, whereas for Communists and governors of unannounced or unclear affi liation, the effect is signifi cant at the .05 level.

The graphs and regression analysis presented in this section show once more the political dynamics underlying protest in Yeltsin’s Russia. They also illus-trate how over time the political dynamics led to changes in the identity of striking regions. What we see, despite the small number of national or mul-tiregional events recorded, is that there is still a national political component to the waves. 20 De facto, there is a difference between how regions in the two main pro- and anti-Kremlin camps (with considerable numbers of regions hedging their bets) behave. The different political groups pursue different polit-ical strategies .

Table 4.3. Determinants of Participation in Second Protest Wave (1998–1999) – Logistic Regression

Model 1 Model 2

Wave 1 2.92*** (0.67)

3.12*** (0.71)

Kremlin 1.15* (0.61)

−

OVR − −1.54* (0.93)

KPRF − −2.21** (0.91)

Unaffi liated − −1.34** (0.61)

Change in arrears 2.31 (4.75)

1.98 (4.65)

Urbanization −.003 (0.02)

-0.01 (0.03)

Constant −2.02 (1.95)

(−0.47) (2.13)

Obs. 78 76Wald Chi-square 20.70*** 21.60***Pseudo R2 0.32 0.34


20 Only about 20 of the 5,822 events are explicitly noted as being national or multiregional in organization, though this number is likely to be underestimated.


Conclusion

In this chapter, I have examined the underlying political and economic condi-tions that made Boris Yeltsin’s second term as President a tempestuous period in the streets and factories of many of Russia’s towns and cities. I have shown how an economic crisis, and in particular demonetization and barter, created ample opportunities for the politicization of mass discontent. I have also shown how center-periphery relations and the nature of the constitutional settlement itself were subject to intense informal political bargaining and pressure. This gave elements of an elite divided between the center and regions, and between pro- and anti-Kremlin factions, incentives to support protest actions as a way of strengthening their bargaining position.

Who exploited these opportunities for public protest depended heavily on patterns of elite political competition. Opponents of the Kremlin tended to sup-port protest whereas Kremlin allies did not. Moreover, as I have demonstrated, changes in elite political dynamics, notably the appointment of Primakov as prime minister, led to changes in the identity of protesters. All of these elements demonstrate the importance of elite competition and elite mobilization strate-gies in shaping protest patterns.

I expect that the political structuring of protest in Russia is likely also to be seen in other hybrid regimes. The expectation is not only that, as existing social movement literature would suggest, a divided elite leads to higher levels of con-tention, but also that protest in the localities is heavily structured by national elite divisions, even when the underlying sources of discontent are primarily local in nature. As we will see in the next chapter, the elimination, or more accurately the sublimation, of these divides was a key element in the decline of protest and the stability of the early Putin years.

124

5

Elections and the Decline of Protest

“Reality is the material world as it is shown on television.” Viktor Pelevin, Generation P .

By the summer of 1999, the Russian elite was deeply divided and in political disarray. President Boris Yeltsin had one year left on his second term in offi ce and no clear successor had yet emerged. In April of that year, then-prime min-ister Evgenii Primakov had looked the most likely candidate for the presidency, given his success in stemming the effects of the economic crisis and his high approval ratings. But Primakov was both too Soviet in style and too popular for Yeltsin’s taste, so Primakov was fi red. He was replaced in May by a young security offi cial from St. Petersburg, Sergei Stepashin. 1 But Stepashin struggled to establish his authority, opening his fi rst cabinet meeting by declaring, “In order to avoid various sorts of talk of who is the boss in the government, I state that its chairman (the prime minister) leads the government, and he is respon-sible for all that happens with the government.” 2 On August 9, Stepashin too was fi red.

The catalyst for Stepashin ’s removal was the announcement that Primakov and Moscow Mayor Iuri Luzhkov had formed a bloc to compete in the December Duma elections. This bloc, called Fatherland–All Russia (OVR ), brought Yeltsin’s main challengers together with a range of powerful regional governors. The for-mation of OVR crystallized competition for the succession between Primakov and Luzhkov on one side and Yeltsin’s entourage on the other. On the Kremlin side were Stepashin’s successor, Vladimir Putin (another Petersburger with a security background), state television (RTR), and the media empire of then-Kremlin-allied oligarch, Boris Berezovskii . On the other side, Primakov and

1 Although born in Port Artur, Stepashin had studied and built his political base in Leningrad, and is usually referred to as being from St. Petersburg.

2 “Constitutional Watch: Russia,” East European Constitutional Review , 1999. Yeltsin’s close associate Valentin Yumashev reported that Stepashin was replaced for his failure to respond to the challenge from the anti-Kremlin group, his weakness in the face of violence in the Caucasus, and his failure to protect Yeltsin from lobbyists (Colton 2008 : 430).

Elections and the Decline of Protest 125

Luzhkov were supported by the third national television channel, NTV, and the oligarch Vladimir Gusinskii. 3 The contrast between the two sides could hardly have been more stark, or the stakes higher: Commentators everywhere saw the Duma elections as a sort of primary from which the strongest candidate for the presidential succession would emerge.

In this context, with the elite so obviously divided, readers of this book might expect rising public unrest, perhaps even above the turbulent levels of 1997 and 1998. Scholars of political opportunities and protest would agree, because divided elites and political realignment are both thought to open up opportunities for protest. Yet rather than rising, protest fell precipitously. In this chapter, I explain why.

The explanation focuses, as it does throughout this book, on competition among different elite actors and the incentives created to sponsor or suppress protest actions. The incentives in this case are shaped by two factors, one politi-cal and one institutional. First, the political context was crucially shaped by the speed and ruthlessness with which Putin and his team were able to resolve the uncertainty over the succession. As it became more and more clear that Putin would be the new president, the regional governors who, as we saw in Chapter 3 , had driven protest in the late 1990s increasingly fl ocked to support the new heir apparent. In the absence of the kind of independent organizations capable of taking advantage of the elections to make political demands from below, the resolution of elite confl ict was enough to demobilize political protest.

The second factor contributing to protest decline was the incentive structure created by the specifi c institutional context in which the Duma elections took place. A mixed electoral system combined with an absence of institutional-ized political parties meant that the elections effectively provided two separate contests; one in which Moscow-based presidential candidates fought a pseudo-primary for the succession, and a second in which regional governors focused on advancing their own, usually non-party, candidates. These two contests were quite separate, and so the presidential race was largely insulated from the involvement of regional governors’ political machines. As I show empir-ically, this meant that protest politics in the regions no longer exhibited the kind of national political structure that was present before the Duma election campaign.

These arguments are important for understanding politics and protest beyond the specifi cs of the Russian case. In the fi rst instance, they demonstrate that the conventional way of thinking about politics in hybrids as consisting of a clearly distinguished “regime” and “opposition,” with protest rising with

3 The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) monitors, although fi nding the election to be “competitive and pluralistic,” were critical of the media’s failure “to pro-vide impartial and fair information.” Following Putin’s victory, Gusinskii was forced to pay for his opposition, being fi rst arrested, forced to sign away much of his property, and then effectively exiled. Gusinskii was in a sense a victim of his own role in re-electing Yeltsin in 1996. Berezovskii was later to fall from the Kremlin’s graces too and shared the same fate as Gusinskii.


political openings in the regime, is misleading. Instead what we see are patterns of protest characterized by a fl uid boundary between regime and opposition, in which political calculations and institutions can lead one-time oppositionists to bandwagon with the new center. Second, the account I present here dem-onstrates that students of protest need to pay more attention to the effect of specifi c institutions on the incentives for protest. Whereas the study of institu-tions has come to dominate most subfi elds of political science in the last twenty years, the study of contentious politics has largely focused elsewhere and has tended to miss the effects of institutions on protest.

The chapter is structured as follows. In the next section, I make the case not only that protest declined in the run-up to the December 1999 elections, but that this decline is paradoxical, given what we know about protest patterns and elections. I then discuss existing theories of protest decline and suggest an alter-native that turns on state mobilizing strategies and elite competition, which are themselves shaped by political signals and political institutions. I demonstrate empirically that this is the most plausible way of thinking about protest decline in 1999. I do this in two stages. In the fi rst stage, I show that the largest factor contributing to protest decline in the fall of 1999 was the resolution of uncer-tainty over the succession. In the second, I present data that shows the political decoupling of the PR and SMD parts of the December elections. I argue that this decoupling contributed to the fact that interregional diffusion of protest disappeared during the election campaign. I conclude by refl ecting on what the results imply for the study of contention in hybrid political systems.

Political Protest and the Paradox of the 1999 Elections

From the perspective of protest politics and contention, the Duma elections of 1999 in Russia represent a paradox. In many ways, the circumstances appeared to be ripe for rising contention as crucial elections took place, politics realigned, well-placed leaders reached out for support, and the elite was divided into two intensely competing camps. Yet, rather than rising, protest in fact fell. In this sec-tion, I explore this paradox in more detail, looking at the underlying conditions that should have facilitated process and at the pattern of events that actually took place. I then consider some of the possible ways of explaining the declines in pro-test that took place, before offering a new theory in the next section .

According to the literature on contention, we should expect rising protest when one or more of the following conditions prevails: (1) access for new actors; (2) evidence of political realignment; (3) the appearance of infl uential allies; (4) emerging splits within the elite; (5) decline in will or capacity to repress dissent (Tarrow 1998 : 76). In the run-up to the 1999 Duma elections, at least (2), (3), and (4) were present.

First, evidence of an imminent political realignment (condition [2]) lay in the apparent strength of OVR, which included not only former Prime Minister Primakov, but also the governors of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tatarstan, and many other powerful fi gures with a record of diffi cult relations with Yeltsin.


With such a formidable lineup, OVR immediately jumped into second place in opinion polls behind the Communist Party, and Yeltsin’s supporters looked likely to lose control of the Kremlin for the fi rst time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Second, on both sides of the election contest were politicians with the capacity to mobilize support on the streets. Each of the coalitions included regional governors who controlled the sort of political machines that could produce mass mobilization. These governors were not just “infl uential allies” for protesters, but men who had a demonstrated ability to put people on the streets (condition [3]).

Third, the extent of the division within the elite was also clear (condi-tion [4]). In fact, the formation of OVR served clearly to polarize the options for the succession to Yeltsin, since it effectively drew political oxygen away from other potential challengers and, in particular from other governors with national political ambitions . Most notable among these was Samara Governor Konstantin Titov. Titov had initially enjoyed the support of Kremlin-connected oligarchs like Anatolii Chubais and Oleg Deripaska , and as such might have been a candidate who could provide a bridge between Yeltsin’s group and the regional governors. However, Titov split with Luzhkov and Primakov over Primakov’s appointment to the prime minister’s offi ce in 1998, and in February 1999, he announced the creation of his own party, Golos Ro ssii (Voice of Russia), attracting the support of thirty-six members of the upper house of parliament, the Federation Council. However, with the formation of OVR, supporters abandoned Titov one by one. By April, only one member of the Federation Council, the president of the parliament of the rich but sparsely populated Tiumen’ region, was still counted in his camp. With Titov effec-tively out of the running, the choice between the Kremlin and OVR was stark (Aleskandrov 2004: 161–3). 4

Given these conditions and the history of high and politicized protest that we saw in Chapters 3 and 4 , most scholars of contention would have expected to see even higher levels of protest in the context of the 1999 elections. Moreover, elections had provided a stimulant to protest in Russia before (Beissinger 2002 : 105) and have often led to high levels of protest in other countries (Wada 2004 ). Indeed, the political environment in early August 1999 in Russia bears a lot of similarities to the “colored” revolutions that were later to sweep the region. A lame-duck President was stepping down with, as of August 1999, no clear successor in place. Moreover, the incumbent president was highly unpop-ular and unable to generate much electoral support for a successor. These are precisely the kinds of circumstances that led to mass mobilizations and the overthrow of the ruling group in the “colored” revolutions in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005) (Hale 2005 , 2006a ).

Consequently, both from the point of view of work on contentious poli-tics and in light of events later in the region, the Duma elections of 1999 present a paradox. As Figure 5.1 shows, instead of rising, protest actually

4 Titov did stand for President in 2000 but received only 1.5 percent of the vote.


fell precipitously in the run-up to the elections in December 1999. The num-ber of marches and rallies recorded each month by the MVD fell from a peak of 160 per month in March 1999 to 46 in August, 25 in October, and a mere 20 in December. Hunger strikes followed the same pattern, falling from 39 per month in March to the single digits in September, October, and November.

Strike levels, which had peaked at 196 per month in November 1998, fell rapidly with the onset of summer, as was typical, but failed to rise again in the fall. The month of September 1999 saw only thirty-one strikes in the MVD reports, traditionally troublesome October only thirty-two strikes, and December only forty. This fall in the number of strikes is refl ected in declines in working days lost to strikes, from more than 217,000 working days lost in September 1999 to only 85,000 in December, as shown in Figure 5.2 .

So why did protest decline in Russia in the fall of 1999 and why, in particu-lar, did this decline take place in the context of the bitter political struggle over elections to the Duma in December of that year?

One answer could be the consolidation of power undertaken by Vladimir Putin. After all, as we will see in the next chapter, upon assuming power, Putin quickly undertook measures to curb regional leaders, unions, and others who might challenge his rule. However, although these steps were clearly impor-tant in limiting levels of contention later in the Putin era, in the fall of 1999, they were still in the future. It is clear from Figures 5.1 and 5.2 that the major decline in protest came not after the consolidation of power by the new Putin regime in 2000 and 2001, but rather before, between the summer and fall of 1999, at the apparent height of the succession struggle.

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Figure 5.1. Temporal patterns of protest in the Russian Federation, 1999–2000.


A more plausible set of reasons for protest decline might be that elections provide a forum for participation and so channel energy away from protest events. Perhaps, with the arrival of the elections, protest moved from the streets and into institutions (Hipsher 1996 ). If this is the case, it may be that protest did not decline so much as expressed itself at the ballot box.

However, there does not seem to be much support for the idea that pro-test was transformed into other forms of political participation. Russian elec-tions offer a number of possibilities for protest voting, the most obvious in 1999 being the possibility of voting “against all” (Hutcheson 2004 ). Few took this route. In the party list vote, only 3.3 percent of voters voted “against all,” though the proportion was higher in the single-member district races, at 11.6 percent (Rose and Munro 2002 : 131). 5 There are other ways in which a protest vote can be registered; voting for an antisystem party or possibly even vot-ing for the establishment opposition (in this case OVR ) (Wille 2001 ). Since 35 percent of the votes cast in the PR part of the election were for nationalist or Communist parties, and a further 13 percent of the votes went to OVR, it is clear that voters protesting against the status quo did indeed make up a signifi -cant proportion of the electorate (Parker and Bostian 1999 ). Nevertheless, even if the protest vote could be considered to be high, it is not clear why voting for

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Figure 5.2. Working days lost to strikes in the Russian Federation, 1999–2000.

5 This option was no longer available in national elections after 2004.


the opposition would displace rather than complement other forms of protest. In fact, studies elsewhere have found that protest at the ballot box tends to lead to increases, not declines, in other forms of protest (Wada 2004 ). Another possibility is abstention – perhaps protest was refl ected in unusually high levels of voters staying away from the polls? However, in 1999, no major political force called for a boycott of the elections, and turnout was 61.8 percent, down slightly from 1995 (64.7 percent) but up from 1993 (54.8 percent). 6 Clearly, the paradox of protest decline is not resolved by an appeal to protest in the elec-tions themselves. In the rest of the chapter, I seek to explain what happened.

Theories of Protest Decline

Scholars have focused on three types of explanation for protest decline. First, there are individual level explanations that address the question of how indi-viduals relate to the collective, why they participate, and why they stop par-ticipating (McAdam 1982 ). Often the explanation of individual participation is tied to collective identities or perceptions of legitimacy, and disruptions or changes in these that lead to individuals leaving movements and protest declin-ing (Gamson 1995 , Jessup 1997 ).

Second, there is the issue of organization. Social movement organizations, by defi nition, require dense social networks (Tarrow 1998 : 2), but, as has been long understood (Michels 1911 ), different options for organizing those net-works have different implications for the path of development of the move-ment. Organization can be good at helping movements survive periods in which activity is low due to an unreceptive political climate (Taylor 1989 ). On the other hand, the creation of organizations saps protest strength (Fox Piven and Cloward 1979 ) and may spread resources too thinly (Gamson 1990 ), both of which lead to declines in contentious activity.

A third approach to protest decline focuses interaction of the three so-called master variables of the social movement literature: the interaction between mobilizing structures, strategic frames, and political opportunities. Koopmans ( 1993 ), for example, shows how increasing repression (closing political oppor-tunities), radicalization of a small group (changes in framing), and institution-alization of the majority of protesters (changes in mobilizing structures) can lead to demobilization of protest. Voss ( 1996 ) and Kamenitsa ( 1998 ) make similar arguments, stressing the complexity of decline, with changes in mobi-lizing structures, framing, and political opportunities “each compounding and complicating the others” (Kamenitsa 1998 : 259–60). 7

These ways of looking at decline are certainly useful and help considerably in understanding movement decline in a broad range of cases. However, these approaches developed in the context of long-standing liberal democracies focus attention on the relationship between the individual protester or potential

6 IDEA (2002: 52), Voter Turnout Since 1945: A Global Report . Available at http://www.idea.int/publications/vt/upload/VT_Screenopt_2002.pdf.

7 Oberschall ( 1973 ) also stresses the multivariate and complex nature of movement decline.


protester and the organizations that they form. In this book, I have argued that the relative absence of such bottom-up organizations in Russia, and potentially other hybrids, limits the amount we can understand by looking at individual protesters and autonomous organizations. Instead what we need is an explana-tion of protest decline that draws on existing theories of protest decline but that is different in a number of important respects.

First, I have argued that key elements of protest in hybrids like Russia should be understood as being heavily infl uenced by elite political strategies, rather than being seen as basically autonomous. In such a context, issues of individual moti-vations, collective identities, legitimacy, mobilizing structures, and framing take a back seat, at least in the short run, to the analysis of political opportunities.

Second, given the importance of elite calculations in my story, I emphasize more heavily than existing explanations the role of both formal and informal political institutions in shaping elite incentives and so protest patterns. At least since the emergence of the new institutionalism in the mid 1990s (Hall and Taylor 1996 ), political scientists have understood that the details of how for-mal and informal institutions shape incentives are important for understanding political behavior. However, perhaps because the majority of important work in contentious politics is done by sociologists rather than political scientists, work on social movements and protest, although paying attention to the effect of political institutions on protest in a general sense, has been much less concerned with comparing the effects of particular institutional arrangements.

The general arrangement of political institutions has been a central feature of the so-called political process school of social movement analysis. For example, Tilly ( 1995 ) has shown how the increasing centrality of parliament within the British political system over time led to the “parliamentarization” of contention in Great Britain, meaning that parliament became an object of contention, a source of incitement to claims making, and a tool for people making collective demands. In a somewhat similar vein, Meyer ( 1993 , 2007 ) notes that the “Madisonian design” of U.S. institutions has the effect of moderating protest movements, creating allies for them within mainstream politics and of “institutionalizing” discontent. Fox Piven and Cloward ( 1979 ) note that the overall electoral system is a “structuring institution,” and that “whether action emerges in the factories and streets may depend on the course of the early phase of protest at the polls.”

Beyond these analyses of the general constitutional context, there are a number of studies in which scholars have looked at how particular institutions affect pro-test levels. Powell ( 1981 ) has argued that democracies that feature proportional representation integrate intense preferences better and so feature lower levels of protest. Similarly, in his groundbreaking study of protest in the United States, Eisinger ( 1973 ) showed how both general levels of openness and specifi c institu-tions – such as whether cities were run by elected mayors or appointed manag-ers – had major consequences for cross-sectional variation in protest levels. 8 Most relevant here, Meyer and Minkoff ( 2004 ) propose to understand variation in

8 Eisinger did not use the term “political institutions,” referring instead to “the political environment,” but the substance of his point refers clearly to what scholars would today call institutions.


protest through a combination of a structural model that identifi es the effect of formal rules and the practices they generate and a signaling model that identi-fi es signs that activists look for as an encouragement for mobilization. Clearly, the operationalization of these variables is context-specifi c, but the general idea of looking at the effect of formal rules on the one hand and of political signals that players receive on the other is extremely useful. In this chapter, I dem-onstrate the utility of the Meyer and Minkoff approach in understanding the decline in protest in fall of 1999.

On the signaling side, Vladimir Putin very quickly and very effectively sig-naled his ability to cajole or coerce governors into supporting him, and dem-onstrated his strength with the public as a political candidate. As we will see, Putin’s entry into the fray, if not technically the Duma contest itself, led key political actors in general, and regional governors in particular, to quickly revise their views on the succession. The role of the Duma election as an informal primary, and Putin’s success in that campaign, meant that the great uncertainty of August was almost completely dispelled by the time December arrived.

On the structural side, the formal electoral rules under which the Duma elections were conducted effectively allowed most regional governors to sit out the struggle for power at the top and wait until a winner emerged. The mixed electoral system used in 1999, in which a national list proportional representa-tion (PR) election took place alongside 224 single-member district (SMD) elec-tions, I argue, played a key role in allowing subnational elites to protect their most important interests while largely sitting out a national struggle for power among Moscow-based political clans. This meant that the regional political machines that play a key role in protest dynamics did not become embroiled in the presidential succession campaign. This ended the politically structured protest waves analyzed in Chapter 4 and led to a succession that was decided mostly behind closed doors and partly at the ballot box, but certainly not in the streets and factories of Russia.

In the rest of this chapter, I derive a direct test of the effects of the signaling explanation relative to the most plausible alternative explanations. Since there is no variation in the rules governing the Duma election, it is hard to provide a direct test of the structural argument, but I am able to present both qualitative and quantitive evidence of the effect of these rules and compare this evidence with the evidence for alternative explanations.

Putin’s Political Strategy and Protest Decline

Perhaps the most important element in the decline in protest in fall of 1999 was the effect on elite expectations of the signal sent by Putin’s meteoric rise from obscurity to heir apparent between August and October 1999. In this section, I demonstrate empirically that Putin’s success, and the consequent reduction in the degree of uncertainty over the succession, had a major impact on reducing protest levels in the run-up to the elections.


The outlines of the story of Putin’s rise in the late summer and fall of 1999 are well known. 9 Following the fi ring of Prime Minister Stepashin on August 9, Yeltsin nominated the relatively unknown career KGB offi cer and sitting head of the KGB successor organization, the FSB, Vladimir Putin, to be his prime minister. Putin was hardly a political heavyweight and was confi rmed in the post by the Duma with only seven votes to spare (Colton 2008 : 432). After the confi rmation, he went rapidly to work on two related tasks. The fi rst was to create a politi-cal party that could put up a credible challenge to Primakov and his alliance of regional governors. Second, having established a party, the next task was to fi nd a way to win the elections. In each task, the Kremlin drew on both the techniques of backroom politics and the skills it had acquired in the presidential race of 1996 in creating a successful broadcast media campaign.

Putin also made the most of the assets he brought with him to the posi-tion of prime minister. These were his previous service as head of the auditing agency in the Kremlin administration, as a deputy chief of staff responsible for relations with the regions, and his then-job as head of the FSB. In each of these sensitive positions, Putin had acted as an enforcer for ‘the Family’ and he was reputed to have acquired a considerable collection of compromising materials ( kompromat ) that had been gathered in the course of so-called anti-corruption campaigns in the regions. Putin used these materials and “the active cooperation of the Federal Security Service” to bring Federal offi cials in the regions back under Moscow’s control and, in particular, “to force governors to leave such opposition blocs as Fatherland–All Russia” (Petrov 2004 : 228). 10 The effect was dramatic. As Primakov himself put it, previously supportive governors now “averted their eyes … ‘You see,’ they said, ‘we are dependent on fi nancial transfers from the center.’ Others said nothing, but we understood very well that they did not want to fall out with law-enforcement agencies” (as cited by Colton and McFaul 2003 : 93).

With this kind of support behind Putin, most governors understood that band-wagoning with him was a much more prudent strategy than organizing against him. Consequently, on September 21, the Kremlin was able to announce the cre-ation of its own interregional group, Unity (Edinstvo), which brought together some thirty-one governors, including several already signed up for OVR , under the leadership of Sergei Shoigu , the Minister for Emergency Situations. 11

Having put together a powerful electoral bloc in a matter of a few short days, the next task for the Kremlin was to ensure that Unity would perform well in the elections. Part of the strategy was dictated by events. On August 7, 1999, Shamil Basaev led around 2,000 Chechen fi ghters into the neighboring republic of Dagestan . Soon after, three mysterious and murderous apartment bombings

9 The politics of Putin’s rise are well covered in many accounts and are treated only briefl y here. See, for example, Shevtsova (2003).

10 Petrov ( 2004 ) also suggests the later dissolution of OVR and merger with Unity was proposed by governors from some of the most scandal-prone regions (229, fn 27).

11 Shoigu was a popular, telegenic fi gure, frequently appearing on television in dramatic situations bringing help to victims of Russia’s many natural and man-made disasters.


in the cities of Buynaksk, Moscow , and Volgodonsk took place, in which some 300 civilians were killed. Putin responded with an aggressive and, initially at least, successful military assault on Chechnya itself and famously gritty prom-ises to destroy the militants. This tough tone was to prove enormously popular, and the voters were soon rallying around the new prime minister.

The new securitization of politics was not simply a matter of tone. Military units were put on special alert, as were local departments of the MVD , FSB, the Emergencies Ministry, and the Ministry of Justice. This meant additional security checks on roads and enterprises, even in regions far from the Caucasus itself. These measures greatly reduced regional governors’ political margin for maneuver, placing them under close scrutiny from Federal authorities. In fact, in the view of some commentators, Putin’s arrival entirely changed the nature of the bargaining between the center and the regions. Whereas Stepashin had, upon taking up the job of prime minister, immediately asked the governors to prepare a list of all their complaints and requests so the government could address them, Putin’s arrival had moved all these issues to the backburner and placed security questions front and center (Avdonin 2004 : 43–4).

The campaign strategy that accompanied the policies also built on Putin’s tough new image and was based on an intense and highly personalized media blitz. Sarah Oates ( 2003 ) describes the Duma election as witnessing the “culmi-nation of all the lessons learned in creating a successful broadcast party” (43). The campaign focused heavily on personalities. For Unity, the stars were Putin (although he was not even a party member, never mind a candidate), party leader Sergei Shoigu , three-time Olympic Greco-Roman wrestling champion Aleksandr Karelin , and former organized crime policeman Aleksandr Gurov . Television spots avoided words as much as possible, instead focusing on images of “Shoigu among the troops in Chechnya, Karelin throwing wrestling oppo-nents to the ground, and Gurov chasing down criminals” (Oates 2003 : 43).

The success of the campaign was dramatic. In August 1999, Putin enjoyed the support of only 2 percent of Russian voters. In September, the polls gave him 4 percent, but by October, 21 percent of voters said they supported him for presidency, ahead of Primakov . By November, 45 percent of voters were tell-ing pollsters they intended to support Putin to succeed Yeltsin. The succession crisis was practically over (Colton and McFaul 2003 : 173).

In Table 5.1 , I use regression analysis to demonstrate the importance of the reduction in uncertainty over the succession for reducing protest levels in the regions. As in the preceding chapters, I model the effect of a range of factors on different kinds of protest. Although I expect all protest to be infl uenced by elite politics, following my arguments about the importance of organizational ecology, I distinguish between labor protest and other forms of protest. 12

I proxy the degree of uncertainty over the succession by the percentage of voters who told opinion pollsters that they were likely to vote for Putin for

12 Due to the relatively small number of other events, I do not distinguish between hunger strikes and other events here, because the relative rarity means we lose many observations.


President in 2000. As noted earlier, these numbers changed dramatically, from only 2 percent in August to more than 50 percent in December. In Model 1, I use working days lost to strikes in all sectors of the economy as the dependent variable. 13 Model 2 shows the effects on the number of protest events, not including strikes, recorded in each region in the fall of 1999.

I compare the effect of Putin’s poll numbers with the main alternatives. The strongest alternative explanation relates to arrears in the payment of wages that, as noted in Chapter 3 , had become the dominant economic problem in Russia in the second half of the 1990s. Beginning with the Primakov adminis-tration, signifi cant efforts had been made to pay back wages owed to workers, and this process continued under Putin. To test the effect of the turnaround in the payment of wages, I look at both the outstanding level of arrears per cap-ita in each region and the effect of the change in arrears over the most recent

Table 5.1. Effect of Putin’s Popularity on Protest Events (Conditional Negative Binomial Regression with Fixed Effects)

(1) Working Days Lost to Strikes

Non-Strike Protest Events

Putin’s Popularity −.016** (.007)

−.015*** (.006)

Wage Arrears .526** (.243)

.147 (.499)

Change in Wage Arrears .358 (1.317)

−1.997 (1.667)

Change in Industrial Output .074** (.035)

−.001 (.026)

Change in Unemployment .159 (.187)

.243 (.158)


.004 (.034)


−.313** (.158)

−.111 (.210)

Lagged Event .024 (.008)***

.044 (.030)

Constant −4.741*** (1.329)

.649 (2.234)

Observations 153 238Number of groups 31 50Log-likelihood −613.863*** −211.140*

Standard errors in parentheses. * Indicates signifi cant at p=.1, ** Indicates signifi cant at p=.05, *** Indicates signifi cant at p=.01.

13 This approach differs from Chapter 3 where we used non-miners’ strikes only. Here we are interested not in the regional distribution but in patterns over time, so including miners is appropriate. The results are, however, identical if we use only non-miners’ strikes, as we did in Chapter 3 .


month. Levels are intended to capture the degree of hardship being experi-enced, whereas the changes in arrears are likely to have a signifi cant effect on workers’ expectations about future dynamics. We might expect, for example, workers with high levels of outstanding arrears to be less likely to protest if the arrears are beginning to be paid back even if the outstanding obligations remain signifi cant.

I also look at changes in economic activity as captured by changes in regional industrial output and by changes in unemployment. The output data are intended to capture the general trends in the economy, whereas changes in unemployment refl ect the relative scarcity of labor and so the bargaining position of workers. Both of these measures pick up different aspects of the economic recovery that was underway in the fall of 1999 and that should be expected to have an impact on strike activity. I also control for the effect of strikes the previous month, the population of the region and for the level of urbanization. As before, the impact of the various factors on protest is mod-elled using a time-series cross-section negative binomial count model. 14

The fi ndings are clear: The effects of the economic recovery on strikes are weak whereas the effects of resolving uncertainty over the succession are strong. As Model 1 shows, changes in support for Putin have a statistically signifi cant and substantively large effect on the number of working days lost. According to the model, for every 10 percent increase in Putin’s approval rating, working days lost to strikes in the regions declined on average by 15 percent. This fi g-ure, of course, is illustrative. For one thing, it is unlikely that the effect of falling uncertainty is uniform. Initial small improvements in Putin’s ratings probably did little to reduce uncertainty. At the other end of the process, by the time December came around, the likelihood of a Putin succession would already have been largely incorporated into elite thinking and so further changes in his poll numbers are likely to have less of an effect on uncertainty and thus on strike rates. Nevertheless, given the fi fty percentage points Putin gained in the polls between August and December, the effect of reduced uncertainty on strikes is clearly very important.

The effect on non-strike protest levels is also clearly negative and substan-tively important. Consequently, taken together, these models provide further evidence both of the importance of organizational ecology in trying to under-stand protest patterns in non-democratic regimes, and of the effect of elite competition and mobilization strategies.

By contrast, the performance of the economic variables is remarkably weak. Wage arrears do matter for strikes, as they did in Chapter 3 , and again are less related to the economic recovery than to the depth of the crisis that pre-ceded the recovery. Outstanding stocks of wage arrears are a major contributor to working days lost to strikes, but month-on-month changes in the level of arrears do not appear to have mattered much in the fall of 1999, and neither

14 See Chapter 3 for an explanation of this model and why it is the appropriate econometric tech-nique to use in this case.


measure seems to have any effect on non-strike protest. Changes in industrial output, if anything, have a positive effect on strikes (consistent with the bar-gaining power theories outlined in Chapter 3 ), but changes in unemployment have no effect over this period.

These results are further evidence of the impact of elite politics on protest and show the overwhelming importance of elite political signals in understand-ing protest decline in the fall of 1999. In the next section, I present evidence for the importance of the other part of the argument: the effect of the electoral rules.

Parallel Elections and the Separation of the National and the Local

In this section, I make the case that the formal electoral rules for the Duma elections in 1999 also, unintentionally, contributed to protest decline in the fall of 1999. Elections for the State Duma in December 1999 were carried out according to what is usually termed a “mixed” electoral system. 15 That is, half the seats in the Duma (225) were allocated according to a national list proportional representation (PR) ballot with a 5 percent threshold, whereas the other half of the seats were allocated on the basis of fi rst-past-the-post competitions in 224 single-member districts (SMDs). 16 In the absence of well-institutionalized national political parties, however, the elections were not so much “mixed” as “parallel.” With the exception of a few nationally important fi gures, such as Moscow Mayor Iuri Luzhkov, regional governors had little power to infl uence either the selection of candidates or the cam-paign in the proportional representation seats. By contrast, they enjoyed enor-mous infl uence in the SMD seats. Consequently, governors focused heavily on these local battles and had few incentives to use their political machines as part of the broader national competition. Since, as I have shown, governors enjoyed enormous infl uence over protest actions, the denationalization of pol-itics helped insulate the elections from the possibility of major mobilizations in the regions.

Testing this argument directly is diffi cult for the simple reason that the electoral rules do not vary over the period for which we have data on protest. However,

15 Mixed systems are used in about twenty countries. In some cases, the PR list is used to offset the disproportionalities that emerge in the SMD elections, but in Russia it is not. Like Russia, Cameroon, Croatia, Guatemala, Guinea, Japan, South Korea, Niger, the Seychelles, and Somalia use First Past the Post (FPTP) single-member districts alongside a List PR component, whereas Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Lithuania use the Two-Round System for the SMD component of their system. Andorra uses the Block Vote to elect half its MPs, whereas Tunisia and Senegal use the Party Block to elect a number of their deputies. Taiwan is unusual in using SNTV, a Semi-PR system, alongside a PR system component. See www.aceproject.org (accessed June 19, 2006).

16 There was no election in Chechnya, district number 31. In the December elections, only 216 deputies were actually elected because the election failed in eight districts as the leading vote getter won fewer votes than votes “against all.” These were districts numbers 50, 87, 99, 108, 110, 162, 165, and 210 (Gelman et al. 2005 : 192).


in this section, I offer both qualitative and quantitative evidence in support of the claim that the electoral rules played a signifi cant role in reducing protest, and that different rules might have had a very different effect. The qualitative evi-dence is intended to demonstrate the extent to which the rules created not mixed but parallel elections driven by very different logics and involving different sets of actors. The quantitative evidence shows that the nationally structured protest patterns I demonstrated in Chapter 4 disappeared under these conditions. In the absence of protest data under a different set of electoral rules, neither of these arguments is defi nitive proof that the electoral rules mattered for protest in the way I claim, but together they provide a strong circumstantial case.

The party list proportional representation (PR) election, though in part a battle between political parties for representation in the Duma, also, as I have noted, effectively served as a primary in which competing Moscow-based politicians, notably then-Prime Minister Putin and former Prime Minister Primakov , fought a television-centered presidential primary. In this race, it was widely understood, a vote for Unity meant a vote for Putin (even though he was not a party member), and a vote for OVR was a vote for Primakov. The single-member district elections, on the other hand, were largely local competi-tions, fought by local candidates with little regard for party labels (and very often without party labels at all). The separation of the political contests can be seen in the nomination of candidates, the conduct of the campaigns, and in the behavior of voters themselves.

The ways in which candidates were nominated to be on the ballot for the two elections exhibited two very separate logics. The PR lists were constructed on the basis of national strategy and were extremely Moscow-centric in their selection of candidates. For a start, the number of lists presented to voters refl ected learning on the part of the national parties from the 1995 Duma elec-tions. In 1995, thirteen parties had attained more than 1 percent of the vote but less than the 5 percent necessary for representation in the Duma. Consequently, in 1999, pre-election coalition building among parties was a major feature of the national list elections (Shcherbak 2005 ). As a result, only four parties gained more than 1 percent but less than 5 percent this time around. 17 Hence, contrary to most international experience, in Russia, the PR list part of the election actually reduced the number of parties competing in 1999, whereas, as we will see, nominations in the SMD part of the ballot did the opposite. The infl uence of Moscow-based national elites is also evident not just in the number of lists but in the identity of the candidates who actually appeared on the PR lists; these were more Moscow lists than national lists. Even the list of OVR , the party of Russia’s regional bosses, was heavily Moscow-based. OVR’s 240-candidate list had 110 names from Moscow, and twelve of the top eigh-teen candidates were from Moscow (Sakwa 2003 : 134).

17 Our Home is Russia (NDR) (1.19 percent), the Party of Pensioners (1.95 percent), Women of Russia (2.04 percent) and Communists, Workers of Russia for the Soviet Union (KTRSS) (2.22 percent) (Yargomskaya 2005 : 79).


By contrast, the SMD elections were very local in terms of the nomina-tion of candidates. In all, 1,134 independents ran in the 224 districts, mak-ing up 52 percent of all candidates and taking 49 percent of seats. Only the KPRF, Yabloko , and the leftist Spiritual Heritage movement fi elded candidates in as many as 100 SMD districts (Colton and McFaul 2003 : 28–9). Unity , the runner-up in the PR election, won only nine seats from thirty candidates in the SMD election (Gelman et al. 2005 : 192). OVR had only 91 candidates out of the 224 districts, mostly locally chosen. Thirty-four of these candidates were in regions where the governor was on the OVR national list or was one of the three founders of the party. In quite a few regions, there were no OVR nominees in some or all of the region’s districts, even though the governor was publicly associated with the bloc (Colton and McFaul 2003 : 95).

Political campaigns also were very different between the PR and SMD bal-lots. The PR campaign was largely national and was decided by what one of the participants termed the “air war” – nationally broadcast television appeals. 18 This was out of necessity, because both Unity and OVR were new parties and neither had any major organization in place on the ground. The focus here, as we have seen, was on images of Putin and the leaders of Unity. Similarly on the other side, the OVR campaign focused heavily on the personalities of the popular former Prime Minister Evgenii Primakov and Moscow Mayor Iuri Lushkov.

This contrasts greatly with the elections to the SMD seats, where the major-ity of candidates were independent and there were virtually no mechanisms to coordinate their campaigns. The SMD elections were decided mainly on the basis of local- and regional-level political calculations, and there was little underlying shape to cleavages among the regions themselves. According to Sakwa ( 2003 ), “there is little coherent organization of a single regional lobby; neither is there evidence of stable regional cleavages giving rise to specifi c political representa-tion … even the obvious line between the twenty-one ethno-federal republics and the ordinary oblasts has not provoked a stable pattern of electoral or party affi liation” (129). Consequently, the elections in each region turned on local issues. As Turovsky ( 2005 ) puts it, “these elections are not in a proper sense national but are rather the sum of local election campaigns” (147).

In these local elections, governors and local state offi cials played an over-whelming role. Colton and McFaul ( 2003 ) fi nd them to be “the most powerful actors on the scene” (36, italics in original). Myagkov ( 2003 ) found that in general, the partisanship of the governor is the only signifi cant predictor of the vote for Unity or OVR (traditional socioeconomic models perform well for the other parties), whereas in the two cases he examines in particular, Kalmykia and Tuva , the statistical evidence “is consistent with a conjecture that local election offi cials simply added extra ballots to the ballot boxes” (156). 19

18 Sergei Popov, Unity’s Deputy Campaign Manager, cited by Colton and McFaul 2003 : 56. 19 Even in the party list vote, the infl uence of governors was considerable, particularly in regions

supporting OVR, where parties with gubernatorial endorsement polled about 17.9 points better than parties without such endorsement (Rose and Munro 2002 : 136).


Whatever the truth, governors focused hard on getting their candidates elected with or without party labels, and the national parties depended heavily on local support. Due to the exceptionally short period between its formation and the elections, Unity remained basically a Moscow-based operation, relying on local infl uence in the cases where it ran SMD candidates. One-third of Unity candidates were in places where they thought they had the reliable support of the governor, and the places in which they were successful were the home regions of Shoigu and Karelin (Tuva and Novosibirsk , respectively), or where signifi cant support was provided by local elites. 20

OVR’s support was similarly concentrated in those regions where the governors were particularly committed to OVR ; twenty-two of thirty-one winners were from six leading OVR regions (nine from Moscow , four from Moscow region, three each from Bashkortostan and Tatarstan , two from St. Petersburg , and one from Mordovia). Four were incumbents and all oth-ers had ‘high elite positions” (Colton and McFaul 2003 : 104). Outside of the few strongly committed regions, national party affi liations meant little, and governors were more than willing to cross party lines to try to ensure good working relations with whoever won. Aman Tuleev , the Governor of Kemerovo, and fourth on the list of the KPRF in the PR ballot, became a major cheerleader for Unity in the SMD ballot (electing two candidates in his home region), whereas the Kremlin reached out to help non-Unity SMD candidates who they felt would be friendly after the elections. This support included everything from providing money to not nominating a competing Unity candidate (Colton and McFaul 2003 : 77). In some places, governors who supported OVR in the national list election supported independents over OVR candidates in the SMD ballot, hoping that independents would be more loyal to the regional patron rather than to their national party afterward (Colton and McFaul 2003 : 95–6).

Further evidence of governors’ priorities in the elections lies in the fact that the leaders of Fatherland (Primakov , Luzhkov , and St. Petersburg gover-nor Vladimir Yakovlev ) all said they would not serve in the Duma if elected. Primakov relented (not having a region to govern), but the others did not. In fact, Luzhkov deliberately scheduled elections and ran for reelection as Mayor of Moscow simultaneously with the Duma elections. The leaders of the All-Russia faction of OVR, Mintimir Shaimiiev (Tatarstan), Murtaza Rakhimov (Bashkortostan), and Ruslan Aushev (Ingushetia), all declined to have their names on their party list (Colton and McFaul 2003 : 86).

If local issues trumped national loyalties for governors, the same was true of organized interests at the regional level. Although the largest national level labor confederation, the FNPR , backed OVR , this had little effect on unions in the regions where local affi liations mattered much more (Ashwin and Clark 2003 : 57). Only three branch unions – the Agro-Industrial Workers (with the

20 Kemerovo, Kalmykiia, and Primorskii Krai (Colton and McFaul 2003 : 74).


KPRF), the metallurgists, and the miners – actively participated in the 1999 elections, supporting candidates in the single-member constituencies. Other unions preferred to follow local strongmen or wait until the winner became more apparent. This suggests that for workers and other organized interests, what matters most is the ability to cooperate with those in power, whoever they may be, and uncertainty over outcomes might actually discourage active polit-ical engagement. As a result, the elections tended to cause the interest groups in the regions to turn away from national politics and focus on getting their favored candidates elected in local SMD districts.

Clearly, given the evidence presented so far, the reason for the effective sepa-ration of the two parts of the ballot lies not just in the electoral rules but in the lack of effective national parties. As Yargomskaya ( 2005 ) notes in analyzing both the 1995 and the 1999 Duma elections, “each part [of the voting] has its own arena of electoral competition. Political parties mediate competition in one part and the electorate does in the other. Presumably the two ballots could be linked by electoral strategies undertaken by either” (7). Yargomskaya’s laconic “presumably” refl ects the reality that it was not institutions alone but rather the relative absence of parties with strong infl uence over both parts of the bal-lot that meant that few of the possible strategic linkages in terms of candidate selection and campaigns were made.

The weakness of parties in the regions is well documented (Golosov 2004 , Hale 2006b , Stoner-Weiss 2001 ). Golosov ( 2004 ) notes that even to the extent that there is party representation in regional legislatures, these parties are largely autonomous from the national system of party competition (255). The weakness of the parties also shows up in voter surveys. VTsIOM polls in September 1999 showed half of the electorate to be unsure who the “party of power” was; 17 percent and 11 percent cited the national opposition OVR and Communist parties, respectively. Given that these parties controlled sev-eral regions, making them the “party of power” locally, and that Unity held its fi rst party conference only on October 3, a mere ten weeks before the election (Rose and Munro 2002 : 114), this is perhaps not surprising.

The mixed ballot plus the lack of strong national parties meant that the Duma elections in 1999 produced two quite separate contests, one that was driven by politics in Moscow and another that was largely a local affair. In this context, most regional governors had every incentive to focus their efforts on local issues and very little to become involved in the national campaign. As I show now, the lack of effective political parties to coordinate campaigns meant that pro-test politics, which had previously been strongly infl uenced by national political cleavages, became quite divorced from national politics precisely during national elections when one might expect the national infl uence to be greatest.

Denationalizing Protest In Chapter 4 , I demonstrated that protest under Yeltsin was structured by the national political allegiances of different governors. In the context of a national


election, one might expect to see increasingly strong signs of these “political similarity” effects. However, if the effect of the structure of the Duma elections was indeed, as I have argued, to denationalize politics and to separate politics in the regions from an essentially Moscow- and television-based party list elec-tion, then we would expect the political similarity effect in the regions to dimin-ish. This is indeed what the data show. Rather than coalescing around national political cleavages in the run-up to the elections, protest actually became more localized and lost its national coherence.

To show this, I look at protest diffusion patterns in Russia both before and during the Duma elections. There is a growing theoretical literature on the diffusion of political phenomena from one place to another, and lively debates on the mechanisms by which ideas and actions might travel from one place to another (Meseguer 2005 ). In the context of social movements and protest, diffusion is thought to occur through such varied mechanisms as social infl u-ence, normative pressure, signaling the effi cacity of potential tactics, or simply the creation of an “occasion” for considering whether to act (Collins 1981 ; Oliver 1989 ; Oliver and Myers 2003 ). In the former Soviet space in particular, Beissinger ( 2002 , 2007 ) demonstrates the extraordinary infl uence protest in one place can have on protest elsewhere. In this section, I analyze protest dif-fusion specifi cally. I show that the protest waves of 1997 and 1998–9 exhibit a marked effect of protest diffusion across regions, but that the diffusion effect disappears during the Duma campaign in 1999. The end of diffusion of protest from region to region suggests a decoupling of protest in individual regions from national politics.

Table 5.2 analyzes weekly protest patterns between 1997 and June 1999. Three dependent variables are considered, each giving a different view of the level of protest: the number of working days lost to strikes, the total number of days lost to hunger strikes, and the total number of other events. Events are recorded weekly, summed by region, and regressed on events in the preceding weeks both in the region itself (lagged event) and against the totals for all other regions.

The results are consistent across all three dependent variables. Most impor-tantly for current purposes, there is strong evidence of diffusion across dif-ferent regions. Events in one place have an effect on events in other places. There are strong effects of events at t-1 in other regions on events at time t in a given region across all three dependent variables. Not surprisingly, there is also strong evidence in all cases of continuity from week to week in protest levels within a given region. Events in a region the previous week (lagged event) are consistently strong predictors of events that week. 21

As before, I also fi nd that protest (in this case, of all kinds) is related to wage arrears, both in terms of the depth of the problem (as measured by

21 Events at t-2 bear no systematic relationship, and longer lags are inconsistent in their effects across dependent variables.


the total accumulated arrears) and in terms of the changing levels of arrears. Increases in arrears lead to increases in protest. Increases in unemployment give rise to more strikes but do not affect other forms of protest, and changes in industrial output have no discernible impact. The control variables perform as expected. 22

In Table 5.3 , I rerun the analysis, this time looking at the period covering the run-up to the Duma elections, July to December 1999. Once more, I look at the number of working days lost to strikes, the number of days of hunger strikes, and the number of other events. The results provide strong evidence for the “parallel elections” hypothesis. Even though events in a given region in a given week are still strongly affected by events the previous week, this is

Table 5.2. Weekly Event Diffusion, January 1997–June 1999 (Conditional Negative Binomial Regression with Fixed Effects)



(3) Other Protest Events

Other Regions t-1 .003*** (.0002)

.189*** (.049)

.010*** (.002)

Wage Arrears .611*** (.027)

.585*** (.041)

.208*** (.027)

Change in Wage Arrears 2.450*** (.925)

7.976*** (1.448)

3.351** (1.365)

Change in Industrial Output

.013 (.027)

−.035 (.045)

−.033 (.029)

Change in Unemployment

.369*** (.079)

.083 (.115)

−.012 (.075)

Urbanization .026*** (.003)

.017*** (.004)

.011*** (.003)


−.216*** (.022)

−.239*** (.041)

.122*** (.019)

Lagged Event .0000638*** (.000001)

.002*** (.0001)

.0004*** (.00001)

Constant −5.609*** (.180)

−4.995*** (.313)

−5.529*** (.186)

Observations 7265 6081 9026Number of groups 62 52 77Log-likelihood −21940*** −7547*** −15879


22 More urbanized areas have more protest – a reliable pattern found in all the analyses in this book. Strikes in Russia, in this period at least, happen in the less populated regions. This is consistent with the bargaining theory in which strikes are a weapon of weakness, not strength. But other kinds of protest tend to take place in more populous places, refl ecting a regular fi nding in the literature that, all else being equal, protests are more likely to take place in the capital and other major cities.


only true for events in the region itself. Diffusion effects from other regions no longer have any impact at all.

The economic variables also perform a little differently. Accumulated wage arrears and changes in unemployment still affect the intensity of strikes but not of hunger strikes and other protests. In addition, rises in industrial output seem to increase strikes and other protests, a relationship that has been found in the advanced industrial economies, but which I did not fi nd in Russia looking at the 1997–2000 period as a whole. The populations and urbanization control variables behave as before.

Given that July to December 1999 is precisely the period of the run-up to national elections, when we would most expect protests to take on a national coherence, these fi ndings are striking. Moreover, when combined with the qual-itative evidence on the separation of the two elections, the quantitative fi ndings provide quite strong support for the idea that the elections themselves had denationalizing effects on politics. If the decline in protest had simply been due to voting replacing other kinds of protest action, there is no reason to expect that this would be accompanied by an end to interregional contagion effects.

Table 5.3. Weekly Event Diffusion in July-December 1999: Geography and Politics (Conditional Negative Binomial Regression with Fixed Effects)



(3) Other Protest Events

Other Regions t-1 −.003 (.005)

.507 (.6859)

.000001 (.00003)

Wage Arrears .347*** (.121)

.399 (.314)

−.096 (.212)

Change in Wage Arrears −3.054 (2.922)

−17.328 (11.709)

10.829 (15.457)

Change in Industrial Output

.118** (.060)

−.270 (.181)

.220** (.097)

Change in Unemployment −.743** (.296)

.469 (.647)

.757** (.382)

Urbanization .033*** (.011)

−.007 (.021)

−.020*** (.010)


−.336*** (.078)

.074 (.184)

.352*** (.067)

Lagged Event .0002*** (.00001)

.005*** (.001)

.0004*** (.00005)

Constant −5.285*** (.807)

−4.187 (1.477)

−3.133*** (.631)

Observations 781 413 1064Number of groups 32 17 44Log-likelihood −2464*** −313*** −1226



Instead what we see is clear evidence of politics and protest in the regions becoming decoupled from national politics, even in the middle of a critically important national election.

Conclusion: Bandwagons, Protest, and Regime

In this chapter, I have shown that while we should have expected the succes-sion crisis in the fall of 1999 to lead to high levels of contention and mobiliza-tion on the streets, protest declined rather than increased. A potential Russian version of the so-called colored revolutions never took place. I have argued that a key reason for this was the success of Vladimir Putin in resolving uncer-tainty over the succession. As it became increasingly clear that Putin would win the contest, the Russian elite opted to bandwagon rather than challenge. This meant a rapid drop-off in protest and a period of quiet as elites strug-gled to demonstrate loyalty to the new leader. The mixed electoral system used in 1999, in which a national list PR election took place alongside 224 single-member district elections, also, I argue, played a key role in allowing subnational elites to protect their primary interests while largely sitting out a national struggle for power among Moscow-based political clans. The result was a dramatic reduction in contention just at a time when, with a different organizational ecology, the opportunities for protest would have been increas-ing, not decreasing.

The fi ndings on the decline of protest in Russia in 1999 fi t well with the broader argument of this book; that in hybrid regimes, patterns of protest are closely infl uenced by elites and by the incentives elites face in terms of whether to use their political machines to mobilize or demobilize protesters. This approach underlines the importance of recognizing “the regime” as a con-tingent set of relationships rather than as something monolithic against which “the opposition” struggles. There are moments when facilitating protest is in the interest of elements of the elite, and other moments when bandwagoning is the (almost) universally preferred strategy. Thus the “opposition strength” and “regime strength” that feature so prominently in many studies of regime change (Levitsky and Way 2010 ) are better thought of as being to a signifi cant extent codetermined rather than independent from one another.

I have also shown in this chapter that we should expect the institutions that shape elite competition to have an important effect on when one strategy is preferred over another. In doing so, I am echoing Henry Hale’s ( 2005 ) call for more attention to “institutions and the patterns of elite interaction they induce” (134). Hale argues that institutions are likely to be critical to patterns of regime durability and change, but the call should be extended not just to students of regime change, but also to students of protest and of contentious politics. Different institutional confi gurations, both at the broad regime level and at the rather detailed level of specifi c electoral rules, are likely to have seri-ous implications for patterns of protest.


Such institutional effects, however, are likely to be important only in the short to medium term. Over a longer time span, the institutional structure in most hybrid regimes is largely endogenous, and politicians actively manipu-late it to shape elite incentives. In the next two chapters, I show this process in action, looking at how the Putin administration developed a new set of strate-gies that radically changed the incentive structure, providing strong incentives for elites to bandwagon with the center even outside of elections. Moreover, as I will demonstrate, institutional changes were just one element in a broader strategy to shape elite incentives and to insulate as far as possible elite politics from destabilizing pressure from below.

147

6

Vladimir Putin and Defeat-Proofi ng the System

“It should be remembered that the word ‘democracy’ which is used so frequently in the modern mass media, is by no means the same word ‘democ-racy’ as was so widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The two words are merely homonyms. The old word democracy was derived from the Greek ‘demos’, while the new word is derived from the expression ‘demo-version’ .”

Viktor Pelevin, Generation P.

If few people outside of the Kremlin had heard of Vladimir Putin in August 1999, by the time he stood down as President in May 2008, the former KGB colonel was a household name. Moreover, in stepping down and transferring power to an elected successor, Putin was taking a historic step: Executive power in Russia had changed hands through the ballot box for only the second time in history.

Well, yes and no. The ballot box had played a role in that the new president, Dmitri Medvedev , had won the elections with 70 percent of the fi rst-round votes. However, the elections hardly represented much of a choice, pitting Putin’s chosen successor and the enormous resources of the Russian state against two veteran politicians with four presidential election defeats between them and a little-known liberal allegedly with close ties to the Kremlin. 1 Furthermore, not only was the manner of the transfer of power controversial, it was unclear whether power had really changed hands. Medvedev had moved into the presi-dent’s offi ce, but Putin became prime minister and continued to be the focus of much of politics and policy in Russia.

1 The veterans were KPRF leader Gennady Zyuganov and LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky. The liberal was Andrei Bogdanov, leader of the Democratic Party of Russia. Since Bogdanov quali-fi ed as a candidate by amassing 2 million signatures, and his Democratic Party had managed only 90,000 votes in the Duma elections, it was widely thought that Bogdanov was a Kremlin-supported candidate running to ensure that there would be at least two names on the ballot. See, for example, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article3460483.ece (accessed June 2009).


There was also debate over what Vladimir Putin had actually achieved while in the president’s chair. Opinion was bitterly divided on whether Putin had in fact fulfi lled his stated goal of strengthening the Russian state. 2 There was much agreement, however, that Putin was stepping down in a political context that was radically different from the one in which he had assumed power. In this chapter and the next, I examine a series of institutional and political inno-vations made by the Putin administration that helped transform politics, and in particular the politics of protest, in ways both intended and unintended.

One of the things that certainly was different between the Putin and Yeltsin eras was the nature of protest. In the previous chapter, we saw how protest levels fell as the succession to Yeltsin was resolved. Though we lack the kind of detailed data that was available for 1997–2000, it is clear that protest remained low for the rest of Putin’s fi rst term as president. If we can take the offi cial strike data as an indicator of patterns over time (as our analysis in Chapter 2 suggested we can), we see the number of reported strikes falling to 291 in 2001 from 817 in 2000. Only 80 strikes were recorded by Goskomstat in 2002, 67 in 2003, before a big rise to 5,933 in 2004. 3 A similar pattern is evident in the data on working days lost to strikes. In 2000, 236,400 working days were recorded lost, 47,100 in 2001, 29,100 in 2002, and 29,453 in 2003. In 2004, the number of working days reported lost rose somewhat to 210,852, back up at the level for 2000, but still well below that of 1997–9. 4 In this chapter, I look at some of the measures the Putin administration took that led to these sustained low protest levels.

The argument principally concerns intraelite politics and patterns of elite competition. Given the preceding analysis of organizational ecology, elites have organizational assets at their disposal that can be used to mobilize or demo-bilize larger publics. Consequently, a key to ensuring social peace is to pro-vide elites with incentives to bandwagon with the incumbent leadership in the Kremlin rather than to compete with them. This is particularly important in a hybrid regime like Russia that holds at least partly competitive elections.

Maintaining elite unity depends in part on perceptions of the adminstra-tion’s likely political longevity (Hale 2005 , 2006a ), and these perceptions in Russia were in turn related to the economic resurgence of the early Putin years and to Putin’s own high personal approval ratings. 5 The goal of this chapter, however, is to look at another crucial element: specifi c institutional changes

2 For a range of views, see, among others, Appel ( 2008 ), Blank ( 2008 ), Easter ( 2008 ), McFaul and Stoner-Weiss ( 2008 ).

3 Although 5,933 strikes may appear to be more than recorded for the whole 1997–9 strike wave, the numbers are misleading. Goskomstat appears to count a stoppage at one institution as a strike. Hence, a strike involving sixty schools, for example, is counted as sixty strikes. In the MVD data, this would be identifi ed as one strike, unless the MVD offi cials expressly separated them. The MVD approach to counting events is the same as that of Ekiert and Kubik ( 1998 ).

4 Data as reported to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), www.ilo.org . 5 There are differing interpretations of the extent to which Putin deserves credit either for the

economy or for his popularity, and these issues have been examined in detail by other scholars.

Vladimir Putin and Defeat-Proofi ng the System 149

implemented during his presidency that solidifi ed Putin’s position and helped bind the elite together to insulate the incumbent leadership against fl uctuations in popularity and challenges by nonelite political actors. To achieve this, the Kremlin followed a strategy of incorporating the labor unions and the political machines of the regional governors on the one hand and of defeat-proofi ng the elections on the other, to make it clear to elites that their interests are better served by bandwagoning with rather than challenging incumbents.

I begin by analyzing the measures taken by the Putin regime to try to ensure that labor unions and the political machines available to regional governors would be used to support, not compete with, the Kremlin. I argue that in the absence of a strong national organization on the ground, the solution consisted of creating a system of punishments and rewards that would give intermediate elites powerful incentives to put their energies into supporting the Kremlin. In the second half of the chapter, I look at the additional complications posed by holding elections in an authoritarian setting like Russia and on the measures taken to try and defeat-proof these too. These steps include the creation of a new party of power, United Russia, political product differentiation in offering a choice of Kremlin-sponsored parties, and the insertion of veto points into the system. I end by considering some of the potential sources of weakness or problems in the system.

Incorporating Labor into the “Vertical”

Putin’s main goal was outlined at the very beginning of his presidency: restor-ing the power of the Russian state. In particular, this meant re-establishing the capacity of the Federal government and its ability to control lower-level insti-tutions that had gained enormous autonomy under Yeltsin (Lukin 2009 ). The strategy was to re-establish the “vertical of power” and develop what Putin called in his address to the nation after his election in 2000 “the dictatorship of laws” (Ross 2002 : 32), and “an effective state capable of guaranteeing the rules of the game translated into laws for everyone” (Coulloudon 2000 : 426). 6

Although the notion of a vertical of power in which each offi cial responds to the instructions and desires of his superior makes sense as a metaphor, in reality, power is rarely, if ever, exercised in this way. Even in formally highly centralized regimes, lower-level offi cials are really agents in chains of patron-client relationships and can develop considerable autonomy from their bosses, especially where monitoring is diffi cult or costly or where local elites have access to resources (Ross 1973 ). In the Russian case, where, as we have seen, actors outside of Moscow, and in particular regional governors, have at their

On economic growth, see, for example, Appel ( 2008 ), Aslund ( 2004 ), and Goldman ( 2004 ). On sources of Putin’s popularity, see Colton and Hale ( 2009 ) and Lukin ( 2009 ).

6 Putin’s insistence that a new round of reform and the rehabilitation of the Russian state could only be achieved through the strengthening of top-down power refl ected a majority view among politically important players of all ideological stripes (Coulloudon 2000 ).


disposal considerable political machines (Hale 2003 ), the best way to rebuild “the vertical”was to fi nd ways to reshape the incentives of lower level elites to make it in their own interests to adhere closely to Kremlin preferences. 7

In Chapter 3 , I demonstrated the important role played by labor unions in protest in the context of a divided elite. This had not gone unnoticed in the Kremlin, and one of the fi rst institutional reforms on the agenda of the new Putin administration was a major overhaul of labor legislation that would change the position of the largest labor unions and effectively incorporate them into the Kremlin’s system.

For the fi rst ten years of Russia’s independence and pursuit of marketiza-tion, Russian labor relations were governed by a labor code that dated from 1971 and that was designed for the conditions of state socialism. All sides, including the neoliberals in the Kremlin, liberals and Communists in the parlia-ment, and successor and alternative trade unionists, were in agreement on one thing: The existing labor code was inappropriate for modern Russian condi-tions and should be amended. Agreement, of course, ended there.

The fi rst government draft of a new labor code presented to the Duma was closely based on a version prepared by the IMF and would have signifi cantly reduced the rights and privileges of all unions, both successor and alternative alike. 8 Against the government version stood drafts prepared by each of the main currents of opposition. The so-called Golov draft, submitted by Iabloko , refl ected the views of the liberal independent unions such as Sotsprof ; the Avaliani draft, submitted by the KPRF Duma faction, refl ected the radical left-ist views of labor unions such as Zashchita Truda from Astrakhan ; and a draft known as the “draft of the eight,” submitted by a group of centrist deputies, refl ected the views of, among others, the FNPR leadership (Kudukin, Maleva, Misikhina, and Sourkov 2001 ). In the face of such broad-based opposition and determined parliamentary maneuvering by pro-labor deputies such as Zashchita’s Oleg Shein and OVR ’s Andrei Isaev , the government could not be sure of a majority on its draft, and the bill was withdrawn.

This about-turn represented a rare setback for the Putin administration, and they decided to change tack. The government convened a commission includ-ing representatives of the unions, employers, and the different Duma factions. The result was a new draft in the summer of 2001 that enjoyed the support of both the government and the FNPR while drawing fi erce opposition from the alternative unions. As sociologist Boris Kagarlitskii described it, “[t]he crux of the deal was very simple: The FNPR would give its consent to limiting the rights of hired employees, and in return the law would effectively consolidate its monopoly position … It looked like the old Soviet system was returning,

7 In fact, some observers have argued that regional governors enjoy more autonomy, within rather clearly specifi ed limits, under “the vertical” than they did under Yeltsin. See Russia Profi le, April 30, 2008, Pleasing Everyone The “Vertical of Power” Inherited by Medvedev Is Not as Stable as Some Experts Believe by Dmitry Oreshkin.

8 See Glinski-Vassiliev 2001 .


with offi cial unions becoming de facto an appendage of the administration and alternative unions being banned, the only real difference being that the new draft labor laws provide for a much lower level of social protection – in fact almost none.” 9

Although Kagarlitskii’s language might be hyperbolic, he captured the essence of the deal rather well. The new Code contained several provisions designed to weaken unions hoping to compete with the FNPR. Three changes stand out that really hurt the alternative unions (Ashwin and Clarke 2003 : 114). First, in order to be recognized to take part in the negotiation of a collective agreement at the enterprise level, a union must be a primary organization of an all-Russian trade union. This is a serious problem for most of the alternative unions since they are usually local in character, being formed out of local confl icts or strike committees rather than being part of a broader national movement.

Perhaps even more damaging to the alternative unions is a second provision that requires that unions create a joint negotiating team within a period of fi ve days where more than one union is present in an enterprise. In the absence of such an agreement, the majority union takes responsibility for negotiations. This means that the FNPR affi liate can exclude competitors simply by not talking with them.

Third, the Labor Code requires that strikes need to be confi rmed by a major-ity vote of a meeting attended by two-thirds of the entire labor force of an enterprise in order to be legal. This makes it very diffi cult for many alternative unions that only represent a particular group or section of workers within an enterprise to organize a legal strike. 10

Although the alternative unions had clearly lost out, the new Labor Code preserved important rights for the FNPR, and in particular the new code main-tained the system of social partnership in enterprises that virtually guarantees a role for the FNPR in Russian labor relations no matter how ineffectively the union represents its members (see Chapter 3 ). With the introduction of the new Labor Code, the government fully integrated the offi cial unions into a system of hierachically managed interest intermediation at the expense of more demo-cratic and representative alternatives. In this next section, we see how the same was done with regional governors.

Enlisting the Regional Political Machines

Incorporating the unions, however, was just a fi rst step in reconfi guring the structure of power. The primary task in creating a new “vertical” in Russia lay in reconfi guring relations between the center and the powerful governors

9 Moscow Times , December 18, 2001. 10 Alternative unions have long had trouble undertaking legal strikes. In an interview with the

author in November 2000, President of Sotsprof, Sergei Vladimirovich Khramov, claimed that of approximately 100 court cases per year challenging the legality of strikes, over 80 percent of the cases concerned Sotsprof.


who, to a great extent, dominated politics in Russia’s regions. The reforms were undertaken in two stages: before and after the Beslan school hostage taking of 2004. In the fi rst period, the Putin administration made signifi cant progress in recentralizing authority and in asserting dominance over the gov-ernors. In the second period, the reforms established even greater control but, crucially, also created a system for aligning the center’s and the governors’ incentives in a way that, to a signifi cant extent, transcended the zero-sum logic of center-region relations. Creating a win-win logic for the Kremlin and the governors was a key part of the process of defeat-proofi ng the political regime.

At the outset of the reform of center-region relations, a central element was strengthening of the Federal apparatus’ control over the security forces in the regions, which, in times of great fi nancial stress and weakness at the center, had increasingly tended to slip under the infl uence of the regional governors. The fi rst step was to reorganize the institutional architecture of the Federation by creating seven Federal “super” districts, each with an appointed presidential representative. Most of these presidential representatives had backgrounds in the military or the security services, and the reorganization was backed up by the reorganization of the Interior Ministry (MVD ) and Federal Security Services (FSB) along the lines of the new regions. The representatives moved quickly to take control of federal agencies in the regions, notably the FSB, the tax police, and the regional branches of national television stations (Petrov and Slider 2003 : 230).

Another key goal was to regain control over federal budgetary resources, reducing governors’ infl uence on these funds by channeling money through the regional branches of the federal treasury (Petrov and Slider 2003 : 229). Putin and his team also sought to reduce the proportion of total tax revenues controlled at the regional level, suspending article 48 of the Russian Budget Code that requires regions to receive at least 50 percent of Russia’s over-all tax income. By 2002, the Federal government received 62 percent of tax income and the regions only 38 percent (Reddaway and Orttung 2004 : 32). These changes meant regions had diffi culty meeting their obligations and were increasingly dependent on federal support. As Nezavisimaya Gazeta put it, all regions were now seeking aid, distributed on the principle, “from each accord-ing to his ability, to each at the discretion of the center” (cited in Reddaway and Orttung 2004 : 31).

A new Tax Code approved by the parliament in July 2000 also diminished the autonomy of regional governors. The new code created a single unifi ed social tax to take the place of separate payments to the Pension Fund , Social Insurance Fund , and Medical Insurance Fund. The regional branches of these extrabudgetary funds had often been controlled by allies of the regional gov-ernors. In addition, the new code cut by 75 percent the turnover tax on enter-prises. This tax, which had fi nanced regional road and housing budgets, was eliminated completely by 2003. Finally, the new code stipulated that the value


added tax (VAT), which was previously shared with regions on a negotiated basis, was to be wholly collected by the center. 11

These measures were soon backed up with substantial institutional reform to bring governors to heel. The extraconstitutional privileges of Republics were reduced, with teams being set up to ensure that republican constitutions were brought into line with federal law. Members of the upper house of the Federal Assembly, the Federation Council, voted themselves out of offi ce in July. This meant that governors lost the immunity from prosecution that they had enjoyed as ex offi cio members of the Federation Council. The same month, new laws were adopted that would allow the President to remove regional gov-ernors deemed to have broken the law. To drive the message home, in October, two sitting governors, Aleksandr Rutskoi of Kursk and Aleksandr Nazarov of Chukotka, found their re-election plans stymied on the one hand by a court ruling and on the other by an investigation by the Federal Tax Police.

The effect of this political, fi nancial, and institutional reorganization was to generate a degree of public loyalty on the part of governors unprecedented in the post-Soviet era. The few governors who raised their heads above the parapet to protest, such as Cheliabinsk governor Eduard Rossel , Chuvash President Nikolai Federov , and the President of Bashkiria, Murtaza Rakhimov , were quickly cowed. 12 Rossel was threatened by Urals Federal Representative, Petr Latyshev , that unspecifi ed “measures would be taken” if he continued to oppose Putin’s plans, while Rakhimov capitulated, issuing a press release on October 26 denying any differences with the President or his representative. 13 This was not an atmosphere in which governors felt able to resist Moscow.

The extent to which Putin had established a grip on the formerly recalcitrant governors was illustrated by the round of gubernatorial elections that took place in 2000. The Moscow Times ’ Ana Uzelac neatly summed up the results thus:

Once they were the Kremlin’s fi ercest enemies, known for their vitriolic criticism of its policies as much as for the authoritarian manner in which they managed their regions. But times have changed, and so have they. The wave of gubernatorial elections that swept over Russia in the past year has left the country with a newly docile regional elite: Among 44 governors elected last year, there is not one openly opposed to the Kremlin. But even as the governors’ personalities changed, they themselves most often did not. 14

As startling as these moves were, they were only the beginning. In the after-math of the Beslan tragedy in 2004, Putin took further measures that not only increased control over regional governors but also decisively changed the polit-ical incentives of governors in ways that helped align their interests with those of the Kremlin. Most importantly, direct popular election of governors was

11 “Constitutional Watch: Russia,” East European Constitutional Review , Vol. 9.4, 2000. 12 The chief executive in those regions of Russia with the status of “Republics” have the title

President. 13 “Constitutional Watch: Russia,” East European Constitutional Review , Vol. 9.4, 2000. 14 Moscow Times , January 24, 2001.


abolished. Instead, the president would nominate candidates, who would then be voted up or down by regional legislatures, effectively giving the Kremlin the ability to veto gubernatorial candidates. 15

The system of appointment of governors helps the Kremlin overcome one of the key challenges it faces in running a hybrid regime; how to create a system to reward and punish voters. Whereas successful long-standing authoritarian par-ties like Mexico ’s PRI generally have an elaborate system in place in practically every locality to ensure the desired outcomes in terms of voting and other forms of political participation (Magaloni 2006 ), no such apparatus was available to the Kremlin during Putin’s presidency. Patronage in Russia, instead, operated largely through regional governors’ offi ces (Hale 2003 ). Consequently, instead of punishing and rewarding voters, the Kremlin created a system for punishing and rewarding governors.

In key ways, the shift to nomination of governors by the President marked a return to the hierarchical power structure of the Communist era. In the Communist era, First Secretaries of the regional-level party organization enjoyed tremendous power within their own regions but were dependent upon Moscow for preferment. Like Communist Party First Secretaries, regional governors are also enormously powerful within their own territories. In most regions, gubernatorial infl uence extends to the disbursement of state funds, the ownership and profi tability of banks and other enterprises, control of regional labor unions, and a vast array of regulatory and administrative powers, creat-ing the potential for powerful political machines (Hale 2003 ). However, also like First Secretaries, governors who use their political machines against the Kremlin can, with some costs, now be removed.

Apart from the regional governors, Rutskoi and Nazarov mentioned above, some twenty-fi ve of the seventy-nine governors who sought reappointment between the introduction of the appointment system and April 22, 2008 were fi red. 16 Moreover, there is evidence that governors who are in a strong position to deliver politically for the Kremlin are likely to be retained even if they had previously been on the “wrong” side before Putin’s appointment (Robertson 2010 ). Governors who are politically strong within their regions, like Aman Tuleev in Kemerovo, Iuri Luzhkov in Moscow, and Mintimer Shaimiev in Tatarstan, but who showed willingness to cooperate with the Putin administra-tion, have been retained despite a previous history of independence. Similarly, fi ve of the eight governors who had previously been members of the opposition Communist Party but since left were retained. All three who were still members

15 Reforms to the voting system in regional legislatures also increased the power of the President to infl uence these legislatures.

16 Other governors replaced in this period include Mikhail Evdokimov (Altaiskii Krai) and Viktor Shershunov (Kostroma), who died in automobile accidents, and Valerii Kokov (Kabardino-Balkariya) who resigned for legitimate health reasons. Sergei Sobyanin (Tyumen) was also not reappointed but was promoted, becoming Head of the Presidential Administration (Robertson 2010 ).


of the Communists, by contrast, were fi red (Vladimir Tikhonov of Ivanovo, Mikhail Mashkovtsev of Kamchatka, and Vasili Starodubtsev of Tula).

Weak governors, whether cooperative or not, have found themselves in trou-ble. Aleksei Barinov of Nenetskii Automous Okrug is a case in point. Barinov had been elected in January 2005 with a very small margin over his opponent (1.72 percent in the fi rst round), in an election in which 19.5 percent of voters cast a ballot “against all” candidates. 17 He then rapidly fell out with important oil interests in the region, and with Sergei Mironov , the Speaker of the upper house of the Federal Assembly, an infl uential Putin ally. Barinov, who was the last governor in Russia to be elected, became the fi rst to be arrested in offi ce when Federal Prosecutors arrested and charged him with embezzlement and extortion on May 24, 2006.

The shift to appointments of regional governors has given the Kremlin some-thing that it previously lacked: an effective system for disbursing punishments and rewards in the regions. 18 For most governors, too, this new situation repre-sents a welcome improvement. Many were relieved of the term limits imposed on elected offi ce, while all now face a smaller “selectorate” than before, and one that can be expected to make its desires quite clear. As one Moscow-based commentator described the situation: “What exists is a contractual relationship between the Centre and the regions: we don’t touch you, we let you steal, we even give you federal subsidies and allow you to steal them. You pretend that you are loyal, and ensure falsifi ed, but correct, election results, virtual imple-mentation of orders from the Centre, and say the right things on television.” 19

Defeat-Proofi ng the Electoral System

Providing incentives for elites to bandwagon with the regime by incorporat-ing the largest labor unions and by reasserting control over resources and gubernatorial appointments has been a key part of elite consolidation under Vladimir Putin. However, the redesign of the regime has gone much further to include new elements that try not just to reduce the possibility of elite-led anti- government protest, but also to eliminate the possibility of an electoral defeat for the regime. In this section, I look at some additional measures the Putin regime has introduced to try to square the circle of being an authoritar-ian regime with elections.

The core idea draws on my analysis of political protest, arguing that authori-tarian stability depends on the interaction of intermediate elites and masses. Authoritarians must simultaneously get elites to bandwagon with the regime while deterring or repressing challenges from outside. For Putin, a key element

17 http://www.barentsobserver.com/aleksei-barinov-becomes-new-governor-in-nenets-ao.203218–16174 . Accessed October 14, 2008.

18 Magaloni ( 2006 ) calls such a system a “punishment regime.” 19 Dmitri Oreshkin “The Wheels Have Come Off the Putin Model.” www.opendemocracy.net ,

August 26, 2009.


in defeat-proofi ng the electoral system was to create a new “party of power” – an electoral party that would unite most of the elite and provide access to the spoils of offi ce and a legislative majority in the Duma. However, Putin and his allies are aware of the problems encountered in the past when a succession of “parties of power” had come and gone, so another stage has been to insure against defeat by also creating subordinate parties. This strategy has two main advantages. Like an oligopolist competing in a market, creating additional elec-toral parties allows the Kremlin to increase its overall market share by differen-tiating the products it sells to the voters: one blue (United Russia ) and one red (Rodina and Just Russia ). Moreover, loyal opposition parties have the effect of inhibiting voters’ ability to coalesce around an alternative (Magaloni 2006 ).

The third element of the redesign was to insert in the system a series of bar-riers to access that would be patrolled by politically malleable courts and elec-toral commissions at the national and regional levels. This would allow threats from outside the elite to be selectively eliminated as the need might arise. The key was not to make defeat impossible, but rather to make sure that defeat, if it came, would be a “friendly” amendment or, if not, could be vetoed by the state. I outline each of these stages in turn.

A New Electoral Party of Power The lesson drawn by Kremlin strategists from the 1999 Duma elections was that in order to dominate elections and maximize the Kremlin’s ability to decide the succession, they needed a dominant pro-presidential political party to compete in elections. They rapidly set about the twin tasks of creating such a party, United Russia (Edinaia Rossiia), and of rewriting the election laws in such a way as to ensure that this party would prosper electorally (Hale 2006b : 229–33).

The strategy was to build upon the success of Unity in the 1999 Duma elec-tions and to draw into one political party all elements of the ruling political elite that were amenable to co-optation. Unity leader, Sergei Shoigu , began the task of signing up new members across the country, and in particular of picking up members of the regional legislatures. Next they turned to pulling together members of former or would-be parties of power. Nash Dom Rossii (NDR – Our Home is Russia) was formally dissolved in February 2001, with its leader and former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin joining Unity. Next Unity joined with its formerly bitter foe, OVR , and two groups of independent depu-ties (People’s Deputy and Russia’s Regions) in a parliamentary coalition. This coalition formally created the new political party, United Russia in February 2002 . Having created the new party at the Federal level, efforts continued to create a national organization through a combination of the electoral benefi ts that membership in the party might bring and pressure from the Kremlin and its representatives. As Henry Hale ( 2006 ) notes, the presidential representa-tives to the new federal regions “were charged with coordinating much of this process, helping to recruit candidates, convincing them to run on United Russia’s label or not at all, ensuring that pro-presidential candidates did not


compete against each other in the same districts, and channeling resources to the preferred candidates” (231).

To push this process along, and to make United Russia an attractive option for elites, Putin also made a series of signifi cant changes to the laws governing electoral competition that would help ensure the dominance of United Russia and, consequently, make it the most attractive vehicle to power for ambitious elites. A new Law on Political Parties in July 2001 signifi cantly increased barriers to entry for new parties and reserved the right to nominate candidates only for offi cially registered parties. Among a host of technical requirements for registra-tion, parties had to show that they had at least 50,000 members and had regional branches with at least 500 members in at least half of the regions of the Russian Federation. A Law on Voters’ Rights the following year required that all elections to the regional legislatures include a substantial proportional representation (PR) component that would only be open to parties registered under the Federal law on parties. This created a monopoly on ballot access to half the seats in regional legislatures for the large national parties (Hale 2004 : 186–8).

The key moment, however, in the establishment of United Russia as the dominant party in Russia was Putin’s endorsement of the party in the 2007 Duma elections. Though Putin had long followed Yeltsin’s lead as a president who was above party, on October 1, 2007, he took the surprising and some-what risky step of agreeing to head up the United Russia list of candidates, effectively turning the December Duma elections into a referendum on Putin’s years in offi ce. In short order, following his decision, demonstrations were orchestrated throughout the country in support of Putin, and the All-Russian Public Movement in Support of Vladimir Putin was created. 20 Putin himself played an active role in the election campaign. Perhaps the “highlight” of the campaign came in a televised speech to United Russia supporters just three days before the elections in which he accused his opponents of being foreign-supported jackals who would return Russia to the days of dependence and humiliation experienced under Yeltsin. With such strong support from the pop-ular president, United Russia surged to 64.3 percent of the votes and received 315 of the 450 seats in the new Duma, enough to ensure a majority for any constitutional amendments the Kremlin might desire. 21

Political Product Differentiation: Sponsored Parties However, the redesign of the party system was not simply about creating a new dominant party. The goal was to create not just a new party of power, but an entirely new party system. A key step in this process was the preparation of new legislation abolishing the single-member district element of the Duma elections in favor of a single national list proportional representation system

20 See www.russiaprofi le.org , November 23, 2007, Russia Profi le Weekly Experts Panel: The Putin Movement, Introduced by Vladimir Frolov, Contributors: Stephen Blank, Ethan S. Burger, Eugene Kolesnikov, Andrei Tsygankov.

21 See www.russiavotes.org for full election results.


for all 450 seats. This measure was moved in the aftermath of the Beslan trag-edy in 2004 and was justifi ed as necessary to build nationally coherent parties that would be a bulwark against separatism. However, whereas the authors of the legislation hoped that adopting a PR-only system would provide a substan-tial boost to Russia’s weak party system, the change to national list PR also presented the authorities with a problem.

Even though the system for redistributing votes and the high threshold for entry to parliament (7 percent) means the distribution of seats is far from pro-portional, the Kremlin had previously relied heavily on the sundry indepen-dents elected in single-member districts for support. 22 Only in 2003 did the Kremlin do well enough on the party list vote to gain a majority of seats, when 37.6 percent of the vote in the party list election brought United Russia 120 of 225 list seats (53.3 percent). Consequently, it would be helpful to the Kremlin to insure itself by offering other political brands that also depended on Kremlin support, especially if the goal was to achieve a large enough majority to change the constitution.

The solution was to take the redesign of the electoral system further and create not just a dominant party, but a subordinate party too. Previous elec-tions had shown that there was a considerable constituency for parties of the center and parties of the left. Indeed, whereas unaligned independents tended to do extremely well in the single-member districts, the Communist Party and other leftist parties did well both there and in the party list vote. If the Kremlin had had little diffi culty in creating a powerful centrist party, why not put up two parties that could compete in these different sections of the electorate? This would allow the Kremlin a greater share of the vote than a single party of power could achieve. Thus for elites and voters unenthusiastic about United Russia, a different brand of Kremlin-sponsored party was created that would be capable of absorbing protest votes that might otherwise go to unreconciled oppositionists, and at the same time provide two parties through which those bandwagoning with the Kremlin could gain access to the spoils of offi ce.

Kremlin-sponsored oppositions have long been a theme in post-Communist Russian politics. The nationalist, extremist Liberal Democratic Party has often been accused of receiving Kremlin support in order to draw votes away from the Communist Party. More recently, the Rodina (Motherland) Party that con-tested successfully the 2003 Duma elections, winning 9 percent of the vote and thirty-seven seats, was also considered by many to be a Kremlin-inspired ruse to take protest votes away from the Communists. Just Russia (SR –Spravedlivaia Rossia), created in October 2006 from Rodina , the Pensioners Party, and the Party of Life, was simply the most openly pro-Kremlin of these sponsored left parties. Former Party of Life leader and Chairman of the Federation Council Sergei Mironov was elected to lead the new party and immediately committed his party to the oxymoron of simultaneous opposition to power and support

22 Russia uses the Hare system for redistributing votes, which disproportionately rewards large parties.


for Vladimir Putin. As Putin’s longtime associate and close ally Mironov put it upon accepting leadership of the new party, “If United Russia is the party of power, we will become the party of the people … We will follow the course of President Vladimir Putin and will not allow anyone to veer from it after Putin leaves his post in 2008.” 23

Following the party’s creation, Mironov continued to try to position his new party as the most pro-Putin of all parties, calling for a third term for Putin long after Putin himself had effectively put to rest speculation that the constitution would be changed to allow a third term. Mironov also reached out to those unhappy with the new order by trying to tap into the tropes of the old regime, making regular use of Communist-era vocabulary, addressing the party faith-ful as comrades, and committing the party to opposing the construction of a market economy.

Speculation over the source of the idea to create two parties is divided as to whether SR was the brainchild of Vladislav Surkov , the Kremlin operative usu-ally credited with party-building initiatives, or if it was born of demands from more state-centric factions in the Kremlin, associated with Deputy Head of Administration Igor Sechin , for a party which could represent them, or indeed whether it was a vehicle designed to give more access to the Duma for regional elites. 24 In fact, the idea of two competing parties of power traces back at least to 1995, when NDR and the Rybkin Bloc represented two faces of the party of power. 25 Whatever the intellectual history of SR’s conception, it seems clear that drawing votes away from the Communists and providing a safe environ-ment for opposition politics are goals that can be achieved simultaneously.

In its fi rst major electoral contest as a new party on the scene, SR took a creditable third place overall in fourteen regional elections held simultaneously on March 11, 2007, including being the largest party in Stavropol’ Krai. In the Duma elections in the fall, SR initially seemed to enjoy considerable Kremlin support. However, Putin’s decision to lead the United Russia list dealt a signifi -cant blow to SR’s hopes. No longer would it be possible to run a campaign that simultaneously backed Putin while criticizing United Russia. Following Putin’s announcement, Just Russia witnessed a rapid collapse in its support, and as the elections approached, it looked increasingly likely that Just Russia would fail to gather the 7 percent of the votes needed to enter the Duma. However, as the Duma campaign wound down, Just Russia seemed to experience a signifi cant increase in both its advertizing and its coverage in the media, and it scraped into the Duma with 7.74 percent of the votes and thirty-eight seats.

Although Just Russia is clearly less signifi cant than its leaders expected it to be when Putin “welcomed” the party’s founding (Sestanovich 2007 : 124), it is

23 “New Party Says Kremlin Knows Best,” Nabi Abdullaev, Moscow Times , October 30, 2006, JRL #243 2006.

24 See “Power to the Bureaucrats,” Yelena Rykovtseva, Russia Profi le, November 16, 2006, JRL #259, November 17, 2006, “The Next Stop Is the Duma,” Eugene Ivanov, March 18, 2007, JRL #66, 2007.

25 I thank Henry Hale for pointing this out.


worth noting that the sponsored party strategy does not require a great deal of electoral success for the sponsored party. Just Russia , like Motherland before it, might turn out to be expendable. The key, however, is for these parties to be there in case there is signifi cant disaffection with the party of power and to insure the Kremlin against the vagaries of political popularity. Even if Just Russia itself does not survive, the idea of sponsored oppositions, especially of the left, is likely to remain a feature of the Russian regime.

The Insertion of Veto Points In order to ensure that the offi cially appointed opposition parties stand a good chance of attracting opposition votes, and to try to ensure that they do not become vehicles for the activities of real oppositionists, the electoral system created under Putin also contains several points before the elections themselves at which the state can exercise a veto over the participation of “unwelcome” forces. These veto points are policed by politically pliant courts and electoral commissions at the regional and national levels (Popova 2006 ).

The fi rst veto point is the process of registering as a political party. Participation in the new electoral system is limited to political parties, defi ned as: “a public association created for enabling citizens of the Russian Federation to participate in the political life of society by shaping and expressing their political will, to participate in public and political events, in elections, refer-enda and also for representing the interests of citizens in the bodies of state power and bodies of local self-government.” 26 The barriers to registering as a political party are high. Parties must have branches in more than half of Russia’s Federal units, and each of those branches must have at least 500 mem-bers. Moreover, the total number of Party members must be at least 50,000. 27

In practice, however, the barrier does not seem to have been too high to prevent the registration of large numbers of parties. As of September 2009, the Central Election Commission website listed some fi fteen successfully registered political parties. Clearly this is a hurdle that could be selectively made more challenging if deemed necessary in particular cases. 28

However, the key stage for managing electoral participation appears to lie in the process for registering party lists of candidates for the elections themselves. This process is rather convoluted and offers authorities, through the Federal Registration Service and the Central Election Commission (CEC), the oppor-tunity to intervene at two stages. The fi rst stage comes with the certifi cation of the candidate lists. Parties must select lists of candidates by secret ballot at

26 Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation. http://www.cikrf.ru/cikrf/eng/politparty/

27 Amendments to the law in 2009 relax these requirements somewhat. By 2011, when the next Duma elections are scheduled, parties will need 45,000 members with at least 450 members in more than half of the regions, and in 2012, these numbers fall to 40,000 and 400, respectively. http://www.russiavotes.org/duma/duma_election_law.php

28 http://www.cikrf.ru/cikrf/eng/politparty/ . This number is down from twenty-fi ve two years earlier.


party conferences and then submit those lists for approval to the CEC. In addi-tion to the list of names, parties are required to submit additional documenta-tion on the citizenship, employment, and fi nancial status of candidates. Subject to appeal to the Supreme Court, the CEC has the right to reject entire lists due to inadequacies in the documentation of particular candidates.

In the second stage, parties must then collect 200,000 signatures no later than 45 days before the election. 29 No more than 10,000 signatures can come from any one region. In 2007, parties had between one month and six weeks (depending on the precise timing of the offi cial election announcement) to gather these signatures. Alternatively, parties could pay a R60 million (roughly $2.3 million) as a deposit, which was returnable if the party gained more than 4 percent of the vote. The CEC can refuse registration for an entire list based on procedural violations of the electoral law, or if a sample of signatures shows 5 percent or more irregularities. 30

Additional fl exibility for authorities wishing to exclude particular parties from participation lies in the law on extremism which came into effect in August 2006. The law provides for the exclusion of any party whose state-ments contain “extremist” or racist language. However laudable this might be as a goal, in Russia, the potential for abuse is clear. Moreover, the law also potentially allows the authorities to ban criticism of other candidates since anyone “publicly slandering a person holding a state offi ce” can be barred from running. 31

Clearly, the electoral commissions charged with verifi cation at each stage in this process play a critical role. To date, at the national level, the Central Election Commission (CEC) has been a loyal, if still fairly technocratic, instrument. Loyalty to incumbents is guaranteed by the composition of the CEC; its fi fteen members are appointed to renewable four-year terms, with fi ve members appointed by the President, fi ve by the Duma, and fi ve by the Federation Council. In March 2007, the sitting Chairman of the CEC Aleksandr Veshniakov came to the end of his second term and was replaced by Vladimir Churov . Churov has no legal training, and the legislation creating the CEC had to be changed to allow the appointment of a non-lawyer. Churov worked for a decade in the cradle of the Putin political family, the St. Petersburg Mayor’s offi ce, four years directly under Putin himself, and is an associate of now-President Dmitri Medvedev and of close Putin ally Dmitri Kozak . Some have interpreted Churov’s appointment as a step toward a more explicitly political role for the CEC. 32

29 In 2011, 150,000 signatures will be required and 120,000 after that. No more than 5,000 can come from any one region. The electoral deposit option was abolished in 2009. http://www.russiavotes.org/duma/duma_election_law.php

30 Summary of law on registration of candidates for the election is drawn from russiavotes.org. 31 Dmitry Babich, “A Dangerous Cocktail for Democracy,” Russia Profi le, August 2, 2006, JRL

2006–174. 32 See RIA Novosti, March 28, 2007. http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20070328/62746679.html


If experience to date is a good guide, then the process of review and registra-tion is likely to be extremely politicized. The politiciziation of registration was already clear in the regional elections in March 2007. In regional elections, the law requires parties to subdivide their lists of candidates within each region, providing more opportunity for the authorities to fi nd problems and dismiss the party from participating in the region as a whole. Liliia Shibanova, direc-tor of Golos (Voice), a voters’ rights association, claimed that Union of Right Forces (SPS ) and KPRF lists for Dagestan were struck from the ballot after authorities faulted candidate lists in one of the fi fty-three subregional units. Though the Supreme Court reinstated the KPRF in Dagestan , similar problems led to the exclusion of 31 percent of lists, according to Shibanova. 33

Perhaps the highest profi le exclusion came in St. Petersburg , where the locally strong Iabloko party was refused registration by local offi cials (along with the People’s Will Party and the United Socialist Party of Russia ). According to the St. Petersburg electoral commission, 12 percent of a sample of 8,000 signa-tures examined by authorities were ruled to be invalid. In total, Iabloko had submitted 40,000 signatures. Iabloko offi cials blamed St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matvienko for the decision to refuse their party registration, and local reporters pointed to Iabloko’s opposition to the construction of a new offi ce tower for Gazprom as a key factor. 34

Political use of the registration system was even more marked in the 2007 Duma elections. Only eleven of the thirty-fi ve parties that applied to partic-ipate in the Duma elections were granted registration by the CEC. 35 Among the parties refused registration were extremist parties like Dmitri Rogozin ’s Great Russia party. Several technical grounds were cited by offi cials, including spelling mistakes in fi nancial documents. 36 However, it was clear that exclud-ing these ultranationalist (and indeed genuinely extremist) options was likely to help direct nationalists toward the Kremlin-supported parties. Also refused registration – on the legally sound grounds that they had not applied to register as a political party – was the list of candidates put forward by the opposition movement, Other Russia. Other Russia , as we will see in the next chapter, nonetheless attempted to conduct a wide-reaching political campaign around the elections, despite considerable harassment from the authorities. The Other Russia candidate for the 2008 presidential elections, former world chess cham-pion Garry Kasparov , was also denied registration and subjected to consider-able pressure and intimidation. 37

Even if signifi cant political forces have rarely been excluded from elections, the potential to have them excluded from political competition is intimidating and leads to self-censorship and more cooperative behavior on the part of the

33 Vedomosti , March 15, 2007. 34 See St. Petersburg Times , January 30, 2007, and Moscow Times , January 30, 2007. 35 http://www.ipu.org/parline/reports/2263_E.htm 36 http://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=22463 37 http://www.theotherrussia.org/2007/12/14/blocked-in-all-directions-kasparov-drops-

presidential-bid/


opposition. In that sense, the registration system creates what Ellen Lust-Okar ( 2005 ) calls a “divided structure of contestation,” in which those permitted to compete in politics are reluctant to make more radical demands out of fear of being forced into joining those who are excluded.

Yet the new system of electoral contestation being implemented in Russia goes further than a “divided structure of contestation.” The problem for would-be opposition and insurgent parties in Russia is less that they will be excluded from competition and more that without the support of the state and the administrative resources and media access that it brings, their chances of electoral success are extremely small. This means that contestation within the system can, in fact, be relatively broad because the level of competition is kept low. As noted earlier in the chapter, there are some fi fteen offi cially reg-istered parties representing a broad spectrum of views, and barriers to ballot access for these parties are probably no higher than barriers to ballot access in established two-party systems like the United States. Instead, what is most challenging for these parties is campaigning in a context in which they receive little, if any, attention from the electronic media and in which any sign of political progress on their part will be met with increasingly strong resistance from incumbent elites who have more than enough administrative resources to block a challenge. Add in the rampant disregard of campaign fi nance leg-islation that has marked Russian elections to date, and it is hard to see an insurgent campaign coming close to meaningful success in the elections. 38 The 7-percent threshold in the Duma, and the advantages in terms of registration given to parties already represented in the Duma, seem likely to limit electoral success to a small group of parties including United Russia, Just Russia, the KPRF, the Liberal Democrats, and perhaps one other. Finally, the Hare method of seat distribution strongly favors United Russia. Thus elites who choose to compete within the framework of one of the two Kremlin parties stand a very strong chance of sharing in the spoils of offi ce, whereas those who do not, have little chance.

Nevertheless, the new system provides not only for broad contestation, but where signifi cant local elites are divided, it can also allow for real competition. There are very real political battles fought between Just Russia and United Russia. The elections in Stavropol’ Krai and other places in March 2007 were often bitterly contested and were no mere shadow boxing, and the same was true in many regions in December 2007.

Finally, a central feature of the system is that state management of political parties and opposition goes very deep. It is not just that there are many oppo-sitions, but also that it is extremely hard to draw a line between opposition and regime. The regime plays such an active role in organizing and managing “opposition” voices that the lines between the two are extremely blurred. Just

38 The administration has also taken steps to reduce the impact of any potential boycott of the elections, reducing the minimum turnout required for the elections to be valid to 25 percent and eliminating the option for voters of casting a ballot against all candidates.


Russia is, at the same time, a party of power and a party of opposition. The option of voting for Just Russia gives voters the chance both to register opposi-tion and to vote for the regime (as personifi ed in Vladimir Putin). As we shall see in the next chapter, playing on ambiguity and blurring the lines between opposition and regime is a key technique of the postmodern authoritarians in Putin’s Kremlin.

Potential Problems, Sources of Weakness

The brilliance of authoritarian institutional design notwithstanding, the one general rule that can be said about human attempts at institutional engineering is that unintended consequences are all but certain to follow. Russia’s design for defeat-proof competition is unlikely to be an exception to this rule. In this fi nal section, I consider briefl y four key sources of instability in the new system that may lead the current institutional structure to be more dynamic in practice than most observers would currently allow.

One problem is time inconsistency: ensuring that a party is loyal beforehand does not guarantee that it will be loyal once it has actually achieved electoral success and a political following. A clear example of this was the Motherland Party, which began as a Kremlin-supported device to draw votes away from the Communist Party in 2003, but that rapidly began to show signs of becom-ing a rebellious opposition in the aftermath of its Kremlin-created electoral success. Any party set up as an opposition might well fi nd real incentives to start acting like one, especially in the event that the economic or social situa-tion starts to turn for the worse. The experience of Motherland, however, should also give the leaders of Just Russia or any other potential opposition pause. After all, the potential of such leaders as Sergei Glaziev and Dmitri Rogozin to lead an authentic left-nationalist opposition rapidly led to their removal and replacement with the apparently more reliable Mironov . The fear of exclusion, on the other hand, will be balanced by the sense of power and potential given by holding a prominent and strategic position in the political system. The question over time is which logic will prevail.

A second key problem with sponsored or “satellite” parties is their tendency to jump ship when the regime is under pressure. For example, a switch in the allegiance of formerly loyal parties was a key feature of the democratic transi-tion in Poland in 1989. Although Solidarity did surprisingly well in the elections of June 1989, they were limited to 35 percent of the seats in the lower house of parliament (the Sejm) by the Roundtable Agreements with the Communists. The fi rst Solidarity government only came to power after the defection of regime satellite parties, The United People’s Party and the Democratic Party, to Solidarity in August 1989 (Ekiert and Kubik 1999 : 49). Something similar happened in the Mexican transition with the defection of former PRI satellite parties such as the Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution (PARM). As these examples suggest, today’s loyal partner can easily become tomorrow’s threat, especially if there is real split within the elite.


A third potential problem is suggested by the sociological literature on orga-nizational ecology. The strategy of creating dominant regime-sponsored parties is based on the idea that dominance of an economic or political market by a small number of large “generalists” inhibits the entry of new organizations (Piore and Sabel 1984 ). However, in economic markets, it has also been shown that this process (known as market concentration) can be accompanied by a proliferation of smaller niche producers, especially where homogenization is identifi ed as a problem and where the incumbents represent a target against which to organize (Carroll, Dobrev, and Swaminathan 2002 , Greve, Pozner, and Rao 2006 ). 39 The political analogy is obvious. To the extent that United Russia (or any other Kremlin-sponsored major parties) dominate the political fi eld, their dominance will tend to provoke a reaction and encourage the prolif-eration of oppositionist projects. The ultimate success of these opposition proj-ects will, of course, depend on many factors, but the very possibility of creating new, legal organizations to compete with the incumbents means regime success will always contain within it the seeds of failure. In the next chapter, we see this process in action in the emergence of new opposition groups after 2004 .

Finally, there are potential problems with the system for appointing regional governors. Aligning the governors’ incentives with Moscow was a clever short-term solution to the problem of winning elections without the advantages of a well-organized ruling party. Without a strong party network on the ground, authoritarians have diffi culty getting voters to turn out and vote for the incum-bents (Magaloni 2006 ). The decision to revert to central appointment of gov-ernors neatly sidestepped this problem and linked the tenure of individual governors to their ability to arrange satisfactory electoral outcomes for the center.

Shifting gubernatorial incentives in this way has a downside, however. Governors who no longer need to be elected are likely to be less sensitive to public opinion in their regions. This means they will spend less time cultivat-ing their own popularity with voters and so are less likely to do a good job from the perspective of citizens. Worse, because governors are appointed by the Kremlin, problems in any one of Russia’s regions immediately become the Kremlin’s problems, rather than simply issues to be settled by the local elite. This dramatically extends the range of issues for which the Kremlin can be held responsible. Demonstrations in places as far apart as Kaliningrad , Samara, and Irkutsk in the winter of 2010, calling for the removal of the regional gover-nor and the resignation of the national government, illustrate the point quite well. 40

In general, therefore, there are real dynamic tensions involved in trying to create an opposition party that looks real enough for people of opposition

39 This is known as “resource partitioning” theory. 40 “Regiony Bez Putina” Gazeta.com, February 15, 2010. In fact, there was some evidence at

the beginning of 2010 that the Kremlin was considering reintroducing a system for electing governors.


sentiment to want to vote for it, but that is not real enough to actually turn into an opposition. These tensions may well overwhelm even the most sophisticated and well-designed system in the medium term. How this plays out will partly depend, as suggested earlier in this chapter, on the interaction between intrael-ite politics and the politics of opposition carried on beyond the electoral arena in the streets and squares of Russia. In the context of the streets, the start-up costs and initial capital required to launch a real political challenge are much lower than in the electoral sphere. Opposition in this realm is, consequently, much harder to neuter, and the Kremlin has followed a more aggressive strat-egy in an attempt to maintain control. It is to this issue that I now turn.

167

7

Protest, Repression, and Order from Below

“Tatarsky of course hated most of the manifestions of Soviet power, but he still couldn’t understand why it was worth exchanging an evil empire for an evil banana republic that imported its bananas from Finland.”

Viktor Pelevin, Generation P .

Early Sunday mornings are usually a pleasant, quiet time to stroll the streets of St. Petersburg . On Sunday November 26, 2007, however, one week before nationwide elections to the State Duma, opposition activists were planning a Dissenters’ March ( marsh nesoglasnykh ) to Palace Square in front of the former Winter Palace, and the atmosphere in the city center was busy and intimidating. The main avenues were fi lled with young men, and the nar-row streets leading to Palace Square were blocked with buses and fences. Snow ploughs and garbage trucks blocked the open side of the square. Yet the large number of people on the streets, up to 10,000 by some estimates, were certainly not “dissenters.” Instead the streets teemed with men in the blue-gray uniforms of the Interior Ministry (MVD ), some disguised by masks beneath their helmets, and many wearing the insignia of the elite special unit OMON.

Dissenters, by contrast, were hard to fi nd. Opposition leaders Ol’ga Kurnosova of the United Civil Front ( Ob”edinennyi grazhdanskii front , OGF), Leonid Gozman of the Union of Right Forces ( Soiuz pravykh sil , SPS ), and Maksim Reznik of the political party Iabloko , had spent the night at the Iabloko offi ces in an attempt to avoid preemptive arrest. When they emerged with other supporters at around 9:30 a.m ., they were met by ten police cars and fi ve busloads of OMON . The dissenters had strict instructions: Carry white fl owers as a sign of peace; display no political banners; stay on the sidewalk; cross only at the green light. In short, give the police no excuses. Suddenly though, a group of young men ran out from the crowd and unfurled the fl ag of the banned National Bolshevik Party ( Natsional-bol’shevistskaia partiia , NBP ). “Arrest them all,” someone called out, and in short order, the protest organizers and some 150 participants were arrested.


The Petersburg events were just part of a range of protests across Russia that weekend, planned to coincide with the December parliamentary elections. The reactions of the authorities varied from place to place. St. Petersburg , which has been particularly troublesome to the administration of Vladimir Putin, saw one of the strictest, most public crackdowns. In Moscow , by con-trast, where most international attention was focused, the authorities allowed a much larger crowd of around 3,500 to march. Arrests were made there too, particularly of prominent people such as OGF leader Garry Kasparov and human rights campaigner Lev Ponomarev , and people were beaten, but the march was allowed to take place – even though it was not reported on state television channels that evening. Elsewhere, protests were either banned by local authorities (for example, Samara and Cheboksari) or organizers were preemptively arrested (for example, Krasnoiarsk and Novosibirsk ). 1

Why all this fuss over a few marginal protesters with little public support? After all, since winning an electoral landslide in June 2000, Vladimir Putin had had the country at his feet. As we saw in Chapters 3 – 5 , the presidency of Boris Yeltsin had seen high levels of protest in the factories, streets, and schools of Russia, and disarray among different factions within the elite. Under Putin, calm had been restored, and the elite had a new leader to rally around. Why would the powerful Putin regime, on the eve of an election victory that was a forgone conclusion, be concerned about a few hundred marchers? After all, what can a few protesting liberals, pensioners, and students do to hardline regimes that enjoy a massive advantage in terms of political, military, and paramilitary resources?

Perhaps the Putin administration was wary because of what had happened in Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005) , where in so-called colored revolutions, mass protest in the streets resulted in the ouster of incumbent authoritarian leaders. Moreover, such mass mobilizations against sit-ting autocrats have not been confi ned to the former communist states, but have led to regime change in many other places too, including Ghana, Indonesia, Kenya, Peru, and the Philippines (Howard and Roessler 2006 ).

Yet why would the Putin administration worry about these examples when it was quite obvious to observers that there was little or no threat of a rerun of the colored revolutions? After all, in each of the colored revolutions, the incumbents were being challenged by signifi cant opposition forces with a strong political following, and this was certainly not the case in the Russian Duma elections of 2007.

In this chapter, I argue that the answer lies in the potential vulnerability of incumbent rulers in hybrid regimes to even small signs of regime weak-ness. Even though they may face little credible opposition now, authoritarian rulers understand that successful authoritarianism does not just happen but

1 This account of the events of November 25 and 26, 2007 is drawn from participant observation; Ol’ga Kurnosova interview with author, St. Petersburg, November 26, 2007; and Kommersant , no. 217 (November 26, 2007).

Protest, Repression, and Order from Below 169

requires extensive coordination among elites over time. Ruling coalitions are politically constructed across a more or less broad range of players with dif-ferent resources, and these coalitions need to be maintained. At any given moment, key elite players, whether from the security apparatus, business, or politics, can choose to ally themselves with the incumbent leadership, or they can decide they are better off throwing their lot in with the opposition and challenging for power. Maintaining the incumbent advantage, therefore, depends to a signifi cant extent on maintaining an air of invincibility or per-manence, and convincing other potential leaders and elites that their best hopes for advancement lie in continuing to work together with the incum-bent leadership rather than organizing against it. In the previous chapter, we looked at institutional ways in which the Putin regime has sought to reinforce elite unity. In this chapter, I look at another way in which elite coordination is achieved: preempting threats that emerge from outside the elite in the form of mass protest or unrest.

Pressure from the streets is an issue largely neglected by analysts of hybrid regimes, who tend to focus on elections and the means used to secure or, if nec-essary, fake electoral victories (Magaloni 2006 , Schedler 2006 ). Nevertheless, opposition that emerges outside of the regular electoral calendar is an extremely, and perhaps increasingly, important phenomenon. In addition to the colored revolutions mentioned earlier in the chapter, protests and demonstrations have overthrown elected presidents in a number of countries in recent years, such as Bolivia and Ecuador . Indeed, even in cases where elections have been seen as the main force behind regime change, mobilization outside of elec-tions has also played a major role. For example, in Mexico , where elections are generally credited with the liberalization of the national regime (Ochoa-Reza 2004 ), social mobilization, including the Zapatista uprising , scared the Salinas administration into allowing freer elections in the fi rst place as a way of reaching out to the moderate opposition (Magaloni 2006 : 242–5).

In this chapter, I argue that the crucial role of street protest in political change in hybrids in the last decade or so is no coincidence. This is because hybrid regimes are particularly vulnerable to pressure from street protests or other forms of contention. Like other authoritarian regimes, hybrids tend to have lower institutional legitimacy than democracies, and their leaders operate in an environment in which reliable political information is scarce relative to democracies. These factors make authoritarian regimes vulnerable to instabil-ity resulting from even small signs of weakness. However, the challenge from the streets is even more acute in hybrids due to the combination of allowing some open political competition and the relative weakness of the repressive apparatus compared to other authoritarian regimes.

Having set up the problem of instability in hybrids, I then look at how the Putin administration in Russia has set out to solve it. I show that the response can be thought of as a combination of coercion and channeling , and I docu-ment how the basic set of techniques used has evolved and become increas-ingly refi ned in response to the changing nature of the challenge. To do this, I


look in detail at two major sources of challenge to the regime: the pensioners’ revolt of 2005 and the youth opposition movements that took center stage in 2005 and 2006.

These two case studies are useful for understanding the development of techniques of repression, but they are also particularly important because they represent a turning point in contentious politics in Russia. In terms of the key variables in this book, the period between 2005 and 2006 saw a signifi cant shift in the organizational ecology, and since the organizational ecology has changed, patterns of protest have changed. This is true both of the quantity and of the nature of protest. Gone is the peace on the streets of the fi rst Putin term. Instead, we have seen the development of an increasingly well organized and signifi cant independent opposition whose protests have become a fre-quent sight on Russia’s streets. In response, the state has increased its capacity both to repress opposition protesters and to mobilize pro-government activ-ists. Consequently, we also see many “protesters” on the streets of Russia who are not oppositionists at all, but who are (typically young) people demonstrat-ing either in support of the government or against its critics. The combination of these two developments meant that in Putin’s second term, we again saw the rise of mobilization in the streets, though much of it consisted of large pro-government rallies, combined with usually small, if frequent (and often harshly repressed). opposition demonstrations.

The rest of the chapter proceeds as follows. I fi rst explain why authoritar-ians are so sensitive to mobilizations of even relatively small numbers in the streets and argue that this problem is even more acute for authoritarians in hybrid regimes than in closed regimes. In the next section, I analyze the chal-lenge to the Russian authorities posed by the pensioners’ protests of 2005 and the ways in which the regime learned from it. I then examine the aftermath of the pensioners’ protests and the role of other oppositionists, in particular young people, in creating a newly united civic opposition for the fi rst time in the Putin era. I look carefully at the regime’s response and how its repressive techniques have developed through experimentation and learning. I conclude by considering the comparative implications for other countries of the Russian experience.

Managing Contention in Hybrids

All political leaders, both in democracies and in autocracies, face the prob-lem of maintaining order and of protecting their rule from challenges in the streets. In this section, I argue that the risk of regime instability arising from street protests is more severe for authoritarian governments than it is for democrats due to differences in the institutional legitimacy of the differ-ent systems and in the nature of the information environment in which they operate. I also argue that among rulers in different kinds of authoritarian regime, incumbents in hybrids are even more at risk from challenges in the streets because their regimes are both more open and have less repressive


capacity than closed authoritarian regimes. As a result, leaders in contempo-rary hybrids are often threatened by protest mobilization and so have to put a lot of effort and creativity into defeat-proofi ng the regime against challenges from the street.

Although marches, demonstrations, and other forms of political protest can damage political leaders almost anywhere, the potential challenge to incum-bent rulers from open contention in the streets is more serious in authoritarian regimes than it is in democracies. There are a number of reasons for this. First, democracies have greater immunity to street protests because they are pro-tected by the legitimacy of high-quality electoral and representative institu-tions that normally make it easy to characterize mobilization outside of these institutions as illegitimate (Hardin 1999 , Koopmans 1997 ). Authoritarian rul-ers tend to lack this kind of procedural legitimacy. Moreover, authoritarians also tend to lack widely legitimate institutional means for dispute resolution among elites and, in particular, usually lack established ways of managing their thorniest problem: succession. This means that institutional means of dealing with problems and confl icts are less developed and less resilient to outside pressures.

Authoritarian rulers have an additional problem in that authoritarian regimes are characterized by relatively low levels of reliable political informa-tion relative to democracies, and so even small protests can signal weakness and quickly lead to elite defections that can put the survival of the incum-bents at risk (Collier and Mahoney 1997 ). 2 Authoritarian stability, therefore, depends heavily on perceptions of the incumbent’s strength. Momentum and perception matter in all political systems, including democracies, but per-ceptions are more important for stability in authoritarian regimes than in democracies. 3 This is because authoritarian regimes are generally character-ized by “pluralistic ignorance” (Kuran 1991 ). In other words, people, both in

2 The so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine is a good illustration. By the time presidential elec-tions in Ukraine came around in December 2004, it was already clear that Leonid Kuchma’s chosen successor, Viktor Ianukovich, would face a stiff challenge from the former prime minister, and former Kuchma ally, Viktor Iushchenko. The fact that the opposition could fi eld such a credible challenger can be traced in part to the emergence of the “Ukraine without Kuchma” movement, which arose in a large wave of protest in 2001 over audio tapes implicating Kuchma in the murder of the journalist Heorgiy Gongadze. Although the protests did not bring down Kuchma directly, they “represented a kind of dry run for the next revolution,” where “many of the leaders of the [Orange Revolution] protests cut their organizational teeth” (Karatnycky 2005 : 35–52). Iushchenko condemned the protesters at the time, but these organizers became an invaluable weapon for him, and an essential part of his political base, when he decided to run as an “outsider.” See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/monitoring/media_reports/1168935.stm

3 Bartels ( 1988 ) describes four psychological processes that create political momentum: conta-gion, supporting the winner, strategic considerations, and cue taking. Kenney and Rice ( 1994 ) add the perception of inevitability. There is also a literature in bandwagoning or “support the underdog” behavior among voters in elections that stresses the effects of dominance in the media in creating the impression in voters’ minds that some candidates are more “serious” or plausible contenders than others (Fleitas 1971 , Goidel and Shields 1994 ).


the country at large and in the political elite, know what they themselves are thinking, but, given the incentives in authoritarian systems to dissemble and fake loyalty, they have little information on, and a great deal of uncertainty about, what others are thinking.

In such low-information environments, signals matter a lot and can gener-ate much more dramatic changes in behavior than the underlying distribution of preferences would seem to merit. Small acts of protest by isolated groups can grow quickly into major challenges. Whereas it takes millions of voters to signal the weakness of a regime in elections, relatively small numbers of pro-testers in the streets, even in the low thousands, can raise questions about an authoritarian regime’s invincibility (Lohmann 1994 ). On the other hand, effi -cient acts of repression can subdue what might otherwise be major challenges. By the time major challenges arrive, requiring large-scale repression, the dic-tator may already be playing a losing hand (Francisco 2005 ). Consequently, even strong authoritarians are nervous of public opposition. 4 The problem, of course, is that identifying challenges when they remain small requires consid-erable, reliable information about society, which authoritarians usually lack. Defeat-proofi ng the streets is, therefore, in many ways more challenging than defeat-proofi ng elections.

Authoritarian rulers understand these limitations well and so tend to pursue repression on two levels: coercing opponents who are already orga-nized and at the same time working hard to “channel” discontent away from organized dissent. 5 As a result, censorship and political restrictions are more common in authoritarian regimes than they are in democracies or in hybrid regimes, but violent coercion tends to be lower because it is unnecessary when institutional forms of repression or channeling prevent mobilization (Davenport 1995 ). Where institutional repression and channeling have failed and mobilization has already taken place, rulers have the choice of making concessions or repressing, and in the latter case, the level of violence used can be extreme. 6

4 Boudreau ( 2005 ) analyzes why weak authoritarians might appear excessively sensitive to minor challenges. I argue, for the reasons given, that this apparent hypersensitivity can be found even in strong authoritarian regimes. On the other hand, one of the striking features of authoritarians is the diffi culty that they have in interpreting the information that they do have. A prominent example was the way in which the Polish Communist Party vastly overestimated its support in the fi rst free elections in 1989. It seems astonishing in retrospect, given Polish experience in the 1970s and 1980s, that the Communists expected to do well in the elections.

5 On the distinction between coercion and channeling, see Oberschall ( 1973 ). 6 In both political science and sociology, the literature on repression is considerable. For a sam-

pling on physical coercion, see Ekkart Zimmermann, Soziologie der politischen Gewalt: Darst. u. Kritik vergleichender Aggregatdatenanalysen aus d. USA (Stuttgart, 1977); on formal ver-sus informal repression, see Robert W. White and Terry Falkenberg White, “Repression and the Liberal State: The Case of Northern Ireland, 1969–1972,” Journal of Confl ict Resolution 39, no. 2 (June 1995 ): 330–52; and on structural versus behavioral repression, see Edward N. Muller and Erich Weede, “Cross-National Variation in Political Violence,” Journal of Confl ict Resolution 34, no. 4 (December 1990): 624–51.


What about hybrid regimes? Hybrids are likely to face many of the same problems of stability as closed authoritarian regimes. Leaders in hybrid regimes often face many of the same information problems as closed authoritarians, due to a relative lack of dense social networks and independent media. This means challenge and change can come quickly and unexpectedly. 7 However, the problem of stability is more acute in hybrid regimes than in closed author-itarian regimes due to the combination of open political competition and authoritarian control that defi nes these regimes.

The very fact that hybrids hold elections with some competition puts them at greater risk from street protest. Even if the incumbents face no real prospect of losing at the ballot box, elections can play an important part in generating protest by acting as an occasion for action (Collins 1981 ; Oliver 1989 ; Oliver and Myers 2003 ), as a device for coordination among opponents, and as a chance to focus attention on regime defi ciencies (Wada 2004 ). This is par-ticularly the case when elections are perceived to have been fraudulent (Bunce and Wolchik 2006 , Tucker 2007 ). In addition, in hybrid regimes, elections generally include some potential regime opponents and exclude others, and this exclusion can lead those left out to seek to mobilize outside of the elec-tions, perhaps resorting to violence (Lust-Okar 2005 ). Furthermore, whereas large numbers of opposition supporters are needed to create a challenge in elections, much smaller numbers on the streets (and even smaller numbers in insurgencies) can create real political challenges. Elections consequently present a dilemma. The more opposition groups are allowed to participate, the more risky elections are. The more oppositionists are excluded, the like-lier they are to mobilize in other ways. A key challenge for leaders in hybrid contexts, therefore, is to fi nd a way to repress such excluded actors without excessive public violence.

However, in managing protest from the excluded, hybrid regimes are with-out the full-blown institutional repressive apparatus of closed authoritarians. Hybrids, after all, are regimes that, by defi nition, allow at least some public displays of opposition. They tend not to exhibit the obvious censorship and blatant political restrictions of closed authoritarians, and so preventing signs of unrest is harder. This puts more weight on the coercive apparatus, but this apparatus too, in turn, is more restricted in the application of open coercion than is typically the case in closed authoritarian regimes. As a result, both preventative measures and open coercion are more diffi cult for hybrid regimes than for closed authoritarian regimes. This makes instability an emergent property of hybrid regimes; the combination of competition and control that defi nes hybrid regimes gives rise to frequent instability. Indeed some studies fi nd violence to be more common in hybrids than in closed regimes (Fein 1995 ,

7 For example, the Rose, Orange, and Tulip “revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan , respectively were sudden and quite unanticipated by the ruling regimes. None of these cases, however, came completely out of nowhere. In each, a disputed election provoked a crisis. What was shocking to the regime was the strength of the opposition that mobilized and the capacity of a disaffected segment of the elite to unite with mass mobilization from below.


Regan and Henderson 2002 ). Consequently, rulers in hybrids face a singu-lar dilemma: How to allow signifi cant political freedoms without allowing dangerous levels of opposition and without signaling weakness to potentially disaffected segments of the elite. The success of rulers in hybrids depends on fi nding ways to square this circle.

To show how this is achieved in Russia, I adopt Oberschall’s ( 1973 ) dis-tinction between two modes or repression, coercion and channeling, both of which, I argue, are extensively used in contemporary Russia. 8 Patterns of coercion draw heavily on the repertoire of the Soviet era in that exten-sive use is made of both openly observable coercion and of more covert preventative coercion. Activists participating in rallies are often heavily and publicly intimidated in order to discourage other citizens from par-ticipating. Perhaps even more frequently, organizers and known activists are detained in advance of protest marches either to prevent protests or to reduce their effectiveness. Coercion in Russia is overwhelmingly carried out by special units of the state apparatus, notably the OMON units, though there is also considerable discussion about the possible use of more informal groups related to soccer clubs and other extremists. These are all standard Brezhnev-era techniques.

More innovation in the Putin era has gone into developing new techniques for channeling protest. The collapse of the Soviet social model removed many of the tools of control used in the Brezhnev era. However, with much trial and error, the Putin administration has developed a new set of tools for infl uencing both the capacity of people to protest and how protest appears in the media. A key element of this is control over the major electronic media, whether directly through state ownership or through the manipulation of private owners. Manipulation of the media has been well documented elsewhere (Mickiewicz 2008 , Oates 2006 ), so I focus here on another aspect, efforts to develop tools to control civil society, and NGOs in particular, and to develop new ersatz social movements that can rally support for the regime in a moment of crisis or challenge.

I illustrate these arguments by looking in detail at two case studies of repression under Putin, focusing in particular on the pensioners’ movement and on an assortment of oppositionists ranging from liberals, antiglobalists, anarchists, and others that began to coalesce in the aftermath of the pension-ers’ protests in 2005.

Putin, Protest, and Print Dresses

Known to participants as the sitsevaia revoliutsiia – evoking cheap cotton print dresses worn by elderly women in the Soviet era – Russia’s very own color revolt consisted of a wave of largely spontaneous protests on the part of pensioners against changes in the benefi ts system that came into effect on

8 See also Earl ( 2003 ).


January 1, 2005. Although the protests did not come close to bringing down the regime, or even the government for that matter, the events of January and February 2005, came hard on the heels of the Orange events in Ukraine and played a crucial role in alerting the Putin administration to the need to develop a new strategy for insulating its rule against challenges from below.

The source of the trouble was the blandly titled Federal Law No. 122, “On Implementing Changes in Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation.” Introduced by the federal government and passed in August 2004 with the overwhelming support of the dominant pro-Putin party United Russia , this omnibus bill included important changes to the system for paying benefi ts of various kinds to large numbers of Russian citizens. In particular, the law, which became known as the “monetization ” law, was intended to replace in-kind benefi ts with cash payments for a range of items. This would generate an infl ow of cash to pay for new investments. As simple as it sounds, however, there were serious political complications.

First, the law would take from pensioners the right to free public transpor-tation. 9 This meant eliminating rights long held by the most politically mobi-lized section of the populace. It is a regularity of post-Communist society that the life cycles of protest common to capitalist societies, in which young people tend to play a predominant role, are turned on their head. In post-Commu-nism, older people tend to be both more ideologically motivated to protest and more available in terms of the opportunity cost of their time (Hurst and O’Brien 2002 ). Unlike the younger generation of Russian citizens brought up in the chaotic environment of the post-Communist years, older Russians were politically socialized in an era in which the working class was the backbone of the regime. Though often called on to make great sacrifi ces in “the con-struction of socialism,” this section of society had also come to have high expectations of the state. Not only are the pensioners of 2005 the generation of the so-called “social compact” of the Brezhnev era, in which full employ-ment, job security, and a paternalistic state were part of the authoritarian bargain (Pravda 1981 ); many of the organizers were also people rewarded or honored by the Soviet state for service in war, in raising children, or for their contributions to the economy. Though by 2005 most of the social compact had been dismantled, the right to free transportation and other benefi ts were among its last remnants and, as earned privileges, carried a special signifi -cance. Consequently, in ending free access to services for a group dominated by old-age pensioners, the authorities were taking a substantial political risk.

Second, in implementing the changes, the Federal government sought to divest itself of responsibility for benefi ts and allow each region to set the terms under which monetary compensation would be paid. This approach had been useful to the government in the past. Arguably at least, decentralization might have some policy benefi ts, bringing detailed local knowledge to bear on issues with signifi cant local wrinkles. In addition, decentralization had the political

9 Versiya , No. 1 (324), January 10–16, 2005.


benefi t of putting regional governments into the fi ring line over an unpopular change in federal law. This blurring of the lines of responsibility made blame for the changes harder to allocate and so should have tended to have a damp-ening effect on protest (Javeline 2003 ).

However, the benefi ts of decentralization came with signifi cant, and unan-ticipated, costs. One was that regional authorities had little incentive to fully replace in-kind benefi ts with cash, and in most places, replacement was only partial. Second, the Kremlin was not able to ensure that local authorities were appropriately prepared, especially in the context of the virtual revolution in center-regional relations that Putin had been pushing through (see Chapter 6 ). As Leonid Roketskii, chair of the Federation Council Committee on local self-management, put it: “Everyone was thinking about the change in powers between the regions and the center, and the [new system for] the appointment of governors. Local authorities were occupied with thinking about their own fate and prepared nothing.” 10

Another key problem was that in Russia’s two largest cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, responsibility was split between the city authorities and sepa-rate regional bodies responsible for the surrounding regions. This meant that many people who had customarily traveled at no cost in and out of the cities themselves were no longer able to afford to travel across jurisdictional lines. It is no coincidence that some of the largest and most disruptive protests in this cycle took place in the town of Khimki , a suburb of Moscow but administered by Moscow Region rather than the Moscow City authorities.

Nevertheless, the changes in the benefi ts system included in Law 122 passed largely under the radar with no major public outcry during the balmy month of August. It was only after the new regulations came into effect on January 1, 2005, that the full implications of the law started to become clearer to those affected.

The fi rst hints of trouble appeared in St. Petersburg during a January 9 demonstration ostensibly intended to commemorate the Bloody Sunday mas-sacre that had taken place in the city in 1905. The protest organizer, Mikhail Druzhininskii , a tram driver and independent activist, intended the event to provide a forum for expressing discontent over the benefi ts reform. In advance of the demonstration, Druzhininskii turned his tram into a touring political propaganda machine, offering free rides and handing out fl yers for the pro-test. There was a willing audience among St. Petersburg’s elderly population, because free transportation was to be replaced with a monthly grant of 250 rubles ($8), when a monthly travel pass cost 660 rubles ($22).

The January 9 demonstration went as planned, providing an opportu-nity for informal networking, and an agreement was reached to hold another meeting, the following Friday, January 14, 2005. This time, the meeting was to be held without offi cial permission at the city administration in Smolnyi. Around 200 people, mostly pensioners, showed up, and the mood was angry.

10 Kommersant , No. 3, January 13, 2005.


The senior citizens were joined by small numbers of young people from Youth Iabloko and the NBP . Participants at both meetings worked hard to get the message out that more protests would be held, contacting networks of friends and colleagues by telephone, and telling neighbors in person.

The momentum of protest in St. Petersburg was given a major boost by events elsewhere. On January 10, “several hundred” residents of the town of Khimki (on the outskirts of Moscow) had blocked Leningrad Shosse, the main thoroughfare from the airport into central Moscow. Leafl ets had been distributed the day before by the local Union of Pensioners calling on people to gather at the city administration building. According to Kommersant , “sev-eral hundred gathered at the anointed time in the square, but there was no-one there to organize a meeting. So spontaneously, the idea was born to block the Leningrad Shosse, and the crowd quickly approved. They were joined by others who had been waiting nearby for buses. … According to the partici-pants, some 5–7000 people participated in the action. According to the police, 700. Either way at 11 o’clock the traffi c jam on Leningrad Shosse stretched for several miles.” 11 Five hundred pensioners also gathered in Tol’yatti, orga-nized by the local movement, National Alliance. Singing revolutionary songs, they blocked roads, broke through armed guards into the mayor’s offi ce, and demanded the return of benefi ts. Similar protests took place in Al’met’evsk (Tatarstan ), Vladimir, and Sterlitamak (Bashkortostan), where 8,000 people blocked the roads. 12

In St. Petersburg, the protests were largely spontaneous, whereas in Moscow and Khimki , the Communist Party (KPRF) seems to have played an impor-tant role. In each case, it appears that protests were local and organized in isolation from one another. Nevertheless, the power of example was strong. By Saturday, January 15, less than a week after Druzhininskii’s fi rst small pro-test, St. Petersburg was in an uproar. Three meetings were held that day: one at Smolnyi, another at Victory Park metro, and a third at Gostinyi Dvor on St. Petersburg’s central street, Nevskii Prospekt. Only the last of these had been sanctioned by city offi cials. The meeting at Smolnyi was much larger than expected, and about 500 people set off to march down Nevskii Prospekt. They were joined by passersby along the way, until a crowd estimated at sev-eral thousand had gathered. They joined up with those meeting at Gostinyi Dvor, blocking off the two central streets of Nevskii and Sadovaia. One local paper described the scene as follows: “The joining of the two columns was very emotional, reminiscent of the fi lm scene in which the two Soviet fronts met up outside Stalingrad, people threw themselves on one another, shook hands and cried ‘Hurrah!’.” 13 The paper estimated the crowd at “not less than 10,000 people,” a fi gure that the more sober Kommersant also published. 14 At

11 Kommersant , No. 1, January 11, 2005. 12 Kommersant , No. 2, January 12, 2005. 13 Novyi Peterburg , No. 2 (713), January 20, 2005. 14 Kommersant . Druzhininskii estimated the crowd at 5,000–10,000 (Author’s interview, June

2005).


the same time, another 4,000 pensioners, with the support of young activists from Iabloko , blocked Moskovskii Prospekt.

The regular city police stood aside, but the 18th “Anti-Extremist” Division of the Anti-Organized Crime Squad (Upravlenie po Bor’be s Organizovannoi Prestupnost’iu, UBOP), picked out the young activists from the crowd. In the evening, St. Petersburg Governor, Valentina Matvienko, appeared on television promising the pensioners that they would not be abandoned, and offering each pensioner a R230 travel pass to compensate for the end of free transport.

The following day, however, Nevskii Prospekt was once again blocked from 2 p.m . until 9 p.m . The promise of travel cards had not satisfi ed the pensioners, and the slogan of the day was “Ne verim!” [We don’t believe you!]. Matvienko sent the chair of the social affairs committee of the Petersburg administration, Aleksandr Rzhanenkov, to meet with the demonstrators. He promised that the governor herself would meet with representatives of the protestors.

The pensioners put together a document listing “The Demands of the Citizens Taking Part in the Spontaneous Protest Actions of January 14–16, 2005 in St. Petersburg.” There were ten points, extending well beyond stop-ping the monetization of benefi ts to include pension increases, reinstating a popular political talk show on St. Petersburg television, and demanding a review of a court decision to jail NBP members who had occupied government offi ces in Moscow the previous year.

The meeting with Matvienko lasted more than an hour. Matvienko, a close ally of Putin, agreed to pass on the protesters’ sentiments with respect to the NBP and stressed her sympathy on the monetization issue. However, she refused to reinstate free transportation and also refused to reinstate the talk show. Though she said no repressive action would be taken, within the hour it was announced that she had given prosecutors instructions to start criminal charges against “the organizers of spontaneous meetings.” At the same time, a major fi ght broke out between demonstrators and offi cers of the 18th UBOP, and arrests were made by uniformed offi cers and by plainclothes militia men in the crowd. 15

The Response: Coercion and Channeling

Despite their surprise at the intensity of the popular reaction to the implemen-tation of Law 122, the authorities quickly adapted strategies to deal with the situation. The techniques used, successfully in the end, to contain protests, included limited public coercion targeted at activists, with some broader, less visible coercion taking place quietly after demonstrations had ended. Coercion was backed by measures to limit demonstrations to much more stringently controlled and intimidating conditions.

Vigorous efforts were also made to channel political energies in another direction. Strict control of electronic media was used in an attempt to discredit

15 Novyi Peterburg , No. 2 (713), January 20, 2005.


organizers as negative social elements, and the authorities sought to delineate a legitimate sphere of protest over economic demands from an illegitimate sphere of attempts to politicize the situation. At the same time, the authorities began to use the resources of the state to mobilize pro-regime counterdemon-strations. Both of these techniques foreshadowed more developed repressive strategies that emerged over the next two years in the form of licensing oppo-sition and fi lling the organization space. St. Petersburg had become, accord-ing to one local commentator, “not only the main revolutionary center of the struggle against monetization , but also the region where the authorities learn to extinguish mass unrest.” 16

Coercion Already by demonstrations on January 17, the authorities, improvising on the Soviet play book, lined the streets with militia offi cers, strictly controlling every step of the demonstrators, preventing them from blocking the roads, and dragging activists out of the crowd. 17 St. Petersburg police reported mak-ing eight arrests on January 18 for conducting unapproved meetings, while Maksim Reznik , chairman of the St. Petersburg branch of Iabloko , claimed that not only young activists but pensioners who had played an organiza-tional role were also targeted. For example, 67-year-old pensioner Galina Tolmacheva , who was not a member of any political organization but had called 600 people encouraging them to participate in unauthorized protests, was arrested and allegedly beaten unconscious by police. 18

Authorities in other cities followed the same tactics. For example, in Novosibirsk , Aleksandr Tarkov , local leader of the Russian Party of Pensioners, was arrested and fi ned R1,000 for violating picketing procedures. Tarkov had been involved in organizing a pensioner’s protest of more than 500 that blocked the city’s main street for two hours. Police allowed the road blockade to take place and refrained from using force to break up the meeting, but the organiz-ers were issued with administrative indictments after the demonstration. 19

Channeling Vigorous efforts were also made to channel citizens away from protest by using control of the electronic media to make a distinction between trouble-makers and instigators, who were supposedly behind the protests, and the innocent pensioners who were being duped into participating. Anchors on St. Petersburg city television, Kanal 5 , condemned the protests as a provoca-tion on the part of extremists and warned pensioners against getting involved. One man, 79-year-old Aleksandr Aiol , had been killed by an impatient driver in the attempt to block Moskovsky Prospect. The TV station blamed the

16 Kommersant , No. 6, January 18, 2005. 17 Kommersant , No. 6, January 18, 2005. 18 RFE/RL, January 25, 2005, and author’s interview with Reznik, June 2005. 19 RAI Novosti, Johnson’s Russia List, 9045.


death on “the puppetmasters of Iabloko and the extremists of the NBP. ” 20 City spokesmen vowed to track down the organizers behind the protest. 21

This approach of drawing a distinction between legitimate economic com-plaints on the one hand and illegitimate politicization on the other was repeated in the state-controlled electronic media throughout Russia. In response to the Khimki protests, the Acting Governor of Moscow Oblast blamed “extrem-ists” for indulging in provocations and warned that “our law enforcement organs have videotapes of all those people younger than pension age who are traveling back and forth from city to city, inciting the population to close streets and engage in other violations of the law.” Federal Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin also blamed young activists, and in particular members of the Communist Party (KPFR) and NBP. 22

The authorities also sought to regain control of the streets by launching their own set of pro-government demonstrations. Again adapting a technique from the Soviet period, considerable efforts were expended to “show” that there was popular support for the monetization reforms. United Russia’s local party organizations were issued with instructions to outdo the protesters in numbers participating in demonstrations and marches. The weekend of March 12–13 witnessed a major political counteroffensive on the part of the authorities, with pro-government demonstrations taking place in cities across the Russian Federation. This made for the intriguing spectacle of competing opposition, political party, and government demonstrations across the country.

In St. Petersburg, United Russia was instructed by Moscow to produce 10,000 people for a demonstration in support of the reforms. However, local

20 Smena , No. 5 (23809), January 17, 2005; Komsomol’skaia Pravda v Sankt-Peterburge , No. 2(77)-p/6(23440)-p, January 17, 2005.

21 The rhetoric of innocent but irrational pensioners, predominantly women, manipulated by out-siders is reminiscent of the Soviet Communist Party’s response to women’s mobilization against collectivization in the 1930s. For more on women’s revolts (or babii bunty ) and the response of Soviet authorities, see Viola ( 1996 ).

22 RFE/RL, January 25, 2005. Despite these claims, it seems much more likely that national politi-cal parties like the KPRF and even the NBP tried to exploit the protests for political capital rather than organizing them. The initial protests were largely spontaneous, organized by local pen-sioners themselves, with some participation from activists like Druzhininskii. In St. Petersburg, this was undoubtedly the case, and in other cities, local initiatives also took national parties by surprise. Julie Corwin, writing for RFE/RL on January 25, cites the following example: “64-year-old Olga Fedorova, who is facing administrative proceedings regarding her role in Khimki protests held in Moscow Oblast, said that ‘all the talk about ‘young instigators’ is rub-bish.’ Fedorova said she telephoned some of her acquaintances about the 10 January meeting at the Leningrad Highway and didn’t expect more than 20 people to be there. According to police records, around 2,000 people took part. When she arrived with a megaphone in hand, people approached her asking if she was in charge; but she arrived after the highway was blocked. The police picked her up the next day in the hallway of her apartment building. She denied having been at the demonstration, but the police told her that they had her image on fi lm … Fedorova supports Viktor Anpilov’s Working Russia Party, but her motivation to protest was more per-sonal than political. With a 1,500 ruble ($54) monthly pension, she could no longer afford her daily visits to relatives in the city of Moscow.”


United Russia activists were able to organize a crowd of no more than 4,000 to gather on March 13 outside of the Petersburg Legislative Assembly. Moreover, the pro-government rally was repeatedly interrupted by “gate-crashers” from the opposition. The Speaker of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, Vadim Tiul’panov , was hit by snowballs and a couple of eggs thrown by NBP mem-bers, who were promptly arrested. Members of Iabloko and a youth group called Moving Without Putin also tried to unfurl anti-Putin banners at the meetings. They were arrested and fi ned R500. 23

Outside of highly mobilized St. Petersburg, the largest competing protests were in Moscow. On Saturday, February 12, in Lakuzhskaya Square, the KPRF, NBP, and Avantguard of Red Youth (AKM) organized a protest of about 3,000 people. They demanded the end of monetization and the resigna-tion of the government. 24 A parallel, small Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR ) meeting, with about 150 people, made no demands but handed out free tea, coffee, hot food, and travel tickets worth 50, 100, 500, and 1,000 roubles.

The pro-government United Russia meeting on the central Tverskaya Street was much larger, attracting about 20,000 people. In this crowd were workers from the city sanitation department, who drew the attention of journalists. One told a journalist from Kommersant that they were told to attend and to bring “fi ve to ten people each. When the boss asks such things, there is no question of whether to go or not. Everyone has a family they need to feed.” Other participants included students from local higher education establish-ments. One student, who gave his name as Aleksandr, reported that they had been told to go by the Dean’s offi ce, and that “failure to attend could lead to problems.” At Triumfalnaya Square stood tens of buses bringing in residents from outside of Moscow and the surrounding regions. Whereas some march-ers openly expressed their support for Putin, most were unwilling to talk to journalists. Attempts by journalists to talk with the demonstrators were cut off by minders. One woman in a fur coat fended off journalists saying, “leave my guys alone, they’ve just fi nished their shift and aren’t giving interviews.”

The pattern of dueling protests was repeated across Russia. In Omsk, 3,000 demonstrated for Putin. The crowd consisted mostly of fi rst-year students from colleges and their teachers, whereas the opposition put together a crowd of 5,000 activists from the KPRF, Iabloko , SPS , the Movement in Support of the Army , the Confederation of Labor , and the Union of Christian Democrats of Russia . In Voronezh , 4,000 gathered, organized by local Communists, and demonstrated outside local state television demanding air time for the Communists and “an end to the baseless fl attery of the authorities.”

23 Kommersant , St. Petersburg 25/P, February 14, 2005. The material in the following paragraphs on the events of February 12 and 13 is based on reports in the same newspaper.

24 One of the more creative, if reactionary, of the slogans ran “Nam ne nuzhen Putin Vova, nam by Stalina zhivogo.” This slogan uses the diminutive of Vladimir, Vova, to create a rhyme that roughly translates as “We don’t need Vova Putin, we need Stalin livin’.” The march also used the symbolism of the 1905 Revolution as a rallying cry.


In Irkutsk, the local KPRF organized seven opposition pickets, whereas United Russia offi cials met their quota by organizing a meeting at the hockey stadium half an hour before the popular local team Baikal-Energiya was to play. Similar parallel demonstrations took place in Lipetsk, Cheboksary, Ufa, Nizhny Novgorod , Saratov, and Tula. Finally, in Novosibirsk , the KPRF put together twenty meetings of 100 people each in temperatures of minus twenty degrees Celsius. Governor Vladimir Nikolaev prevented the protesters from entering the main square of the town on the grounds that an agricultural fair had been organized. United Russia, by contrast, had no trouble in organizing their 500-person demonstration in the main square.

In addition to repression and counterorganizing, offi cial tactics to demo-bilize the pensioners’ protests included blame shifting and concessions. Putin himself was quick to blame the (his!) government for errors in implementation and put out a statement on January 16 saying that “he had already charged the Russian government with ‘correcting the law on monetization’ and that situation was under control.” 25 The government, for its part, blamed the problem on mistakes in implementation of monetization by regional author-ities. Federal Minister for Health and Social Development Mikhail Zurabov announced, with impressive precision, that almost all of the 14,442,298 peo-ple owed monetization payments from the Federal government had received them. 26

At the local level, attempts were made to demobilize protest by bureaucra-tizing the confl ict. Speaker of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly Vadim Tiul’panov set up a committee of deputies and representatives of civil soci-ety to deal with the issue. The aim was delay rather than action, and the United Russia representatives on the committee maintained a consistently pro-government line. Among other things, they rejected the proposal to ask the Constitutional Court about the legitimacy of the monetization bill, thus breaking a promise made to demonstrators. The attitude of the legislators emerged clearly when committee chairman and United Russia member Igor Mikhailov reminded the representatives that “I am the householder here. You are guests.” Mikhailov then insisted on the meeting being held behind closed doors. 27

Limited real concessions also came. In St. Petersburg , the Legislative Assembly declared a moratorium on implementation of Law 122 until February 15 and after that date allowed pensioners to buy a monthly travel pass at a discounted price equal to the monetary payments they would receive. 28 In Voronezh , acting governor Sergei Naumov signed a decision requiring private bus drivers to take welfare recipients for free and in return promised the bus companies compensation from the city budget. 29

25 Komsomol’skaia Pravda v Sankt Peterburge , No. 2(77)-p/6(23400), January 17, 2005. 26 Kommersant , No. 16, February 1, 2005. 27 Kommersant , No. 19, February 4, 2005. 28 Kommersant , No. 24, February 11, 2005. 29 Kommersant , No. 19, February 4, 2005.


Perhaps the best summary of the government’s tactics was offered by prom-inent political commentator Yulia Latynina in her column in the Moscow Times :

Russians have taken to the streets for the fi rst time in many years. It is particularly interesting to observe the protesters through the lens of state television, which showed us that: One, there were no demonstrations protesting the end of welfare benefi ts. There were only demonstrations in favor of reform. Two, if there were protest demonstrations, there were orchestrated by certain malicious and subversive elements serving a particu-lar agenda. Three, President Vladimir Putin personally made sure that any reasonable demands from the protesters were met. 30

Gradually this combination of coercion, channeling, and concessions began to work. Participation in demonstrations dwindled, even in St. Petersburg. Despite the efforts of the activists and oppositionists, the rallies became smaller, and pensioners returned to their lives. The fi rst large and radical challenge to Putin melted away almost as quickly as it had begun. Aleksandr Shurskov , founder of an internet-based anti-Putin organization Oborona (Defense) and leader of Young Iabloko in St. Petersburg, agreed with other civil society leaders that the decline was due to a combination of control of the press, branding dem-onstrators as extremists, and some real concessions to economic demands. “Though we tried to push things in a political direction, and people at the rallies supported political slogans, by the beginning of March there were no more mass protests, and no more blocking of streets. The only people who came to demonstrations were party members. Political events no longer drew much attention, so we took events in a more theatrical direction.” 31 It is to this more theatrical direction, the second phase of “youth-dominated” protest activity, and the regime’s response that we now turn.

After the Revolution: The New Politics of the Streets

Although the January protests dwindled away, they had a signifi cant lasting effect on politics under Putin. The protests marked for the fi rst time in the Putin era the emergence of a genuine, radical opposition. This was important in itself, but the interpretative context used by both the regime and oppo-sitionists to analyze what had happened also helped lead to real changes in the organizational ecology of movements in Russia. The opposition began to coalesce for the fi rst time into a diverse, loosely organized, but nonetheless more cohesive and organized movement to oppose the Putin administration. As I show in this section, this opposition was more creative in its tactics, more independent of elite support, probably more numerous, and certainly possessed of more potential for creating a national movement than any other protesters since the Yeltsin era.

30 Moscow Times , February, 2, 2005. 31 Author’s interview, July 2005.


The events of January had suggested the limits of Putin’s power and the vulnerability of the regime to changes in public sentiment. As Kurnosova of OGF put it, the January events made it clear that “everything depends upon Putin’s artifi cially high approval ratings. Once there is a fall in his popular-ity, new leaders will appear and the ‘nomenklatura’ will abandon him.” 32 All activists interviewed in St. Petersburg expressed variations on this basic point and underlined the need for openness to a range of challenges to the regime. The experience of January consequently forged a new sense of solidarity and tolerance among different factions of the opposition and a new understanding of the need for unity in the face of the regime. This was a signifi cant departure from before the 2005 protests and marked a new stage in politics in Russia.

In St. Petersburg, this new understanding took an institutional form with the creation of the Petersburg Civic Opposition (Peterburgskoe grazhdanskoe soprotivlenie, PGS), a coordinating committee uniting anti-Putin groups to discuss forthcoming issues and tactics. The group involved the major oppo-sition forces in the city, including political parties like Iabloko , the National Bolshevik Party, Nash Vybor, and the Social Democratic Party , independent trade unionists from various sectors, and about twenty social organizations. This alliance became the basis for subsequent opposition alliances like the Other Russia movement and the United Civic Front (OGF).

The PGS was an alliance of some pretty unlikely bedfellows, united in their disdain for the Putin regime and its close allies in the St. Petersburg adminis-tration. Some were principled liberals who saw themselves as one day work-ing on the side of (a better) government, others were oppositionists to the core, anarchists and streetfi ghters. Neither the KPRF- nor the FNPR -affi liated unions joined the PGS. 33 The approach of the PGS and its member organiza-tions was to campaign around a fl exible set of issues that they felt might give them leverage. A major issue in St. Petersburg, as it has been in Moscow , is over building projects, and in particular the development of existing green spaces within the city. Other issues include reform of housing services, automobile insurance, and control of the press. Coordination was light, and actions were led by individual groups with information sharing and coordination.

A key element in the united opposition in St. Petersburg and elsewhere was the rehabilitation of the National Bolshevik Party (NBP) from neo-fascist pariah to leading organizer and provocateur on the “democratic” left. This rehabilitation has arisen in part from a change of strategy on the part of the

32 Author’s interview, July 2005. 33 The KPRF in St. Petersburg is not involved because it maintains largely cordial relations with

St. Petersburg governor Valentina Matviienko dating back to her days as a Komsomol leader. Former offi cial labor unions in the Federation of Independent Trade Unions (FNPR) also keep their distance from the PGS. According to Maksim Reznik, Chair of the St. Petersburg branch of Yabloko and coordinator of the PGS, the unions will not participate in PGS events and are nervous of any outside participation in their events. According to Reznik, the unions are limited to coordinating protest with the elites and the police as necessary to extract money. Author’s interview, July 2005.


NBP, and in part as a result of a recognition by others in the opposition of the power of the NBP to mobilize and excite young people. The NBP was founded on a curious mixture of Marxism, militant conservative Eurasianism, and xenophobic Russian nationalism. However, in 2005, it sought to move toward more “general social democratic principles: free elections, free choice and social responsibility.” 34 Whatever the reality of the NBP’s conversion, liberal civil society activists in St. Petersburg noted that they had at least stopped chanting xenophobic slogans within earshot! 35

Though the NBP itself has now been outlawed, and many of its activists are in prison, the party has played a key role in reinvigorating street protest as a vital form of politics in post-Communist Russia. NBP activists graduated from throwing food or fl owers at prominent fi gures such as former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasianov (now an ally of the opposition), then-NATO Secretary-General Lord George Robertson, Central Election Commission Chairman Aleksandr Veshniakov , fi lm director Nikita Mikhalkov, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Great Britain’s Prince Charles, to more sophisticated forms of direct action, including blocking highways and “fl ash mobbing.” 36 Perhaps the most infamous of NBP’s fl ash mobbings came on August 2, 2004, when NBP activists occupied the offi ces of Health and Social Development Minister Mikhail Zurabov , and on December 14, 2004, when they occupied the visi-tors’ room of the Presidential Administration. 37

These tactics illustrate a key point about the diffi culty for authoritarians in hybrids who are attempting to create defeat-proof regimes. Whereas it takes large numbers of oppositionists to create problems in elections, relatively small numbers of protesters can generate great embarrassment for the authorities and create a real political problem.

34 Author’s interview with Andrey Dmitriev, leader St. Petersburg NBP, July 2005. 35 The NBP are infamous for a number of slogans, but perhaps most notorious is their chant,

“Stalin, Beria, GULAG!” 36 The list of grandees targeted by the NBP comes from RFE/RL, April 29, 2005. Flash mobbing

is defi ned as a large group of people who appear at a predetermined location, perform some specifi c action, and then disappear. The tactic is believed to have fi rst appeared in New York in 2003 and has been widely emulated around the world. Participants communicate by internet and cell phone to coordinate time, place, and actions. For more information, see Sean Savage’s website at www.cheesebikini.com . Savage claims to have invented the term. See also the Social Issues Research Council at http://www.sirc.org/articles/fl ash_mob.shtml . Flash mobbing appears to have originated from surrealist rather than political inspiration, and originally, participants would simultaneously carry out quite meaningless actions. The SIRC website quotes Savage as saying, “If anyone tells you they know what the point is, they either don’t know what they’re talk-ing about or they’re lying.” However, the NBP and other youth groups in Russia have used it as a potent political tool.

37 According to the NBP, eight activists are currently serving terms of two to four years for involve-ment in the occupation of the Presidential Administration visitors’ room, and fi ve are serving similar terms as a result of the Health Ministry occupation. In all, the NBP lists twenty-three of its activists as currently being “political prisoners.” http://nbp-info.ru/cat18/index.html (accessed July 18, 2006).


Other youth groups have imitated the NBP in adapting surrealism and theater to political ends. Oborona uses a mix of street theater, enormous dolls and puppets, and burning of bizarre effi gies in an attempt, according to Aleksandr Shurskov , founder of Oborona in St. Petersburg, “to wage a war of language and ideas, to help people understand things like corrup-tion, the war [in Chechnya ] and terrorism and to see for themselves the con-nections between them.” Oborona, which has contacts with activists from Serbia , Ukraine , Georgia , and Belarus , also undertakes activities in higher education establishments, running politically controversial fi lms and hold-ing discussion clubs. The aim of all these activities is to sidestep the political domination by the regime of traditional mass media outlets and to use direct contact and the internet as tools for mobilizing students and other young people. 38

The new civic opposition represents a major change in the organizational ecology under Putin, and consequently, we have seen real changes in the nature and volume of contention. It is diffi cult to assess systematically whether quan-titatively these groups carry out more protest activity than before. Short of access to the kind of data on which the previous chapters of this book are based, it is extremely hard to say. Nevertheless, it is clear that the organiza-tional and political character of protest has changed considerably. No longer is protest dominated by workers with economic demands, involved in bar-gaining games among a divided elite. Instead, there are real, widespread, and numerous opposition groups actively challenging the Russian state wherever they can.

In addition, the variety of protests and protest participants is much greater than at any time since Putin was installed as president. For example, in March 2006, an estimated 125,000 demonstrators gathered in more than 360 cities and towns to protest increases in utility prices and rents, while on February 12, 2006, thousands of car owners rallied in 22 cities to protest the jailing of a railway worker who failed to get out of the way of a speeding car carry-ing the Altai region’s governor. 39 The protests were organized by Freedom of Choice , a motorists’ lobbying group, claiming to represent the “backbone of society”: people between twenty-fi ve and fi fty years old who have a car, a cel-lular telephone, and Internet access. 40 Moreover, in early 2007, activists across Russia organized a series of high-profi le demonstrations, called Dissenters’ Marches , in Nizhnyi Novgorod, St. Petersburg , and Moscow These events were just part of more than 2,900 different protest events attended by more

38 Author’s interview, July 2005. 39 The governor’s Mercedes crashed into a tree, killing the governor, his bodyguard, and his

driver. 40 Both protests were reported by RFE/RL, March 7, 2006. For a detailed analysis of Freedom of

Choice and other protest groups in the Putin era, see Samuel A. Greene, “Making Democracy Matter: Addressing State-Society Engagement in Post-Communist Transition” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 30–September 2, 2007).


than 800,000 people in 2007 alone. 41 Clearly, St. Petersburg is far from the only place in Russia where a civic opposition has been born, and activists in different cities are capable of much greater coordination than before. Although reliable, comparable cross-national data on protests are hard to come by, mak-ing it impossible to say much about whether this level of protest is a lot or a little when compared with other countries, it seems likely that this represents a much higher number of protest events than at any time since Putin fi rst took offi ce.

On the other hand, the elite is now extraordinarily unifi ed, and unless the protestors can attract to their side signifi cant elements of the ruling elite, pro-test is likely to remain limited to those excluded from or dissatisfi ed with the politics of the Putin era, with limited capacity to draw mass support. Despite substantial international attention, the Dissenters’ Marches were small and easily, if quite violently, dispersed by the police. Moreover, even in their rel-ative stronghold of St. Petersburg, the democratic fraction in the Legislative Assembly included only six deputies. Broader support for the civic opposition comes only on a case-by-case basis, so, as the activists themselves recognize, the government is secure unless it makes some sort of major mistake. The han-dling of the benefi ts issue was one such situation, but even then the threat to the regime was not existential. It made Putin and his entourage nervous, cer-tainly, especially given the timing following events in Ukraine . However, with-out a split in the elite and an issue on which the survival of the regime would be directly at stake – both elements of the “Orange” uprising in Ukraine – the Putin administration (as opposed to the Russian government) was never in serious trouble.

It is striking though, how quickly, given the right issue, supporters came fl ocking to the side of otherwise isolated oppositionists. As the activists them-selves recognize, they are playing a game of wait-and-see, trying to highlight issues they think might resonate with the public or, as in the case of January 2005, trying to jump on the bandwagon when spontaneous public outrage emerges. In the absence of a free media and unfettered political competition, and even of reliable polling data, “pluralistic ignorance” (Kuran 1991 ) makes mass political behavior unpredictable, and vast changes of fortune remain a small but real possibility.

The administration of President Putin, for its part, also seemed to recognize that a new phase of politics in Russia began with the Sitsevaia Revolution. Having ensured the cooperation of the largest parts of organized labor, and having “tidied up” political parties and the electoral arena, the administra-tion recognized that its primary challenge now comes from the emergent civic opposition. In fact, in the years since the events of January 2005, the

41 Author’s calculations from reports on demonstrations listed at www.ikd.ru . As with all data on protests, the numbers should be treated with some caution. In particular, although data on the number of events is likely to be somewhat understated, activists tend to overstate the number of participants.


government has shown an increasing preoccupation with the opposition in general and the NGO sector in particular. To deal with this challenge, the tactics employed again include selective public repression coupled with inten-sive low-profi le repression, institutional channelling, and attempts to fi ll the organizational space with licensed, pro-regime social organizations, just as the electoral space is fi lled with licensed parties.

We have seen already in preceding sections some evidence of selective pub-lic repression in the arrests and prison sentences handed out (with signifi cant public fanfare) to NBP and other activists. In this section, I focus in more detail on the three elements of the strategy: coercion , licensing of opposi-tion through new laws governing NGO activity, and fi lling the organizational space by creating ersatz social organizations, and in particular youth groups, friendly to the Kremlin.

Coercion in Russia: Brezhnev and Putin

Part of the Putin administration’s response to the new challenges it faced on the streets was to intensify its efforts to coerce the opposition into obedience. Unsurprisingly, this has meant drawing heavily on experience from the Soviet period, though as with repertoires of protest (Tilly 1995 ), the Soviet repertoire of repression provides only a starting point from which there has been consid-erable innovation.

Under Stalin , coercion played a huge role in overall repressive strategies and was massive and brutal. Open acts of rebellion were overwhelmingly crushed, but individuals, and indeed whole populations, were also repressed “preemptively” or arbitrarily (Beissinger 2002 , Viola 1996 , 2002 ). By the Khrushchev era, however, coercion had become more bureaucratized, and systematic guidelines were developed for the application of public force. Initial responsibility lay with local party organizations in concert with local police (militia) and KGB units. If necessary, troops from the local garrison could be called in or, in the worst of cases, special units could be sum-moned upon permission from Moscow (Alexeeva and Chiladze 1985, cited in Beissinger 2002 : 331). Nevertheless, mass disturbances were far more common in the post-Stalin era than popular stereotypes of the USSR would have it, and severe force, including the use of live ammunition, was not infrequent. 42

By contrast, “in the Brezhnev and immediate post-Brezhnev years the authorities displayed a reticence to deploy severe violence against partici-pants in mass actions, although mass actions on a large scale occurred on a signifi cant number of occasions” (Beissinger 2002 : 331). Instead authorities sought to prevent public expressions of opposition using proactive interven-tion to prevent demonstrations, including detaining or harassing organizers,

42 Alexeeva and Chiladze cite eight occasions in which live ammunition was used under Khrushchev, whereas Kozlov ( 2002 ) describes major “mass uprisings” from Russia to Kazakhstan.


particularly in advance of symbolic dates, warning potential participants in advance of negative consequences, infi ltrating crowds with police informers, and blocking off potential gathering places in advance.

After largely disappearing under Yeltsin, these tactics of preventive deten-tion and harassment have once again become widely used under Putin. So common in fact is the use of this kind of action that activists have now become used to going into hiding before events in order to avoid arrest.

Preventive detention began to be used extensively in the run-up to the G8 summit in St. Petersburg in July 2006, when hundreds of people were preemp-tively arrested as part of a sustained effort on the part of the authorities to make sure that protesters would not spoil the tableau of a resurgent Russia. 43 Though it is diffi cult to estimate the number of activists subject to arrest or harassment by police and authorities at different levels before the summit, it is clear that there was a major coordinated effort to prevent potential protesters making their way either to St. Petersburg for the “alterglobalist” anti-sum-mit/Russian Social Forum, or to Moscow for the oppositionist Other Russia forum. 44 Human Rights Watch (HRW) noted tactics including “summon-ing attendees to police departments, coercing from them written promises to stay at home, planting drugs, and threatening them with administrative charges.” The NBP reported that at least thirty-six activists in thirteen cities faced harassment including beatings and arrest, and that fourteen failed to make it to Moscow for the Other Russia conference. HRW reported “dozens of others” being prevented from coming to Moscow, including local leaders of Iabloko , the People’s Democratic Union (Rossiiskii narodno-demokraticheskii soiuz), and United Civil Front . 45 The Avantguard of Red Youth (Avangard Krasnoi Molodezhi, AKM) reported that of the sixty representatives of the Moscow branch that set out for St. Petersburg, only forty got there, the rest being held by police under various pretexts.

Police efforts were not limited to those on the extreme left. In Moscow on July 10, 2006, around 1 p.m ., Anton Pominov, an activist from the Youth Civil Rights Movement (Мolodezhnoe Pravozashchitnoe Dvizhenie, MPD), was harassed by offi cers of the UBOP and the Federal Security Service (Federalnaia Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, FSB). 46 In Samara, a group of seven “anti-militarists” had a similar experience. 47 At 9 a.m . on July 10, the apartments of these

43 For articles depicting the summit as the return of Russia to a position of importance and strength on the world stage, see, among others, Helen Womack, New Statesman , July 17, 2006; Clifford A. Kupchan, Los Angeles Times , July 14, 2006; The Economist , July 5–21, 2006; Der Spiegel , July 10, 2006; C. J. Chivers, New York Times , July 16, 2006.

44 Anna G. Arutunyan, an editor of The Moscow Times , writing in The Nation on July 19, 2006, estimated that some 200 activists were arrested on their way to St. Petersburg.

45 http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2006/07/12/russia-attempts-stifl e-dissent-summit 46 This and the following two stories were provided by Libertarnii Informatsionno-Novostnoi

Kollektiv LINK (Libertarian Information-News Collective) at www.rpk.len.ru/docs/2006/ju111005.html (last accessed April 15, 2009).

47 The seven were: Daniil Vanchaev, Dmitri Dorosheko, Rita Kavtorina, Dmitri Treshchanin, Georgii Kvantrishvili, Elena Kuznetsova, and Mikhail Gangan.


seven activists were searched by offi cers of the FSB and the regional anti–organized crime unit (Regionalnoie Upravlenie po Borbe s Organizovannoi Prestupnostiu, RUBOP), their computers and literature were confi scated, and they were informed that a previous criminal investigation into “disrespect of the President” had been reopened. 48 Such stories among both high-profi le and more obscure opposition activists are legion. 49

Though these coercive tactics are very reminiscent of the Brezhnev era, the repertoire has had to evolve in some respects. In a hybrid regime, responsive, to some degree, to domestic and international opinion, observable repression requires a higher degree of legitimation than it does in a closed authoritarian regime. Consequently, the open use of force is likely to be limited to cases in which the regime fi nds it relatively easy to make a “legitimate” case. For example, physical coercion will be more common when demonstrators can be depicted as foreign agents provocateurs than when they are ordinary old-age pensioners. Furthermore, when arrests are made, prisoners are, with few exceptions, held on only administrative charges and usually rapidly released. The severity of coercion, therefore, is qualitatively less than in the Soviet era, even if the style is strongly reminiscent.

Channeling under Putin

The Brezhnevian repertoire of coercion was, of course, developed within a broader context of intensive channeling of political behavior that was designed to make overt, large-scale public coercion unnecessary. With the end of Communism as a social and economic model, this extensive network of punishments and inducements disappeared, and the task of ensuring stability with minimal coercion became, in some ways, more challenging for Russia’s authoritarian rulers. Consequently, building a new set of organizations and institutions to incentivize behavior supportive of regime goals has been a major part of the project of protecting the post-Communist political regime from disturbance from the streets. In this section, I look at two parts of this project: creating a licensed civil society and developing ersatz social move-ments in support of the regime.

48 On February 23, 2006, these seven individuals had participated in a street protest involving a dramatization depicting masked men from the “Ministry of Defense” and the “Supreme High Command.” After this event, the prosecutor’s offi ce opened a criminal investigation in connec-tion with “disrespect of the President,” though the investigation was quickly closed due to the lack of evidence that a crime had been committed.

49 Those who did manage to make it to St. Petersburg were, as is often also the case in long-standing democracies, kept far, far away from the main conference (which was taking place in the town of Strelna, about one hour from St. Petersburg by bus). Instead they were shepherded into the Kirov sports stadium on Krestovskii Island. The stadium also had the advantage of being easy for police to isolate from the rest of the city, as around 100 activists found out when they unsuccessfully tried to leave the stadium on July 15, only to fi nd their way blocked by police.


Soviet society was based on a mono-organizational model in which the party-state monopolized legitimate forms of social organization (Bunce 1999 : 22). Politics was the exclusive domain of the Communist Party and the state apparatus. Legitimate society too, though full of organizations for the pursuit of activities from hiking to chess, was monopolized. None of these groups could be independent of the party-state, but instead were actively spon-sored by it. Civil society as understood in a liberal sense not only did not exist, it was actively eliminated by the party-state. Similarly, the legitimate economy in the USSR was totally dominated by the party-state monopoly. 50

In the post-Soviet era, the absence of a mono-organizational model, of course, makes the problem of maintaining order without large-scale overt repression vastly more challenging. One element is the absence of a monopoly over social life and, in particular, civic organization. Many consequences fl ow from this, but here I mention just two. First, in the absence of this monopoly, it is hard for the regime to monitor the activities of its citizens. This means, among other things, that opposition can be fomenting and organizing without the knowledge of the authorities. Surprises are consequently much more likely than they were before.

Second, outside of the mono-organizational model, the regime loses its considerable control over economic and social status and mobility. Under Communism, almost all individuals were directly reliant on the party-state for their means of subsistence, and career advancement was dependent upon the support, or at least silence, of party offi cials. Hence the economic and social consequences of openly disobeying the regime were potentially catastrophic, and the threats and intimidation of Brezhnev’s time carried much more punch than they do now.

It is no coincidence that retaining the instruments of control over the economy has been a keen feature of some of the more hardline authoritarian regimes in the post-Communist space. In particular, Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus and Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan have limited the introduction of market mechanisms in the economy and have continued to use state alloca-tion of resources as a key tool of power. In Russia, by contrast, the state plays a much more limited role in the economy, and so any would-be strongman has a more limited set of instruments at his disposal. 51 In the semi-marketized

50 It is important to distinguish both in the economy and society between “legitimate” and “ille-gitimate” activity, because there was considerable cultural, social, and economic activity tak-ing place outside of party-state sanction. The image of a totally monopolizing party-state was always more an aspiration of the authorities than a reality. Nevertheless, the combination of monopolization of the economic, social, and political spheres meant that, as Bunce ( 1999 ) put it, “mass publics were rendered dependent on the party-state for jobs, income, consumer goods, education, housing, healthcare, and social and geographical mobility” (24), and this monopoly was used to maintain a sort of social contract in which minimum but improving standards of living were largely guaranteed in return for acquiescence with the system (Pravda 1981 ).

51 Nor has Russia moved from Communism to the less comprehensive but still politically useful model of heavy state involvement in manufacturing industry and agriculture that characterized


economic environment of Russia today, most state jobs pay poorly and welfare benefi ts are miserly, making economic threats or promises a far less powerful tool for managing politics outside of the elite. 52 It is in this context that the Kremlin has worked to create a new approach to managing the relationship between state and society that is based on licensing civil society and fi lling the organizational space with ersatz social movements. I now address each of these aspects in turn.

Licensing Civil Society The Kremlin has worked to create a system that gives the administration broad discretion over which groups and which individuals are able to operate in Russia. Groups that accept a role within the licensed system have seen their opportu-nities for funding and their institutionalized access to policy making improve signifi cantly, whereas groups that the regime deems oppositionist in orientation are either eliminated or live a tenuous existence at the mercy of the authorities.

Crucial to the new system is Federal Law No. 18-FZ, “On introducing changes to several legislative acts of the Russian Federation,” signed into law on January 10, 2006. Despite its bland name, the law introduced potentially sweeping changes to the way civil society and other nongovernmental organizations in Russia could operate. As is typical of Putin’s administration, the changes were ambiguous in nature, on the one hand promising to put NGO activities on a fi rmer footing and on the other giving the government more control over the sector.

In part, the law was intended to clean up the NGO sector, which had previously been awash with organizations that were either simply badly run or operated more as fronts for commercial or even criminal activity than as NGOs. Central to this effort were measures requiring greater transparency and improved fi nancial control. 53 Reforms like these are potentially important

import substituting industrialization (ISI). The ISI model provided parties like the PRI in Mexico with considerable discretion in the allocation of resources, allowing the creation of a relatively privileged urban working class and monopolistic organizations incorporating peasants and workers.

52 On the other hand, it would be foolish to ignore the impact of the high rates of economic growth experienced by Russia since around 2000 on regime stability. Few things breed con-fi dence and regime strength, and give more incentives to bandwagon, than economic growth rates above 5 percent per year. Moreover, capitalism does have well-known advantages from the perspective of demobilizing potential protesters. Whereas state socialism tended to homogenize and unify society, so the introduction of capitalism tends to lead to a proliferation of different interests, which divide society. Workers in particular face a disadvantage in terms of overcoming barriers to organization (Offe and Wisenthal 1980 ). These disadvantages, moreover, are more acute in the context of economic crisis and a radical restructuring of opportunities in which workers’ identities and their association with the workplace are increasingly attenuated, even if in extremis , as I showed in Chapter 3 , extreme hardship and economic injustice can help people overcome their divisions. Inside the elite, of course, as the Khodorkovskii saga amply demon-strates, targeting of individual economic interests remains extremely important.

53 Interview with Pavel Chikov, chairman of the Agora Interregional Human Rights Association, by Evgenii Natarov, June 8, 2007, www.gazeta.ru/comments/2007/06/05_x_1774893.shtml (last accessed May 15, 2009).


in developing a professionalized NGO sector capable of attracting domestic philanthropists and of playing a major role in improving the quality of life in Russia. As I discuss in Chapter 8 , this element of the law could be of consider-able benefi t to the development of the NGO sector in the medium term.

However, the other part of the administration’s strategy is to make sure that the government is able to keep NGOs, and in particular foreign and foreign-funded NGOs, on a tight rein. All NGOs have been required to re-register with the authorities, and the law provides for several grounds on which reg-istration might be refused. The reporting requirements of NGOs have been signifi cantly increased. In particular, NGOs are required to report all funds received from foreign sources and to provide details on how these are used. Government offi cials are authorized to demand documents covering internal governance, day-to-day decisions, and fi nancial oversight, and the govern-ment can send representatives to all of an organization’s meetings and events without restriction, including strictly internal meetings. 54

It is clear that the authorities have tailored the new legislation to provide them with the discretion to deal with potential threats from NGOs and what they see as the foreign sponsorship of the colored revolutions in Yugoslavia , Georgia, Ukraine , and Kyrgyzstan . The point is not the closure or detailed monitoring of the NGO sector as a whole, but rather the creation of a legisla-tive framework that can be used selectively. Most NGOs will have no trouble with the new legislation, but those who offend the authorities may well have diffi culties. As a result, the Russian authorities are literally capable of licens-ing civil society activity.

Also part of the reforms to the system for regulating civil society was a new set of incentives for groups that do not clash actively with the regime. The incentives include a system of federal and regional Public Chambers and a new system of government grants to NGOs. The Public Chambers are consultative bodies bringing together appointed local notables and representatives of civil society to advise on legislation and policy. They are intended to provide a forum for the representation of civil society as well as an institutional basis on which government-selected civic organizations can work with the authorities. The Federal Public Chamber also runs an annual NGO funding competition, which in 2009 distributed 1.2 billion rubles in presidential grants to more than 700 NGOs.

The Public Chambers have been widely criticized by Moscow -based human rights groups as an effort on the part of the government to incorporate civil society. The three-tiered composition of the Federal Public Chamber illus-trates a strong pro-regime slant: forty-two members appointed directly by the President, who in turn appoint another forty-two members, and these eighty-four together appoint the fi nal additional forty-two based on nominations

54 My analysis of the provisions of Federal Law No. 18-FZ is based on “Analysis of Law #18-FZ,” International Center for Not-for-Profi t Law, at www.icnl.org/KNOWLEDGE/news/2006/01–19_Russia_NGO_Law_Analysis.pd f (last accessed May 15, 2009).


from regional groups. The creation of such a state-sponsored body, with a composition dominated by Kremlin appointees, creates a dilemma from the perspective of those seeking to deepen democracy. Although the Public Chambers invite civic organizations into the policy-making process and give them a public forum, it is a fact that there is little or no democratic account-ability in such bodies, and Kremlin (or local state) favor can be taken away as quickly as it has been bestowed. Moreover, with signifi cant sums in state support potentially available, civil society groups will have strong incentives to maintain good relationships with the Public Chamber and the state offi cials who appoint its membership.

It is still too early to assess accurately how these new laws and institutions will work in practice, but the NGO community seems divided on their effect. 55 Moscow -based human rights groups tend to denounce them as empty shells or as efforts to incorporate civil society, whereas other civil society organiza-tions, by contrast, are willing to try and work with the new institutions. Yet the creation of such state-sponsored organs clearly does create a dilemma. Although the new laws and money invite civic organizations into the policy-making process and give them a public forum, there is little or no democratic accountability or transparency, and government favor can be used as a tool to infl uence NGO activities. 56 For many, probably most, NGOs, the trade-offs are small and easy to accept, but for those whom the state views with suspi-cion, the changes represent more of a threat than an opportunity.

Filling the Organizational Space: Ersatz Social Movements In addition to its efforts to regulate existing organizations, a major innovation on the part of the Putin administration has been the creation of an organi-zational infrastructure that the state can call on to support its goals and to provide mass mobilization in favor of the regime, if needed, directly counter-ing any challenge from the streets. This has meant creating organizations that look in many ways like social movements but that are closely associated with leading fi gures in the regime and take their directions from the highest level of the state. Such ersatz social movements are a key feature of the Putin regime’s redesign of state-society relations.

Although state-sponsored organizations in general, and youth organiza-tions in particular, are nothing new in Russia, from a practical perspective, creating successful pro-regime organizations in the current era is a quite dif-ferent task than it was under the communist regime. In the Soviet period, orga-nizations were relatively easy to create and control. Appointments to all jobs of any political importance required approval from above (the nomenklatura

55 In its years of operation, the Public Chamber showed signs of making a positive contribution to national life, proposing amendments to many draft bills, including bills on NGOs, chari-ties, the armed forces, and education. Federal Law No. 131, “On the General Organizational Principles of Local Self-Government in the Russian Federation,” did not fully come into effect until January 1, 2009.

56 The potential of these reforms is considered in more detail in Chapter 8 .


system), so not only were organizers preapproved by the authorities, but mem-bership in organizations like the Communist Youth League, the Komsomol , also proved to be an important recruiting ground and pathway to success for ambitious young people. Moreover, since the state controlled virtually all resources in society, funding for activities of any size required state support.

In the post-Communist era, by contrast, managing civil society, and youth organizations in particular, requires a more delicate touch. Barriers to entry for nonstate, and even antistate, organizations are considerably lower than before, meaning that pro-regime groups now have to compete with other forces. This means that the state has to design a movement that people would actually want to join. In addition, there is more political value to be gained from an organization perceived to be somewhat independent, and so political entrepreneurs wanting to create ersatz social movements have to be circum-spect about how close their links are with the government. Consequently, the process of creating pro-Kremlin organizations has been subject to experimen-tation and learning over time.

The Kremlin’s fi rst venture into the youth movement market was the orga-nization Moving Together (Idushchie vmeste). Founded by the brothers Vasilii and Boris Iakemenko in 2000, out of their “spontaneous admiration” for President Putin, Moving Together rapidly gained a reputation as the “Putin Youth” movement and drew close and approving attention from the Kremlin. With the backing of the authorities, it enjoyed a rapid rise between 2000 and 2003 and brought its founders to the attention of Kremlin ideologists Vladislav Surkov and Gleb Pavlovskii.

Despite these early efforts, however, 2004 and 2005 saw the rise of ideolog-ically motivated opposition youth groups like the NBP , Youth Iabloko , Moving Without Putin , and Say NO!, as well as the apparent role of youth groups in overthrowing governments in Serbia , Georgia , and Ukraine . As a result, Surkov and Vasilii Iakemenko decided a change of course was needed and sought to develop a more aggressive organization with a greater focus on ideology, identity formation, and the confl ation of self-interest and ideology. 57 Through a series of seminars and focus groups, a new approach was devised, and in March 2005, Moving Togethe r announced the creation of a new organization, Nashi (Ours). 58 Since its fi rst public appearance in May 2005, when 50,000 young people par-ticipated in World War II victory celebrations, Nashi has evolved into a hugely successful operation. Through its wide network of “regional commissars” and annual summer training camps, Nashi has channeled a new generation of ambi-tious young people into pro-state organizing that involves activities as varied as visiting war veterans, bringing tens of thousands of young people into the streets

57 Doug Buchacek, “Nasha Pravda, Nashe Delo: The Mobilization of the Nashi Generation in Contemporary Russia” (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2006), 18. Vladislav Surkov, the Putin administration’s chief ideologist, is seen as the father and sponsor of Nashi. For a detailed analysis of the relationship between Surkov and Nashi, see Buchacek ( 2006 : 58–60).

58 For a detailed analysis of Nashi’s ideological positions, see Buchacek ( 2006 : 21–31).


for pro-regime demonstrations, harassing foreign diplomats, and providing pro-tection from hazing for army draftees through the program Nasha armiia. 59

Moreover, Nashi has used its closeness to the Kremlin to attain not just a signifi cant membership across the Russian Federation but also signifi cant fi nancial support from major Russian companies. As Nashi founder Vasilii Iakemenko has said, “We ask [businesses] to support the creation of a new political and managerial elite for the country. If they refuse, it’s considered unpatriotic.” Funds for patriotic education are also available to Nashi (and other organizations) from the State Program for the Patriotic Education of Citizens, which allocated 497.8 million rubles ($17.5 million) to fund military-style training, patriotic song writing, and other efforts to make patriotism “the spiritual backbone” of the nation (Buchacek 2006 : 57–61).

Nashi’s moment of greatest prominence came in the election cycle run-ning from the Duma election of December 2007 to the presidential election of May 2008, when Vladimir Putin was succeeded by his chosen heir, Dmitri Medvedev. For many observers, this was precisely the moment for which Nashi had been created. As Vladimir Frolov of the Fund for Effective Politics put it, “If push comes to shove, Nashi ’s job will be to occupy every public square in front of every public building of importance,” so that “CNN would have a nice picture with the Kremlin in the background.” 60

During the election period, Nashi acted almost as the personal mobiliz-ing wing of President Putin, working hard to reassure anxious voters that Russia would remain under Putin’s watchful eye, and matching the efforts of the opposition demonstration for demonstration. Moreover, in case of any mishaps, Nashi had prepared leafl ets on November 30, 2007 , noting the “crushing victory” of United Russia in the December 2 elections and calling on young supporters of Putin to take to the streets on December 3 to head off the “colored revolution” that was allegedly being prepared. 61

With the elections over, and the imaginary revolution safely averted, many of Nashi’s leading fi gures took their reward of higher offi ce, including seats as United Russia members in the new Duma. Vasilii Iakemenko himself took up a new post as head of the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs (Rosmolodezhy). 62 As a result, most observers now predicted a decline in Nashi’s fortunes, and the arrest of some fi fty overzealous Nashi protesters at demonstrations in front of the European Commission offi ces in Moscow seemed to confi rm the organization’s fall from grace. 63

59 Currently, Nashi lists thirty cities in which it claims signifi cant representation. See www.nashi.su (last accessed May 15, 2009).

60 As cited (Buchacek 2006 : 62). 61 “Ten’ sokrushitel’noi pobedy” (“The Shadow of a Crushing Victory”), November 30, 2007, at

www.gazeta.ru/politics/elections2007/articles/2366780.shtml (last accessed May 15, 2009). 62 Ekspert , 617, no. 28 (July 14, 2008). 63 “‘Nashi’ poshli po puti ‘Nesoglasnykh’” (“‘Ours’ Took the Path of ‘Dissenters’”), January 9,

2008, at www.gazeta.ru/politics/2008/01/09_a_2531442.shtml (last accessed May 15, 2009).


However, if the argument I have proposed is correct, then maintaining the appearance of support for the incumbent elite is important even outside of elec-tions, and it is likely that Nashi, or something like it, will be retained even in the postelection period. It is too early to know for certain, but there are signs that Nashi is going to be with us for some time. In the 2008 competition for federal support for NGOs, Nashi was awarded more than 15 million rubles, a sum that many thought more than adequate to maintain and even “reanimate” the organi-zation (Nashi had received 6 million rubles in the same competition the previous year). 64 Moreover, on November 2, 2008, Nashi planned a rally of some 15,000 activists in front of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. The demonstration itself was organized by a new “patriotic contour” of Nashi, called Stal’ (Steel), and made up of activists from the Nasha armiia program. Other new “contours” include an the “orthodox contour” formed with the blessing of the Russian Orthodox Church; an electoral contour, Nashi vybory, headed by Duma Deputy Sergei Belokonev; an “antifascist” contour, a “President’s Messenger” contour, and a schoolchildren’s wing called Myshki (Little Mice). 65

In creating Nashi, and developing close links to other youth organizations, such as Molodaia gvardiia (Young Guard) and Mestnye (Locals), the Kremlin has moved much further than before toward developing tools for channeling mobilization. By actively competing for adherents in a crowded fi eld, such movements are much more than simply branches of the state. Instead they are ersatz social movements. They partly fi t defi nitions of social movements: link-ing people together through more or less dense networks, developing common frames in response to perceived injustices, and making demands on (often foreign) governments and other actors. Yet they differ from social movements in that they are deliberately designed, created, organized, supported, and – if need be – marginalized by important regime players.

Russian Repression in the Broader Context

Like all political regimes, hybrids face challenges from protest and contentious action in the streets. In this chapter, I have argued that hybrids are less well equipped to deal with this challenge than democracies or closed authoritarian regimes, lacking either the closed authoritarian’s overt tools of control or the democratic regime’s institutional legitimacy. Moreover, because of low infor-mation and the importance of political perceptions, relatively small numbers of protesters can represent a serious political challenge. Consequently, insta-bility is an emergent property of hybrid regimes to which rulers have to be constantly adapting. Nevertheless, this does not mean that hybrid regimes are doomed to fail. Learning and innovation takes place on the part of the regime

64 “ ‘Nashi’ za nash schet” (“‘Ours’ at Our Expense”), November 1, 2008, at www.gazeta.ru/politics/2008/11/01_a_2870871.shtml (last accessed May 15, 2009).

65 “Komissary deneg ishchut” (“Commissars Are Looking for Money”), October 28, 2008, at www.gazeta.ru/politics/2008/10/28_a_2867577.shtml (last accessed May 15, 2009).


(and on the part of protesters), and new ways to manage dissent are developed. Incumbents can and do respond to new types of challenges at home and learn lessons from events abroad.

I have analyzed this process in Russia under Putin. Having achieved consol-idation of the elite, the Putin administration presided over a period of apparent social peace, supported by subordinate labor organizations and a strong eco-nomic expansion. Since 2005, however, a range of groups have begun to coop-erate in developing a well-organized, if still marginal, independent opposition. I have shown how, despite its strength, the Putin administration is sensitive to even small challenges in order to preserve the perception of invincibility on which elite unity depends. This has led to the development of a wide range of repressive strategies including both physical coercion and broader policies aimed at channeling dissent.

Directly coercive forms of repression draw heavily on the Brezhnevian rep-ertoire and seek to combine rather limited overt physical violence with exten-sive covert and preventive coercion. Efforts to channel dissent have had to be creative because the disappearance of the Soviet social model radically changed the context in which the state operated. Extensive innovation and experimenta-tion has taken place and an elaborate set of instruments have been developed to create the legal authority and institutional capacity to license civil society and to generate a range of state-supported ersatz social movements that can com-pete with independent opposition organizations. 66 The situation is constantly evolving on both sides, however, and as we will see in the concluding chapter, there are also reasons to believe that the very institutions set up to control soci-ety may in the end carry within them the seeds of greater political openness.

This broad approach to repression is, of course, not new. Rulers in both authoritarian and democratic states alike have long understood the impor-tance of channeling protest actions and political energy in nonthreatening directions (Oberschall 1973 ). Even in the Soviet period, physical repression was used in conjunction with an elaborate repertoire of efforts at coopta-tion (Gershenson and Grossman 2001 ). Furthermore, many of the tactics implemented in Putin’s Russia are reminiscent of approaches adopted by ear-lier authoritarian regimes. Putin’s ersatz social movements, for example, in some ways echo corporatist labor unions or tame political parties used by authoritarians in contexts as diverse as communist Poland and Brazil under the generals.

What is new, however, is that the would-be authoritarian today faces the task of repression in circumstances that generate pressures that his or her twentieth-century predecessors did not face. With the end of Communism as a dynamic political force, leftists and anti-Communist strongmen alike have more diffi culty justifying antidemocratic practices. In addition, globalization

66 There is also evidence that a similar strategy has been taken with regard to the internet where regulation has involved not just authoritarian, repressive legislation, but also licensing of pro-viders and active efforts to create supportive content (Alexander 2004 ).


has made information harder to control, making it not just diffi cult to isolate a country from the rest of the world but also extremely costly from the point of view of economic development. Consequently in more and more places, rul-ers are compelled to justify their rule in democracy’s terms. Hence although extremely repressive and reclusive regimes, like the military junta in Burma, still exist, their numbers have diminished over the last twenty years. In fact, authoritarian regimes that hold elections with at least some opposition are now the most common form of authoritarian regime (Schedler 2002 ).

In claiming the mantle of democracy, these regimes try to avoid explicit cen-sorship and political restrictions. 67 The demands of domestic and international legitimacy require public displays of opposition. For similar reasons, obvious rules limiting political participation or censorship are impossible. Strict censor-ship, however, is not only incompatible with hybridity, from the incumbent’s point of view it would also be undesirable. Information and feedback are needed from society in order to improve state performance and to avoid falling into the stagnation that affl icted more classical closed regimes like the USSR. Rulers in these regimes face a singular dilemma: How to accommodate signifi cant politi-cal freedoms without allowing dangerous levels of opposition that might signal weakness to potentially disaffected segments of the elite. Squaring this circle means that maintaining elite unity and an appearance of invincibility are more important than ever. This creates a paradox in which control of the streets is both more diffi cult and more important for regime stability than before.

In recent years, as the colored revolutions demonstrated, several authoritar-ian leaders in Eurasia and elsewhere have failed to achieve this balancing act. Against this background, the measures the Putin administration has taken have put Russia at the cutting edge of contemporary authoritarian regime design and have made it a model for other authoritarians. 68 The relative suc-cess of the Putin administration has contributed to its prestige in some parts of the world and has helped make Russia something of a research laboratory in contemporary authoritarian regime design, where new techniques are tested and developed, and students from other countries come to watch and learn. Nevertheless, although Putin has made enormous strides in centralizing con-trol and power in Russia, the potential for unrest in the streets continues to exist, and the challenge of holding together an authoritarian regime is likely to require further innovation, particularly if a veneer of democratic politics is to be maintained.

67 Censorship and self-censorship certainly exist in the Russian media. Rumors of lists of forbid-den topics distributed by the Kremlin are common, though the extent to which they are used is unclear. I am grateful to Samuel Greene for pointing this out.

68 On authoritarians learning from one another, see Vitali Silitski, “Contagion Deterred: Preemptive Authoritarianism in the Former Soviet Union,” in Valerie Bunce, Michael A. McFaul, and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, eds., Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Post-Communist World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). On faking democracy in the post-Soviet space, see Andrew Wilson, Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

200

8

Implications for Russia and Elsewhere

“Agitprop is immortal. It is only the words that change.” Viktor Pelevin, Generation P .

Patterns of political protest display distinctive features in different places and at different times. For example, people in different countries or cultural settings deploy symbols in protesting that do not necessarily travel well. Argentine pro-testers who jangled keys in 2002 to symbolize that their homes and businesses were being jeopardized by economic crisis would have a hard time decoding the bowler hats and sashes of Orangemen marching on the streets of Belfast. 1 Different people also resort to different actions to express their discontent. In the period of post-Communist economic crisis, thousands of Hungarians and Slovaks issued open letters and signed petitions demanding help in their plight. Poles, on the other hand, were much more likely to go on strike or occupy public buildings (Ekiert and Kubik 1998 ). Russians, as we have seen, resorted with surprising frequency to direct actions and to the rather unusual practice of hunger striking in shifts, which meant that hunger strikes could last for many, many months.

Particularities aside, I have laid out in this book features that we can expect to apply across a broad range of hybrid political regimes. Specifi cally, I have argued that an organizational ecology dominated by the state, by state- supported remnants of the previous regime, and by ersatz social movements leads to pat-terns of protest in which elite politics plays a central role. Under these circum-stances, the volume of protest is likely to follow elite political dynamics very closely. When there is open competition among elites, state actors may seek to mobilize broader publics in pursuit of their goals. In particular, those who lack a strong political hand in intra-elite confl icts are likely to use their infl uence over resources and organizations to encourage and sometimes directly organize protest actions. Others will try and suppress protest. At times of elite consolida-tion, by contrast, overall protest is much lower, though there may be signifi cant

1 http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0211/p01s03-woam.html

Implications for Russia and Elsewhere 201

pro-government mobilization designed in part to maintain the impression of elite consensus. In other words, in hybrid regimes, protest is heavily managed by elites.

The realm of “managed protest,” however, does not exhaust the possibilities of protest in hybrid regimes. In a context in which both institutions and organi-zations for aggregating political interests are weak or missing, a signifi cant part of protest is likely to consist of wildcat-style, spontaneous actions. These are usually the result of deprivation or injustice and despair over institutionalized means of resolving problems. Direct rather than symbolic actions, and extreme measures like hunger strikes or even violence, are likely to be common.

Moreover, where massive repression is not expected as a regime’s fi rst response, wildcat protests can, as we saw in the case of the pensioners pro-test, spread and scale up rapidly through imitation, even in the absence of strong preexisting organizational ties. As we also saw, such protests can even be quite successful in achieving their short-term aims. Without the develop-ment of organizational capacity, however, they are unlikely to turn into sus-tained campaigns.

The aim of this book has been not only to study the nature of protest in hybrid regimes, but also to use the lens of protest to understand better how regimes that mix open competition with authoritarianism manage politics. I have shown how in response to spontaneous street protests, Vladimir Putin undertook a major redesign of Russian politics in an attempt to create a defeat-proof political system that, nonetheless, allows a certain scope for political competition. Part of this redesign involved extensive institutional engineering to subordinate labor unions and regional political machines to presidential control, and to create an electoral system that practically eliminates the pos-sibility of victory for Kremlin opponents. Institutions, however, are only part of the story. How institutions work depends heavily on the organizations that inhabit them; organizations that link intermediate elites and masses are just as crucial to authoritarian stability as electoral rules.

Consequently, in the aftermath of the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine and widespread, largely spontaneous protests across Russia in early 2005, intensive innovation took place to develop a comprehensive strategy to man-age public protest. The Putin regime developed new techniques to co-opt and license civil society and to mobilize pro-regime ersatz social movements. The result was the creation of a new postmodern form of authoritarianism that has become a model for authoritarians in hybrid regimes in many countries. In this way, as we saw, even without sustained campaigns, spontaneous protests can have long-term effects on the nature of the political regime, though these might be to make the regime more repressive, not less, at least in the short run.

In this concluding chapter, I draw together some of the implications of this book for how we understand contention and social movements in the con-text of hybrid regimes. I begin by considering what my argument means for protest in places other than Russia, setting out what my theory tells us we should expect under different combinations of organizational ecology, state


mobilization strategies, and elite competition. I then turn to what my fi ndings mean for the study of contention, social movements, and repression. In doing so, I focus on implications for the relationship between contention and move-ments, between movements and the people they claim to represent, for how we should understand political opportunities in hybrids, and for the nature of repression in contemporary hybrid regimes. I end by discussing what this book might tell us about the future of the central case in this book – Russia. In short, I argue that Russia is not likely to experience an “electoral revolution” of the kind seen in Georgia and Ukraine unless there is a signifi cant split in the elite. If such a split does occur, however, we should expect that the intraelite confl ict will spread rapidly to the streets. Nevertheless, even without such a “revolution,” if the basic premise of this book is true, namely that the nature of organizations in a society is a crucial factor in democratic or nondemocratic development, then there is reason to believe that the longer-term legacy of the Putin era may be less baleful than the current conventional wisdom holds.

Implications for Other Cases

The analysis of protest in Russia ought to travel well to other hybrid regimes. These are places where, with some variation, organizations capable of rep-resenting civil society are relatively weak; where state (or party) institutions representing factions within the regime are relatively strong; where there is the possibility of competition among elite factions; and where elites are willing to mobilize publics as part of their struggles.

Where these conditions do not apply, protest is likely to look quite different. In closed authoritarian regimes, for example, independent organization outside of the regime is usually heavily suppressed, unauthorized demonstrations of discontent are strictly prohibited and seriously punished, and organizing large-scale protest is extremely diffi cult. An illustration is the case of Uzbekistan where, in May 2005, the government of Islam Karimov dispersed thousands of protesters in the city of Andijan, fi ring on the demonstrators and killing hundreds of people. 2 As a result, in places like Uzbekistan, we generally witness little open contention and the contention that does take place often consists of violent rebellion or localized direct action.

In liberal democracies, we would also expect to see very different patterns of protest. The ecology of organizations there consists of large numbers of strong, largely autonomous groups that make protest an everyday part of the politi-cal process. Though protest is frequent, it generally does little to destabilize liberal democratic political regimes because it is overwhelmingly nonviolent, symbolic, and integrated with intrainstitutional efforts to change policies or rules. Protest is so common that some scholars have termed the liberal democ-racies “movement societies” (Meyer and Tarrow 1998 ).

2 The offi cial government estimate of the casualties was 169, whereas human rights campaigners estimated the death toll at 745. See http://hrw.org/campaigns/uzbekistan/andijan/


Between these two extremes lie hybrid regimes in which we observe consid-erable variation in the quality and quantity of contention. I have illustrated this by looking at variation within one regime over time. In the second half of the Yeltsin era, we saw an organizational ecology that was dominated by state-led organizations, some of which were actively involved in mobilization, and an elite that was seriously divided. The result was contention in which signifi cant, large-scale mobilizations took place, but protesters were closely controlled and infl uenced by intraelite politics. Alongside this managed contention were polit-ically isolated acts of direct action and extreme protest tactics such as road and rail blockades and hunger strikes.

By contrast, in the fi rst Putin term, the organizational ecology remained state-dominated, but open elite political competition was low and state elites no longer followed active mobilization as a political strategy. In this context, we saw very little public political protest of any kind. Then in the second Putin term, we saw the emergence of some relatively small but committed and genu-inely independent opposition groups that were capable of putting people on the streets to express opposition to the government and its policies. In response, we saw a largely unifi ed elite react with a combination of repression and deliber-ate state mobilization in the streets. This meant that we witnessed large-scale pro-government marches in many key cities, including the capital, and small opposition demonstrations that were often harshly repressed.

So much for Russia; what would we expect to see if we extended the argument to other countries? Table 8.1 illustrates what we might fi nd. The table does two things. The fi rst task is theoretical: to spell out broadly what the theoretically possible combinations of organizational ecology, state mobilizing structures, and elite competition are, and what these different combinations might mean for the quality and quantity of contention. To illustrate some of the possibilities, I treat each of the three main variables as binary: Organizational ecology is either state-dominated or balanced, the state is either mobilizing or demobilizing, and elite competition is either high or low. Clearly there are costs to reducing variables that we have treated in much more detail so far to a simple set of dummies. For exam-ple, to say that the ecology of organizations in Russia between 2005 and 2008 is state-dominated is true but misses the emergence of opposition groups that, I have argued, have been consequential for the dynamics of the regime. Similarly, to characterize the state as mobilizing in Russia both between 1997 and 1999, and again between 2005 and 2008, misses highly consequential differences in the level of government at which mobilization was taking place. Nevertheless, sketching the different theoretical possibilities helps generate some interesting hypotheses about the patterns of contention we should see in other places.

The second task is empirical: to identify real-world cases that fi t in each of the theoretical possibilities. As I suggested in Chapter 1 , and as the rest of the book illustrates, it is relatively easy to identify the dimensions of inter-est in classifying different cases, but implementing these requires considerable contextual knowledge. With this in mind, the examples given in Table 8.1 are intended as suggestive rather than defi nitive.

204

Table 8.1. Varieties of Contention in Hybrid Regimes

Organizational Ecology State Mobilization Strategy


Nature of Contention Possible Cases

State dominated Mobilizing High Large scale, elite-led mobilizations, isolated pockets of direct action

Russia 1997–2000 Kyrgyzstan 2005

Balanced Mobilizing High Frequent large scale, highly polarized protest, with signifi cant state and independent involvement

Venezuela, Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia

State dominated Demobilizing Low Little public protest Russia 2001–2004 Kazakhstan Azerbaijan

Balanced Demobilizing Low Little public protest Unlikely

State dominated Mobilizing Low Large state-controlled rallies, signifi cant repression of opposition

Russia 2005–2008

Balanced Mobilizing Low Large scale controlled rallies, heavy state repression of non-state actors, high likelihood of non-state violence

Algeria after 1992, Egypt

State dominated Demobilizing High Low mobilization with elites refraining from using mobilization potential

Unlikely

Balanced Demobilizing High Large scale anti-government mobilization Georgia 2003Serbia 2000Ukraine 2004


With three dummy variables, there are eight possible outcomes. Reading from top to bottom of the table, we start with cases in which elite competition is high and where state and other elite institutions actively pursue mobiliza-tion of broader publics, while the nature of the organizational ecology varies. Where the organizational ecology is state-dominated, we would expect to see large-scale mobilization that is very closely controlled by elites, and in which participation by independent groups is extremely limited. We might also see isolated pockets of direct action taking place. Cases like this include Russia under Yeltsin, with consequences that we have already examined in great detail. Another possible case is the Kyrgyz “Tulip Revolution” of 2005, in which patron client networks were used to mobilize crowds to overthrow the sitting President, Askar Akayev . Although the Kyrgyz events superfi cially resembled the other colored revolutions, involvement of bottom-up civic groups was lim-ited (Heathershaw 2007 , Radnitz 2006 ).

The Russian and Kyrgyz experience contrasts sharply with places where the organizational ecology is more balanced. There, high competition, mobilizing elites, and the presence of independent organizations would be expected to lead to frequent and often large-scale protest involving both independent and state-mobilized groups. Examples include countries like Venezuela , Mexico , Ecuador , and Bolivia in recent years, where strong state-linked organizations are balanced by vibrant independent organizations with real support. Control of the state by one side or other has not been enough to dampen protest. In these states, the mobilization of large numbers of people in the streets is increas-ingly seen as endemic.

The next two rows compare cases of variation in organizational ecology when both state mobilization and elite competition are low. In these cases, we would expect to see little in the way of public political protest. The case of state-dominated organizational ecology quite accurately describes Russia in the fi rst Putin term but also other post-Soviet states such as Kazakhstan or Azerbaijan . The other possibility, of course, is that low elite competition and low state mobilization could coexist with a balanced organizational ecology. Here again, we would expect to see little public mobilization since there is little confl ict around which to mobilize, though the organizational resources are available. However, the combination of a balanced set of organizations with low elite competition seems unlikely to occur in practice. The high de jure and de facto levels of civil and political rights that are usually needed for a balanced organizational ecology to emerge are also likely to favor high levels of elite competition. Consequently, this combination seems to be a theoretical rather than a practical possibility.

In the next two rows, I continue to vary the organizational ecology, but now in a context in which the state is mobilizing and public elite competition is low. We have already looked in detail at one case where elite competition is low but the state actively involves itself in popular mobilization (Putin’s second term). Here we would expect to see large-scale state-controlled rallies with occasional and heavily repressed opposition events. The case of a balanced organizational


ecology alongside high levels of state mobilization and low levels of public elite competition looks similar but with a key difference. Here we would expect, as before, to see large pro-government mobilizations coupled with heavy state repression of opposition in order to hold the ruling elite coalition together. However, with strong opposition organizations, this peaceful picture is likely to be disrupted by sporadic opposition protest, and often with a signifi cant risk that the excluded opposition will resort to political violence. Examples of this might include some of the North African hybrids, such as Egypt or Algeria, that have dominant political parties and ban participation by well-organized Islamist groups.

Finally, I vary the nature of organizational ecology in a context of a demobi-lizing state and high public elite competition. Where the organizational ecology is state-dominated, the state plays little role in mobilization, and elite com-petition is high, we would again expect low levels of mobilization because there is not the capacity for bottom-up mobilization, and elites are not keen on expanding the circle of contestation. Although this is a theoretical possibility, it is diffi cult to see in practice why elites would refrain from using mobilizational assets at their disposal when public elite competition is high. Such a situation is plausible only when elite competition is intense but behind closed doors, as it is in a closed authoritarian regime undergoing a succession crisis. However, such a scenario is unlikely to be seen in a hybrid regime.

More interesting is the case where elite competition is high and independent organizations exist, but the state is not active in mobilization. Here we would expect to see large-scale anti-government mobilizations with little regime response, as in the colored revolutions in Georgia , Serbia , and Ukraine . In this situation, the question, of course, arises as to why incumbent elites did not mobilize in response to the opposition. There are a number of possibilities. It might be that repression or counter-mobilization was considered but the potential costs of resulting violence were perceived to be too high (Bermeo 1999 ). Another possibility is that repression or counter-mobilization were tried but failed. A divided elite would contribute to both of these possibilities because a high degree of elite division mobilizes the opposition, raising the cost of repression and in turn increasing fear of the consequences of failed repres-sion. Serious elite divisions also raise the probability that counter-mobilization could escalate the situation with a threat of civil war. Fear of the consequences of escalation may also, therefore, play a role in limiting incumbent response in some cases.

Another possibility is simply error. As I noted in Chapter 7 , the problem of repression in hybrids is typically complicated by a lack of reliable information on the extent of support for the opposition, meaning that error on the part of the incumbents is common. Particularly in these three cases, it seems that the incumbents were taken by surprise by the extent of opposition mobilization and so were unable to respond effectively. It also seems likely that learning from the errors made by incumbents in these cases was a major stimulus to the strategy of the Putin administration since 2004.


The extensions of the theory presented here are necessarily schematic and speculative. As the preceding chapters show, details matter a lot in the relation-ship between protest, politics, and regime, and the reduction of the main vari-ables to binary possibilities obscures many important elements. Nevertheless, Table 8.1 illustrates how my argument might travel beyond the Russian case and how the variables I identify can be used to explain the considerable variety of protest patterns we actually see in hybrid regimes. At a minimum, Table 8.1 helps demonstrate the argument made in Chapter 1 : That protest in hybrids cannot simply be thought of as being a midpoint on a line between closed authoritarian regimes and democracies. It also demonstrates that we cannot learn much about protest in hybrids by a straightforward analogy to political opportunity theory, in which hybrids are thought to offer the possibility of protest without much institutional access and so feature higher levels of protest than democracies. Instead, protest in hybrids can be high or low and have dif-ferent qualities depending on the underlying combinations of organizational ecology, state mobilizing strategies, and elite competition.

Social Movements, Political Opportunities and Repression in Hybrids

In focusing on the organizational ecology of hybrids, on state mobilization strategies, and on elite competition, the analysis has drawn on, but differed from, most mainstream analysis in the social movements literature. The con-ceptual approach of the book is fl eshed out in Chapter 1 and in the empiri-cal chapters and need not be repeated. Here instead, I turn to four important implications for social movement analysis that shed light on: (1) the relation-ship between contention and social movements; (2) the relationship between movements and the people they claim to represent; (3) the nature of political opportunities in hybrid regimes; and (4) the nature of repression.

First, with regard to the relationship between contention and social move-ments, I have covered a broad range of different contexts: protest within social movements as conventionally understood (e.g, the Union of Chernobyl Liquidators in Chapter 2 ), protest within organizations closely tied to the state (e.g., the FNPR labor unions in Chapter 3 ), and protest in the absence of move-ments (e.g., pensioners’ protests in Chapter 7 ). These different contexts remind us that protest and social movements are often, but not always, connected.

For example, even when we observe signifi cant mobilization spread across time and space, it may be misleading to assume that the protests are part of a coherent analytic entity, a “movement” that operates within a highly strategic context. Instead, it makes more sense to think of contention as a population of events, as I have done in Chapters 4 and 5 , and to look for empirical rela-tionships between events, rather than just assuming that connections exist (Oliver and Myers 2003 ). Even in the case of quite large-scale and widespread protests, such as the pensioners’ protests of Chapter 7 , whether a protest wave constitutes a movement is an empirical question and cannot simply be assumed.


A second important lesson is that when protests in hybrid regimes are indeed part of a more coherent movement, we need to analyze carefully the relationship between organizations, the people they claim to represent, and the regimes in which they operate. In particular, we need to take into account the tight connections between elites and organizations. We cannot assume that organizations represent those they claim to represent. As we saw in Chapter 3 in the case of labor unions, organizations may be more concerned with con-trolling certain groups than with representing them. In the Russian case, this means thinking in particular about the interests of regional governors and the political machines at their disposal. In other places, other players might be key. For example, Ronconi and Franceschelli ( 2009 ) demonstrate the importance of the clientelistic administration of workfare programs for explaining pat-terns of road blockades in Argentina. The details will vary from case to case, but basic analysis of organizational ecology and elite strategies is essential to understanding how protests begin and end in hybrid regimes.

Third, the analysis also suggests that we need to think differently about the nature of political opportunities for protest in contexts where elites exer-cise such direct infl uence. That protest is highly structured is far from being a new observation (Franzosi 1995 ) and, despite considerable criticism (Goodwin and Jasper 1999 ; McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001 ), the idea that patterns of protest over time are heavily infl uenced by the structure of political oppor-tunities remains a powerful part of our understanding of protest dynamics (Koopmans 1999 ). So how is the political structuring of protest different in hybrid regimes?

What I have shown is that in hybrids, social organizations tend either to be directly penetrated by the state or elites or are so heavily infl uenced by them that elite confl icts are crucial to understanding the world of protest and move-ments. The political opportunity structure is not something that can simply be “applied to the world outside a social protest movement” to which social movements respond (Meyer and Minkoff 2004 : 1457), but instead is central to movement formation and development. It is not just that elite divisions cre-ate opportunities for protesters, but that elite competition and the mobiliz-ing strategies it generates often have a direct and decisive infl uence over who mobilizes and when. Consequently, groups of citizens that are otherwise in a structurally similar position might respond differently to the same social or economic conditions depending on patterns of elite allegiances and confl icts. We saw this explicitly in the changing profi le of protesting workers in Russia as elite political confl icts evolved. As a result, we need to build politics directly into our models of mobilization.

One important way to do this that has been largely neglected in mobilization studies is to integrate the effects of political institutions. As we saw in Chapter 5 , for example, electoral rules can have an important effect on elite incen-tives and thus on protest patterns. As well as formal institutions, Chapter 5 demonstrated the importance of political signaling in affecting protest levels. Such signals are a key element of the information environment within which


actors make their decisions. Another important task in the study of mobiliza-tion, therefore, is to think of systematic ways of integrating the information environment into models.

On the other hand, the analysis also provides evidence that protest in hybrids is in some ways more like protest in advanced industrial contexts than has sometimes been argued. In trying to understand why the post-Communist economic crises in Eastern Europe generated relatively little protest, scholars have questioned the applicability of political opportunity structure outside of stable long-standing democracies, arguing that politics and cleavages are gen-erally too ill-defi ned to offer a meaningful “structure” to political opportunities (Ekiert and Kubik 1998 ). Ekiert and Kubik conclude that under these circum-stances, we see “ unstructured opportunity .” Unstructured opportunity involves few established organizational boundaries, rapid changes in ruling alignments, few predefi ned political agendas, and fl uid and poorly defi ned cleavages among elites (Ekiert and Kubik 1998 : 572). The result is “excessive openness” and weak institutional support for protest (Ekiert and Kubik 1998 : 573).

The problem with “unstructured opportunity,” however, is that there has been considerable work that has demonstrated empirically the importance of political opportunities in shaping protest outside the long-standing democra-cies. 3 This structure is evident even in the most chaotic moments of regime and state dissolution. For example, in his careful study of nationalist protest around the collapse of the USSR, Mark Beissinger ( 2002 ) found that though events can develop a momentum of their own, they are “highly structured over time” (101).

It may be true that alignments among elites are fl uid, cleavages are poorly defi ned, and the political agenda less well developed than in long-standing stable democracies. Nevertheless, as we have seen, elite competition remains crucial to understanding cycles of contention over time. The evidence of this book suggests that the sharpening of elite cleavages plays a central role in gen-erating national cycles of contention, whereas a resolution of intraelite confl ict is very likely to lead to the ending of protest cycles. In fact, rather than being unstructured by politics, I show that protest in hybrid regimes tends to be more structured by elite politics than it is in long-standing democracies.

Fourth, the emphasis on the role of elites in mobilizing protest also suggests a new perspective on the role and nature of repression. Even though much of the literature on repression in nondemocracies tends to treat the state as a uni-tary actor who either represses or does not (Boudreau 2005 , Francisco 2005 ), Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate that elites at different levels often face different incentives with regard to protest and, even within the same political level, some elite groups might seek to repress protest, whereas others seek to facilitate it. This is particularly likely in federal states like Russia or China, where the instruments of repression and facilitation are, at least in part, decentralized

3 Among others, see Skocpol ( 1979 ) on social revolutions, Tilly et al. ( 1978 ), Sandoval ( 1993 ) on Brazil, and Beissinger ( 2002 ) on the USSR.


(Chen forthcoming, O’Brien and Li 2006 ). Levels of repression in hybrids, therefore, can vary at any given time across different levels of government and across different places depending on the political preferences of those in control locally.

Furthermore, as I argued in Chapter 7 , elite divisions and protest are interre-lated. Protest can refl ect elite division, as in the 1990s in Russia. Alternatively, it can create elite division by encouraging elements of the existing ruling group to defect to the opposition. It is worth remembering, for example, that the hero of Ukraine’ s Orange Revolution in 2004, Viktor Iushchenko, had been appointed Prime Minister by President Kuchma in December 1999 and had condemned as “fascists” protesters who denounced Kuchma’s involvement in the mur-der of journalist Heorgy Gongadze . 4 Similarly, in Russia, potential “opposi-tion” presidential candidates include Vladimir Putin’s former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasianov . Such radical shifts on the part of former regime stalwarts are a reminder that traditional distinctions between regime and opposition are treacherous, perhaps particularly so in hybrid regimes.

This serves as a further reminder that repression should be understood as being part of the regime’s strategy for promoting elite unity. Repression is not just about fi ghting existing opponents but about deterring future ones. In fact, much of repression is about holding together elite coalitions, and the target audience for acts of repression largely consists of existing pro-regime elites. Repressive strategies, therefore, need to be broadly understood to include the wide range of policies, practices, and institutions that increase the costs of mobilization in the streets, but also to include measures that increase the costs to elites of organizing outside of the prevailing coalition. In Russia, these policies include the nomination of regional governors by the center and threats of exclusion of candidates from elections, as well as harsh and preventive coercion, licensing of civil society, and mobilization of pro-regime movements.

Implications for Russian Politics

At the time of writing, there is great pessimism about the prospects of further democratization in Russia; indeed, there is a general belief that Russia has experienced a headlong retreat from democracy (Fish 2005 ). The pessimism on Russia is matched by a warm (if cooling) glow left by apparent democratic breakthroughs around other parts of the post-Communist world. In places ranging from Serbia to Georgia , Ukraine , and Kyrgyzstan , fraudulent elections were overturned by the exercise of mass protest on the streets. These revolu-tions with adjectives (Bulldozer in Serbia, Rose in Georgia, Orange in Ukraine, and Tulip in Kyrgyzstan) are collectively known in the region as “colored

4 Taras Kuzio, “Ukraine: Gongadze convictions are selective justice,” Oxford Analytica, Global Strategic Analysis, Tuesday, March 25, 2008. http://www.taraskuzio.net/media18_fi les/68.pdf


revolutions” and have captured the imagination of oppositionists in other post-Soviet states, including Russia, Belarus , and Azerbaijan.

Scholars too have taken great interest in the colored revolutions and have coined the term “electoral revolutions” to describe a broader phenomenon of which the colored revolutions are part. 5 A key feature of electoral revolutions is their tendency to diffuse across borders, as events in one place act as an example for events elsewhere and result in deliberate and conscious emula-tion (Beissinger 2006 and 2007 , Bunce and Wolchik 2006b, Tucker 2007 ). The apparent contagiousness of “electoral revolutions” led to much excitement in journalistic and policy circles, and the idea of pushing democracy through an “electoral revolution” or a “people power” revolution gained ground among foreign funders of civic groups and NGOs in the post-Soviet space and else-where. In an infl uential pamphlet, Adrian Karatnycky and Peter Ackerman ( 2005 ) argued that popular street protest is the best foundation upon which to build democracy and advocated that assistance to civil society should be shifted away from less political, service-type organizations and toward “polit-ical-reform-oriented NGOs … non-violent civic resistance or … activist youth groups” (9).

However, neglected in the enthusiasm for electoral revolutions and rapid democratic breakthroughs has been the issue of whether they in fact lead to durable democratizing outcomes. It is increasingly clear, for example, that the democratic movement, if there was one, in Kyrgyzstan and Georgia was rather fl eeting, whereas opinion is divided on Ukraine . Hale ( 2006a ) sees Ukraine as the one case where democratization might be lasting, whereas Beissinger ( 2006 ) sees it as having already experienced its own Thermidor. Kalandadze and Orenstein ( 2009 ) see the failure of electoral revolutions to deliver mean-ingful democratization in the former Soviet Union as also being the case more generally across the world.

This book does not claim to answer the question of whether “electoral revo-lutions” can democratize countries in a meaningful or durable way. What it does tell us, however, is that we should not expect such a revolution in Russia any time soon. Furthermore, it tells us that the conditions thought to con-tribute to “electoral revolution” – fraudulent elections, corruption, educated populations, and activist youth (Bunce and Wolchik 2006a , Tucker 2007 ) – are not themselves enough to bring about a revolution. Perhaps more than most, citizens of Russia have experience of fraudulent elections, with wide-spread abuses and violations in almost every electoral contest that has taken place there. These abuses have taken the form of almost everything, from total disregard of campaign fi nance laws to abuse of administrative resources, the

5 “Electoral revolutions” are cases in which signifi cant democratic breakthroughs are thought to occur as corrupt, authoritarian incumbents are overthrown by “an upsurge in mass participa-tion, not just in elections, but also in the streets before, and sometimes after the election” (Bunce and Wolchik 2006a : 5). Such “electoral revolutions” or “liberalizing electoral outcomes” have occurred not just in the post-Communist world but in many other places including Ghana, Indonesia, Kenya, Peru, and the Philippines (Howard and Roessler 2006 ).


disqualifi cation/intimidation of potential opponents, ballot stuffi ng, and the fraudulent counting of votes. Russian voters in the post-Communist period have become used to these practices and indeed may by now consider them part of standard electoral practice.

The same might be said, however, of voters in Ukraine , Georgia , Kyrgyzstan , and Serbia, and yet “electoral revolutions” arising from electoral fraud occurred in each of these cases. The difference in each of these cases is that signifi cant elements of the elite had already split from the ruling coalition and stood to benefi t from overturning the election results. These counterelites demonstrated their strength in the elections and were then able to convince other key players in the regime that it was time to switch sides. Only when there is a counterelite strong enough to make elections close is there any likelihood of an “electoral revolution.” Even then, as the case of the Mexican presidential elections in 2006 demonstrates, the charges of fraud need to be suffi ciently well docu-mented, persuasive, and widely diffused for the political impact to be felt.

The Kremlin in the past has taken extensive precautions to ensure that such a close outcome does not occur, and will no doubt continue to do so in the future. Control over television and tremendous infl uence on most of the print media have been used to stunning effect in every presidential election begin-ning in 1996. Moreover, it is unlikely that any candidate the Kremlin seriously fears would even make it onto the ballot. Changes in the laws covering political parties and elections, as I have documented, have dramatically increased the ability of the Kremlin to infl uence the choices presented to voters. And when these methods fail, there is always the tried and tested variant of using the pros-ecutor’s offi ce, to which Gusinskii, Berezovskii, Khodorkovskii, Kasianov , and myriad other less famous potential opponents can testify. This strategy is likely to work at least in the short term, even if longer-term prospects are unclear.

Democratization from the Ground Up?

If elections are not likely to bring democratic progress to Russia in the short term, and signifi cant impediments to democratic development like natu-ral resources, an overpowerful presidency, and a state-centered economy are unlikely to change soon (Fish 2005 ), should we be entirely pessimistic about prospects for greater democracy in Russia?

Not necessarily. As Tilly ( 2004 ), Collier ( 1999 ), and many others have shown, changes in the nature of political regimes are almost always accompanied by, and often driven by, protest on the part of excluded groups. There are many mechanisms through which this relationship can operate. One key mechanism to which this book draws attention is that protest from below can help break down elite consensus and monopolistic politics, leading to improvements in the level of political competition and advances in the degree of democratization. This fi nding fi ts with other literature that argues that pressure from below can be a key element in generating the elite splits that lead to democratic transi-tions (Collier and Mahoney 1997 ).


A central premise of this book, however, is that pressure from below for change is unlikely without the emergence of genuine independent organiza-tions representing the interests of nonelite actors. Where there are few strong, autonomous organizations that can channel discontent and put pressure on elites, protest is unlikely to play an independent role in promoting democrati-zation. Consequently, developing strong and autonomous organizations repre-senting societal interests would constitute a major step forward in improving the chances of democratization.

If I am right that the quality and strength of independent organizations mat-ter enormously for democratic development, then there are reasons to believe that the legacy of the Putin era may be more propitious than the conventional wisdom would have it. There are two principal reasons for this: growth in independent civic organizations, and efforts on the part of the state to encour-age certain kinds of NGO and civic involvement in policy. In this fi nal section, I touch on developments in civil society and in policy regulating the relationship between the state, NGOs, and local administrations that, contrary to the con-ventional wisdom, suggest growing dynamism and potential for improving the quality of political participation in the future.

The most important point is simply that, due to the improved economic conditions since 2000 and the passage of time, the number and quality of nongovernmental and social organizations in Russia has grown substantially during the Putin years. Hard systematic evidence on the development of such organizations is diffi cult to fi nd. For example, the Federal Registration Service (the body responsible for registering NGOs) estimated the number of noncom-mercial organizations as 243,130 in 2006. This number differs dramatically from the 673,019 non-state organizations said to exist in 2007 by the “Report on the State of Civil Society in the Russian Federation,” published by the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation in 2007. The Public Chamber report notes the difference but no gives no reason for the huge discrepancy. 6 Whatever the actual fi gures, Sundstrom and Henry ( 2005 ) consider that “the sheer number of organizations struggling to change state-society relations is the foremost differ-ence” over recent years in Russian civil society (306). Sundstrom and Henry’s view is backed up by people actively involved in civil society development on the ground. The Siberian Civic Iniative Support Center , based in Novosibirsk, for example, reported 3,500 active groups in its network covering 11 Siberian regions in 2006. This number compares with 703 in 2000 and 164 in 1996. 7 These groups cover a vast range of issues, from advocating on behalf of pen-sioners, women, the disabled, and the environment to campaigning on behalf of Russia’s long-suffering motorists.

Numbers are, of course, only part of the story. Effectiveness depends also on the professionalism and institutionalization of organizations, on the quality

6 See http://www.oprf.ru/fi les/doklad_-engl-verstka.pdf 7 Sarah Lindemann-Komarova, “The Effect of Being: The Trickle-Up Strategy for Building

Democracy in Siberia 1994–2006,” Joel l. Fleischman Fellow, Duke University, Presentation, October 2006.


of their connections with the communities they seek to serve, and on the input civil society has into government policy and governance more generally. In these respects, activists report that coalitions, networking, and cooperation between the groups have improved dramatically, and that NGOs are becoming more effective as projects become more result-driven and a broader range of local funding sources become available. In addition, competitions for funding sponsored by federal and local governments have led to an increase in the qual-ity of projects being supported. 8

A second point of great importance is to note that whereas the recent growth in the NGO sector is largely the result of local initiative, and the Putin adminis-tration can take little of the credit, the Federal government in recent years has nevertheless taken a number of very specifi c initiatives that could well have an impact on enhancing the effectiveness and development of civil society. Faced with a political system that, as discussed in Chapter 6 , largely eliminates the possibility of defeat at elections, the administration has sought other, nonelec-toral means through which it can interact with and gather useful information from society. 9

In Chapter 7 , I discussed three key measures taken in Putin’s second term to reorganize the relationship between the state and society: amendments to the law on NGOs, the creation of a system of Public Chambers , and the Law on Local Self-Government (Federal Law 131). In that chapter, I outlined how these innovations have helped create a licensed civil society that is largely con-trollable by the state. However, this licensed civil society is not simply a fake or imitation of “real” civil society. It is instead intended to constitute a working link between the state and society that provides the state with useful informa-tion to help overcome the problems of governance in the absence of democ-racy. In other words, licensed civil society is not just about faking democracy or about control, but also about providing incumbents with information on emerging problems and on potential solutions in order to help them channel resources to the strategically most productive places and avoid the kind of unpleasant surprises that we saw with the pensioners’ protests of 2005.

Each of the key changes introduced by the Putin administration to relations with civil society has included an element of this genuine effort at informa-tion exchange. For example, the NGO reform law (Federal Law No. 18-FZ, “On introducing changes to several legislative acts of the Russian Federation”) does indeed, as noted in Chapter 7 , contain elements that facilitate control and supervision by the state, especially over foreign-funded organizations, and some see the law as a direct breach of Russia’s obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. 10 However, others take a more sanguine view,

8 Author’s interview with Sarah Lindemann-Komarova, Siberian Civic Initiatives Support Center, Gorno-Altaisk, July 2008.

9 On the role of “substitutes” for democracy more generally, see Petrov, Lipman, and Hale ( 2010 ).

10 See International Center for Not-for-Profi t Law ( http://www.icnl.org/ ).


arguing that the law is necessary improve the quality of the NGO sector, to reg-ularize the fi nances of NGOs and to encourage private individuals to donate money. Many NGOs were unregistered before, making them subject to the whims of local offi cials who often had little or no understanding of the NGO sector. Moreover, NGOs often take an extremely casual or irregular approach to fi nancial management, which leaves them vulnerable and makes it diffi cult for them to attract or properly manage private donations or public funds. Seen in this way, the increased professionalization required by the amendments to the law on NGO constitutes a necessary step if the sector is to develop along the model of NGOs in long-standing democracies and become a more effective partner to the state in addressing social problems. 11

After a few years of operation of the NGO law, this ambiguity has only deepened. Many have been critical of how the authorities have “overstepped the mark” in implementation, noting how diffi cult it will be for small organi-zations and those without “near state” funding to operate unless signifi cant modifi cations are made. The Agora Interregional Human Rights Association reported at the end of 2006 that some 80 percent of NGOs had not fulfi lled the new registration requirements. However, Pavel Chikov, Agora’s Chairman, reported that his experience with the process made him no longer see the law as a frontal assault on the NGO sector. Rather what was going on, Chikov felt, was an attempt to “up-grade the pool” of NGOs, and that “in principle there was some sense in the innovations. For the fi rst time leaders have begun to think about how to carry out elementary procedures, how to engage in cor-respondence with state bodies, and about the fact that it would not be a bad idea to study the law on noncommercial organizations.” 12

Another key element of the Putin administration’s activist policy toward civic society was the creation on July 1, 2005 of a new consultative body at the Federal level, the so-called Public Chamber. The chamber is a consultative body and, as critics have pointed out, consists mainly of Presidential appointees. However, since January 2009, the Public Chamber has been formally incorporated into consultation procedures prior to drafting and passage of legislation. Moreover, despite its appointment structure, such a body could provide the kind of routin-ized access to public offi cials and capacity to comment on issues of importance to civil society that is much desired by the Third Sector even in long-standing democracies. In its fi rst year or so of operation, the Public Chamber showed signs of making a positive contribution to national life, proposing amendments to eighteen draft bills, including the bills on NGOs, charities, the armed forces, and education. Many have been surprised by the boldness shown by the Public

11 Igor Baradechev, Vice President of the Siberian Civic Initiatives Support Center, essay on “trickle up,” JRL, No. 160, 2006.

12 Gazeta.ru June 8, 2007, Interview with Pavel Chikov, chairman of the Agora Interregional Human Rights Association, by Yevgeniy Natarov. Requirements have already been relaxed for religious organizations, and there is some discussion in the Medvedev administration that the relaxations might be extended to other sectors. See JRL, June 18, 2009.


Chamber (Evans 2008 ). 13 At the regional level, where Public Chambers have also been established, the pattern is varied. In some places, the regional Public Chambers have had a very top-down character, whereas in others they are genu-ine forums for bottom-up initiatives. 14 Finally, there are reasons to believe that even if the goal of the Public Chambers is to incorporate civil society, some civic groups will welcome the chance to infl uence state policy from within, hop-ing to exploit the fact that different parts of the state seek to achieve different goals, creating a tension that opens opportunities for infl uence (Foster 2001 ). As Soviet experience shows, once established, institutions can turn out to have quite paradoxical effects (Bunce 1999 ).

Finally, Federal Law 131, “On The General Organizational Principles Of Local Self-Government In The Russian Federation,” enacted on October 6, 2003, is potentially the most signifi cant of the laws regulating civil and local input into policy. 15 Law 131 mandates a number of very signifi cant ways in which local people and local civic organizations can be given a voice in local issues relating to such matters as housing and economic development. Among other things, the law provides for public hearings and local referenda on the basis of citizen initiatives, and the mandatory consideration of laws proposed by citizen initiative groups. The law also provides for something called Territorial Public Self-Government, which means that local issues can be decided by local representatives, elected at local meetings of residents. 16

A lot, of course, will depend on how this law is implemented. Much, for example, will turn on how regions and municipalities defi ne the groups that are able to participate. Some of the thresholds may be too high for the law to have much content in practice. For example, Territorial Public Self-Governments require at least one meeting of citizens at which at least half of the people over the age of sixteen and living on the territory are present. 17 As with all things in Russia, implementation can be expected to be patchy, good in some places and

13 http://www.oprf.ru 14 Responses in the regions to the creation of the Federal Public Chamber have varied consider-

ably. In some regions, such as Omsk and Kemerovo, regional administrations have sought to establish “top-down” Public Chambers to replace previously existing “Public Chambers from below.” Russian Regional Report Vol. 9, No. 9, April 3, 2006. In other places, such as the Altai Republic, the initiative to form a region-level chamber came from the NGO citizens initia-tives, whereas in still other places, such as Novosibirsk , there was a mixture of top-down and bottom-up involvement.

15 The law was implemented in stages, with full implementation being completed on January 1, 2009.

16 Federal Law 131, art. 27. Potential units of self-governance mentioned in the law include “apart-ments of one entrance of an apartment block; an apartment block; a group of dwelling houses; a microrayon of dwelling houses; a rural locality not deemed a settlement; [or] other territories of residence of citizens”. These bodies will have responsibility for housing issues and “other eco-nomic activities aimed at meeting the social and everyday needs of the citizens residing on the territory concerned,” and may submit draft municipal laws subject to compulsory consideration by the municipal assembly.

17 Federal Law 131, art. 27.6.


poor in others. Nevertheless, the law on local self-government does represent a signifi cant opportunity for active citizens to take initiatives in the kind of local matters that are of real importance in people’s lives.

Considerable ambiguity, therefore, remains with regard to the overall effect of the package of laws directly affecting the NGO sector. The ambiguity is consistent with the interpretation of these measures as being intended to serve multiple purposes. On the one hand, it seems clear that high-profi le, Moscow-based, and foreign-funded critics of the Putin administration have much to worry about. Although they have the resources to overcome reporting require-ments, they have clearly been put on notice. Local, small-scale organizations too may be hurt by the excessive rigor of reporting requirements. On the other hand, there does seem to be a deeply felt need to develop and institutionalize the NGO sector better, as part of providing the state with a means of improv-ing the information fl ow from society. Parts of the law on NGOs are a step in this direction. Moreover, if civic organizations can rise to the challenge, the Public Chambers and the Law on Local Self-Government could represent important developments that will provide regularized mechanisms for NGO and local input into policy making.

In other words, even though there is much to the criticisms made of the Putin administration in the realm of democratization, its legacy is multivocal. Many of the changes made to the political system under Putin have indeed reduced the degree of political competition, and the Kremlin has shown considerable creativity, capacity for innovation, and determination in using electoral and other means to limit competition. Analyses that focus on institutions highlight such developments (Fish 2006 ). Yet there are also signs of progress that a focus on contentious politics, political protest, and the nature of organizational life allows us to see. Using this lens, we notice that although the Putin administra-tion has been busily constructing and maintaining its “vertical of power,” orga-nizational and associational life in Russia has moved on and has continued to develop. New organizations have been born, and patterns of participation are starting to change, albeit quite slowly. The current administration seems to recognize that it needs such groups in order to govern effectively and is experi-menting with new ways of reaching out to them. In doing so, the Kremlin may, inadvertently, be helping lay a stronger foundation for democratic development in Russia . Hybridity is not just about creating uncertainty in the eyes of people trying to evaluate the regime (Ottaway 2003 ), nor is it the result of inadequate state strength (Way 2002 ) or of inadequate opposition strength (Levitsky and Way 2010 ). Instead, the institutions are part of a deliberate strategy designed to extract the benefi ts of competition while minimizing the likelihood of loss of control. Competition is less something that authoritarians have failed to elimi-nate, but rather something that they consciously allow and try to control.

This effort, of course, is fraught with risk. Although at this stage there is lit-tle coherent bottom-up pressure for change, if a succession struggle opened up divisions at the top, mass mobilization could follow. Contrary to the conven-tional wisdom on post-Communist Russian politics, my analysis of workers’


willingness to participate in protest actions that are organized for them, of the pensioners revolt of 2005, and of the widespread proliferation of protest move-ments of various kinds in 2005–7, all suggest that there is the potential in key areas, like Moscow and St. Petersburg, for large-scale mobilization of protest-ers. Moreover, regional governors retain the capacity, analyzed in Chapter 3 , to infl uence mobilization in their regions and may begin to support mobilization if sides are being taken between competing national factions.

As demonstrated in Chapter 7 , there is a small but vigorous ultra-opposition-ist tendency that has been radicalized by the Putin experience. This opposition is broad, if not particularly deep, and is willing to gloss over major ideological and political divisions to mobilize young people and other disgruntled groups behind an “anti-Putin” candidate. They are essentially reactive rather than proactive in terms of identifying issues around which to frame mobilization, but they have demonstrated a capacity for rapid mobilization of signifi cant numbers of people across different regions in Russia. These activists have been hardened in an unfriendly environment (to put it mildly) and could prove to be much more effective in a more permissive context.

Even so, a major split in the elite is essential before the latent potential for mass protest could be transformed into something as politically powerful as the Orange movement in neighboring Ukraine . Hale ( 2006a ), looking at the range of colored revolutions, argues in a similar vein that “the civic groups have only come to play a prominent role when division among a country’s powerful elites has opened up space for them to do so” (321). In fact, as I have shown, divided elites do much more than open up the space for civic groups: They pay for tents, food, buses, and security, and may even provide the demonstrators.

219

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Appendix 1

Event Protocol

The following is a guide to the coding of events. Each event was coded to pre-serve all the information contained in the original report, as listed in the fi rst part of the appendix. The characteristics of events were then aggregated into the sub-categories listed in the second part of the appendix.

1. Event type:

1 Demonstration (“piket”, “demonstratsiia”, “meeting”, “skhod”) 2 Strike 3 Hunger strike 4 Railroad blockade 5 Road blockade 6 Vandalism 7 Occupation/Sit-in 8 Self-immolation 9 Presidential Elections

10 Cutting off water supply 11 March on Moscow 12 Suicide 13 Illegal airplane landing 14 Tent city 15 Mass Fight 16 March to Yakutsk 17 Delay airplanes 18 March 21 Three-day strike 22 Two-day strike 23 One-hour strike 24 Two-hour strike 25 Three-hour strike

Appendix 1: Event Protocol238

26 One-day strike 27 Selling RNE newspaper/leafl ets 28 “Pogrom” 29 Arson * also desecration of synagogues 30 Bombing 31 Blocking ship 32 Storming of theater 33 Holding hostage of enterprise director and other leadership 34 Handcuffed self to gate 35 Human chain 36 Civil funeral 37 Graffi ti

2. Number of participants: 3. Type of participants:

1 Pensioners 2 Young People 3 Workers 4 Single Mothers/Mothers of many children 5 Traders 6 Unemployed 7 Local Residents 8 Environmental Activists 9 LDPR members 10 Students 11 Invalids 12 Women 13 Members of the “national democratic movement Vatan” 14 Director of College 15 Member of “Democratic Movement” and “Young Christian

Democrats” 16 Chernobyl liquidators 17 Political Candidates 18 Great Patriotic War Veterans 19 Trudovaia Rossiia 20 Teachers 21 “Deceived Voters” 22 Mai 23 “Adygylara” and “Agyze-Khase” members 24 KPRF 25 “RNE” (Russkoe natsional’noe edinstvo) 26 Trade Unionists 27 Anarchists 28 Union of Offi cers 29 St. Petersburg Political Science Associations

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 239

30 Schoolchildren and their parents 31 Azeris 32 A Family 33 National Bolshevik Party and Avantguard of Red Youth 34 Journalists 35 Inhabitants of the city of Pushkin 36 Veterans of Chechen War 37 Air-traffi c Controllers 38 Palestinians 39 Doctors 40 “Nash Ostrov” 41 Villagers of Suvorovskii 42 Orthodox Believers 43 Supporters of candidate for head of raion administration 44 Communist Union of Youth 45 SPS members 46 Cancer patients and their families 47 Kurds 51 RKRP 52 Tax Inspectors 53 Organization “Sutyazhnik” 54 “Spaseniye Rossii” 55 Lakski nationals 56 Investors in bank “Russkaia Nedvizhimost” 57 Congress of Soviet Women 58 Investors in bank OiaR 59 Commercial bank customers 60 Investors in bank ‘Russkii Dom Selenga” 61 Investors of bank “Privolzkskii” 62 Fund for the defence of Glasnost’ 63 Military rescue team 64 Tekobank investors 65 Enterprise general director 66 Russian Radio Enthusiasts 67 “Women For Peace in the World” 68 Russkie natsional’nyi sobor 69 Ossetians 70 City Duma member and craftsman at the mine 71 GUVD 72 Kumyk nationals 73 Chechens 74 Union of Christian Renewal 75 Broadcast workers 76 Nightwatchman 77 Taxi drivers


78 Russian Liberation Movement 79 Cossacks 80 Savers in “Forward” bank 81 Lezginski and Avar nationals 82 Darginskii nationals 83 Military pensioners 84 National Patriotic Union of Russia 85 Soldiers’ wives 86 Investors in N-PEKS 87 Ingush 88 Soldiers’ mothers 89 Veterans Defense Organization 90 Investors in Progressprombank 91 Insurance company Kavmedstrakh customers 92 Passengers returning from their dachas 93 Supporters of former State Duma deputy Marychev 94 National Council of the Chechen People 95 Otriad Rossii 96 Indian students 97 Supporters of the Mayor of Leninsk-Kuznetsk 98 V. I. Cherepkov (Mayor of Vladivostok) 99 Actors

100 Pamiat 101 Tatar Social Center 102 Private entrepreneur 103 Investors in Progressprombank 104 Investors in Elin-Bank 105 Investors in various fi nancial institutions 106 Memorial 107 Resident of Dnepropetrovsk 108 Resident of Kaliningrad 109 Heart-to-Heart 110 Director of children’s rehabilitation center and his deputy 111 U.S. citizen 112 Demokraticheskaia Rossiya 113 Committee to defend the constitution of Dagestan 114 Lipa 115 Mayor’s staff 116 Patients 117 Zashchita 118 Buddhists 119 Children 120 Caucasian nationalities 121 NPG 122 Kazakh


123 Helicopter Pilots 124 Supporters of A. P. Vavilov 125 Russian National Party 126 Anti-Bureaucratic Party 127 Federation of Independent Trade Unions of the Unemployed of the

Kuzbass 128 Defense industry trade unions 129 Nefteiugansk Solidarnost’ 130 Soldiers 131 Committee of mothers 132 Women of Russia 133 Residents of Kakashura 134 Investors in Infrobank and Zolotobank 135 Truckers 136 Union of women 137 Free Trade Unions 138 Anarcho-syndicalists 139 Committee for memory of victims of Sept/Oct 1993 140 Investors in Vossibkombank 141 Youth patriotic movement Vozrozhenie and RCSM 142 National front of working people, army, and youth 143 Young Russia: Yaroslavl 98 – strike organizing committee 144 Workers’ committees from Yaroslavl 145 Organization of Voters for Social Fairness 146 Union for Defence of Entrepreneurs 147 RCSM 148 Head of local administration 149 Yabloko 150 Electoral bloc Soglasie 151 Civilians 152 Socio-ecological union of Russia 153 Naval supplies factory of the Red Banner of the Northern Fleet 154 National Bolshevik Party of Russia 155 Working Party of the Chuvash Republic 156 Fairness and Law157 Union of Soviet Offi cers 158 Citizens of arab nationality 159 Liberal democratic union of youth 160 Chair of city soviet of education workers 161 Movement “ograblennogo naroda” 162 Bashkir national center 163 Representatives of international trade enterprises 164 Cancer patient 165 Private taxi drivers 166 League of Private Business and Association of Commercial Banks 167 Veterans of war and labor


168 Kurdish Workers Party and Kurdish national-cultural autonomy 169 Defense Ministry Naval and Physical Training Center workers 170 Family and friends of head of village administration, A. M.

Deniyalov, killed as a result of a fi ght with the head of the agricul-tural administration and a militiaman

171 Pentecostals 172 Chinese 173 Stavropol’ organization of Russian refugees 174 Supporters of national assembly candidates M. Murmuzashev and

I. Mikhailov 175 Investors in Inkombank 176 Supporters of national assembly candidate Alimurzaev 177 Family of kidnapped man 178 Representatives of various enterprises 179 Union of investors of the Kuzbass 180 Supporters of Abdulaev 181 Party of Peace and Unity 182 Supporters of Spartak and CSKA 183 Organization Rossiiskie studenty 184 Russkaia Natsional’naia Obshina 185 Russian Union of Cossaks 186 Supporters of B. R. Kasimov 187 Forest fi re fi ghters (airborne) 188 Teachers and students of Yugoslav school 189 Kongress Russkykh Obshin 190 Supporters of N. D. Dzhavtov 191 Rabochaia Partiia Rossii 192 Union of Entrepreneurs and Association of ConsumerSocieties of

Kareliya 193 Sodruzhestvo (a pensioner’s social defense group) 194 Soyuz Slavyan 195 Movement in support of the army 196 Otechestvo 197 Union of veterans 198 Chest’ imeiu and Zashchita prav individual’nykh predprinimatelei 199 Prava Grazhdan 200 Dem-vybor Rossii 201 Mentally ill person 202 Investors in Ekspressbank 203 Chinese citizens 204 Nogai organization “Berlik” 205 Various groups of a democratic orientation 206 Partiia Narodnogo Kapitala 207 Supporters of S. E. Derev, candidate for head of Republican

Administration of Karachaevo-Cherkassiia


208 Cherkessians 209 Nogaitsy 210 Investors in private pension fund “SPK Rossiiskii Kapital” 211 Supporters of head of Republican Administration of Karachaevo-

Cherkassiia, Semenov 212 Investors in Ekspressbank 213 Duma social committee chairman 214 United Front of Workers 215 People’s Deputy A. D. Portiankin 216 Assembly of the Peoples of Karachaevo-Cherkassiia 217 Zhenshchiny Rodnogo Krasnoiar’ia 218 Investors of Severno-zapadnogo komercheskogo banka 219 Organization “Stalin” 220 Armed militiamen 221 Cherkessians, Abazins, other nationalities, and Cossaks 222 Raduzhnaia Geril’ia 223 Kuzbassprombank 224 Various movements and parties of Tatarstan (Communists, trade

unions, and rights organizations) 225 Lezginy 226 Womens’ organization “Dostoinstvo” 227 Immigrant from Uzbekistan 228 Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers 229 Russian-speaking population 230 Private bus owners 231 Black Hundreds (orthodox, patriotic movement) 232 Cherkessians 233 Abazins 234 Drivers 235 Georgians 236 Movement “my sibiriaki” 237 Deputies of the Abazins, Cherkess, and other nationalities 238 Movements “Adyglara” and “Adyge-Khasa” 239 Zhenshchiny rodnogo krasnoiar’ia 240 Organization “Deceived Investors” 241 Za Vernyi Vybor 242 Moscow Federation of Tus, Association of students, veterans

organizations 243 Supporters of SPS mayoral candidate Sergei Kirienko

4. Sector:

1 Industrial

1.1 Oil and gas production and refi ning 1.2 Coal mining


1.3 Electricity production 1.4 Chemical industry 1.5 Wood processing 1.6 Construction equipment 1.7 Light industry 1.8 Metallurgy 1.9 Machine building 1.12 Light industry 1.11 Food processing

2 Agriculture 3 Forestry 4 Construction 5 Transport 6 Communications 7 Education

7.1 School or pre-school 7.2 University

8 Healthcare 9 Science 10 Retail 11 Municipal/Domestic Services 12 Water production 13 Weather Service at Airports 14 Budget Sphere 15 Lawyers 16 Defense Industry 71 Education and Industrial Workers 87 Teachers, Doctors and Communal Services 811 Doctors and Communal services 711 Teachers, miners and construction workers 17 Dockers 18 Prison/correctional facility

5. Demands:

1 Payment of back wages 2 Payment of child support 3 Removal of enterprise director 4 Housing 5 Market related issues 6 End to Chechen war 7 Freedom of arrested trade union leader 8 Opposing a change in enterprise management 9 Opposing a change in local bus routes


10 Against electricity supply cuts 11 Against animal cruelty 12 Against tax law 13 Against garbage incinerator construction 14 Wage increase 15 Support of LDPR 16 Increase in fuel supplies 17 For a referendum on the immunity of Deputies and against compul-

sory service in military “hotspots” 18 Pension issues 19 Opposing construction of a nuclear power plant and import of

nuclear waste 20 Protesting a college closure 21 Protesting exclusion of candidates from local election 22 Medicines and improved living conditions 23 A change in the chair of the local election commission 24 Opposition to drug addiction treatment center 25 Liberation of alleged bomber 26 Increased budget for veterans of Great Patriotic War 27 Resignation of President R.F. 28 Free electricity, improvement of roads and public transport 29 Implementation of RF laws with respect to the rights of Chernobyl

liquidators 30 Protesting staff cuts 31 Resignation of Mayor 32 In defense of former Partizan Kononov/ support of Russians in

Latvia 33 Meeting with election commission on participation in Presidential

elections 34 Against cadre policy of Semenov and demanding transfer of Cherkas

and Abkhas land to Stavropol Krai 35 Freeing of an arrested man 36 Boycott elections 37 Demanding expulsion of (unemployed and unregistered) Chechens 38 In support of (former) mayor, Cherpkov 39 Demanding that local elections be declared invalid/reviewed 40 Protesting Duma ratifi cation of SNV 2 41 Demanding free circulation of dollars in RF 42 Protesting Agricultural Council decision on division of land 43 Protest against punishments for trading without licences or medical

certifi cates 44 Support for enterprise 45 Demanding compensation for damage done by earthquakes in Jan-

Feb 1999 46 Compensation for losses incurred during fi ghting in autumn 1999


47 Maintaining payments for distant areas 48 Against single social tax 49 Against Ukraine joining NATO 50 Against privatization 51 Independent investigation of a death in an incident with RUBOP/

ROVD 52 Lower bread prices and support for bread enterprise 53 Reconstruction of monument to Felix Dzershinskii 54 Restoration of electricity supply 55 Protesting construction of commercial space 56 Opposing construction 57 Against raising prices of domestic services 58 Supporting the fi ring of a head doctor 59 Protesting decision of arbitration court 60 Improving living conditions 61 Opening of ice rink 62 Protesting oil spills 63 Raise the Kursk and bomb Chechnya 64 Demanding closure of highway due to accidents 65 Protesting closure of a workshop for invalid children 66 Resumption of water supply 67 Against the World Bank 68 Restoration of gas supply 69 Support of Milosevic/Serbia 70 Demanding tougher registration requirements of those of Caucasian

nationality 71 Against Israel 72 Demanding handover to crowd of two Chechens accused of rape 73 Protesting sackings 74 In support of a gubernatorial candidate 75 Protesting Duma decision to remove privileges from Chernobyl

liquidators 76 Protesting construction of a Mormon church 77 Restoration of heating 78 Protesting unifi cation of two separate faculties at a university 79 Marking the October Revolution 80 Against cancellation of local rail services 81 Against local administration decision to require use of cash tills 82 Against Palestinian violence 83 Strict adherence to election laws in mayoral elections 84 Against proposed changes to the Labor Code 85 Protesting the removal of acting head of administration V.I.

Tolkachev by Schchelkovskii city court 86 Against adoption by Duma of new national anthem 87 Against moving a radiology unit


88 In defense of Kurdish United Workers Party leader Ozalan 89 Against taking agricultural land for private dachas 90 Protesting the results of raion elections. 97 Rebirth of Russian politics 98 Resignation of Russian Government 99 Discussed issues in connection with upcoming City Elections

100 Protesting decision to declare elections invalid 101 Demanding withdrawal of border guards and additional MVD

troops 102 Dissatisfaction with three candidates being rejected from raion

administration elections 103 Socio-economic goals 104 Demanding a contract for services provided 105 In support of Vladivostok Mayor Cherepkov 106 Return of savings in bank “Saiany” 107 Defending socio-economic privileges of teachers and students in

VUZs. 108 Dissatisfaction with courts 109 Demanding changes in candidate registration in mayoral elections 110 Demanding compensation for being moved from building 111 Protesting new representatives of regional administration 112 Demanding to be moved to live elsewhere 113 Against increase in percentage of wages going to pension fund 114 Return of savings in bank Russkaia Nedvizhimost’ 115 Repair of local railway 116 Restoration of right to discount travel on local transport 117 Social guarantees in event of mine closure 118 Handing over to crowd of UVD/FSB offi cer involved in killing of

local resident 119 Return of savings to customers of bank OiaR and insurance com-

pany Zashchita 120 Increased budget for healthcare equipment 121 Free medical services 122 Against commercialization of public transport 123 Budget division issues 124 Rights of investors to return of money 125 Against the construction of a nuclear plant in Rostov 126 Resignation of head of administration 127 In support of national day of action by independent trade unions 128 Against limits on freedom of speech and press in Belarus 129 Change in the political-economic course of the government 130 Against the unlawful imprisonment on weapons charges of the Isaev

brothers 131 Against Ingush being resettled in the area 132 Protesting construction of the Moscow-St. Petersburg highway


133 Traders demanding offi cial recognition and organization of their business

134 Protesting mine closure 135 Against disruption of unifi ed, national energy system 136 Return of Tekobank investors’ savings 137 Free men charged with extortion in Irkutsk 138 Reduce/Abolish taxes on the market 139 Demanding a change in enterprise management 140 Demanding the removal of a military base of border guards 141 Protesting discrimination on the part of local authorities 142 Lenin’s birthday 143 Protesting Rosugol’s withholding of funds 144 Protesting enterprise closure 145 Demanding the strengthening of border controls with Azerbaijan 146 Protesting the reduction in the number of markets 147 Political demands 148 Demanding an end to the fl otation of Domodedovo civil airline 149 Demanding the rights of disabled persons 150 Distribution of broadcast licences 151 Demanding equal airtime for political opposition 152 Dissatisfaction with results of local elections 153 Protesting a decision to resettle Ingush in the area 154 Demanding resolution of the issue of money for the release of 6 kid-

nap victims 155 Protesting a decision to close trading spaces a the market 156 Against the location of a drug treatment center 157 Demanding a faster search for the murderer of a student 158 Against NATO expansion 159 Demanding reelection of the mine committee 160 Against raising the price for a place at the market 161 Demanding improvement in the work of law-enforcement agencies

in serious crimes 162 Against deforestation in Karelia 163 Dissolution of GosDuma 164 Naming a date for elections for head of administration 165 Improve work of law enforcement on a murder of a Kalmyk

student 166 Against construction on a Moscow street 167 Resignation of regional parliament 168 Resignation of regional governor 169 Abolition of tickets for taxi passengers and limits in the use of pri-

vate cars as taxis 170 Demanding the exile of the family of an Avar arrested for murder 171 Demanding payment for repairs carried out 172 Demanding bank leadership be held responsible for deposits


173 Audit of enterprise and profkom 174 Opposing construction of an auto repair shop 175 Opposing construction of a university building 176 Against persecution of ethnic minorities in Azerbaijan 177 Resignation of city duma 178 Demanding that a person accused of murder be turned over to the

crowd 179 In support of Lev Rokhlin 180 Against planned resettlement of Ingush in the area 181 Against closure of a market 182 Resignation of head of city administration 183 Improve search for a suspected murderer 184 Explanation of the arrest of a policeman arrested for bribe-taking 185 Resignation of republican government 186 Protesting arrests at previous demonstration of 1 July 1997 187 Asking state to take control of majority of shares in an enterprise 188 Demanding the extension of market leases 189 Demanding the return of land to an Avar kolkhoz 190 Rejecting return of the land to Kalmuk’s (189) 191 Demanding housing 192 Objecting to housing Chechens 193 Resignation of hospital executives 194 Protesting against plans to move Lenin’s mausoleum 195 Demanding return of refugees and making territorial claims 196 Support of all-Russian March on Moscow 197 Letter to RF President and Security Council Secretary asking for

peaceful settlement of Ossetia-Ingush problem 198 Demanding CIS traders be banned from market 199 Demanding to be allowed to trade 200 Raising of invalidity pension and an end to annual medical

assessment 201 Protest against nuclear waste 202 Demanding implementation of court decision to a worker his job

back 203 Challenging a decision to move people out of a hostel designed to

house foreign workers 204 Demanding a change in enterprise management 205 Improved working conditions 206 Against Nemtsov’s housing reform 207 Opposing construction of underground garages 208 Resignation of city government 209 Demanding Chechen government take measure to control move-

ment of fi ghters 210 A share of land for construction 211 Against construction of a nuclear plant


212 Against construction of a market in a green zone 213 Return of money in Progressprombank 214 Return of money in Kavmedstrakh 215 Against price increases for suburban trains 216 Against construction of Katunskii hydroplant 217 Demanding airtime on TV to present socio-economic questions 218 Against forestry and demand for protection of mountain Bol’shoi

Tkhach 219 Demanding release of arrested residents 220 Against economic reforms 221 Protesting the collapse of agriculture 222 Demanding a meeting of Chechen and Dagestan governments to

stop kidnapping of people and the stealing of transportation 223 Renewed access to the unoffi cial “University of the Volga” 224 Dissatisfaction with a newly elected raion administration and the

crime situation 225 Protesting against prohibition on handing out Marychev’s leafl ets 226 In support of the head of a city administration 227 Against Chechen separatism 228 Resignation of local FSB head 229 Calling on all nationalities to unite 230 Commemorating October 1993 events 231 Against Egor Stroev 232 Calling for a Moscow commission on criminal investigations to

examine a criminal case brought against them 233 Demanding the return of a building to a climbers’ club 234 Defense of Leninski-Kuznetsk Mayor G.V. Koniakhin 235 New collective agreement 236 Re-examine privatization of the enterprise 237 Release of a militiaman kidnapped in Chechnya 238 Take measures against those responsible for the economic collapse

of a mine 239 Demanding radical measures be taken to ensure security along the

Chechen border 240 A decision on the future of the Pechegorsk coal basin 241 Demanding resiting of village further from gas plant 242 Against local law on land reform 243 Protesting against the distribution of new passports with Russian

symbols 244 Objecting to decision of RF Prosecutor to disregard Cherepkov’s

claim that local prosecutors were turning a blind eye to crime 245 Formation of self-defence units for service along the Chechen

border 246 Decision on status of a theater


247 Honest investigation of the circumstances of an exchange of fi re between a militiaman and a civilian that ended in the latter’s fatal wounding

248 Demanding fulfi llment of a court decision to turn a mine over to state property

249 Money for textbooks 250 Against construction of a “for fee” parking lot 251 Punishment of a militiaman involved in the death of a local man 252 Meeting with representatives of the RF government 253 Meeting with governor of oblast 254 Meeting with Severokuzbassugol’ 255 Improve security in the border region, free kidnapping victims and

formation of self-defense units 256 Demanding fi nancial compensation for land taken for construction 257 Against “nuclear piracy at Sosnovyi Bor” 258 Audit of regional budget implementation 259 75th Anniversary of the formation of the USSR 260 Reduction in electricity prices 261 Protesting Polish government’s changes to rules for entering Poland 262 Demanding RF govt., Gossoviet of Dagestan and Pres. Maskhadiov

of Chechnya return 7 local policemen kidnapped by Chechens 263 Unemployment benefi ts 264 Agreement on deliveries to Estonia for next year 265 “Free Gulaev – candidate for the Presidency of Ingushetiia” 266 Independent environmental analysis 267 Compensation for land polluted by Chernobyl 268 Payment of various benefi ts 269 Improving position of pensioners 270 Protest director’s decision to cancel bonuses 271 Support for Iraq 272 Revival of USSR 273 Anti-Communist slogans 274 Compensation for people living along border 275 Release of Dagestani’s kidnapped and taken to Chechnya 276 Release of bank director 277 Return of money from Severo-Zapado Kommers bank 278 Recognize election of new enterprise director 279 Restoration of domestic services to dormitory 280 54 anniversary of deportation of the Chechen people 281 Protesting merger with hospital 282 Improvement of heating system 283 Against Kuchma 284 Protesting the break-up of a pensioners’ demonstration in Riga 285 In memory of Stalin 286 Against war


287 Abolition of legislation on child support 288 To ban the sale of land 289 Protesting “genocide” of Chechens by state security 290 Lower taxes 291 Defense of Ataman of Cossaks arrested for contempt of court 292 Against plan to restructure local military garrison 293 Investigation of crimes alleged during election for head of

administration 294 No changes to Republic constitution 295 Against moving the market to the edge of town 296 Calling for director of Rostovugol’ to be held responsible 297 Environmental protection 298 Financing of maternity wards and anti-TB programs 299 Jailing Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin 300 Protesting the removal of documents for a criminal investigation 301 Special food and privileges for the job 302 In support of Kliment’ev 303 Improve the conditions of students and change the course of educa-

tion reform 304 Against Ukrainian independence 305 Rights of invalids 306 To accelerate court decision on use of telephone equipment 307 To end ban on operations of TOO Sibir’avia 308 Against construction of a monument to Poles killed in the war 309 Against taking atlas of Buddhist medicine to exhibit in the U.S. 310 For abolition of education charges 311 Arrest of militiaman for murder of trader 312 Firing of OUR head for exceeding his powers in a search 313 Nationalization of coal industry 314 Protesting refusal of a work permit 315 Meeting with vice P.M. Nemtsov 316 To encourage more voters to turn out in gubernatorial elections 317 Protesting widening of road near kindergarten 318 Support of miners 319 Call on miners’ strike committee to unblock railroads 320 Revolutionary slogans 321 Peaceful resolution of the situation in Dagestan 322 323 Jobs not promises 324 Defense of arrested militiaman 325 Talks with President of Republic/Governor 326 Against opening of an automobile market 327 Against Pakistan’s nuclear tests 328 Protesting kidnapping of local farm chairman 329 Review of elections to GosDuma


330 Investigation of the murder of a journalist 331 Support of strikes at Zvezda plant 332 Support for science 333 Protesting Lukoil drilling 334 Claims related to status and shares of oil companies 335 Protests against a released prisoner living in the area 336 Workers rights 337 Against introduction of toll on Federal highway 338 Protesting the murder of the mayor, calling for resignation of city

duma and the nationalization of Yukos 339 Against break-up of Gazprom 340 Protesting court decision on illegal demonstration 341 Demanding Yukos pay taxes to local budget 342 Against Wahabbism and terrorism 343 Free medicines 344 Opposing Chechen land claims 345 Supporting mayor and demanding investigation of his attempted

murder 346 Appointment of a government commission 347 Against reconfi guring of bottom fl oor of dormitory 348 Irregular delivery of empty wagons 349 Blocking rails to mine refusing to support protest 350 Against building a metallurgy plant 351 Raise minimum wage 352 Adequate sanitation in streets 353 Resignation of head of local social security administration 354 Marking death of the mufti of Dagestan 355 Demanding to know where the money to pay workers who are

breaking strike is coming from 356 Investigation of the murder of the mufti 357 Resolve hospital fi nances 358 Resignation of Chernomyrdin 359 General Strike 360 Reduction in tariffs/duties 361 Protesting bankruptcy of a company 362 Reduced food prices 363 Support for M. Khachilaev 364 Medical examination of man who died in police custody 365 Against Chubais 366 Handover of 3 students suspected of murder 367 Early Duma elections 368 Closing of market near supermarket 369 Criticising TUs for not participating in national day of action 370 Reorganization of higher education and timely payment of wages

and stipends


371 5 year anniversary of events of 1993 372 Reinstatement of sacked members of strike committee 373 Changes to Russian constitution 374 Early elections 375 Protesting violent curtailment of miners’ protest 376 Return of Alaska 377 To get their jobs back 378 Pro-beer slogans 379 Improve communal services 380 In defence of Duma member A. Makashov 381 Against ban on sale of alcoholic products at kiosks in town 382 Arrest of local assemblyman who had a car accident and a fi ght with

village man 383 Draw attention to inadequate funding of healthcare, lack of medi-

cines and low wages of doctors 384 Demand to Altaiagroprod to fulfi ll obligation to deliver coal and

food products to pensioners, teachers and others 385 Abolition of the Presidency 386 Control of rising prices 387 Abolition of fees for medical services and education 388 81st anniversary of the October Revolution 389 Against the policy of K. Ilyumzhinov to change status of

Kalmykiia 390 In support of the policy of K. Ilyumzhinov to change status of

Kalmykiia 391 Marking death of G. Starovoitova 392 Referendum on construction of a plant for processing precious

metals 393 Against placing a tuberculosis clinic in the neighborhood 394 Meeting with a representative of the Mayor to resolve problems

with the water and heating supply 395 Money to treat work-related injuries 396 Confl ict with neighbors in dormitory 397 Against the importation of nuclear waste from Bulgaria 398 Demand that general and executive directors elected by the collec-

tive be freed from arrest for not complying with a court decision to fi re them

399 Support for hunger-striking teachers 400 Adherence to the constitution of the R.F. with respect to education

and the rights of citizens 401 Against bombing of Iraq 402 Abolition of fi xed tax on profi ts 403 Condemning inadequate measures taken to provide town with elec-

tricity and heating 404 Defense of historic and revolutionary monuments


405 Indexation of wages 406 In support of newly appointed mayor Kopilov 407 In support of enterprise director 408 Demanding release of wage fund from bank 409 76th anniversary of the founding of the USSR 410 Recognition of Tatar as a state language 411 Recognition of Bashkir as a state language 412 75th anniversary of the death of Lenin 413 Designation of raion as a border region, and meeting with governor

and Krai government 414 Reduction in land taxes on places of business 415 Freeing of arrested people 416 Improvements in conditions for trade in the raion 417 Cancellation of mayor’s decision limiting business 418 Settlement of wage arrears upon sacking 419 Protesting introduction of high taxes 420 Reduced price access to public transport, free medical services and

half price drugs 421 Against US bombing of Iraq, blockade of Cuba and the coming

aggression against N. Korea 422 Improvement in security along Chechen border and stabilization of

the criminal situation 423 Free PKK leader Ozalan 424 Objective investigation of shooting of head of administration by

militiaman 425 Defense of the Fatherland day 426 Real participation of the work collective in the management of the

enterprise 427 Return of money from RAO UES for energy produced 428 Russkii natsional’nyi sabor 429 Unifi cation of the Russian nation 430 Free man charged with buying votes in local elections 431 Demanding payment for timber 432 Cancellation of results of national assembly elections 433 Subsidies for those moved to other part of the country 434 Objecting to a city court sentencing of a trader who killed another

trader in a fi ght 435 Objective investigation of the shooting of a local man by ROVD

offi cer 436 Audit of distribution of money to shareholders 437 Against search and arrest of Chechens 438 Give Chechens the right to join interior ministry services 439 Right to move to empty homes in the area 440 Demanding access to the 2nd round of elections to the National

Assembly for a candidate excluded by the Election Commission


441 To draw Chinese government’s attention to unfair treatment of their enterprises by Russian tax police

442 Arrears in money for treatment of job related illnesses 443 Maintain production and jobs 444 Support of RNE 445 Against persecution of RNE leader Barkashov 446 Patriotic slogans 447 Reexamination of election results 448 Against NATO bombing of Yugoslavia 449 Effective measures against kidnapping 450 Dissatisfaction with Election Commission cancelling results of fi rst

round of national assembly election 451 Nationalist slogans and defense of RNE 452 Recount of votes in national assembly elections 453 Reexamination in court of the legality of the elections 454 Support for B.R. Kasimov, head of raion administration and candi-

date in the national assembly elections 455 Criticising Latvian government for supporting USA in Yugoslavia 456 Criticising mayor of Moscow for attack on RNE 457 Resignation of mayor 458 Protesting possible closure of Palace of Sport 459 Reduction in sales tax 460 For impeachment of President of RF 461 Marking the victory of Aleksandr Nevsky 462 Release of a man accused of shooting on a GAI post 463 Contesting the results of the election of the Chair of a Kolkhoz 464 Demanding that head of ROVD, I.D. Magomedov stay in his post 465 Opposing court decision allowing tax police to arrest accounts of

a fi rm 466 Against the introduction of passport checks and registration rules

at the market 467 Objecting to hold-up in delivery of houses for refugees 468 Demanding reconsideration of court decision on results of national

assembly elections 469 168 anniversary of tsarist deportation of population of Akhmediurt 470 National Student Day of Action: defense of the constitutional rights,

implementation of laws on higher education and general social prob-lems of students. Also against NATO aggression in Yugoslavia

471 Protesting introduction of highway tolls 472 Against decree of local administration on postponement of compen-

sation for wages 473 Dismantling of statue of Peter 1 474 Dissatisfaction with KPRF head of administration 475 Preserve social guarantees


476 6th anniversary of April 1993 referendum 477 LDPR Party of Freedom, Fairness and Patriotism 478 Discussions over land disputed between local residents and neigh-

bors in the Chechen Republic 479 Return of his money 480 Return of sovkhoz/kolkhoz land for personal use 481 Cancelling agreement renting enterprise to Promtorgbank due to

non-payment of wages 482 Victory Day 483 Against US bombing of Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia 484 Support of Evgenii Primakov 485 Investigation of an incident with a militiaman 486 Set up separate Nogai electoral district and militia unit made up of

Nogai 487 Against impeachment of the Russian President 488 Hand over 2 militiamen who killed local man arrested for sex crimes 489 Demanding expulsion of local Ingush 490 Against resignation of RF government 491 Defense of national, orthodox symbols 492 Declare Karachaevo-Cherkassiia elections invalid 493 Active search for missing militiaman 494 Disagreement on election results 495 Against ban on fi shing 496 Against arrest of local LDPR 497 Promoting a candidate for governor 498 Close garbage processing plant 499 Speed up investigation of Daniialov’s death 500 Education and healthcare for children 501 Objective investigation of arrest of 2 market workers 502 Try to prevent break-up of illegal sturgeon fi shing 503 Protesting erection of electricity pylons 504 Against social policy of the region 505 Demanding that the Republican government stop paying taxes to

the Federal authorities 506 Improve the ecological situation in the Pechora basin 507 Protesting increased rent on trading spaces in the market 508 Lower price of communal services 509 Demanding from mayor fi nancing for the legislative assembly 510 Dissatisfaction with the Karachaevo-Cherkessiia’s Supreme

Court decision to uphold the elections for head of the Republican administration

511 Change in management 512 Demanding removal from village of the family of a man suspected

of murder, and inviting parliamentary and executive leaders to a


meeting to discuss the organization of defences along the Chechen border

513 Planning to hold banned meeting of Cherkess and Abazin youth 514 Demanding the RF GosDuma take measures to strengthen executive

and law enforcement powers in Karachaevo-Cherkassiia, in order to get the Republic out of the politico-legal and economic crisis

515 To include the Cherkess and Abazin regions of Stavropol’skii Krai in Karachaevo-Cherkassiya elections

516 Improving fi nancing of hospitals 517 Careful investigation of a murder 518 Demand Chechen President Maskhadov turn over murderers of

local man and stop banditry 519 Against privatization of a coal pit 520 Promote the RNE 521 Dissatisfaction with political and criminal situation 522 Upset by murder of a militiaman, they set out to “meet” with people

of a Chechen village 523 Discuss crisis in Karachaevo-Cherkessiia 524 Burned German fl ag marked with swastika 525 Against use of rocket fuel in the city of Perm 526 To demand that a Chechen, I.N. Aliroev, be banished from

Stavropol’skii Krai. The Chechen representatives agreed 527 Medical and fi nancial support for a citizen of Bol’shaia Kamen’

injured in an auto accident with the former U.S. consul 528 An end to pollution of the Black Sea with oil products 529 Observance of constitutional rights of Ingush refugees 530 To allow delivery of 2 wagons as temporary housing for refugees 531 Against death sentence for Ozalan 532 Payment of holiday pay owed 533 Return of refugees 534 Protesting court decision to turn enterprise over to new owner

Altsem 535 Dismantling of parking lot 536 Demanding bus service to village 537 Demanding overturn of raion court decision to reinstate sovkhoz

director 538 Anniversary of death of Nicholas II 539 To have elections not just for single mandate districts, but also for

party lists, and to outlaw the combining of membership of Gossoviet with any other activity

540 Protesting actions of law enforcement agency 541 Support the military preparedness of the fl eet 542 Claiming appointment of acting head of Karachaevo-Cherkessiia

and acting minister of interior by Moscow as unconstitutional. Calling for Semenov’s assumption of power.


543 Against construction of a power plant 544 Blocking arrival of 14 forced refugees of Ingush nationality 545 Payment of invalidity benefi t 546 Punishment of local Nogai people for starting a fi ght in which 2

Dargins were injured 547 Release of arrested Nogai, resettlement elsewhere of Dargintsy and

change in militia leadership 548 Firing head of enterprise “Igraklinskoe” and head of village mili-

tia – both Dargintsy 549 Demanding to be returned to their former settlements in Tarskoe 550 Home of leading Semenov supporter fi re-bombed 551 To close factory “Roskontakt” and stop production of bricks with

elevated radioactivity 552 Timely delivery of orders to Kristall factory 553 Further medical tests on a man who died in city care 554 Support after fl oods 555 Demanding housing for an invalid friend 556 Against local authorities’ decision to raise housing costs 557 Protesting against local administration interfering in the economic

activity of the enterprise 558 Communication to RF President, government and Federal Assembly

demanding that all short-term soldiers be withdrawn from combat areas in Dagestan, and calling for a conference of North Caucasus nationalities to agree principles for peaceful resolution and coopera-tion, as well as the establishment of a single center for coordinating policy in the region

559 Setting up of passport control and medical examination point at the market itself and the prohibition of any agency other than the bor-der patrol from checking passports

560 Against MinTrud decision reducing benefi ts for Chernobyl liquidators

561 Opposing setting up of base for Federal troops near village 562 Opposing the Supreme Court of Karachaevo-Cherkessiia fi nd-

ing elections valid and appointing Semenov head of Republic administration

563 Peace, order, respect for the will of the voters, unity and accord among nationalities

564 An end to petrol price increases 565 In support of armed forces taking part in action in Dagestan 566 Against Chechen aggression in Dagestan 567 Support of measures taken by RF in Karachaevo-Cherkessiia to sta-

bilize the situation 568 Against sending local conscripts to Dagestan 569 Introduction of Federal troops to protect from Chechen attacks 570 Cancellation of tax on carrying passengers


571 Attending swearing in of V. Semenov as head of Karachaevo-Cherkessiia

572 Opposing Semenov’s taking offi ce 573 Against publication of pornography 574 Demand to be rehoused due to state of building 575 Support for Governor Lebed for bringing “legal order” to the

enterprise 576 Protesting meeting of chair of Gossoviet of Dagestan Magomedov

with Chechen President Maskhadov 577 Demanding change in route of trucks of company “Geofi zpribor” 578 Blocking entry of re-appointed general-director Shelepov 579 Support for State Duma candidate Potapov 580 Lower prices for gasoline and oil products 581 Payment of stipends 582 Against socio-economic course of the government 583 Against a speech being delivered by President Lukashenko of Belarus 584 Protesting against undemocratic parliamentary elections in Georgia 585 Objecting to budget funds being used to build a cottage village 586 Protesting Turkish government’s violence against Kurds 587 Indexation of pensions 588 Support for GosDuma candidate L. Zlobinoi 589 To prevent tax inspectors seizing equipment of a bankrupt enterprise 590 To return to robbed people what they deserve and to provide a fi t-

ting life for pensioners 591 Anti-fascist, anti-Barkashov slogans 592 In support of Chernobyl liquidators 593 Improve medical services 594 Against Federal actions in Chechnya 595 Boycott work on legislative and executive organs of Karachaevo-

Cherkessiya and transfer Cherkessiya to become an autonomous region of Stavropol’skii Krai

596 Against Moscow Mayor Luzhkov 597 Protesting arbitration court decision to fi re existing management of

enterprise 598 Protesting infringement of rights of Cherkess and Abazins 599 Defense of head of raion M.N. Shebzukhov fi red by head of Republic

Semenov 600 Protesting end of negotiations over lease of Radio Lemma and its

moving to another location 601 For honest legislative elections 602 Support of Samara Governor Konstantin Titov 603 Protesting refusal to broadcast analytic programs of Russian TV in

Bashkortostan 604 Against OVR


605 Against unfair action of metallurgical investment company in taking ownership of Kuznetskii Metallurgicheskii Kombinat and Cherni-gorskii razres

606 Change of court decision to move company out of Prestizh shopping center

607 Against signing of Russia-Belarus Union treaty 608 “Against all” 609 “The State is the Chief Terrorist” and “Zone Protected from the

Russian Army” 610 In support of Mayor Luzhkov 611 In support of Moscow Mayoral candidate Sergei Kirienko 612 In support of OVR and St. Petersburg Mayor Yakovlev 613 Protesting exclusion from waiting list for special housing for the

blind 614 Connect houses to central urban heating system 615 Critical of the Moscow Patriarch 616 Demanding the provision of equipment for trading premises 617 Against increased use of garbage incinerator and related pollution

6. Target of protest:

1 Regional government 2 City/local government 3 National government 4 Enterprise administration 5 KPRF 6 Poland 7 Minatom 8 Election Commission 9 President of RF 10 International Economic Conference 11 Siemens

7. Location

1 Regional government building 2 City/local government building 3 Enterprise property 4 Railroad 5 Highway 6 MVD property 7 State Duma (Moscow) 8 Karl Marx statue in Teatral’nyi Square (Moscow) 9 Solovetskii Kamen’ at Lubyanka (Moscow) 10 Polish Diplomatic property 11 FSB offi ces 12 Marinskii Theater


13 Hotel Metropol 14 Latvian diplomatic property 15 Main square of town 16 Polling station 17 Prosecutor’s offi ce 18 Offi ces of Yugbank 19 Moscow Metro 20 Yabloko offi ces 21 Moscow State University 22 Foreign Ministry 23 Trade Union Building 24 Building of Kubanenergo 25 Energy Ministry 26 Red Square 27 Defense Ministry 28 Ministry of Labor and Social Development 29 Offi ces of “Soiuz Chernobyltsev” 30 Polpred’s offi ce 31 Kurgan State University 32 Palestinian diplomatic property 33 Turkish diplomatic property 34 Court Property 35 Offi ces of independent trade unions 36 Bridge over the Yenesei 37 Outdoor market 38 Kazan Cathedral 39 City garbage dump 40 Siemens H.Q. 41 Embassy of Belarus 42 British Embassy 43 White House 44 Tekobank 45 Base for border guards 46 West-Siberian Railway 47 St. Petersburg-Murmansk highway 48 Rostov-Baku highway 49 Kavkaz Highway 50 Krasnoyarsk-Kyzyl highway 51 City telecoms department 52 Arbat Street 53 River boat port 54 Magadan-Ust’-Nera highway 55 TV station 56 Moscow-Brest highway 57 Hotel


58 Karasuk-Zmeinogorsk highway 59 Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk-Tymovskoe highway 60 Dal’nevostochnyi railroad 61 Trans-siberian highway 62 Yekaterinburg-Kurgan highway 63 US consulate/embassy 64 Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk highway 65 Rostov nuclear plant 66 Makhachkala-Astrakhan highway 67 Kaliningrad-Warsaw highway 68 Lenin statue 69 Offi ce of the head of the raion administration 70 Landepokhya – Uokkoniem highway 71 Nakhodka-Vladivostok highway 72 Vladikavkas-Tblisi highway 73 Abakan-Adinsk highway 74 Gorkovskii railroad 75 Railway station 76 Khasavyurt-Grozny highway 77 Bridge 78 Kostrom-Ostrovskoe highway 79 Moscow station in St. Petersburg 80 Railway Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk to Noglika 81 Khasavyurt-Gudermes highway 82 Alfa Bank 83 Oktyabr’skii Zh.D. 84 Khasavyurt-Tlokh highway 85 Progressprombank offi ce 86 Unemployment offi ce 87 Highway Makhachkala-Buinaksk 88 Trans-Siberian railroad 89 Tyumen’-Tobolsk highway 90 Tyumen’-Khanty-Mansiisk Highway 91 BAM 92 GUM 93 School 94 Monument to victims of the repressions 95 Sportsclub 96 Ukrainian embassy 97 St. Petersburg canals 98 U.S. Embassy 99 Rostov-Kiev railroad

100 Ukrainian diplomatic property 101 Military aerodrome 102 Museum


103 Embassy of Pakistan 104 TV station 105 Gorbaty Most 106 St. Petersburg metro 107 Military barracks 108 Power station 109 Central bank 110 Kuzbaspromstroibank 111 airport 112 Federation Council 113 Cultural-Historical Center 114 Severokuzbasugol’ 115 Luianskaia Ploshchad’ 116 Vasil’evskii spusk 117 Dvortsovaya Ploshchad’ 118 Minatomenergo 119 Statue of Peter 1 120 Former Lenin Museum 121 Bank Rossiskii Kredit 122 Ministry of Transport 123 Leningradskii Shosse 124 Liubinskaia Ulitsa 125 Greek Embassy 126 UN information offi ce 127 Israeli Embassy 128 Chinese Embassy 129 French Embassy 130 German Embassy 131 Inkombank 132 Czech Embassy 133 Republican Election Commission 134 Don Public Library 135 Yugoslav Embassy 136 American Business Center 137 Head of city administration’s offi ce 138 Hotel Severnaia where NATO representatives were staying 139 Building of Northern Fleet 140 Private home 141 Factory “Shar” 142 Home of local campaign manager of Governor V. Semenov 143 Theater 144 Stadium 145 Offi ces of “Kondpetrolium” 146 Aleksandrovskyi Sad 147 Supreme Court of Republic


148 Pushkin Square 149 Ploshchad’ Revoliutisii 150 Tverskaia 151 Triumfal’naia Ploshchad’ 152 Regional military committee 153 Dom Pravitel’stva 154 Church 155 Metro station 1905 156 Krasnaia Presnia 157 Federal treasury building 158 Georgian Embassy 159 Kiev station 160 Offi ces of Republic of Bashkortostan 161 Ostankino 162 Church of Christ the Savior (Moscow) 163 Garbage Incinerator

Missing Data Where there is no data for a particular day, events that are reported as ongo-

ing on the previous day and continuing on the subsequent day are assumed to still be taking place. Where the number of participants changes from the previous day to the subsequent day, the number is assumed to be the same as on the previous day.

Coding Sub-Categories of Demands

The following is intended as a guide to how the demands listed were further categorized for the purpose of analysis. There are two main goals: to group demands into general categories and to identify the level at which action would be needed to address the demands. The numbers refer to the specifi c demands listed in Appendix 1. National is chosen as the level of action where a change to national legislation affecting more than one region of the Federation would be needed, and where demands are posed in a general way rather than par-ticular way. For example, “maintaining payments for distant areas” is coded as national even when the particular protestors are among the ones likely to benefi t from a change.

enforcement of the law: material – undefi ned ●

581 ●

enforcement of the law: material – national ●

29, 149, 196, 263, 305, 370, 400, 470, 545 ●

enforcement of the law: material – regional ●

258 ●

enforcement of the law: material – local/specifi c: ●

1, 2, 18, 171, 202, 248, 268, 306, 341, 384, 418, 427, 431, 442, 532, ●

enforcement of the law: physical security – undefi ned ●


449, 521, ●

enforcement of the law: physical security – national ●

289, 342 ●

enforcement of the law: physical security – regional ●

209, 239, 255, 262, 275, 289, 422, 512, 518, 569 ●

enforcement of the law: physical security – local/specifi c ●

101, 328, 345 ●

increased social spending/change in material distribution: undefi ned ●

60, 103, 121, 122, 123, 343, 443, 593 ●

increased social spending/change in material distribution: national ●

12, 26, 41, 47, 48, 57, 67, 75, 84, 107, 113, 129, 135, 200, 206, 220, 221, ●

260, 269, 287, 288, 290, 298, 303, 310, 313, 332, 351, 360, 362, 370, 383, 386, 387, 399, 402, 420, 433, 459, 475, 500, 508, 516, 560, 564, 580, 587, 590, 592, increased social spending/change in material distribution: regional ●

240, 274, 504, 505, 509, 582, ●

increased social spending/change in material distribution: local/specifi c ●

4, 9, 10, 16, 20, 22, 28, 42, 45, 46, 52, 54, 65, 66, 68, 77, 78, 80, 89, 110, ●

112, 115, 116, 117, 120, 191, 203, 210, 215, 233, 242, 246, 249, 279, 281, 282, 292, 319, 323, 331, 337, 352, 357, 379, 394, 403, 458, 467, 471, 495, 502, 527, 536, 554, 555, 556, 570, 574, 585, 613, 614, 616 improved wages/ working conditions: undefi ned ●

205, 336 ●

improved wages/ working conditions: national ●

318, 359, 405, ●

improved wages/ working conditions: regional ●

254, 296 ●

improved wages/ working conditions: local/specifi c ●

14, 30, 73, 134, 143, 144, 173, 235, 238, 270, 301, 349, 355, 361, 372, 377, ●

395, 408, 472, commercial/market related demands: undefi ned ●

124, 419 ●

commercial/market related demands: national ●

150, 414, ●

commercial/market related demands: regional ●

commercial/market related demands: local/specifi c ●

5, 43, 44, 52, 81, 104, 106, 114, 119, 133, 136, 138, 146, 148, 155, 160, 169, ●

172, 181, 188, 198, 199, 213, 214, 277, 295, 307, 348, 361, 368, 416, 417, 436, 466, 479, 507, 552, 606, change in ownership/control of enterprise ●

3, 8, 50, 139, 159, 187, 193, 204, 236, 248, 278, 334, 338, 339, 381, 398, ●

407, 426, 463, 465, 480, 481, 511, 519, 534, 537, 557, 578, 589, 597, 600, 605 ethnic politics: removal, resettlement, land claim, exclusion of particular ●

ethnic groups


ethnic politics: removal, resettlement, land claim, exclusion of particular ●

ethnic groups: national 229, 342, 558, 559, 591 ●

ethnic politics: removal, resettlement, land claim, exclusion of particular ●

ethnic groups: regional 34, 197, 227, 243, 245, 321, 389, 390, 410, 411, 413, 513, 515, 523, 563, ●

565, 566, 567, 576, 595, 598, 603, 609, ethnic politics: removal, resettlement, land claim, exclusion of particular ●

ethnic groups: local 37, 70, 131, 141, 145, 153, 180, 189, 190, 192, 195, 344, 437, 438, 439, 441, ●

478, 486, 529, 530, 533, 544, 546, 547, 548, 549, 568 courts in general: 108, 161, ●

particular criminal justice complaints ●

25, 35, 51, 59, 72, 118, 130, 137, 154, 158, 165, 170, 178, 183, 184, 186, ●

219, 222, 224, 232, 237, 247, 251, 265, 276, 291, 300, 311, 312, 314, 324, 330, 335, 338, 340, 347, 356, 364, 366, 375, 382, 396, 415, 424, 430, 434, 435, 462, 464, 485, 488, 489, 493, 496, 499, 501, 512, 517, 518, 522, 526, 540, 553 political parties/personnel changes at national level ●

15, 27, 98, 163, 231, 252, 273, 299, 315, 320, 358, 365, 367, 373, 374, 380, ●

460, 477, 484, 487, 490, 579, 588, 594, 615 political parties/personnel changes at regional level ●

74, 105, 111, 126, 164, 167, 168, 185, 244, 253, 294, 325, 354, 456, 474, ●

497, 514, 542, 550, 571, 572, 575, 595, 596, 599, 602 political parties/personnel changes at local level/specifi c ●

31, 38, 58, 85, 99, 100, 105, 177, 179, 182, 208, 224, 226, 228, 234, 244, ●

338, 345, 353, 406, 457, elections/ irregularities: unspecifi ed ●

36, ●

1elections/irregularities: national ●

33, 151, 329, 367, 601, 604, 608, 612, ●

election/ irregularities: regional ●

265, 316, 432, 440, 447, 450, 452, 453, 454, 468, 492, 494, 510, 539, 562, ●

563, 610, 611, 612 election irregularities: local/specifi c ●

21, 23, 39, 83, 90, 102, 109, 152, 225 ●

national festival ●

425, 482, ●

historical commemoration ●

53, 79, 86, 142, 194, 230, 259, 280, 285, 308, 371, 388, 391, 404, 412, 461, ●

469, 473, 476, 538 foreign affairs ●

32, 40, 49, 69, 71, 82, 88, 128, 176, 261, 271, 283, 284, 286, 304, 327, 376, ●

401, 409, 421, 423, 448, 455, 470, 483, 524, 531, 583, 584, 586, 607 Russian nationalist demands ●


63, 97, 428, 429, 444, 445, 446, 451, 456, 491, 520 ●

environmental/NIMBY ●

environmental/NIMBY: national, general ●

11, 19, 62, 201, 218, 267, 297, 397, 528 ●

environmental/NIMBY: regional ●

162, 506, ●

environmental/NIMBY: local/specifi c ●

13, 19, 24, 55, 56, 61, 64, 76, 87, 125, 132, 140, 156, 166, 174, 175, 207, ●

211, 212, 216, 218, 241, 250, 256, 257, 266, 317, 326, 333, 350, 392, 393, 498, 503, 525, 535, 543, 551, 561, 577, 617 other ●

6, 7, 17, 127, 147, 217, 223, 264, 272, 302, 309, 346, 363, 369, 378, 385, ●

541, 573

269

Appendix 2

Sectoral and Seasonal Strike Patterns

Sectors of the Economy and Strikes

In the literature to date, it is thought that strikes in post-Communist Russia were largely limited to teachers and some other public sector workers (Gimpelson and Treisman 2002 ). This impression is created by Goskomstat offi cial strike statistics based on self-reporting that systematically tends to underreport strikes in industry or the private sector. The MVD data proba-bly also share this tendency because public offi cials have incentives to draw attention to public sector strikes to support their claims for improved funding, whereas private employers have an incentive to minimize the public attention that strikes draw. As a result, public sector strikes are more likely to come to the attention of the police than private sector strikes.

Nevertheless, it is clear even from the MVD data that we have greatly underestimated the extent to which the late 1990s saw a strike wave that affected many sectors of the Russian economy and not just the budget sector. It remains true that the leading role in this wave was taken by budget sector workers such as teachers and healthcare workers. It is also true that miners, whose militancy played such an important role in the collapse of the Soviet system, also played a prominent role, most famously in the occupation of the Gorbaty Bridge outside the White House, the main building of the federal gov-ernment, in central Moscow during the summer of 1998. Yet the strike wave went considerably beyond these two most highly publicized groups.

Table A2.1 shows the sectoral breakdown of working days lost to strikes. The total number of working days lost to strikes in the education is the largest single sector from 1997 to 1999, when the protest wave was peaking. However, in no year did strikes in education account for even half of the total number of working days lost. This contrasts with the offi cial Goskomstat statistics that indicate that two-thirds of days lost to strikes in 1998 were in the education sector.

Healthcare workers account for a major proportion of strikes in the early part of the period, but healthcare strikes decline over time both in absolute and relative terms. The data also refl ect the well-known participation of miners

Appendix 2: Sectoral and Seasonal Strike Patterns270

in the strike wave. Most interesting, though, in Table A2.1 is the category “others,” which refl ects strikes on the part of workers whose militancy has generally been ignored.

Table A2.2 gives us more insight into this group, breaking “others” down into lower levels of aggregation.

As A2.2 shows, the single largest group in this category consists of strikes in the industrial sector. Industrial strikes were very signifi cant until 2000, when they fell off almost entirely. This data on industrial strikes is one of the most interesting aspects of the new data collected from the MVD records, because there has been very little systematic work on strikes in industry since the collapse of the USSR. I break this category down further in Table A2.3 .

Table A2.1. Sectoral Breakdown of Working Days Lost to Strikes

1997 1998 1999 2000 Total

Days Lost Days Lost Days Lost Days Lost Days Lost

Education 1 962 921 2 325 124 1 131 444 184 366 5 603 855Health 600 660 158 130 46 475 4 486 809 751Miners 840 121 1 261 169 1 004 401 28 578 3 134 269Others 1 417 710 1 084 784 273 787 57 138 2 833 419total 4 821 412 4 829 207 2 456 107 274 568 12 381 294

Percentage Percentage Percentage Percentage Percentage

Education 40.7 48.1 46.1 67.1 45.3Health 12.5 3.3 1.9 1.6 6.5Miners 17.4 26.1 40.9 10.4 25.3Others 29.4 22.5 11.1 20.8 22.9

Table A2.2. Breakdown of Strikes Outside of Education, Health, and Mining

1997 1998 1999 2000 Total


Agriculture 100 0 0 0 100Industry 918 137 690 450 111 971 1 384 1 721 942Services 433 297 377 300 159 297 55 742 1 025 636Unspecifi ed 66 176 17 034 2 519 12 85 741total 1 417 710 1 084 784 273 787 57 138 2 833 419


Agriculture 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 –Industry 64.8 63.6 40.9 2.4 60.8Services 30.6 34.8 58.2 97.6 36.2Unspecifi ed 4.7 1.6 0.9 0.0 3.0

271

Table A2.3. Industrial Strikes

1997 1998 1999 2000 1997–2000


Industry (unspecifi ed) 91 046 179 331 2 838 796 274 011Oil and gas 8 300 5 558 9 770 0 23 628Light industry 20 594 12 619 7 248 518 40 979Electricity Production 24 1945 117 026 7 928 0 366 899Chemicals 1 262 1 946 800 0 4 008Wood Processing & Forestry 63 376 39 941 185 0 103 502Construction Equipment 15 931 28 328 81 340 70 125 669Metallurgy 10 481 211 187 1 570 0 223 238Machine Building 461 452 94 514 56 0 556 022Defense 3 750 236 0 3 986Total 918 137 690 450 11 1971 1 384 1 721 942


Industry (unspecifi ed) 9.9 26.0 2.5 57.5 15.9Oil and gas 0.9 0.8 8.7 0.0 1.4Light industry 2.2 1.8 6.5 37.4 2.4Electricity Production 26.4 16.9 7.1 0.0 21.3Chemicals 0.1 0.3 0.7 0.0 0.2Wood Processing & Forestry 6.9 5.8 0.2 0.0 6.0Construction Equipment 1.7 4.1 72.6 5.1 7.3Metallurgy 1.1 30.6 1.4 0.0 13.0Machine Building 50.3 13.7 0.1 0.0 32.3Defense 0.4 0.0 0.2 0.0 0.2


Unfortunately, for some 16 percent of the working days lost to strikes in industry, the specifi c industry or sector is not readily identifi able. Nevertheless, from the rest of the strike data, we are able to construct a picture of the inci-dence of strikes across sectors. The largest single contributor to days lost is the machine-building sector, which includes the manufacture of cars, trucks, ships, industrial equipment, and the like, followed by light industry.

In Table A2.4 I do the same exercise with strikes in the service sector tak-ing out health and education. Table A2.4 shows that even outside of education and health, reported working days lost in services were almost exclusively in municipal services and transportation, the vast majority of which are also in the budget sector. This is as we might expect, given that most of the rest of the service sector were new start-ups that are almost completely nonunionized and often employ casual labor. Nevertheless, the aggregate numbers do hide some important details. It should be noted, for example, that one of the most prolonged (and dangerous) unionization campaigns of the post-Communist period in Russia was in the service sector and centered on efforts to unionize employees in Moscow’s ubiquitous McDonalds restaurants.

In Table A2.5 , I break down strikes between budget and non-budget parts of the economy. The table is more suggestive than conclusive since the divi-sion between budget and non-budget is necessarily somewhat arbitrary. The interweaving of transfers and arrears between sectors, extensive state share-holdings in energy production, oil and gas, and other sectors, and widespread reliance on state orders makes it unreasonable in the late 1990s to think of a clear-cut distinction between sectors of the economy that are tied to govern-ment budgets at different levels and those that are not. The mining industry, which has private and public owners and was heavily dependent on funds from the World Bank for restructuring, is just the most prominent example. Nevertheless, if we consider the budget sector to include municipal services and transport, education, health, and mining, then we can see how heavily

Table A2.4. Service Sector Strikes Outside Health and Education

1997 1998 1999 2000 Total


Municipal 302 732 299 943 131 813 40 821 775 309Transport 130 445 77 357 27 334 14 641 249 777Others 120 0 150 280 550Total 433 297 377 300 159 297 55 742 1 025 636

Percentage Percentage Percentage Percentage

Municipal 69.9 79.5 82.7 73.2 75.6Transport 30.1 20.5 17.2 26.3 24.4Others 0.0 0.0 0.1 0.5 0.1

Appendix 2: Sectoral and Seasonal Strike Patterns 273

the incidence of strikes is weighted toward the budget sector. Moving miners, of course, out of the budget sector category would shift some three million working days lost into the non-budget category. This would bring the propor-tion of working days lost to strikes outside of the budget sector up to nearly 40 percent of the total, a fi gure well in excess of common perceptions of strikes in non-budget sectors.

Seasonal Strike Patterns

An important feature to notice is the seasonal nature of strike activity in Russia. As demonstrated in Chapter 3 , strikes are systematically lower in the summer months than they are at other times of the year. The decline in aggre-gate strikes in the summer was advanced in the press as a sign that the divi-sion of labor had been effectively repealed during Russia’s economic crises of

Table A2.5. Strikes in the Budget and Non-Budget Sectors

1997 1998 1999 2000 Total


Budget Workers 3 836 879 4 121 723 2 341 467 272 892 10 572 961Non-Budget

Workers 984 533 707 484 114 640 1 676 1 808 333

Non-Budget Percentage

20.4 14.7 4.7 0.6 14.6

Non-education sector strikes in Russia (1997-2000)

0

100000

200000

300000

400000

500000

600000

700000

800000

900000

1000000

Jan-

97

Mar

-97

May

-97

Jul-9

7

Sep-9

7

Nov-9

7

Jan-

98

Mar

-98

May

-98

Jul-9

8

Sep-9

8

Nov-9

8

Jan-

99

Mar

-99

May

-99

Jul-9

9

Sep-9

9

Nov-9

9

Jan-

00

Mar

-00

May

-00

Jul-0

0

Sep-0

0

Nov-0

0

Wo

rkin

g D

ays

Lo

st

Non-education strikes All strikes

Figure A2.1. Seasonal patterns outside of education.


the 1990s. The argument is that poverty and food insecurity had become so widespread that even urban Russians were forced to return to producing food for their own consumption. And indeed the substantial summer reductions witnessed in aggregate strike data would seem to be consistent with idea of Russians as subsistence agriculturalists who strike in vain for wages during the winter and return to their plots to grow their crops in the summer.

However, Figure A2.1 suggests a somewhat different interpretation. In Figure A2.1 , total working days lost to strikes are compared with working days lost to strikes not including school and kindergarten teachers, that is, non-education strikes.

Here the seasonal pattern is rather different. Outside of education, more working days seem to be lost in late spring and early summer, whereas the fall and winter appear to be periods of declining activity. It seems clear that the aggregate summer dip is more a function of the academic calendar than any deeper social force.

275

Appendix 3

A Statistical Approach to Political Relations

In Chapter 3 , I gave some theoretical reasons why it is unlikely that protest activity is driving the quality of governors’ relations with Moscow, and why it is much more plausible to assume that the opposite story, the one told in this book, is true. In Table A3.1 , I present powerful statistical support for this view.

In Model 1, I test a range of hypotheses in which political relations are deter-mined by a combination of structural factors (republic or capital status) and political factors. The political factors are whether the governor is supported by the Communists (as measured using data from Gimpelson and Treisman 2002 ), levels of support for Yeltsin in the region in 1993 (as expressed in the referendum of that year on confi dence in the President), and the change in the level of support between 1993 and 1996 (as measured by the difference between the vote for Yeltsin in the fi rst round of the 1996 Presidential election and the 1993 referendum). I also include the MFK measure of ethnic confl ict potential (with the scale reversed to represent ethnic peace) and their measure of elite stability. The results are impressive. Without including any measure of protest, we explain 60 percent of the variance in the seventy-eight observa-tions. The single most important factor driving relations between the regions and the Kremlin, as we might expect, is whether the governor is a Communist or not. Communist governors received a score 36 points lower on the 100-point MKF scale than non-Communists, ceteris paribus . The governors of Moscow and St. Petersburg did 11 points better than other governors.

As we might expect, a governor’s capacity to generate political support for the Yeltsin mattered a lot too. For example, an increase of 1 percent in the 1993 referendum level of support for Yeltsin translates into a .42 increase in the score on the MKF index. 1 This is a large and statistically signifi cant effect. Governors also received very substantial credit in the Kremlin, as we would expect, from working to increase these levels of support. For every 1

1 Not all Yeltsin appointees in 1993 were still governor in April 1998, when the MFK survey was conducted.

Appendix 3: A Statistical Approach to Political Relations276

percentage point improvement in Yeltsin’s support in a region between the referendum of 1993 and the presidential election of 1996, the governor’s score increases by .53 of a percentage point. Ethnic stability was also important, though since the range on this variable is small, the substantive effect is not as large as the regression would suggest. Stability within the regional elites and Republic status had no effect on the quality of a governor’s relations with Moscow. This also confi rms that the MFK analysts making the judgments on relations were not infl uenced by perceptions of protest or instability in the region.

In Model 2, I add the number of working days lost to strikes in various years up to the analysts’ assessment and in 1998 (we can be confi dent that

Table A3.1. Model: Dependent Variable Is the MKF Renaissance Index of Governors’ Relations with Moscow (OLS with White Corrected Standard Errors)

Model (1) Model (2)

Stability .074 (.089)

.043 (.086)

Ethnic Peace .32** (.13)

.37** (.13)

Communist Governor –36** (4.4)

–35** (4.6)

Republic 3.4 (5.1)

2.6 (5.3)

Capital 11** (4.1)

7.8 (5.0)

Support for BNY ‘93 .42* (.21)

.45 (.24)

Change in support for BNY ‘96-’93 .53* (.21)

.66** (.25)

Days lost to strikes ‘94 – .10* (.067)

Days lost to strikes ‘95 – .045 (.056)

Days lost to strikes ‘96 – .0088 (.027)

Days lost to strikes ‘97 – –.00028 (.018)

Days lost to strikes ‘98 – –.096** (.037)

Constant 22 (15)

23 (15)

Observations 78 77R 2 0.60 0.66

* indicates signifi cant at the .05 level, ** indicates signifi cant at the .01 level.

Appendix 3: A Statistical Approach to Political Relations 277

strikes occurring after the assessments had no effect on these assessments). The measure of strikes used is that of Goskomstat, this being the only measure that could have been available to the analysts at the time. The results strongly indicate the independence of the measure of relations from levels of protest. Only two years are statistically signifi cant. The number of working days lost to strikes in 1994 does seem to be related to these relations but inversely. For some reason, it appears that regions with more strikes in 1994 ended up getting higher scores on the index in 1998. The other year is 1998. Since the MKF index was created in April of that year (before Goskomstat data would have been available), we cannot expect strike outcomes over the course of the whole year to have had much effect on the assessment of the quality of relations made by MFK analysts. Nevertheless, the negative relationship that the regression suggests is just what we would expect from Chapters 3 and 4 . Including strikes makes little difference to the other results of the model. Yeltsin’s level of support in 1993 becomes marginally less signifi cant statisti-cally, though the size of the coeffi cient does not change much. The same is true for the score of the governors of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Otherwise, the results are unchanged.

Taken together with the theoretical arguments and measurement issues dis-cussed in Chapter 3 , these statistical results provide great confi dence both in that the direction of causation between political relations and protest is as I argue, and in the validity of the MFK index as a measure of those relations.

279

Index

“Anti-Extremist” Division of the Anti-Organized Crime Squad, 178 , 190

Aiol, Aleksandr, 179 Allianza Civica, 28 Altai Krai, 100 Altai Republic

wage arrears and strikes, 116 Amur, 110 Astrakhan’, 47 , 110 , 150 Aushev, Ruslan, 141 Avantguard of Red Youth, 181 ,

189 , 239 Azerbaijan, 211

and hybrid regimes, 5 , 24 and organizational ecology, 205

Barinov, Aleksei, 155 Basaev, Shamil, 134 Belarus, 8 , 186 , 191 , 211

economic cooperation treaty, 110 Berezovskii, Boris, 124 , 125 Bloody Sunday massacre, 176 Bol’shoi Kamen’, 54 , 78 , 111 Bolivia, 3 , 169

and organizational ecology, 205 Brezhnev, Leonid

and channeling, 190 and hunger strikes, 55 and repression, 174 , 188–89 and the social compact, 175

budget sector and strike reporting incentives,

57 and strike waves, 269 and strikes, 51 determinants of mobilization, 85

Buriatiia, 111

Caucasus and election of 1999, 134

center-region relations and protest, 109–12 and the replacement of governors, 154–55 governors’ capacity, 83 measurement, 81 Putin reforms, 152–55

Central Election Commission and party registration, 160–61

Chavez, Hugo and state mobilization, 28 , 33

Chechnya and Khasavyurt agreement, 110 and opposition to war, 186 and the 1999 elections, 134

Cheliabinsk, 71 , 153 Chernomyrdin, Viktor, 94 , 156 Chubais, Anatolii, 111 , 127 Churov, Vladimir

and the Central Election Commission, 161 Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, 28 Communist Party

and protest, 47 protest participants, 57

Confederation of Labor, 181 contention

and blame attribution, 176 and electoral fraud, 211–12 and formal institutions, 98 and identity, 65 and institutions, 10 and political signalling, 134–37 and regime dynamics, 38–39 and social movements, 207–08 defi nition, 18 diffusion, 142–45

Index280

fl ash mobbing, 185 in closed autocracies, 22 in democracies, 20 in hybrid regimes

and regime dynamics, 31 repertoires, 42 theory, 24

in post-Communism, 44 in Russia, 14–16

and social movements, 66 demands, 59–60 direct actions, 55 MVD data, 45–49 protest participants, 55–59 symbolic, 53

movement societies, 202 political process model and hybrid

regimes, 97 protest participants and organizational

ecology, 59 regime and opposition in hybrid regimes,

170–74

Dagestan, 134 , 162 debt default, 107–08 democratization

and color revolutions, 210–11 and contention, 13 and Russian politics, 210–18

Deripaska, Oleg, 127 Dissenters’ Marches, 167–68 , 186 , 187 Dissenters’ Marches, 1 Druzhininskii, Mikhail, 176 Dubinin, Valentin, 111

East Germany protest repertoire, 52

Ecuador, 3 , 169 and organizational ecology, 205

elections and protest 1999, 128–30

elite competition and democratization, 34 in hybrid regimes, 10–11 , 34–35 , 203–07 in Russia, 7

Estonia and hybrid regimes, 5

Evenk Autonomous Okrug, 110

Federal Agency for Youth Affairs, 196 Federal Law 131, 216–17 Federal Registration Service

and NGOs, 213

and party registration, 160 Federation of Independent Trade Unions

(FNPR) and independent unions, 80 and organizational ecology, 27 and reform of the labor code,

150–51 and the 1999 elections, 141 and the Communist Party, 66 and the Petersburg Civic Opposition,

184 and wage arrears, 43 and Yeltsin, 74 property, 76

Federov, Nikolai, 153 formal institutions

and organizations, 98 and protest decline, 131–33 electoral rules and protest decline, 137–42

France and protest, 20 strikes in comparative perspective, 49–50

Freedom of Choice, 186

Gazprom Astrakhan’ blockade, 47 tower in St. Petersburg, 162

Georgia, 3 , 8 , 29 , 30 and color revolutions, 127 , 168 , 193 , 202 ,

210 and democratization, 211 and elite competition, 206 , 212 and youth movements, 195 contacts with Russian activists, 186

Glaziev, Sergei and Motherland, 164

Golos Ro ssii, 127 Gongadze, Georgiy, 210 gosudarstvennie kaznacheiskie obligatsii ,

108 Gozman, Leonid, 167 Great Russia

denied registration, 162 Gurov, Aleksandr, 134 Gusinskii, Vladimir, 125

Hicks, John, 84 Hungary

post-Communist protest in comparative perspective, 49–50

protest repertoire, 52 protest under Communism, 21

hunger strikes, 54–55 determinants of, 97

contention (cont.)

Index 281

hybrid regimes and legitimation, 198–99 and repression, 13 , 168–70 , 172–74 in post-Cold War era, 4–5 instability as an emergent property, 197 regime and opposition, 145–46 sub-categories, 5–6 varieties of contention, 203–07 without hegemonic parties, 154

Iabloko, 139 and protest, 167 , 178 , 179 , 180 , 181 , 189 and the labor code, 150 in St. Petersburg, 162 , 184 Youth section, 177 , 183 , 195

Iakemenko brothers and Moving Together, 195

Iakemenko, Vasilii and creation of Nashi, 195 and funding Nashi, 196 and the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs,

196 Iakovlev, Vladimir, 112 , 141 IMF, 150 Industrial Workers union

and 1999 elections, 141 Interior Ministry, 16

and protest control, 167 and protest in Primorskii Krai, 41 reorganization, 152

Iran and hybrid regimes, 5

Isaev, Andrei, 150 Italy

fascist regime, 30 strikes in comparative perspective, 49–50

Ivanovo, 110 wage arrears and strikes, 116

Just Russia and 2007 Duma elections, 159 and potential defection, 160 and the management of elections, 163–64 and the problem of defection, 164–65 creation, 158 pro-Kremlin opposition, 156

Kagarlitskii, Boris on the labor code reform, 150

Kaliningrad, 111 , 165 Kalmykiia, 140 Kamchatka, 111 Karachaevo-Cherkesiia

and disputed election, 58

Karelin, Aleksandr, 134 , 140 Karimov, Islam, 191 , 202 Kasianov, Mikhail, 94 , 185 , 210 , 212 Kasparov, Garry

and the 2008 presidential elections, 162 arrest, 168

Kemerovo and independent unions, 58 and ruble devaluation, 111 coal miners, 54 strikes, 69

Khakasiia and strikes, 69

Khimki, 176 , 177 Khrushchev, Nikita

and repression, 188 Kirienko, Sergei, 54 , 93 , 96 , 97 Kirov, 110 Komsomol, 195 Kondratov, Viktor, 111 Korzhakov, Aleksandr, 111 Kostroma, 110 Kozak, Dmitri

and Vladimir Churov, 161 Krasnoiarsk

and preventive arrest, 168 Krasnoiarskii Krai, 110 Kuchma, Leonid

and opposition, 29 and Viktor Iushchenko, 210

Kudrin, Alexei, 180 Kurnosova, Ol’ga, 167 , 184 Kursk, 111 Kyrgyzstan, 3 , 173 , 193 , 210

and color revolutions, 127 , 168 and democratization, 13 , 99 , 211 and elite competition, 212 and organizational ecology, 205

labor social partnership in Russia, 74–79

labor code reform, 150–51

labor unions fi nancing, 76–77 independent, 73 Independent Union of Mineworkers

(NPG), 73 state dominated, 74–79

Latyshev, Petr, 153 Law on Political Parties

and veto points, 157 Law on Voters’ Rights

and restricting ballot access, 157

Index282

Liberal Democratic Party of Russia and bombing of Yugoslavia, 60 and Kremlin support, 158 and monetization protests, 181 protest participants, 57

Livshits, Aleksandr, 54 Lukashenko, Aleksandr, 8 , 191 Luzhkov, Iuri, 124 , 125 , 127 , 138 , 139 , 140 ,

141 , 154 , 260 , 261

Malaysia and hybrid regimes, 5 and labor unions, 27

Marii-El, 110 Mashkovtsev, Mikhail, 155 Matvienko, Valentina

and Iabloko in St. Petersburg, 162 and pensioners’ protests, 178

May Day and co-opting protest, 77

Medical Insurance Fund, 152 Medvedev, Dmitri, 147 , 161 , 196 Mestnye , 197 Mexico

Allianza Civica, 28 and authoritarian corporatism, 98 and democratization, 169 and hegemonic party rule, 154 and labor unions, 27 and organizational ecology, 205 protest and democratization, 23

miners and 1999 elections, 141 and collapse of USSR, 73 and independent unions, 28 , 58 and ruble devaluation, 54 in Primorskii Krai, 40 repertoire, 44 , 51 versus railroad workers. see Rostov

Mironov, Sergei, 155 , 164 and Just Russia, 158

Molodaia Gvardiia , 33 , 197 monetization, 175 , 178 , 179 , 180 , 181 , 182 Moscow, 197

and bombings, 134 and development, 184 and monetization, 176 and OVR, 140 and party lists 1999, 138–39 and protest, 1 , 47 , 63 , 168 , 177 , 178 , 181 ,

196 and strikes, 92 Dissenters’ March, 186 Gorbaty Most, 51

human rights groups, 193 , 194 Other Russia forum, 189

Moscow region, 140 Movement in Support of the Army, 181 Moving Together, 195

and Nashi, 195 Moving Without Putin, 181 , 195 Murmansk, 110 MVD

and elections of 1999, 134 MVD data

and hunger strikes, 54 and marches and rallies, 128 and miners’ strikes, 87 and protest participants, 57–58 and published sources, 57 and social tension, 53 and strikes, 51 and working days lost to strikes, 102 strengths and weaknesses, 45–49

Nash Dom Rossii , 156 Nashi , 1 , 195–97

and state mobilization, 33 creation of, 195

National Bolshevik Party and charges of extremism, 180 and imprisonment, 188 and pensioners’ protests, 177 , 181 and uniting the opposition, 184–86 and youth, 195 arrest of members, 178 as excuse for arrest, 167 repression of, 189

Naumov, Sergei, 182 Nazarov, Aleksandr, 153 Nazdratenko, Evgenii, 78 , 91 , 112

battle with Yeltsin, 111 Nemtsov, Boris, 54 , 111 Nikolaev, Vladimir, 182 Nizhny Novgorod

and Dissenters’ March, 1 and protest, 182

North Caucasus and ethnic protest, 58

North Korea, 3 , 33 Novosibirsk, 58 , 179 , 182 , 216

and 1999 elections, 140 and independent unions, 58 and preventive arrest, 168 and repression, 179 protest and state mobilization, 182 wage arrears and strikes, 116

Nyazov, Saparmurat, 3

Index 283

Oborona , 183 , 186 OMON, 1 , 167 , 174 Orël, 91 , 110 , 113 organizational ecology

and democratization, 99 and survivor organizations, 97–99 defi nition, 26 ersatz social movements, 27–28 in closed regimes, 26 in democracies, 26 in hybrid regimes, 26–30 , 203–07 in Russia, 7

early post-Soviet extinction, 29 in the sociology of organizations, 25 of labor in Russia, 73–79 post-Communism, 28 survivor organizations, 27

Otechestvo , 242 Otechestvo-Vsia Rossiia , 122 , 124 , 129 , 133 ,

134 , 138 , 139 , 140 , 141 , 150 , 156 formation, 127 predicting the vote for, 140

Other Russia, 162 , 184

Pavlovskii, Gleb and Moving Together, 195

Pension Fund, 152 People’s Democratic Union, 189 People’s Will Party

denied registration, 162 Petersburg Civic Opposition, 184 pluralistic ignorance, 171 , 187 Poland

and party defection, 164 and post-Communist protest, 44 and protest under Communism, 21 protest in comparative perspective, 49 protest repertoire, 52

political opportunities and protest, 126 in hybrid regimes, 208–09

Ponomarev, Lev, 168 Portugal

attitudes to protest, 20 Primakov, Evgenii, 94 , 96 , 101 , 104 , 112 ,

124 , 133 , 135 , 138 , 139 , 140 and Konstantin Titov, 127 and protest dynamics, 112–22 and succession, 124–25 , 138 and wage arrears, 136

Primorskii Krai and co-opting labor unions, 77 and co-opting protest, 77 and protest, 40 , 41

and relations with Moscow, 91 and ruble devaluation, 111 and strikes, 71

privatization and support for strikes, 81

Public Chamber, 194 , 213 , 214 , 215–16 , 217

Putin, Vladimir and determinants of protest, 37 and Duma elections 2007, 157 and labor unions, 150–51 and NGOs, 213–17 and protest decline, 133–37 and protest levels, 148 and strike patterns, 94 and the “vertical” of power, 149–50 and the reemergence of protest, 184–88 and the succession to Yeltsin, 135 erzatz social movements, 33 nature of the regime, 15–16

rail wars, 53 and ruble devaluation, 54 participants, 54

Rakhimov, Murtaza, 141 , 153 repression

and authoritarian regimes, 170–72

and elite competition, 209–10 and hybrid regimes, 168–70 , 172–74 and promoting elite unity, 210 channeling and erzsatz social movements,

194–97 channeling and NGOs under Putin,

192–94 channeling in the USSR, 191–92 coercion under Putin, 189–90 in the USSR, 188–89

Reznik, Maksim, 167 , 179 Rodina

and Just Russia, 158 pro-Kremlin opposition, 156 , 158

Rogozin, Dmitri and Motherland, 164 party denied registration, 162

Rossel, Eduard, 153 Rostov

and strikes, 71 miners versus railroad workers,

65 ruble devaluation, 46 , 103

and protest, 54 , 97 and strikes, 101

Rutskoi, Aleksandr, 153

Index284

Sakha, 111 Sechin, Igor

and Just Russia, 159 Serbia, 8

and color revolutions, 168 , 210 and elite competition, 206 and youth movements, 195 contacts with Russian activists, 186

Shaimiev, Mintimir, 154 Shein, Oleg, 150 Shmakov, Mikhail

and the Communist Party, 66 Shoigu, Sergei, 134 , 140 , 156 Shurskov, Aleksandr, 183 , 186 Siberian Civic Iniative Support Center, 213 sitsevaia revoliutsiia , 174 Slovakia

protest repertoire, 52 Smolensk, 71 , 111 Social Democratic Party

and Petersburg Civic Opposition, 184 and Sotsprof, 73

Social Insurance Fund, 152 social movements

and contention in hybrid regimes, 10

defi nition, 65 Solidarity, 21 , 28

and party defection, 164 Soskovets, Oleg, 111 Sotsprof

and illegal strikes, 45 and protest, 47 and reform of the labor code, 150 as a measure of union organizing, 85 fall from power, 73

Spain attitudes to protest, 20 authoritarian regime, 31

Spiritual Heritage, 139 St. Petersburg, 140 , 167

and channeling, 179–80 and coercion, 179 and monetization, 182 and Petersburg Civic Opposition, 184–85 and protest, 168 , 176–78 , 179 , 180 and strikes, 92 Dissenters’ March, 186 party registration, 162 preventative arrest, 189

Stalin and hunger strikes, 55 and repression, 188 and resistance, 21

Starodubtsev, Vasilii, 155 state mobilization

in democracies, 33 in hybrid regimes, 31–32 , 203–07 in Russia, 7 , 32–33

Stepashin, Sergei, 94 , 124 , 133 and regional governors, 134

strikes and center-region bargaining, 79–83 and elite competition, 81–84 and grievances, 85 and information, 84 and organization, 85 and state mobilization, 79–81 comparative data, 49–50 implications for strike literature, 11 in advanced industrial economies,

84–87 measurement, 87–88 patterns in Russia, 69–72 wildcat, 86

Stroev, Egor, 91 , 110 , 113 , 250 Surkov, Vladislav

and Just Russia, 159 and Moving Together, 195 and the creation of Nashi, 195

Sverdlovsk, 63 , 71

Taimyr Autonomous Okrug, 110 Tarkov, Aleksandr, 179 Tatarstan, 109 , 110 , 111 , 126 , 140

Al’met’evsk, 177 Tax Code, 152 teachers

and cost of strikes, 53 and seasonal variation in strike

patterns, 88 and state mobilization, 181 and strikes, 51 in Altai Krai, 100 in Primorskii Krai, 40 , 111

Tikhonov, Vladimir, 155 Titov, Konstantin, 127 Tiul’panov, Vadim, 181 , 182 Tiumen’, 127 Tolmacheva, Galina, 179 Tomsk

wage arrears and strikes, 116 Trudovaia Rossiia

protest actions, 47 , 63 protest participants, 57

Tuleev, Aman, 140 , 154 Turkmenistan, 3 Tuva, 140

Index 285

Ukraine, 3 , 30 , 187 and color revolutions, 127 , 168 , 193 , 210 and democratization, 99 , 211 and elite competition, 31 , 202 , 206 , 212 and elite splits, 210 and hybrid regimes, 5 and organizational ecology, 29 , 218 and youth movements, 195 contacts with Russian activists, 186 Orange Revolution and Russian reaction,

15 , 201 Ul’ianovsk, 110

wage arrears and strikes, 116 Union of Christian Democrats of Russia, 181 Union of Offi cers, 63 Union of Right Forces

and ballot access, 162 and Dissenters’ March, 167 and monetization protests, 181 protest participants, 57

United Civic Front, 167 , 189 United Russia

and monetization, 175 , 182 and Nashi, 196 and organizational ecology, 165 and protest mobilization, 180–82 and the 2007 elections, 196 creation, 156 endorsement by Putin, 157 party of power, 156

United Socialist Party of Russia denied registration, 162

Unity, 134 and Aman Tuleev, 140 and the 1999 elections, 134–35 , 138 , 139 ,

140 and United Russia, 156 fi rst party conference, 141 predicting the vote for, 140

veksel’s , 105 Venezuela, 3

and hybrid regimes, 5 , 24

and organizational ecology, 205 and state mobilization, 28 , 33 high levels of mobilization, 8

Veshniakov, Aleksandr, 161 and the National Bol’shevik Party,

185 Veterans of Chernobyl, 28

and protest, 63 Vladivostok

and labor unions, 77 and protest marches, 40

Voronezh, 110 , 181 , 182

wage arrears, 105–07 and protest, 108

World Bank, 73 , 87 , 272

Yakunin, Vladimir and patriotic NGOs, 28

Yaroslavl’ 63 , 98, 110, 111 Yeltsin, Boris

and determinants of protest, 37 and Evgenii Primakov, 94 , 104 and prime ministers, 94 and the miners, 73 and the Ministry of Labor, 73 demands for resignation, 64 nature of the regime, 6 , 15 protest and devaluation, 54 succession and protest, 126–28 succession to, 124–25 Yeltsin era and the study of protest, 8

Youth Civil Rights Movement, 189 Yugoslavia

and color revolutions, 193 and protest, 60

Zapatista uprising, 169 Zurabov, Mikhail, 182 , 185 Zvezda

and protest, 41 and rail blockade, 54 strike, 111

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes: Managing Dissent in Post-Communist Russia

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