Financial Times - Russia’s activists find their voice

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June 11, 2017. Kathrin Hille, Max Seddon.

Opposition leader Navalny hopes protests will help challenge Putin ahead of elections.

On a sunny Sunday afternoon in May, more than 20,000 people thronged Sakharov Avenue in central Moscow for an ostensibly apolitical protest against the city’s plan to raze Soviet-era buildings that are home to 1.6m people.

But when opposition leader Alexei Navalny appeared in the crowd in solidarity with his grandmother-in-law, who lives in one of the buildings, the obvious political overtones of his presence split organisers.

Yulia Galyamina, a linguistics professor and activist, invited him to address the crowd. However, as he moved forward, Ekaterina Vinokurova, a journalist, tweeted: “Navalny’s rushing to the stage. This is just unpleasant.”

Before Mr Navalny, a charismatic speaker who inspired the largest anti-Kremlin demonstrations in a generation two and a half months ago, could take to the stage, 30 policemen abruptly removed him from the event at the request of one of the organisers.

The incident pointed to the question that could decide the future of President Vladimir Putin as he seeks a fourth term in elections next March: will growing protest across Russia crystallise into a new political opposition movement?

The demonstration against Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin’s urban renewal plan is only the latest in a series of conflicts across the country over a broadening array of social, economic and cultural issues that belie the stereotype of public lethargy in Mr Putin’s Russia.

“Not only is the number and intensity of protests increasing, but they are spreading wave-like from traditionally more restive places such as large cities to regions where we hadn’t seen such activism in many years,” says Alexei Titkov, a sociologist at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow who monitors protests for the Committee for Civil Initiatives (KGI), a think-tank founded by presidential adviser Alexei Kudrin.

Although comprehensive statistics are hard to come by, analysts say the economic pain from the two-year long recession — triggered by the oil price crash and western sanctions — led to a spike in protest activity in 2015 and 2016. The Centre of Economic and Political Reform, a non-governmental group in Moscow, counted 1,141 protests just on labour issues last year.

Among the most eye-catching have been strikes and road blockades by truck drivers across the country against a new road toll system run by a company linked to Arkady Rotenberg, Mr Putin’s childhood friend and judo sparring partner. There have also been demonstrations by depositors caught in a bank collapse in Tatarstan, and rallies in Novosibirsk, the country’s third-largest city, against a steep rise in utility tariffs.

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Mr Navalny, who wants to challenge Mr Putin in the presidential election, is seeking to tap into this discontent. A felony conviction on what he says are trumped-up charges bars him from running for public office, but Mr Navalny hopes to gather enough public support to force the Kremlin to allow him in. Touring the country since March, the 41-year-old anti-corruption blogger has set up campaign staff in 45 cities.

In March, he spoke at a demonstration in Novosibirsk. He has also campaigned in support of the truckers. “What’s a trucker?” he says in an interview. “It’s a person who does a tough job, makes a tiny bit of money, and now they want to take more money from him and consign more people to poverty so they can give more money to Rotenberg.”

Mr Navalny has one core objective: to tie the causes of the different protesters to the issue of corruption — the cornerstone of his campaign. His ability to make that link will determine whether Russia’s protests fizzle out or become a force for political change.

“People always said political and social demands would merge sooner or later. That’s what’s happening now,” he says. “They all want to talk about poverty, as a consequence of Putin’s government. Everyone links it directly to government policy. There’s a consensus that is forming across the country among all sorts of people.”

Analysts note that the focus of protest activity in the regions is shifting from economic subjects. According to KGI, almost half of all protests in the second half of 2016 focused on political issues in a broad sense — a drastic change from 2015, when economic and social concerns topped the agenda.

“Human interest issues related to culture, history, ethics, etc, have become much more prominent. That is a tricky thing,” says Mr Titkov. “If people who hadn’t taken an interest in politics before but are mobilised by, say, new restrictions on the internet, and conclude that their concrete problem and some broader common agenda are somehow connected, we will get a much larger cohort of participants in future protests.”

The teenagers and students who turned out in force at anti-corruption rallies organised by Mr Navalny in more than 80 Russian cities in late March appeared to signal that this may be happening already. He is aiming to create momentum with another protest on June 12, which he hopes will reach at least twice as many cities.

In Moscow last month, many in the crowd on Sakharov Avenue were property owners who have never previously protested.

Ms Galyamina, an organiser of the Moscow protest who is running for a seat on the city council, is attempting to turn them into a political force. At a seminar in April, she told a packed room how to make posters, flyer their buildings, lobby their neighbours and print pamphlets. “If we already had all this, we’d be living in a different country,” she said. “But it’s never too late to start.”

So far, most Moscow protesters’ anger has focused on Mr Sobyanin, the mayor, rather than Mr Putin. But frustrating encounters with local officials have inspired more than 1,000 volunteers for an initiative to nominate opposition candidates to community boards.

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The trucker protest has also shown signs of becoming more political. When the government first launched the new road toll, called Platon, in 2015, owners of small road transport companies from far-flung parts of Russia thousands of kilometres apart started driving towards Moscow, planning to block the capital’s entire road network.

Although many of the truckers blasted Mr Rotenberg and the government’s policy, criticism of Mr Putin was almost entirely absent. Moscow successfully wore the protesters down with a news blackout, traffic police checks and minor concessions.

But this year, a steep rise in the toll fee jerked the movement back into life. It is now much better organised with regional unions and a dedicated YouTube channel.

Several activists have issued political demands. “I personally am in favour of calling for the government to resign,” says Rustam Malamagomedov, head of the truckers’ union in Dagestan, the restive North Caucasus republic that is one of the protest centres. “Our problem is the entire political system — it doesn’t work in the interest of the people.”

But Mr Malamagomedov’s union voted against calling for the government’s resignation. “These are people who are already struggling to feed their families,” he says. “What they need is not politics — politics means trouble. They need Platon to be cancelled so they can make a living.”

With money running out, many truckers are going back to work even though they failed to achieve their goal. The company of Mr Malamagomedov’s family owns four trucks. Two have resumed service so his brothers can earn some money.

The depositors’ protest in Tatarstan, the last of Russia’s ethnic enclaves to retain the de jure status of a republic, is also having trouble holding up. Tatarstan is one of the most pro-government regions: 83 per cent voted for Mr Putin in presidential elections in 2012. However, local authorities were caught flat-footed when the protest movement appeared last December after the central bank froze transfers from Tatfondbank, the republic’s second-largest lender, on discovering an Rbs45bn ($780m) hole in its balance sheet.

Furious at the local government’s failures — Tatarstan owned about 40 per cent of the bank, while prime minister Ildar Khalikov chaired its board — a few hundred depositors even attempted to barge into Mr Khalikov’s office.

When the central bank shut down the bank in March, protests swelled to a thousand, a huge number for Tatarstan. Mr Khalikov and the head of the regional central bank resigned.

Mr Navalny happened to be opening a campaign office in Kazan, the republic’s capital, at the time. A group of protesters went to meet him, but left disappointed. “He hasn’t done anything to help us or start an investigation,” says Ruslan Titov, a member of the depositors’ organising committee.

The organisers are focusing on bankruptcy procedures and lawsuits rather than broadening their demands. “We’re the victims. We want our money back. We’re not trying to overthrow anyone,” says Mr Titov. Many even see the Kremlin as an ally against Tatarstan’s government. Mr Putin promised to personally supervise Tatfondbank’s struggles in December; a new bailout fund was announced in April.

Numbers at protests have already begun to thin and the remaining protesters are mostly small businessmen with corporate loans.

Ilya Novikov, a Tatfondbank client who is also the local representative for Open Russia, the exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s opposition movement, attempted to broaden the protesters’ demands, but was shouted down. “They have blinkers — they want to stay within what’s allowed,” he says.

The mood is quite different in Novosibirsk, a city of 1.5m with an array of local civil society groups. Here, activists are basking in the glory of a hard-won victory: in April, Vladimir Gorodetsky, the region’s governor, cancelled the plan for a 15 per cent utility price rise, which had sparked the protests last December.

“We are using the momentum to tackle the next issue,” says Sergei Dyachkov, owner of a small consulting company and co-organiser of the demonstrations. The organising committee disbanded, but one-third of its members are planning protests against a new rubbish processing concession that they believe will send fees soaring.

But activists caution that this is hardly a sign of revolution, and that Novosibirsk has a political culture based on compromise. Several of the recent protest’s organisers are former government officials with strong ties across party lines and the clout to make deals.

Mr Navalny’s appearance at one of the rallies was based on such a deal. “Some on the organising committee demanded that he avoid all politics, and he did,” says Sergei Gladchenko, another of the protest organisers and local representative of Mr Navalny’s Progress party.

He sees the main achievement of the utility protest in chipping away at political resignation. “We helped both the people here and the country at large understand that it can be done — you can affect change,” Mr Gladchenko says.

But he believes it will be years until the public in Novosibirsk is ready to push for big political overhauls. “We are not growing ourselves an army of fighters,” he says. “That we leave to Navalny. He collects the youth, and they will bring their parents. That is the future.”

Top-down control: Politicians become estranged from the public

In the course of the five years since Vladimir Putin, right, returned to the presidency after an intermezzo as prime minister, the Kremlin has been fine-tuning Russia’s political system.

It made it harder for independent candidates to participate in elections. It discontinued mayoral elections and put municipal administrations under tighter control of regional governors. Finally, Mr Putin has kept the governors themselves on an ever shorter leash, replacing more than two dozen of them in the past two years before the end of their terms.

One reason behind the attempts at ever tighter top-down control was the shock from the massive street demonstrations in late 2011, when tens of thousands of Muscovites protested fraud in that year’s Duma elections and expressed their displeasure over Mr Putin’s intended return to the presidency.

But Russian political analysts warn that the hollowing out of the institutions may have robbed the government of the ability to anticipate problems in the regions, and could be fuelling tension instead.

“The continuation of a difficult economic situation, an increase of protest activity and a deterioration of the political institutions at the same time is a very dangerous combination,” says Alexander Kynev, a political scientist at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

Over the past year, as the new rules have started to kick in across the regions, the level of political competition, the extent of independence of regional and local lawmakers and the scope of local autonomy have all seen a drastic slide, according to the Committee for Civil Initiatives (KGI), a Moscow think-tank.

The public senses the change, and is growing estranged from its politicians, says the Russia Public Opinion Research Centre (Vciom), a pollster that monitors public sentiment for the Kremlin.

“Values such as fairness, honesty and respect, to which people aren’t normally paying much attention, are getting relevant again,” says Yulia Baskakova of Vciom. “People notice these values only when they feel their absence, and right now, about one quarter of all Russians say there is a deficit of fairness in our society.”

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