Saved by $80-a-barrel oil from almost certain economic depression and political crisis, Russia appears to have weathered the worst of the world downturn. Yet a wave of protest demonstrations has swept the country in recent months, demonstrations remarkable for their geographic range, the demographics of their participants, the choice of issues, and the savvy with which participants have used the Internet to communicate and mobilize. The sheer variety of political affiliations and ad hoc political alliances is unprecedented, as is the sharpness of the criticism of the government and of the hitherto largely “Teflon” Vladimir Putin.
Protests have taken place in at least 48 cities and towns. On March 20, the “Day of Wrath,” demonstrations were held across 11 time zones, from Kaliningrad and Chernyakhovsk in the west to Vladivostok in the Far East. A change in what one Russian analyst called the “geography of discontent” placed the largest protests in the provinces instead of in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the traditional hotbeds of unrest. “Full-blown rallies and picketing” occurred, Nikolai Petrov of the Moscow Carnegie Center noted, in places “where as recently as a year ago even getting 20 people out on the street was a problem.”
Another novelty was the profile of the participants. Until now the paradigm for spontaneous, nationwide, grass-roots movements in Putin’s Russia has been the pensioners’ protest against cuts in their benefits in 2005. But among Russia’s new protesters, retirees and the poor have been largely supplanted by much younger, more affluent, and better educated demonstrators. The middle class “dominated” the 2010 protests, according to a leading Russian political magazine, Vlast (Power). Among those who stated their professions when they signed a “Putin-must-go” Internet petition, half were middle class (traditionally defined in Russia not by income but by education and occupation). Only 8 percent identified themselves as pensioners and 3 percent as pro-democracy activists. Indeed, even as the ranks of the new protesters swell, the established pro-democracy opposition parties and movements continue to draw little support.
Not surprisingly, the issues on the protesters’ minds were different, too. In 2005, the pensioners either wanted more support from the state or refused to settle for what they perceived as the curtailment of their benefits. Today, many, if not most, of the protesters want less from the government: In addition to lower taxes and tariffs, they want less intrusion in their lives and businesses, less corruption, less incompetence, less arbitrariness. Their beefs with the Kremlin, according to an astute Russian observer, reflect the “systemic flaws of power itself.”
Thus, the demonstrators raged at a situation captured by Russia’s only remaining national opposition newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, in the question: What is private property in Russia today, a right sealed by law and contract—or a privilege, which the powers that be grant based on constantly changing conditions and take away whenever they want? As far as “big capital” (the wealthiest entrepreneurs) is concerned, the paper continued, the issue was resolved long ago and the answer is: the state. But now, the commentary concluded, rapacious bureaucrats are taking on small property owners as well.
For the first time, Putin himself became an issue. Up to this point, the former president, now prime minister and de facto regent to President Medvedev, has seemed politically invulnerable. The architect of the current political and economic system, Putin is increasingly held responsible for economic hardship, corruption, and the blatant disregard for ordinary people exhibited by public officials at all levels. To a leading liberal commentator, this was the most notable development of the recent protests: “people overcoming their fear” of opposing the “great and terrible” Putin. “Down with Putin!” “LiLiPut[in] get lost!” “Putin, shoot yourself!” “Tariffs/duties—no; resignation—yes!” read the posters in Vladivostok. “Putin Must Go!” demanded the St. Petersburg protesters. “Russia without Putin!” was a slogan in Moscow. In Siberia, 39 percent of respondents told a pollster Putin was “Siberia’s biggest enemy.”
Posted on March 10 on the “Putin must go” website (putinavotstavku.ru), the petition calling for the prime minister’s resignation collected almost 7,500 signatures in the first five days. Of the signatories, 79 percent were not afraid to put down their full name and profession and even their address. A month later, there were 34,655 signatures, and at press time the total was up to 46,133.
Putin has created an “anti-constitutional system of personal rule for life,” the petition reads, and no “turn toward democratic development” can occur as long as he continues to exercise the real power in the country. Putin will never resign: His determination to hold on indefinitely is a result not only of his thirst for power but also his “fear of being taken to task” for what he has done. Yet, the petition concludes, to continue to have a ruler like Putin is “humiliating for the Russian people and mortally dangerous for Russia. The country can no longer carry this cross.”
On April 3, Professor Evgeny Gontmakher, a leading figure at the Institute of Contemporary Development, the think-tank rumored to be favored by the dauphin Medvedev, claimed there is an “active core” among Russia’s citizens: those who believe that “we cannot live like this any longer” and who tie their hopes to the “European choice” of national development. Specifically, Gontmakher continued, these men and women believe that Russia needs real democracy, instead of an “imitation”; a market economy “with just and honest competition,” instead of the present “ultra-monopolized” and “archaic” system, based on the export of raw materials; and a “socially oriented” welfare state, which, Gontmakher added, Russia does not have either.
It is too soon to say for sure whether the protests of recent months support this proposition. Those who demonstrate are still a tiny minority of the population. Yet the decidedly middle-class bias in their demographics and in the issues that brought them into the streets or to the Internet sites appears to place them well within the constituency for change identified by Gontmakher. The nature of many of the new protesters’ demands is such that, as a Russian commentator points out, the Kremlin cannot satisfy them without creating an “entirely new system of power”—a system that, unlike the current one, “would not separate the interests of the state from the interests of its citizens.”
Disparate though they were, the political, economic, and social issues raised by the protesters had a powerful unifying theme, a leitmotif: a plea for the restoration of human dignity, which is daily offended by the existing political and economic order. “We are Europeans,” a leader of the Kaliningrad protests told a reporter. “Why should we live like slaves?” “You must take responsibility for yourselves and for your lives,” an activist exhorted the crowd at the March 20 protest in Irkutsk in eastern Siberia. An elderly protester said to a reporter, “We have been on the sidelines for a long time, but we are not going to tolerate this any longer.”
Revolutions have started with less.
Leon Aron is director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
