RUSSIA AT WAR
“He’s dead.”
It was Evgenia Albats, the usually irrepressible editor of the opposition-minded Russian newsweekly The New Times, who said it first. Along the length of a lunch table in Boston, phones had begun to buzz.
“Boris is dead,” she repeated. “They killed him.”
RUSSIA RISES
The story of Vladimir Putin’s power—the story of how Putin’s strength is created by the emotions and support of millions of Russians and the acquiescence of millions more—is not the only story in Russian politics. It is not even the only story that matters. Putin’s power was built in the face of opposition and, despite everything, that opposition has persisted. Millions of ordinary Russians continue to see a different future for their country, and the challenge they pose to the Kremlin remains formidable. Their story needs to be told, too, not least because they will play no less of a role than Putin’s supporters in writing the next chapter in Russian history.
Boris Nemtsov, however, will not feature in that future. A Yeltsin-era governor and deputy prime minister with an infectious smile, he—like many of Boris Yeltsin’s young reformers—was associated by most Russians with the chaos and deprivation of the 1990s. But standing shoulder to shoulder with Alexei Navalny and Sergei Udaltsov throughout the Bolotnaya protests, and risking life and limb as the police charged into the May 6, 2012 rally, Nemtsov gradually began to restore his standing. While Udaltsov languished in prison and Navalny was tied up in seemingly endless prosecutions, Nemtsov led the charge against the war in Ukraine. In July 2013, he was elected to the Yaroslavl regional Duma, making him one of very few opposition leaders to actually hold office. In addition, he headed the People’s Freedom Party (Parnas, by its Russian acronym), the only true opposition party officially recognized by the Central Electoral Commission and thus “licensed” to put names on the ballot. Plans were being laid to field a broad slate of opposition candidates in the 2015 parliamentary elections.
It was the anti-war movement, though, that really put Nemtsov back at the forefront of Russian politics, as the most prominent politician of any stripe to speak out forcefully and consistently against both the annexation of Crimea and the intervention in the Donbas. The first major anti-war rally in Russia was held on March 15, 2014, just three days before the annexation of Crimea. Smaller-scale, unsanctioned anti-war and pro-Ukraine rallies had been held before in Moscow, attracting no more than a few hundred people at a time. March 15 was a bitterly cold day, and the rally itself was beset by technical difficulties, which particularly affected the sound system. As a result, many participants left early. Nevertheless, by 1.45pm there were already 5,000 people on the streets. Nemtsov and Ilya Yashin held a banner reading “Russia and Ukraine without Putin!” By 3.45pm there were as many as 50,000 people. Groups represented included a particular slice of the Russian political spectrum—liberal groups like Solidarnost, the Progress Party and Demvybor, and some anarchists. Opposition politicians and activists, war reporters and even members of Pussy Riot took the stage.1 Sergei Kurginian—a Kremlin-friendly nationalist voice who had headlined many of the anti-opposition, fake pro-Kremlin demonstrations (“Putingi”) in 2012—reprised his earlier role, leading a pro-Kremlin rally at the same time as the Peace March, but it attracted only a fraction of the participants, despite the obviously greater popularity of its message.
A second Peace March was scheduled for September 2014. By then, peace rallies—which had been something of an untested idea in the spring—were clearly becoming an opportunity for the opposition as a whole to regroup, and perhaps regain some of the momentum that had been so sorely lacking since Putin’s inauguration in May 2012. Almost all of the major liberal opposition political groupings announced their intention to take part, including Yabloko, RPR-Parnas, the Progress Party, the Green Alliance, the December 5 Party, and Solidarity. The agenda, too, began to grow beyond simply opposition to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine; the application for permission to protest railed against “growing fascism in our country, [and] the heavy economic consequences.”2
Nemtsov was rapidly emerging as the most prominent voice in the anti-war movement, and he in turn helped to attract a small handful of celebrity supporters, including the rock singer Andrei Makarevich and the actor Oleg Basilashvili.3 Still, in an interview with Dozhd the day before the march, Nemtsov kept the focus very much on the war: “If a lot of people come out to the march now, it will be a very powerful signal that the decision in Minsk, the Minsk ceasefire, must be maintained. That’s a very serious thing. It is very fragile, and there are a lot of people who want to break it and start [fighting] all over again. Nonetheless, the opinion of citizens—and first and foremost of Muscovites—can play a very important role. We can, in fact, save people’s lives. You understand, coming out to this march, we are saving the lives of those boys, saving families, children, women, men, fathers, mothers, saving everybody. That is a very important reason to come out.”4
The turnout for the September Peace March was on a par with the spring event, bringing out somewhere in the range of 50,000; a smaller rally was held in St. Petersburg.5 In other cities, however, local authorities refused to allow anti-war marches to go ahead, including in Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Barnaul.6
The day he died, Nemtsov gave what would be his last interview to Ekho Moskvy, a state-owned radio station with a reputation as one of the few broadcast media where opposition leaders could still get a hearing in Russia. After the relative success—in terms of mobilization, if not results—of the March and September 2014 Peace Marches, the opposition settled on a deliberate (if leisurely) pace of one major march every six months or so; the next was scheduled for March 1, 2015. This time, though, the government threw a spanner into the works, denying permission for another rally in central Moscow, and instead offering a location in the bedroom suburb of Marino, about as far as it is possible to go from the Kremlin and still technically be in Moscow. In his Ekho Moskvy interview, Nemtsov explained that, while some groups (including Yabloko) pulled out in protest at the government’s move, the rest of the movement decided to go ahead with the march in Marino, while simultaneously expanding the agenda yet further. Instead of calling it a Peace March, the rally was dubbed the Spring March, trying to steal back the moniker of “Russian Spring” that had been adopted by the nationalists and Donbas separatists, and railing against the government not just for the war, but for the economic hardship the conflict was wreaking on ordinary Russians, and for the cover it provided for corruption and abuse of power.7
SHOTS FIRED
As Nemtsov was preparing to give the interview that no one could know would be his last, a two-day conference at Tufts University was about to get under way. Given that the conference was organized by students, it was a remarkable affair, attracting some of the biggest names in Russian academia, politics and journalism. In one of the morning panels on the first day, Evgenia Albats shared the stage with Oksana Boyko, a talk-show host on Russia Today, the Russian state-backed international broadcaster often accused of propaganda. The fireworks were spectacular, and it did not end well for Boyko, who was forced to admit that Russian state television had fabricated much of its coverage of the early months of the Donbas conflict.
Albats had lunch that afternoon with exiled opposition politician Ilya Ponomarev, Ukrainian revolutionary leader Mustafa Nayyem, and a number of political analysts, including your co-author. (Boyko lunched in a different room.) The news was broken in a text from Yashin, Nemtsov’s comrade from the anti-war movement, who had taken a call from Nemtsov’s companion as she stood helplessly watching him bleed out on the asphalt. It happened at 11.15pm: shots fired from a passing car. Had it been a different time of day, the shadow of a Kremlin tower would have fallen squarely on the spot. Albats boarded the next plane to Moscow. Boyko, perhaps wisely, skipped the rest of the conference.
Nemtsov was not the first opposition figure to be killed in Russia: opposition politicians, including Galina Starovoitova and Sergei Yushenkov, had been murdered, as had journalists including Anna Politkovskaya and Anastasia Baburova, and human-rights activists Stanislav Markelov and Natalia Estemirova, to name just a few. But Nemtsov’s murder was immediately seen as different: he was among the top two or three names in Russia’s current opposition, a former deputy prime minister who could not be regarded as a minor figure of little importance, as Putin had earlier dismissed Politkovskaya. Russia had become the sort of country where opposition leaders were gunned down.
In the next issue of The New Times, Albats recalled a conversation she had had with Nemtsov only the week before. “How come,” she had asked, “Navalny keeps getting thrown in jail, and they never touch you, even though you write harsher and harsher things about Putin, the Kremlin and Donbas?”
“Because I was deputy prime minister,” Nemtsov answered briskly. “You have to understand, they do understand that power will change hands eventually, and they don’t want to create a precedent for whoever comes to power later and might start shooting at those who served Putin.”8
The Spring March planned for March 1 became a memorial procession for Nemtsov. With hastily granted permission from the city authorities, the event was moved to the very center of the city, and participants walked in silence to lay flowers on the spot where Nemtsov was killed. They carried signs and banners adding the Cyrillic soft sign to his given name, transforming Борис into Борись—the imperative form of the verb “to fight.”9
UNDER THE GUN
Looking back from the vantage point of Putin’s fourth term in the Kremlin, it’s easy to conclude that Russia’s opposition was doomed from the day he came back to the presidency and crushed the Bolotnaya protest movement. But for many, that was not the feeling at the time. Putin was back in office; people were in jail; restrictions on the media and on civil society had been tightened—but all the same, many liberals believed things were still looking up.
“In the fall of 2013 there was still a sense of ongoing liberalization, just of everything continuing to open up,” Mikhail Zygar recalled, looking back on a time when he was still editor-in-chief of Dozhd. “There had been [Moscow mayoral] elections in the summer, where Navalny came in second and almost forced a runoff. In the fall, they let both Khodorkovsky and Pussy Riot out of jail. Everyone was looking forward to the Olympics. Everyone was looking forward to more openness and more liberalism. We were certain that our wave was cresting. We didn’t feel the sword of Damocles hanging over us.”
In fact, the opposition had already been dealt a number of blows. Putin returned to the Kremlin in May 2012 with a heavy hand, persecuting opposition leaders and activists, tightening control over the media and the internet, and harassing NGOs and civic groups. That’s not to say that the Kremlin had made no concessions to the Bolotnaya opposition movement: regional gubernatorial elections were reinstated (having been ended after the Beslan terror attack in 2004), and barriers for political parties to gain access to the ballot were reduced somewhat. In April 2012, Yevgeny Urlashov ran on an opposition ticket for mayor of the city of Yaroslavl and won; fifteen months later, he was bundled into a police van and jailed on corruption charges.
The first criminal investigation against Alexei Navalny—the lawyer and anti-corruption blogger who emerged as the charismatic leader of the opposition, overshadowing even Nemtsov—was launched in July 2012, on charges that he had defrauded the Kirov regional government when he had served as an adviser in the privatization of a forestry company, Kirovles. In December of that year, he and his brother, Oleg, were charged with embezzlement in a different case, relating to a contract with the French cosmetics company Yves Rocher (despite the fact that the company reported taking no losses in the matter). In July 2013, Navalny was convicted and given a five-year jail term in the Kirovles case, only to have the prosecution request and receive a suspended sentence the next day, after which he returned to Moscow to contest the mayoral election there. In December 2014, Navalny was given a second suspended sentence in the Yves Rocher case, while his brother, Oleg, was sent to prison for three and a half years. Other movement figures also faced prosecution. In August 2012, two members of Pussy Riot were sent to jail. And Sergei Udaltsov, leader of the radical National Bolshevik Party and among the most vociferous figures in the Bolotnaya movement, was arrested as one of the May 6 protesters and sentenced to four and a half years in prison.
In addition to those and other activists—particularly in Russia’s far-flung regions—pressure was brought to bear on public figures who sympathized with the opposition. Thus, in the spring of 2013, the government opened an investigation into a group of Russian and international experts who had been asked by former Russian Constitutional Court judge Tamara Morshchakova—at the behest of then-President Medvedev—to write confidential opinions regarding the convictions of the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Among them was the economist Sergei Guriev, rector of the New Economic School, who had written economic policy for Medvedev but had, more recently, publicly supported Navalny. Fearing prosecution, he fled the country in April 2013, shortly before the investigators announced pending charges for attempting to subvert the course of justice. Suspicion fell on others, as well; thus, Igor Fediukin, deputy minister of education, came under fire for his perceived collaboration with the Dissernet project, an initiative led by opposition figure Sergei Parkhomenko aimed at uncovering academic fraud and plagiarism among the ruling elite. Fediukin was forced out of office the same week Guriev fled the country. The result was that the fear of prosecution began to hang over even those liberals who had stayed away from political opposition per se.
Meanwhile, the government tightened its control over the information space, both legislatively and managerially. In July 2012, two months after Putin’s inauguration, the government adopted a new law and set of regulations creating a state-run blacklist of internet content that the government found undesirable. Formally, this was targeted at content deemed to promote extremism, narcotics or suicide, or to contain child pornography; however, the system could be—and soon was—used to target protest-related content as well. In March 2014, Roskomnadzor, the agency charged with maintaining and enforcing the blacklist, blocked access to the opposition-minded news sites Grani.ru and EJ.ru, as well as to the blogs of Navalny and opposition leader Garri Kasparov.
In addition to laying the groundwork for control and censorship online, the government moved to tighten control over a wide range of media outlets. The effort began close to home, in December 2013, when Putin issued a decree dismissing the leadership of RIA Novosti—a state media holding known for high professional standards and a modicum of balanced reporting. The agency’s new head, Dmitry Kiselev, was instructed to promote the interests, views and messages of the Russian government. In March 2014, Roskomnadzor threatened to block the major news website Lenta.ru, provoking its owner, Alexander Mamut, to fire the editor. The rest of the editorial staff resigned in protest, and a new staff follows a Kremlin-friendly line. Gazprom Media altered its own management structures to enforce tighter control over the Ekho Moskvy radio station, known as a voice for opposition-minded journalists, activists and politicians. The next month, Pavel Durov—the founder and CEO of VKontakte, Russia’s largest social networking site, who had refused to provide user data to the security services—was pushed out and fled the country. And in September 2014, the Duma passed a law restricting foreigners from holding more than a 20 percent stake in any Russian media outlet, calling into question the future of some of the country’s leading independent publications, including the newspaper Vedomosti and the Russian editions of Forbes, GQ and other magazines. The result was a gradual but significant erosion of diversity across the Russian media space.
Finally, in the year or so after Putin returned to the Kremlin, the Duma came to be known in opposition circles as the “crazy printer,” for the speed with which it seemed to be producing legislation cracking down on civil society organizations, and indeed anyone at all who worked with foreign governments and pro-democracy groups, or who simply had the temerity to publicly espouse unpopular opinions.10
THE WAR COMES HOME
And yet, the opposition persisted—just not in the form it had taken before.
The 2011–12 Bolotnaya protest wave had galvanized what had already been emerging as a wide-ranging anti-regime movement. This involved the amalgamation of longstanding issue-oriented NGOs and civic groups, newer groupings that arose as a response to the 2011 Duma election, and the networks of prominent anti-government activists and journalists into a civic network—a network of networks that was, at the peak of mobilization, much more than the sum of its parts.11 But, like many protest movements, it was a product both of and for the moment. When that moment passed, the movement faded—as movements do—but it did not go away. Instead, as our research shows, it reconstituted itself in new forms, forms better suited to a longer-term fight and with clearer leadership.
The Bolotnaya mobilization that began in December 2011 had brought together a range of NGOs and social movement organizations, including those that had been active in Russia across various issue areas for quite some time, and organizations created immediately before and during the election period. Thereafter, some of these newer organizations fell by the wayside, while others persisted and new ones were created, with an eye toward longer-term contestation of a rapidly retrenching Putin government.12
As the momentum from Bolotnaya began to fade, though, new organizations emerged, less “of the moment” and more focused on longer-term agendas and—almost inevitably—on leaders. Three of these groups emerged around Navalny himself: the Foundation for the Fight Against Corruption (FBK), Navalny’s investigation and advocacy organization, known for its dramatic exposés; the aptly named Team Navalny, a central structure for on- and off-line organizing activities, created with a clear view toward eventually contesting a presidential election; and the Progress Party, Navalny’s formal political platform, which attempted to field candidates in the 2015 regional and 2016 parliamentary elections, but which was never formally registered by the Central Electoral Commission. Separately, an online movement with the unwieldy name “We are against interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine” emerged in March 2014 to organize the first Peace March and continued to serve as the major anti-war platform in Russia; many of the leaders were activists in Nemtsov’s Solidarity movement.
Between 2012 and 2015, we tracked these and other groups on Facebook, where they were most active. Although we could only see what people were doing publicly (and made no attempt to access their private communication), we were able to look systematically at some 200,000 messages communicated between some 45,000 people over that period, across all of the communities and movements described above.
As we would expect, discussions in the network grew quieter over time, declining to barely more than a murmur by the end of 2013.13 But just as Russia’s adventures in Ukraine sparked mass mobilization among nationalists, so too did it bring out the opposition—both into the streets, and onto the internet.14 Crimea and the Donbas clearly breathed new life into the opposition, more than doubling the size of the network we were monitoring from the beginning of 2014 to the summer of 2015.15
In the summer of 2014, more than two years after Putin’s inauguration, when coercion and ideological counter-mobilization had taken hold, many people even inside the opposition began to fret that the movement was dead. Thus, it was somewhat surprising that we found almost three times as much activity in the network as we had right before the 2012 presidential election. Less than 1 percent of this activity, however, was in the communities that had been created during Bolotnaya or before it. Virtually all of the participants were engaged in the new anti-war community.16 And while Bolotnaya-movement and other groups were more active in the fall than in the summer, the anti-war community itself still accounted for 98 percent of activity.
Thus, through at least September 2014 the anti-war movement was the single most important recruiter of new supporters to the opposition. While most of the Bolotnaya and pre-Bolotnaya groups were being kept alive by skeleton crews of activists, the anti-war movement was bringing in thousands of people who had not been active before.17 That does not mean, however, that the anti-war movement was an altogether separate phenomenon. It was, as Bolotnaya had been before, the form that Russia’s opposition took at the moment. Among its most prominent activists were Boris Nemtsov and Ilya Yashin, veterans of opposition party politics, alongside journalists and activists who had been prominent in the Bolotnaya movement. They brought with them to the anti-war community ideas, frames and tropes that were familiar from the 2011–12 protest wave, and which meant that the anti-war movement took on many of the same ideas and aesthetics. Tellingly, Nemtsov himself began researching a high-profile report on the war, to be titled “Putin: War”—an obvious sequel to his “Putin: Results” report that had provided a compendium of evidence for high-level corruption during the 2011–12 wave. This meant, among other things, that Bolotnaya-era participants could fit harmoniously into the movement, while, as the anti-war community dwindled into 2015, its supporters could flow just as easily into other oppositional communities.
FRIENDSHIP PARK
For Nikolai Epple and his neighbors, the war was local.
A thirty-something journalist and literary translator—among his proudest achievements is a translation of G. K. Chesterton’s Basil Howe into Russian—Epple moved in 2011 to Rechnoi Vokzal, a relatively quiet district in far northwest Moscow. It was sentimentality, in part, that had motivated the move from central Moscow out to the far end of the metro’s green line; Epple had grown up there. But it was also the park. Epple and his wife had recently had a baby, and Park Druzhby—“Friendship Park,” one of Moscow’s many green spaces—would be right on their doorstep.
In August 2015, though, the park began to become less friendly. Epple and other residents found a corner of the park—a field popular with dog owners and model aircraft enthusiasts, and a hill popular with sled-borne kids in the winter—cordoned off and piled with construction supplies. That was when Epple remembered his neighbor.
“My wife works at a children’s club,” Epple recalled in an interview. “And this neighbor, his kids go to that club. And he’s an activist, kind of a professional activist. He’s always doing battle against something—against parking, against some procurement contract, just always against something. I always thought he was kind of a crazy person, but for a while there had been this conversation in his circles about the park. No one really paid attention to it. I mean, we always live with this sense that the state’s going to come and take something. But he had been talking about the park for a while.”
And then the bulldozers came.
“There were ten of us at the start, who went out to the bulldozers,” Epple said. “Maybe not even ten. And then people just started coming. Facebook played a very important role, because it was really the pictures on Facebook that pushed it. . . . The core were mothers with baby carriages. That made for good pictures. And they were very dedicated. People would come, and they would call their friends. And then on the second day, on the third day, when it began to resonate, other people started coming: bloggers, journalists. Though at first it was locals, who read about it on social media.”
At stake was a private football field and sports complex, to be built on dubious permits by a contractor with alleged ties to the authorities.18 After being stonewalled by the authorities and United Russia officials, Epple and his neighbors—who manned a permanent tent camp outside the construction site even as the nights grew colder into fall—welcomed help from the liberal party Yabloko, from the Communists, and from Progressive Law, a legal aid fund set up by Navalny’s Progress Party. In short order, however, flyers started appearing in the neighborhood and articles were printed in the local newspaper and on the Russian social networking site VKontakte accusing Epple and the Friendship Park protesters of being a “fifth column” in the service of the State Department.19 By late August, the city sent in the police to break up the protests. When that failed—in part because the police themselves were loath to intervene (and one officer was fired as a result)—private security services descended on the camp in a series of raids, sending some protesters to the hospital.20 The protesters themselves responded by branching out, seeking support from others who found themselves in a similar relationship with the state. Some of these came together in a new city-wide movement “Za Park” (“For the Park”), including a movement organized to prevent the construction of a new church in the Losiny Ostrov (Moose Island) park in northeast Moscow.21
“It was about a week into it, when we sat down, and there was a core team, some kind of structure, we sat and started thinking that we need to make connections, to exchange experience,” Epple recalled. “It took about another week before we really started to get in touch. And then, maybe in a month or two, there was already this association [Za Park].”
Perhaps more worryingly for the Kremlin, however, Epple and his comrades decided to send a delegation to the so-called “Green Column” in the “March for the Turnover of Power” in September 2015, organized by Navalny.22
“That was interesting,” Epple recalls. “Because we took a long time to decide whether we would just go as individuals, or whether we would go to represent the park. Some people said, we don’t need this Navalny or even politics in general. They’ll break us up. Others said no, we have common ground. It was a real debate. In the end, we decided to represent the park.”
It was, Epple said, the outcome of a natural progression of thought.
“A lot of people started off neutral,” he told us. “But after two weeks of sitting in the park, of talking through the night? People who hadn’t thought through for themselves ‘what’s going on with politics?’, ‘what are my convictions?’, ‘who is closest to my opinions?’, after two weeks of talking people moved toward this kind of liberal democratic position. At the beginning, everyone more or less didn’t like [Moscow Mayor Sergei] Sobyanin, but that was disconnected, I mean, not politically motivated. It was just, ‘he’s the boss, who we can identify, and who is a jerk.’ And then over the course of two weeks, those who didn’t have a view, they got one—about democracy, about elections, about how things are the way they are because Putin has been in power for twenty years. And it just built up. It became clear what we needed to do.”
DAY OF THE SNAIL
“We are not a fifth column,” Sergei Voloshchuk told the Russian newspaper RBK in November 2015. By “we,” Voloshchuk was referring to the thousands of long-distance truckers who had converged on Moscow, St. Petersburg and other major cities to protest a new tax being levied by the government on their trade. “I love my country and I hate America. . . . But right now, we’re fighting for our rights and the rights of all Russians.”23
Just months earlier, Voloshchuk and many of his comrades had taken part in the so-called Anti-Maidan, a series of rallies in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia designed to show loyalty to the Kremlin and put a stop to any talk of Ukraine-style regime change in Russia. (Never mind that such talk was mostly in the imaginations of Anti-Maidan organizers.) Participants—who included the Night Wolves biker gang favored by Putin and a group of heartland industrial workers who had threatened to come to Moscow and beat up anti-regime protesters in 2011—carried portraits of Putin and former Chechen leader Akhmat Kadyrov as strong-armed talismans against what they saw as Western encroachment and interference.24 But in November 2015, Voloshchuk and other truckers were huddled in the cabs of their big rigs in makeshift camps outside the Moscow beltway, their PR efforts supported by friends of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, their food and clean water carried in by sympathizers from environmental and LGBT groups—and opposed by their erstwhile allies from the Anti-Maidan.
On December 4, after their warnings went unheeded, Voloshchuk and his comrades struck. They declared the “Day of the Snail,” making good on their threat to drive their trucks slowly around Moscow’s MKAD beltway—a massive ten-to-twelve-lane highway vital to the capital’s transportation—and effectively paralyze it. The reason for their anger was something called “Platon,” an automated road-tax system for heavyweight trucks. Part of the problem was the cost. Most of the striking truckers were privateers, owner-operators of small businesses, who thus could not easily pass on the cost of the tax to their clients. But the other part of the problem was that Platon reeked of corruption: it was to be operated by a private company called RTITS, majority-owned by Igor Rotenberg, the son of Arkady Rotenberg, a close friend and associate of Putin; RTITS would, of course, get a large commission for the taxes collected. One popular protest banner seen on striking trucks read, “The Rotenbergs are worse than ISIS” (and this not long after Russia had gone to war against ISIS in Syria).
The government, of course, should have known better than to pick a fight with the truckers. Organized, networked and with a culture of solidarity and mutual assistance, they were exactly the kind of social group you would expect to react robustly to policies they don’t like. But the government had also been here before. In 2005, when they tried to ban right-side-drive cars—of which Russia at the time had approximately 2 million, mostly imported used from Japan—a driver named Vyacheslav Lysakov created a campaign called “Freedom of Choice,” organized drivers to shut down traffic in central Moscow, and won a repeal of the ban. (Lysakov was later recruited into Putin’s Russian National Front, a campaign organization parallel to United Russia, and abandoned the movement.)25 And the government compromised on Platon, too, keeping the system in place (and thus making good on its commitments to the Rotenbergs), but reducing the tariff by nearly 60 percent and putting a moratorium on fines for noncompliance.
For all its vaunted strength and autocracy, in fact the Russian government frequently backs down in the face of concerted protest—frequently, but not always. In February 2017, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin drew up plans to demolish as many as 8,000 apartment buildings in the city. Some of these plans had been around for a long time; much of the city’s housing stock, particularly so-called Khrushchyovka, or Khrushchev buildings, designed in the 1950s, were nearing the end of their useful lives and had long been slated for removal. But the demolition plans had never been on such a scale.
Here, too, the response could have been predicted. As it became clearer exactly which buildings were on the demolition list, a group of apartment owners came together—on Facebook, of course—to try to stop it. By April, according to our data, there were as many as 3,000 active members in the online movement; by July, the number reached 8,000. On the streets, by the government’s own data, there were some 500 protests in the first half of May alone, encompassing as many as 35,000 people.26 In a partial compromise, the city government cut the list of proposed demolitions to 4,543 and agreed to allow homeowners to vote, requiring at least 60 percent of homeowners in each building to vote “yes” for demolition to go ahead. In the end, 4,079 buildings voted “yes,” and as many as 900,000 Muscovites stand to be relocated—forcibly or otherwise—at some point in the next several years.27 The holdouts will hope that they fare better than Epple and his neighbors at the park.
“In the winter, at the district council somewhere they decided they needed to pick up the pace, because we were blocking the trucks every other night, everyone was tired, and even the construction drivers were quitting,” Epple recalled. “And that’s when the police really got tough. Right before New Year’s they wanted to arrest us and lock us up for fifteen days. Everyone. Not just the core, but just accidental people, who were scared. At the beginning, in the summer, there was just this feeling of surprise, that there were so many of us, we were staying through the night and not leaving. There was inspiration, not fear. And then they brought in the police, and a private security group, and it got serious. People here remember that the state is powerful, and it’s best not to get involved.”
THE PEOPLE V. DIMON
Even as he continued to do battle with prosecutors, Navalny and his team doubled down on their anti-corruption campaigns. Drawing on legal documents and public records sourced from around the world, Navalny traced the allegedly ill-gotten gains of people at the commanding heights of Russian political and economic power. Presented in increasingly slick multi-media packages—and often with well-produced videos for those unwilling to read through the small print—the investigations aimed to uncover not just corruption, but hypocrisy. Thus, as Russia spiraled deeper into conflict with the West, Navalny reveled in uncovering the Russian elite’s real estate holdings in Miami.28 In December 2015, Navalny’s target was Justice Minister Yury Chaika and his son Artyom, whom Navalny accused of using his father’s position as cover for a massive corporate raiding and extortion operation.29 In the summer of 2016, Navalny turned his attention to First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, whom Navalny accused not only of amassing unreasonable amounts of luxury real estate, but also of flying his wife’s prized show-dogs around the world on private jets.30
The biggest broadside, however, came in on March 2, 2017, when Navalny released his “Dimon” investigation, using the street-slang diminutive of Dmitry—as in Medvedev.31 Backed up by reams of paper, and illustrated in a fifty-minute video complete with aerial drone footage, the investigation pointed to an international empire of real estate and business interests, tying in some of Russia’s most prominent oligarchs in the process. It was the highest in Russia’s “vertical of power” Navalny’s exposés had yet climbed.
Investigative work was only one of Navalny’s fronts, however. Having been convicted of fraud in the Kirovles case in 2013 and given a suspended sentence—on charges the defense insisted were trumped up—Navalny appealed up through the Russian court system and eventually to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which in October 2016 found the Russian verdict to have been “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable.”32 In November, Russia’s supreme court accepted the decision from Strasbourg, quashed the verdict and ordered a retrial. Having been freed of this conviction, Navalny could now run for the presidency—something he announced he would do in December 2016.
Running for the Russian presidency, needless to say, is not a simple task, particularly if you’re not nominated by one of the “licensed” political parties. Just to get on the ballot, Navalny would have to collect 7,500 verified signatures supporting his candidacy in each of at least sixty-five regions (out of eighty-five recognized by the Russian government, including Crimea and Sevastopol)—for a total of almost half a million signatures nationwide. Achieving that required infrastructure. On February 4, 2017, Navalny’s campaign opened its first regional hub, in St. Petersburg; two weeks later, a second hub opened in Novosibirsk, followed a week later by a third in Ekaterinburg, and a fourth ten days after that in Nizhny Novgorod. In March, the campaign began opening three or four new regional hubs each week, and Navalny himself traveled to many of them, greeting volunteers, giving public speeches (when allowed by local authorities) and generally rallying the troops.33
It was the “Dimon” investigation that brought the two fronts together. In the face of official silence about the investigation’s charges, Navalny effectively invited his supporters—and the Russian public at large—to be incensed, and proposed that they be incensed together, on March 26. And they were. Rallies were held in as many as eighty cities around the country, bringing together more than 60,000 people, according to independent estimates.34 In Moscow, where the rally had not been sanctioned by city hall, more than 900 people were detained, and some—including Nikolai Lyaskin, Navalny’s Moscow campaign director—were severely injured.35 At least three protesters were sentenced to prison terms of 2–3 years, in an apparent effort to repeat the deterrent effect of the Bolotnaya trials of 2012–13.36
The March 26 rallies marked something of a turning point in Russian politics. Two things happened that had not happened before, at least under Putin. First, not since the miners’ strikes and other industrial disturbances of the 1990s had the number of protesters outside Moscow outnumbered those protesting in the capital itself. And unlike in the 1990s, the regional protesters this time around didn’t have the backing of competing parts of the political establishment.37 Second, these were the first major protests that weren’t directly provoked by the state. Unlike the benefits protests of 2005, the political protests of 2011–12 or even the truckers’ protest of 2015, the anger on March 26, 2017 was proactive, rather than reactive. For the first time, large numbers of people had come out into the streets to demand something they wanted, rather than to prevent something they didn’t want.
From Navalny’s point of view, then, the anti-demolition movement provided an opportunity to capitalize politically on yet more public dissatisfaction with the government. At the largest anti-demolition rally, held on May 14, 2017 on Prospekt Sakharova, the same place where the largest anti-Putin protest had been held in December 2011, Navalny was in the crowd and expected to take the stage. Before that could happen, however, he was corralled by police; by some accounts, it was the organizers themselves who had asked the guards to shepherd him away. Navalny’s overtures to the truckers, too, were generally rebuffed. (That didn’t, however, stop the anti-demolition protesters, the truckers or Epple and his neighbors from being tarred as part of a nefarious, American-backed “fifth column.”)
But Navalny didn’t need to get in through the front door. By declaring an us-versus-them politics, Putin’s Kremlin had provided not just a basis for his own re-legitimation, but also an identity around which oppositional forces could coalesce. Doubtless, Putin and his advisers knew this would happen, and it may even have been the point: in 2012 and 2013, the Kremlin maneuvered opposition leaders into taking positions in support of LGBT rights, blasphemers, Americans and others who were guaranteed not to win them votes. But the knock-on effect appears to have been broader. Raising the stakes of contestation across the board pushes the likes of Epple and his fellow park defenders—or Voloshchuk and his fellow truckers—into positions they would never before have taken. The opposition was taking shape, and Navalny—by design or by accident—was at the heart of it.
TIES THAT BIND
The spring and summer of 2017 were rich with protests. After the success of Navalny’s “Dimon” rallies in March, Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia—run from the ex-oligarch’s exile in London—organized nationwide protests under the hashtag-banner #Nadoel (from the Russian for “fed up”) on April 29. The anti-demolition protests grew in scale until their major rally on May 14. And Navalny brought people back out into the streets for Russia Day on June 12, before the summer holidays sent everyone packing off to the dacha.
Having tracked the post-Bolotnaya opposition on Facebook from 2012 through 2015, we picked up the trail again in 2017, as Navalny’s bid for the 2018 presidential elections began to take shape, and as the debates over the Moscow demolition project came to the fore. Taken together, we were able to capture almost 300,000 interactions among around 30,000 people, from February through July 2017. In other words, just judging by online activity alone—which, obviously, is an imperfect reflection of what happens offline—the opposition space in 2017 was much larger and livelier than it had been at any time since Bolotnaya.38
The activity was not, however, evenly distributed across the network. In the period we studied, there were three times as many individuals in the Navalny network as in the anti-demolition network, but more than twice as many interactions in the anti-demolition network as in the Navalny network. In other words, fewer people were interacting more in the heat of the anti-demolition movement—driven as it was by fast-moving events and the “now-or-never” prospect of losing your home—than in the relatively slower burn of the Navalny network. But even communication in the Navalny network itself was four times as intensive as the entire opposition network (including the anti-war network) had been in 2012–15.
Given privacy concerns and the often anonymous nature of social media, it is difficult to know much about the individuals in these networks, but, because we tracked the opposition over time, we do know a bit about their history with the movement. Roughly 20 percent of the individuals who showed up in the 2017 data had been present in the 2012–15 data, with the highest proportions coming from the Bolotnaya-specific groups and the anti-war movement. Oddly enough, however, it was the anti-demolition movement—which had conspired to keep Navalny off the stage and position itself as apolitical—that drew most heavily from earlier phases of opposition mobilization.39 By contrast, Navalny’s network did a (very) slightly better job of drawing in new entrants.40 There was, as well, considerable overlap between the two movements in 2017.41
In addition to the Facebook data we collected—which mostly showed us organizational activity but didn’t focus specifically on protests—we tracked the spring–summer 2017 protests and their run-ups on Twitter (which is generally more responsive to specific protests and rallies than Facebook), gathering some 110,000 tweets from March through June 2017. As with the movements as a whole, there was considerable overlap of participants from one set of rallies to another.42 Thus, Navalny’s rallies—and even Khodorkovsky’s—contributed large numbers of sympathizers to the season’s mobilization as a whole. The same was not true, however, of the anti-demolition movement, which—as far as our data show—contributed only 3 percent of the participants of the June Russia Day rallies.
One reason for that discrepancy is suggested by investigating the structure of the protest networks themselves. Sociologists have since the 1970s understood what Mark Granovetter called “the strength of weak ties.” As Granovetter showed, while strong ties within a community can support cohesion and solidarity, the tendency to interact primarily with people whom you know well and who know your other interlocutors well often leads people to interact less with people from outside their immediate community. Thus, communities with relatively weaker ties—in which not everyone knows everyone else, but in which more people are likely to interact with a broader range of interlocutors—tend to be better at mobilization, because they find it easier to reach out to potential supporters and spread their message far and wide.
An analysis of the Navalny and anti-demolition networks suggests that Navalny’s movement has considerably weaker ties, and thus, from a mobilizational point of view, is considerably stronger than the anti-demolition movement. By one measure, the anti-demolition network on Facebook was three times as dense as the Navalny network.43 In other words, much more of the communication in the anti-demolition network was going on between people who already communicated with each other a great deal, while Navalny’s activists were reaching out more broadly, and thus drawing in a greater diversity of supporters. By another measure, the anti-demolition network on Twitter—which is arguably the better social medium for disseminating the mobilizational messages in the heat of protest—was almost four times as dense as Navalny’s network.44 Again, this means that the online networks around Navalny were considerably better at spreading messages to new audiences, while the anti-demolition messages were more likely to reverberate among those already recruited to the cause. Several other measures support the same conclusion.45 Thus, by virtually any measure known to the (admittedly imperfect) science of network analysis, the anti-demolition movement—which strived to be apolitical and thus keep the door open to those who might not share Navalny’s worldview—was actually less structurally open and diverse than the communities that came out for the “Dimon” and Russia Day rallies, or even Khodorkovsky’s #Nadoel protests.
But when it comes to content—what the networks were saying, rather than whom they were saying it to—the networks had striking similarities. A systematic analysis of the vocabulary used across the Facebook and Twitter networks we collected shows that—while the two social networking sites tend to favor different kinds of language (Twitter, obviously, demanding shorter words and sentences)—within each site the different communities used remarkably similar language.46
The conclusion, then, is that in terms of participants and content, issue-oriented protest groups like the anti-demolition protesters or the truckers are very closely linked to Navalny’s larger—and heavily politicized—opposition movement. Structurally, however, the issue-oriented groups are more insular, suffering (to turn Granovetter on his head) from the weakness of strong ties. If some protest leaders were fretting that Navalny’s political ambitions might have been detrimental to their cause, then, they need not have worried—at least so far as the public response was concerned. If anything, in the spring and summer of 2017 Navalny’s political appeal appears to have been a powerful unifying factor—something clearly of concern to the Kremlin.
HATE/LOVE
The state, of course, fought back. A court in Kirov made minor procedural adjustments to the prosecution that had been rejected by Strasbourg and reinstated the verdict, again handing Navalny a suspended sentence and thus raising formal questions about whether he could run for office. As Navalny continued to tour the country, opening hubs and giving speeches, he and his allies were increasingly harassed by pro-Kremlin activists, who frequently resorted to violence. In one particular attack on April 27, chemicals poured onto Navalny’s face—which had happened repeatedly in the past—caused such damage to his right eye that he had to fly to Spain for surgery.47
Throughout the spring and summer of 2017, the tactics of the Kremlin and its supporters played perfectly into Navalny’s own plans. Rather than take direct aim at Putin, Navalny’s favored approach had been to lay bare the malfeasance of just about everyone around him—and thus to push the Kremlin into the untenable position of defending the indefensible. In fact, the heavy-handed policing on March 26—when Navalny called people into the streets not to support his candidacy, but to demand answers from Medvedev about corruption—seemed to be exactly what Navalny was hoping for. After all, beating people in the streets to prevent the opposition from coming to power was one thing; beating people to protect the ill-gotten gains of your cronies was another thing entirely.
Another assist for Navalny’s efforts came from an equally unlikely quarter: Russia’s school principals. Under pressure from regional and local administrations, school principals—mostly outside Moscow—felt obliged to find and deter potential activists among their pupils. In one case, after the FSB had come into a school to detain a young man involved in organizing the local March 26 protest in Bryansk, in far western Russia near the border with Belarus and Ukraine, the principal was forced to call a meeting in a (vain) attempt to soothe the nerves of the activist’s classmates. The meeting, of course, was captured on someone’s smartphone and immediately uploaded to social media, where tens of thousands of teenagers heard their elders tell them they were too young to have political opinions.48 Similar videos emerged from schools around the country. Needless to say, teens turned out to the March protests—and those that followed—in record numbers.
But just as Navalny had ramped up his challenge, so too had the Kremlin’s supporters become more “robust” in their approach. It wasn’t until nearly a year after the first major Peace March that the Kremlin’s supporters decided to rally their own troops on the streets of Moscow. The so-called Anti-Maidan rally brought some 35,000–50,000 people out into the streets of the capital, led by a diverse bunch of speakers, including Senator Dmitry Sablin, biker Alexander “Surgeon” Zaldostanov, conspiracy-theorist and author Nikolai Starikov, and others.49 According to the blogger Ilya Varlamov—the same who had documented the appearance of the so-called “little green men” in Crimea—the rally was well attended, with representatives from across the spectrum and the country: student groups, “patriotic clubs,” the Republic of Chechnya, Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party, workers from the Uralvagonzavod machine building company who came to prominence for their calls to use force against the Bolotnaya protesters, and even the Red Cross volunteer corps. Participants carried portraits of Putin and Akhmat Kadyrov—the assassinated former Chechen leader and father of current Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov—and declaimed that Putin and Kadyrov (the younger) would never allow a “Maidan” in Russia.50
There were some reports that the Kremlin’s internal politics division was mobilizing so-called “administrative resources” to boost turnout to the Anti-Maidan and other pro-government rallies. While it seems likely that this is the case at least to some extent, the amount of genuine vs “astro-turf” mobilization is difficult, if not impossible, to assess. But unlike in 2012, when the pro-Kremlin “Putingi” had very little ripple effect, the Anti-Maidan fit into a growing eco-system of ideologically driven mobilization that, while broadly in line with the Kremlin’s objectives, was more concertedly anti-opposition than it was pro-regime. A case in point is the Russian Orthodox activist Dmitry Tsorionov, better known by his nom de guerre Enteo, who created and led a group he called “God’s Will,” known primarily for its theatrical attacks on art and culture deemed to be degenerate or blasphemous. The pinnacle of Enteo’s campaign came on August 14, 2015, when he and his comrades raided an exhibition of the work of the sculptor Vadim Sidur and others, held in the Moscow Manege gallery, immediately opposite the Kremlin.51 By 2017, the Anti-Maidan movement and sister organizations the National Liberation Movement (NOD) and the so-called South East Radical Bloc (SERB), had emerged as bugbears for Navalny and his campaign, harassing and often assaulting him as he toured the country to drum up support, claiming all the while that his agenda was to push the boundaries of Ukraine’s erstwhile Orange Revolution into Russia itself.52
To be sure, much of what they do is violent, destroying property and causing physical bodily harm. But with all of it, including the famous green dye attacks on Navalny himself, there is an element of theatricality, and perhaps not by accident: Anti-Maidan leader Sergei Kurginian is a theater director, and SERB leader Igor Beketov (who has taken the stage name Gosha Tarasevich) is a former actor.
The theatricality seems to borrow heavily from the performance art of another group—Pussy Riot and its progenitor, the Art Group Voina of Petr Verzilov and Petr Pavlensky (who notably nailed his scrotum to Red Square, sewed his lips shut and set fire to the door of the FSB headquarters in Moscow, albeit not all at the same time). Indeed, Tsorionov-Enteo was kicked out of God’s Will—the group he created—when he fell into a romance with Pussy Riot member Maria Alekhina.53
Leonid Volkov—the 37-year-old former computer programmer from Ekaterinburg who manages Navalny’s national campaign—sat at the end of a long table in southern Moscow, his back to the window, juggling a laptop, two smartphones and a tube from which he squeezed a yellowish substance onto a cracker.
“Hematogen,” he said, barely cracking a smile. “The secret of Team Navalny.”
Volkov’s performance-enhancing drug of choice is more often given to children than to adults, a sticky sweet paste often mixed with chocolate that is meant to raise blood oxygen levels. (The only thing it’s scientifically proven to do, alas, is cause diarrhea.) Whether or not it’s the hematogen at play, though, Volkov’s energy level is impressive.
We met Volkov on June 6, 2017—six days before the planned Russia Day rallies—in what he carefully described as “the federal headquarters of the campaign for Alexei Navalny to be allowed to run in 2018.” The room occupied a corner of a large, modern office building near the Avtozavodskaya metro station. Sparsely furnished with long white plastic tables, plastic folding chairs and white boards, the room held maybe eighteen people that afternoon, but it could clearly accommodate many times that. Three doors down the hallway was the much livelier office for Navalny’s anti-corruption group, FBK; in another corner was the studio from which the NavalnyLive Youtube channel was broadcast.
Throughout our conversation, Volkov would disappear into other discussions—on his computer and on one of his smartphones—and return after a pause, only to duck out again a few minutes later, all while never shifting more than a couple of inches in his chair. Just as we were getting started, he fired off instructions to a Whatsapp group of campaign coordinators. A few minutes later, his phone began buzzing with messages.
“They don’t believe it’s me,” he said. After a few seconds of consternation, he shot back to the group: “Fuck off.” That did the trick.
“This,” he said, lifting his head and waving an arm across the room, “is simply one of two independent political agenda-setting centers in Russia. I mean, look at the political system in any developed country, and parliamentary parties, non-parliamentary parties, regions, governors, labor unions, civic organizations and so on—they all set their own agenda. In Russia, that has all been eviscerated. Are governors independent political actors? No. Are political parties independent political actors? No. Labor unions? You’re joking. Non-profit organizations? You’re joking. One way or another, in Russia now and for a fairly long time there have been only two significant centers of political agenda-setting. One of those is the Kremlin. It doesn’t matter what you call it: the Presidential Administration, United Russia, the government, it’s all the same. And the other one is here.”
By that point in the summer, the campaign already had forty-four offices around the country, laying the groundwork for the petition drive that would begin in January 2018; in all, the campaign aimed to open seventy-seven such offices. In each case, the organization sought out local activists who could manage things in each city and region, in close coordination with HQ in Moscow.
“The federal HQ—or even regional HQs—should be seen first and foremost as a service center,” Volkov explained. “Our goal in the end is to make it so that any volunteer—whether he’s got fifteen minutes a day or one week out of the month and he wants to do one thing or another, he wants to hand out flyers or agitate online—he can come into the office and find a way to take part in the campaign. Every volunteer should be able to find a place in this campaign. And so, when it comes to decisions, a lot of decisions are made by the volunteers themselves, and a lot are made by the regional offices themselves. But the political decisions, the really meaningful decisions one way or another are made by Alexei.”
One of those decisions—or, really, several—concerned the planned June 12 Russia Day rally. As in March, activists in more than 100 cities around the country planned protests, many of which were sanctioned by the local authorities.54 Unlike in March, however, the Moscow authorities decided this time to play along—kind of. Moscow city hall approved a march along Prospekt Sakharova, but put pressure on vendors of stage and audio equipment, effectively making it impossible for Navalny or other speakers to communicate with the crowd. As late as June 11, Navalny was playing coy—demanding that the pressure be lifted and so that audio equipment could be procured and threatening to shift the protest “to another format” if his demands weren’t met.55 They weren’t.
Early on the morning of June 12, Navalny sent word through social media that instead of converging on Prospekt Sakharova, protesters should converge on Moscow’s main drag, Tverskaya Street, leading from the Kremlin to Pushkin Square. Tverskaya, however, was already occupied by official Russia Day celebrations, which included arts and crafts booths, historical reenactments, and so on. It was thus in the midst of this general merriment that the protesters unfurled their banners, causing police to charge into the holiday crowds, corralling protesters and bystanders alike into detention vans. Navalny himself was arrested as soon as he left his apartment building, and both he and Volkov were charged with calling for unlawful public protest.
When we met Volkov on June 6, though, none of that history had yet been written. If he had an inkling of what was to come, he didn’t let on.
“I don’t know how to predict turnout for protests,” Volkov said. “No one knows how. . . . My expectations were wrong before March 26, I didn’t know there would be [so many].”
Volkov stopped and surveyed the room before continuing. Campaign workers huddled over screens large and small; conversations were barely audible.
“It’s quiet now,” he said, looking into the middle distance. “I think there’s going to be a whole lot of people on June 12. I’m afraid to be wrong. We’ll see. But however many there are, they’re all ours.”