Graeme B. Robertson-The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes - Managing Dissent in Post-Communist Russia-Cambridge University Press (2010)

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 office, 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builds on previously unpublished data and extensive fieldwork in Russia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
cambridge university press
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Graeme B. Robertson 2011
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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
322.40947dc22 2010031357
isbn 978-0-521-11875-0 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in
this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is,
or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
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-confident, 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
Contents
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 Conflict 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
vii
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 Conflict Over Rules and Resources 109
Primakovs 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
Putins 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-Proofing 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
Contents ix
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
Tables
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, 19972000 54
3.1. Variation in Working Days Lost to Strikes by Region,
19972000 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 (19981999) Logistic Regression 122
5.1. Effect of Putins Popularity on Protest Events 135
5.2. Weekly Event Diffusion, January 1997June 1999 143
5.3. Weekly Event Diffusion in JulyDecember 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
xi
Figures
2.1. MVD and Goskomstat estimates of working days lost

to strikes, 19972000 page 48
2.2. International strike comparisons, 19972000 50
2.3. Participants in protest events, 19972000 56
2.4. Workers protests by sector, 19972000 56
2.5. Participants in protest events excluding workers, 19972000 57
2.6. Categories of demands made at protest events in the Russian
Federation, 19972000 61
2.7. Demands other than for payment of legal obligations
made at protest events in the Russian Federation, 19972000 61
2.8. Scope of demands made at protest events in the Russian
2.9. Scope of demands excluding payment of legal obligations
made at protest events in the Russian Federation, 19972000 63
2.10. Number of demonstrators in the Russian Federation,
19972000 64
3.1. Regional variation in strike intensity in the Russian
4.1. Working days lost to strikes in the Russian Federation,
19972000 102
4.2. Patterns of days lost to strikes and hunger strikes in the
Russian Federation, 19972000 103
4.3. Patterns of protest events in the Russian Federation,
19972000 104
xiii
xiv Figures
4.4. Temporal patterns of strikes and wage arrears in the Russian

4.5. Strikes in 19981999 wave regions only 116
4.6. Strikes and wage arrears in 19981999 wave 121
5.1. Temporal patterns of protest in the Russian
5.2. Working days lost to strikes in the Russian Federation,
19992000 129
A2.1. Seasonal patterns outside of education 273
Acknowledgments
In writing this book, I have benefited 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,
office 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 influence 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 Investigacin y Docencia Econmicas
(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
xv
xvi Acknowledgments
friendship and support, not to mention terrific 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
Griffin 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 fieldwork was done and much of my time in Russia has been
spent in St. Petersburg. I am particularly grateful to Andrei Dmitriev, Olga
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 ones 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 its 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 Toms, whose arrival gave me a wonderful
reason to get this book fi nished. Finally, and most of all, I thank my wife,
Cecilia Martnez 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.
Introduction
[Maria] Under Soviet power we were surrounded by illusions. But now the
world has become real and knowable. Understand?
Its hard to say, Serdyuk replied gloomily. I dont agree that its real. But as for it
being knowable, I guessed that for myself a long time ago. From the smell.
Viktor Pelevin, Buddhas Little Finger
We know no mercy and do not ask for any. So goes the motto of the
Russian Interior Ministrys elite riot police, the legendary OMON, and so
it must have seemed to opposition demonstrators in Nizhny Novgorod on
March 24, 2007.1 Russias 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 Putins growing, self-confident,
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 policemans 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
Johnsons 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
1
2 The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes
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 Presidents Messenger. The
message was simple: Putins opponents are fascists or traitors; Russias enemies
are the United States and Russian liberals; Russias 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 officially 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, Dont 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 defines 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 difficult 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 significant 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 todays 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 specifically 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 todays 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 competition.
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 fissures 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 fluid 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 Putins Kremlin responded to popular protest, both within
the country and outside, to fashion a new governing system that in many ways
reflects 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 office, 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 significant problems
safeguarding civil rights. At the other end of the spectrum, Diamond consid-
ered only some twenty-five 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-five to
sixty-five 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: 3031) 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 defined (Diamond 2002, Schedler 2006). More
8
Estonia became a full member of the European Union on May 1, 2004, having fulfilled EU
requirements on minority rights. Estonia has been given Freedom Houses highest score of 1 (on
a 17 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 Estonias 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 classified as stateless and are disqualified 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 & Littlefield). p. 248. See also
Europe and Central Asia: Summary of Amnesty Internationals 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, reflecting 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 define 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 field 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 field 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 (19972000), the first Putin term (20002004) and the second Putin
term (20052008). Under Yeltsin, as I will show, protest levels were high. By
contrast, in Putins first term protest levels were very low and the protest that
did occur was politically marginalized. In Putins second term, however, pro-
test in the streets reemerged as a significant political issue, increasingly framed
around a regime/opposition divide. This in turn led to significant 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 first
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 find 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 first 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 Russias streets for the first 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 Putins
regime will be long-lived and from changes in the economic environment. The
apparent elite unity has meant that, in the first 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-
flict, 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 difficult
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 unified 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 conflicts 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 postCold
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 difficult 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 significant publics, the structure of elite conflict 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 influence 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 Conflict
One of the largest literatures in the social sciences is on industrial conflict
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 conflict 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 conflict 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 conflict 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 find 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 difficult 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 definition 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 filling 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 fluid 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 benefits 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 unfinished struggle
between an authoritarian state and a democratic opposition. Instead, hybrid
regimes can be deliberately designed to extract the benefits 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 difficulty 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 infighting 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 difficult 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 first 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 efficient (and occasionally equitable) capital markets.12 Other
11
On the historical difficulties of succession in Russia, see Raanan (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 Russias 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 financing, 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 conflict, 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 Russias 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-proofing 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 Kremlins 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 reflected 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 significant 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 conflict 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, significant changes took place in the identity of protesters over time as a
function of elite-level political conflict.
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 Putins rapid political
Introduction 17
ascent. I also argue that the institutional character of the 1999 parliamentary
election, in which national and local officials 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 influenced 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 first
major challenge to Putins 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 filling the organizational space with
ersatz social movements. This has put Russia at the cutting edge of postmodern
authoritarian regime design.
In the final 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 conflict,
social movements, and hybrid regimes. I conclude with thoughts on what my
analysis suggests about regime dynamics in Russia and in other hybrid regimes.
Specifically, 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 influence the development of inde-
pendent organizations in the longer term and that may prove to be significant
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).
1
Protest and Regimes

Organizational Ecology, Mobilization Strategies, and
Elite Competition
Yeltsin-schmeltsin. What do I care so long as they dont 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 influenced 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 significant 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 significant 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 fit
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 definition
of contention, see Tarrow (2003).
18
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, reflecting 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 Tillys 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 official events like state
funerals or official 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
officials 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 officials,
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).
OBrien 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 Partys 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 difficulty
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
difficult 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
reflect social inequalities and prejudices that make the playing field 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
definition, permitted in hybrid regimes and has, officially at least, a legitimate
role to play in political life, massive repression is not expected as the states
first 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 influence from outside. When access to political insti-
tutions is very limited, protest levels are low because there is little possibility of
influence 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 influence specific 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
first 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 Trejos 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 influencing 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 fit
the linear view of protest and levels of democracy than they are to fit the curvi-
linear view. Consequently, in thinking about protest, it is important to be able
to distinguish between the highly fluid, highly conflictual 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 influence 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, Plos, and Carroll 2007: 18) and only a small part of it
has been concerned with social movement organizations. Moreover, in general,
scholars in this subfield 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 flourish (Ingram and Simons 2000),
to the dynamics of a protest cycle, the incumbent leadership, and the avail-
ability of financing (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 field to try to capture all
of the different elements that may influence 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 influencing 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 influ-
ence, as we will see, each others 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 officially 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 difficult to
establish.
Hybrid regimes, by definition, allow some organization outside of the official
realm, but they also, again by definition, 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, financial,
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 significant role in everyday life.
Consequently, the organizational ecology of hybrid regimes frequently reflects
the continued influence 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
Confederacin de Trabajadores de Mxico (CTM) in Mexico, and official
unions in Malaysias electronics sector.
Authoritarian organizations that survive liberalization are likely to find
themselves in possession of significant organizational and often financial
resources that can constitute an important first-mover advantage in the com-
petitive politics of the post-liberalization era. If the first-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 difficult 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 officials, the state will act to protect
survivor organizations, strengthening them further. This cycle of protection
and lack of competition means that it is difficult 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 officials. 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 influence 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 traffic 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 significant consequences for patterns of protest.
Life for independent groups is often difficult. Pressure from the state and,
relatedly, the paucity of domestic sources of financing can make all but the most
high-profile 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 difficulties 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 influence in 19901 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 profile today, the vast majority disappeared in the economic crisis and
political disappointment of the first 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-affiliated movements
as the emergence of separate elite movements made use of the field 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 difficult 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, significant 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 influenced, 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 organizations 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 states relationship with particular
organizations and the general opportunities for new organizations to emerge.
In the chapters that follow, I look at specific organizations in Russia that
exemplify the variety of organizations we are likely to find in hybrids. I first
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 first 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 flavor.
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 Francos 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
find ways to mobilize support in a competitive environment.
Unlike Linzs authoritarians, elites in todays hybrid regimes face at least
some open political competition. Perhaps most significantly, 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 regimes
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 influence over flows of economic and financial 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 office 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 benefit 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 significant 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-
nificant nail in the coffin 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 office 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 modified 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 infighting, 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
field, 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 field 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 (19972000) and the first and second Putin terms (20004 and
36
Table 1.1. Summary of Regimes and Their Contention
Regime Type Organizational Ecology State Mobilization Public Elite Contention

Strategy Competition
Democratic Independent organizations Low levels of state High Nature: Mostly peaceful
dominant mobilization demonstrations of WUNC
Level: High
Hybrid State/ersatz organizations Mix of state and Either High or Low Nature: Some managed and mostly
dominant, but independent independent peaceful. Other isolated, and
organizations exist mobilization confrontational
Level: Varies
Closed State-sponsored organizations State mobilizational Low Nature: Hidden, violent, direct
Authoritarian monopoly monopoly action
Level: Low
Table 1.2. Organizational Ecology, State Mobilizing Strategies, and Elite

Competition in Post-Communist Russia
Period Organizational State Public Elite Contention

Ecology Mobilization Competition
Strategy
Russia State dominated Regional High Nature: Large
19972000 mobilizing scale, elite-
sponsored
mobilizations,
isolated pockets
of direct action
and extreme
protest
Level: High in
places, low in
others
Russia State dominated Demobilizing Low Nature: Isolated
20002004 direct actions
Level: Low
Russia State dominated, Central state Low Nature: Large
20052008 but emergent mobilizing scale state-
opposition sponsored
rallies, frequent
but repressed
opposition
protests
Level: Moderate
20058). 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 significant 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 simplification useful for theorizing about what protest looks
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). Tillys 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 reflected 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
significantly 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 Putins 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 Putins 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 difficult 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 unfinished 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 modified
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.
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, Buddhas 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 regions population below the poverty level. The demonstrations
brought together miners, energy sector workers, teachers, physicians, fisher-
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 filled Vladivostoks
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 dont think the strike will help, because the authorities dont 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.
40
Protest and Regime in Russia 41
Short of taking up guns, others nevertheless did take more direct action designed
to address their own specific 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
Unions 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 first time, elections played an important
political role in determining access to office.
I show that the stereotype of Russians as a patient people with an almost
infinite capacity to bear hardship without protest is very misleading. Instead,
as the countrys 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 reflected
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 significant 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 reflected Russias hybrid political regime and in particular were heavily
influenced 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 firmer 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 Mexicos hybrid period in 19882000, 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 first 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 Ashwins (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
Crowleys Hot Coal Cold Steel (1997) and Debra Javelines (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 official 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 significant 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 significant 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. Official 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
officially 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 significant 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
fit 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
officially 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 offices. 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
specific 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 official 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 officially
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 19923. 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 conflict 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
first Putin presidency. Most observers would agree protest levels were very low
at least during Putins first 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 definition 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 officials to exaggerate protest levels in order to claim
larger budgetary resources. Alternatively, there is the opposite worry, namely
that local officials 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 significant 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, significant underreporting is likely to have characterized official
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 conflict in 1999 and the Astrakhan Gazprom blockade in 2000) suggest
that the MVD is slow to report the beginning of the most conflictual events
and understates participation when events are underway.15 Furthermore, the
authors 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 Anpilovs 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 reflected 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).
1200
MVD
GKS
1000
Working Days Lost (1000s)
800
600
400
200
0
Fe -97
Fe -98
Fe -99
0
O -97
O 98
O 99
O -00
Ap 97
Ap 98
Ap 99
Ap 00
Ju 97
Au 97
D -97
Ju 98
Au 98
D -98
Ju 99
Au 99
D -99
Ju 00
Au 00
D -00
-0
g-
g-
b-
b-
b-
b-
r-
n-
r-
n-
r-
n-
r-
n-
ec
ec
ec
ec
g
g
ct
ct
ct
ct
Fe
Figure 2.1. MVD and Goskomstat estimates of working days lost to strikes,
19972000.
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 official 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 confidence that we are indeed tracking something more than statistical
imaginings.
The next thing to note is that levels of activity are significantly lower in the
Goskomstat data during 1998 and 1999. For 1998, for example, the MVD
figures 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 officially published numbers are higher
in the first 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 35 look in detail at differences between strike levels in differ-
ent regions and use this analysis to draw important conclusions about the
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 find 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, difficult to verify that this is indeed the case. Nevertheless,
comparing the MVD data with Goskomstats 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 official 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: 19972000. The chart includes Greskovitss
(1998) case, Hungary, as well as Ekiert and Kubiks 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 first 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 Kubiks (1998) finding 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 19978 was
0.18, between 1998 and 1999 it was 0.25 and between 1997 and 1999 it was 0.005.
140
120
Days Lost to Strikes Per 1000 Employees
100
80
France
Italy
60 Hungary
Russia
Poland
40
Russia MVD
20
0
1997 1998 1999 2000
Year
Figure 2.2. International strike comparisons, 19972000.
the post-Communist group in this period, clearly, is Russia, according both to

the official 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. Greskovitss 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 figure 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
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 five categories:-
demonstrations, strikes, hunger strikes, and road or railroad blockades. This
provides further confirmation of Tillys (1978) view thata populations repertoire
of collective action generally includes only a handful of alternatives (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-inflicted 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 Beissingers (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 significantly hampered cross-national work in this field.
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 Kubiks 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 difficult, 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 fit 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 benefits, 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 difficult 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 profit-
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 inflicted costs on
the state and those that inflicted costs on the protesters themselves. The former
are most famously exemplified 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 first 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 peoples
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
Bolshoi 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.
Table 2.1. Repertoires of Protest in Russia, 19972000
Type of Event Number of Events Percentage

Symbolic Actions
Demonstrations 1914 32.9
Marches 26 0.4
Strikes 2377 40.8
Selling Illegal Newspaper 32 0.5
total 4349 74.7
Direct Actions
Hunger-strikes 843 14.5
Railroad Blockade 94 1.7
Highway Blockade 356 6.1
Sit-ins/Occupations 40 0.7
Self-immolations/Suicides 30 0.5
Other disruptive actions 110 1.9
total 1473 25.3
total 5822 100
Source: MVD datasets.
Blockading the railway was perhaps the only way that a remote Far Eastern
town could grab the governments 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 Bolshoi
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 fluctuate 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 Bolshoi 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.
As with other forms of protest, those in which protesters inflict costs

upon themselves rather than directly on others can be viewed from multiple,
mutually consistent angles. Punishing yourself can be a rational strategy for
influencing 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 officially 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 Stalins 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 fiscal 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 specific 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 significant 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.
Military
Trade unions 0.4% Women
1.1% 3.0%
Ethnic Others
3.0% 4.4%
Locals/environmental
8.7%
Organized political
groups
4.8%
Pensioners
2.9%
Workers
71.7%
Figure 2.3. Participants in protest events, 19972000.
Other Agriculture
Transport 1%
<.01%
2%
Industry
14%
Miners
Municipal Services
25%
6%
Health
7%
Education
45%
Figure 2.4. Workers protests by sector, 19972000.
Figure 2.3 shows that Russians in this period were most often mobilized
along occupational lines. Some 72 percent of protest events involved people
identified 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
Investors
Students 3%
3% Pensioners
Others
10%
10%
Organized Political Groups
Women
17%
10%
Military
1%
Trade unions
4%
Ethnic Local/environmental
11% 31%
Figure 2.5. Participants in protest events excluding workers, 19972000.
assumed.24 More surprising is the finding 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 official 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 officially 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
specific 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
24
Gimpelson and Treisman (2002) take official data to indicate that almost all strikes take place in
the education sector.
(Beissinger 1998a, 1998b, 2002). The majority of protests involving specific

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 officials),
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 find a direct solution to their own immediate financial
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 conflict. 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 Difficult 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 19972000, 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
classified 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 officials 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 financial 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 definition of
events derived from Hannah Arendt occurrences that interrupt routine pro-
cesses and routine procedures and Michel Foucault the locus of chance
reversal (1415). Standard definitions 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 find the opportunity and will to act (Beissinger 2002: 1415). For
the period around the collapse of the USSR in which fifteen 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 benefits 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 figure is the
diversity of claims represented. The largest set is for changes in the material
distribution of resources in society. Almost one-fifth of events, however, had a
more directly political edge to them, demanding changes of personnel, almost
always of state officials, though sometimes of enterprise management. Foreign
affairs play a surprisingly large role, reflecting 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
National festival
Election irregularities
<1% Historical commemoration
1%
<1%
Personnel changes Foreign affairs
5% 3% Nationalist demands
Criminal justice <1%
2%
Ethnic politics Environmental/NIMBY
1% 1%
Ownership
1% Other
Commercial/market <1%
3%
Wages/work conditions
1%
Social spending/material
distribution
6%
Law: security
<1% Law: material
74%
Figure 2.6. Categories of demands made at protest events in the Russian Federation,
19972000.
Environmental/
Social spending/material
NIMBY Other Law: security
distribution
5% 2% 1%
Nationalist demands 23%
1%
Foreign affairs
12%
Historical
commemoration
2%
National festival Wages/work
1% conditions
Election 4%
irregularities
5%
Commercial/market
12%
Personnel changes
18% Ownership
Criminal justice Ethnic politics
5% 4%
6%
Figure 2.7. Demands other than for payment of legal obligations made at protest
events in the Russian Federation, 19972000.
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,
Undefined National
3% 10%
Regional
3%
Local
84%
Figure 2.8. Scope of demands made at protest events in the Russian Federation,
19972000.
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 specific
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 benefits, 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 satisfied by action at the local level are again a
very significant 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 fits 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.
Undefined
10%
Local
44%
National
35%
Regional
11%
Figure 2.9. Scope of demands excluding payment of legal obligations made at protest
events in the Russian Federation, 19972000.
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 Officers 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 fifty-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-five different hunger strikes during the period. Driving the Chernobyl
protests was first 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
28
Another example was the petition drive on the part of Russias environmental activists for a
referendum to have the State Committee for Environmental Protection and the Federal Forestry
2,000,000
1,800,000
1,600,000
1,400,000
1,200,000
1,000,000
800,000
600,000
400,000
200,000
0
Ju -97
N 97
Ja -97
Ju -98
N 98
Ja -98
Ju -99
N 99
Ja -99
Ju -00
N 00
0
M 97
M 97
M 98
M 98
M 99
M 99
M 00
M 00
Se 97
Se 98
Se 99
Se 00
-0
p-
p-
p-
p-
n-
n-
n-
n-
-
l-
l-
l-
l-
ay
ov
ay
ov
ay
ov
ay
ov
ar
ar
ar
ar
Ja
Figure 2.10. Number of demonstrators in the Russian Federation, 19972000.
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 Yeltsins 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 flatness of the line between
peaks shows the paucity of coordination of demonstrations nationally outside
these two annual events.
As a result, it is difficult 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 difficult 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.
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 definition 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 populations worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment (23).
By this definition 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-
ficult 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 significant difficulties 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 35,
even apparently standard protests such as strikes were rather different in mean-
ing than we would normally expect. Strikes were rarely really like industrial
conflict 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 reflected 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 flourish 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.
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.
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 groups demands would mean less money to satisfy
anothers, and so coordination across groups was difficult. 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
67
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 significant. Ever
since the industrial revolution first brought workers to politics, the strike has
been a key tool not just of industrial conflict, but also of political struggle.
Strikes are used to try to influence 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 reflect 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 conflict 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
find seven regions, spread from Russias 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, 19972000

(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 Astrakhanskaia (1 070), Komi-Permiatskii A.O.
than 10 000 days (10) (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 Yamalo-Nenetskii A.O. (10132), Tverskaia (10 688),
than 100 000 days (22) Stavropolskii Krai (10 720), Lipetskaia (11 489),
Yaroslavskaia (12 041), Riazanskaia (12 724),
Ulianovskaia (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 Novosibirskaia (103 703), Udmurtiia (105 896),
than 500 000 days (22) Permskaia (118 516), Tulskaia (136 756),
Vologodskaia (151 043), Sakhalinskaia (155 369),
Kostromskaia (157 879), Amurskaia (177 663),
Nizhegdskaia (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.
Working Days Lost to Strikes

By Region 1997-2000
Working Days Lost

0 - 12,724
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,

19972000.
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) finds that, whereas workers in Russia in this period
generally had great difficulty in allocating blame for their problems, those
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 first 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 field of organizations actually is in the area and
sector being analyzed.
Specifically, 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-
cifically 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, finding 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 coalfields of Kazakhstan, to the Sakhalin mines
of the Russian Far East, went on strike. The 1989 strikes represented a turning
point of enormous significance and gave birth to a genuine grassroots work-
ers movement in the coal fields of the Soviet Union. From 1989 to 1991, this
movement came to play a significant 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: 16172).
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 Yeltsins 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-traffic 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 profile 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 fit 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: 1612 and Crowley 1997: 123.
By contrast, the former official 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, Yeltsins 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 significant 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 unions 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 officially opposed to the government, the FNPR jealously
guarded its newfound favor. In fact, with little influence among its members
and without alliances with significant 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
first 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 confirmed 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
(conflicts); 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 Yeltsins 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 systems creation.
6
Authors 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
difficulty of finding 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 Russias (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: 16061).
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: 13248; Christensen
1999: 1225.
8
In the midst of the conflict 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-five regional organizations, covering 72 percent of the Russian
workforce (Ashwin and Clarke 2003: 323).
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
Authors interview with officials 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 reflection 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.: 58). For the unions, social partnership helps guarantee at
least some union influence, and the unions often turn to the regional adminis-
tration as an arbiter or go-between to defend them in conflicts with employers.
Such support is particularly valuable because the unions lack credibility either
among their members or with employers (Alasheev n.d.:12).
There are also good financial grounds for regional unions to rely heavily
on the regional authorities. The collapse of the Soviet system left regional-
level union representatives in a financially 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 difficulties 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 difficulty in renovating and maintaining
properties, they remained a significant 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 difficult for the unions 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 conflict
and in providing a link to workers. According to a regional official 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 official 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
Authors 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 unions
foothold as a means for the regional administration to gain leverage over firms that might be
more closely associated with the City administration.
13
Authors 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 official unions squeeze out
more militant alternatives that might have helped organize protest, but the
former Communist unions continued to have ways directly to influence 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 benefits 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 identified 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 governors 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 influence of governors on patterns of protest was felt in many ways. In
most cases, influence 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 officials, 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 Bolshoi 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
Bensusn 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 official unions in Malaysias electronics sector, and with
the so-called sindicatos de proteccin 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
Authors interviews with journalists in Vladivostok, JuneJuly 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 reflect the interests of regional governors,
taking place where protest is rational from the governors 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
defined as intraelite bargaining, whether through formal federal institutions or
more informal political bargaining. Noisy strategies are defined 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 flexibility 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
fiscal 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 benefits. 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 official unions. Where depri-
vation is worse, official 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 profitable 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 specific, 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 find 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 difficult relations
with Boris Yeltsins Kremlin, factors of this type are difficult 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 0100 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
reflects 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 influential 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 affiliation 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 difficult
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 governors capacity to resort to the
tactic of strikes (or other mass protest actions) to influence 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 influence strike levels as part of a negotiating strat-
egy. Moreover, a governors capacity to influence 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 office 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 conflict 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 conflict, rather than relying on measures of eth-
nic diversity that may or may not reflect politically relevant cleavages. The
index is a 0100 scale, with 100 representing no perceived threat of ethnic
conflict.
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 influence the information environment, the relative bargaining power of
workers, and the degree of hardship experienced. In this section, I briefly 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 Hicks 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 centers 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 difficulties 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 coefficient 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 difficult. Standard
approaches using union density are useless where workers are passive members
of former official unions. I have made a first 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 official lists of Sotsprof branches and,
on the basis of interviews with Sotsprof officials 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 officially recognized
Table 3.2. Summary of Hypotheses and Measures
Hypothesis Measure
In regions with little bargaining MKF Renaissance Capital Index of
power, strike activity will be a func- Relations With Moscow
tion of governors relations with
Moscow
Status as a Republic will decrease Republic status dummy
strike activity
Capital cities will have less strike Moscow and St.Petersburg dummy
activity
Economically important regions have Goskomstat Industrial Output Data
fewer strikes
More populous regions will have less Goskomstat Population Data
strike activity
Regions with politically dominant Margin of victory in first round of guberna-
governors will have more strike torial elections. 2 months before election
activity, especially in an election and election month
period
Ethnically polarized regions will have MFK Renaissance Capital index of potential
lower levels of strike activity for ethnic conflict
Strike activity will be higher in regions Goskomstat data on regional urbanization
with higher levels of urbanization levels
Regions with significant independent Dummy variable for significant presence of
union activity will have higher alternative union confederation Sotsprof
strike activity
Strike activity will be higher in regions Monthly change in unemployment using
where labor markets are tightening Goskomstat data
Strike activity will be higher when 3 and 5 month coefficient of variation in
revenues are more variable world oil price
Strike activity will be higher in regions Goskomstat monthly data on wage arrears
with higher levels of wage arrears
Strike activity will be higher in regions Goskomstat monthly data on proportion of
where loss-making enterprises are a loss-making enterprises
higher proportion of enterprises
Strike activity will be higher when World oil prices: average petroleum spot
total funds are available for trans- index of U.K. Brent, Dubai and West
fers are lower Texas Intermediate. Source IMF
unions or in their absence. In his seminal work on wildcat strikes, Gouldner

emphasizes the moral and emotional dimension of wildcat strikes (Gouldner
1954: 5364). 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) find that patterns of wildcat strikes
in coal mines depend on management style and the atmosphere of relationships
between workers and management. Zetka (1992) finds that it is the specifics
not just of industry but of labor processes and their effects on group solidar-
ity that matter. Looking at the postWorld War II U.S. auto industry, a con-
text in which strikes were outlawed and heavily repressed, Zetka finds 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-floor level.
In what follows, I lack sufficiently detailed data to test theories that depend
on shop-floor-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 figured 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 peoples 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 difficulties 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
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 regions population directly. To take into
account region-specific effects that are not otherwise controlled for, and given
that the number of time periods is relatively large, I estimate the models with
fixed 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 influenced 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 governors political relations with
Moscow is, as predicted, negatively related to the number of working days
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 confirmed.
22
STATA estimates a conditional fixed effects overdispersion model, in which the fixed effects
do not apply to the coefficients 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: 98793).
23
The two-lag model was decided upon by adding additional lags and using likelihood ratio tests
to identify the best model specification. Changing the number of lags does not affect the main
results.
Table 3.3. Working Days per Month Lost to Strikes in Non-Mining Sectors (conditional negative binomial regression with fixed
results)
(1) All Regions Percentage (2) Strong Percentage Change (3) Weak Percentage
Change Regions (Strong) Regions Change (Weak)
Governor Relations with .010** 20** .011* 22* .020** 38**
Center (.002) (.004) (.003)
Republic Status .301* 35* .391 22
(.151) (.264)
Capitals 1.462* 77* 3.687** 55**
(.689) (.691)
Industrial Output .050** 22** .015 8 .815** 20**
(.018) (.017) (.061)
Population .156* 20* .048 8 .553** 36**
(100 000s) (.067) (.064) (.165)
Margin .002 4 .001 2 .005 15
(.002) (.004) (.003)
Margin*Election Period .007 9 .000 0 .006 7
(.004) (.007) (.006)
Ethnic Peace .035** 63** .020 45 .045 17
(.009) (.010) (.024)
Urbanization .028** 40** .071** 192** .010 8
(.006) (.010) (.010)
Independent Union .007 1 .092 9 .400* 49*
Activity (.120) (.251) (.168)
Change in Unemployment .022 2 .001 0 .065 5
(.038) (.041) (.078)
Variation in Oil Prices 3.54** 12** 1.925 7 6.195** 20**
(1.113) (1.546) (1.596)
Wage Arrears .661** 67** .192* 21* .948** 43**
(.088) (.076) (.244)
Lossmaking Enterprises .017** 22** .013 17 .027** 36**
(.006) (.009) (.009)
World Oil Price .002 6 .008 36 .003 10
(.004) (.005) (.005)
Chernomyrdin .192 21 .278 24 .639* 90*
(.212) (.291) (.319)
Primakov .670** 95** .366 44 1.101** 201**
(.194) (.262) (.297)
Stepashin .668* 49* 1.141** 68** .213 19
(.271) (.369) (.399)
Putin .374 32 1.433** 76** .103 10
(.318) (.446) (.441)
Kasianov 1.493** 78** 2.943** 95** 1.045 65
(.420) (.598) (.563)
Lagged Working Days Lost .020** 22** .019** 23** .018** 18**
(1000s) (.002) (.002) (.003)
2 Month Lagged Working .013** 14** .009** 10** .012** 11**
Days Lost (1000s) (.002) (.003) (.003)
Summer .405** 33** .392 32 .443* 36*
(.136) (.193) (.194)
Constant 9.221** 11.867** .527
(1.124) (1.300) (2.652)
Observations 2093 972 1199
Number of groups 59 31 35
Loglikelihood 6562** 3140** 3626**
Standard errors in parentheses. * Indicates significant at p=.05, ** Indicates significant 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 90
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, significant, 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 governors 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 classification), putting Orels 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 specification, the range of controls, and variations
in the definition 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
definition of weak and strong (for example using monthly instead of annual
mean industrial output to define 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 conflict. 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 conflict 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 significant 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
significant 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 find strong support for
theories based on economic hardship. Wage arrears and the proportion of loss-
making enterprises are statistically significant 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 find 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 significant, 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
conflict 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 office. These peri-
ods reflect 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 first fired 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 first (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 Primakovs 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 Putins first Prime Minister, Mikhail Kasianov. However,
the results show strikes were already on their way down in 1999, before Putin
came into office. 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 official strike data and anecdotal evidence suggest has continued) is
surely a testament to the strong signals that Putins 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 governors 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 fixed effects)
(1) Days of (2) Number of (3) Number of

Hunger Strikes Hunger Strikes Other Events
Governor Relations with 0.006** 0.010 0.011
Center (0.003) (0.029) (0.011)
Republic Status 0.330 0.178 0.659
(0.219) (1.546) (1.543)
Capitals 1.175 2.203*
(1.153) (1.299)
Industrial Output 0.020 0.009 0.015
(0.026) (0.028) (0.014)
Population 0.087 0.313 0.292
(100 000s) (0.117) (0.314) (0.198)
Margin 0.013*** 0.015 0.002
(0.003) (0.015) (0.009)
Margin*Election Period 0.009* 0.005 0.007*
(0.005) (0.005) (0.004)
Ethnic Peace 0.045*** 0.112 0.021
(0.014) (0.109) (0.045)
Urbanization 0.007 0.138 0.008
(0.010) (0.105) (0.027)
Independent Union Activity 0.070 0.819 0.946**
(0.181) (1.589) (0.439)
Change in Unemployment 0.058 0.007 0.030
(0.055) (0.058) (0.028)
Variation in Oil Prices 1.972 0.587 1.919*
(1.552) (1.651) (1.141)
Wage Arrears 0.352*** 0.113 0.116
(0.125) (0.218) (0.172)
Loss-making Enterprises 0.033*** 0.015 0.002
(0.008) (0.013) (0.010)
World Oil Price 0.009* 0.008 0.009**
(0.005) (0.006) (0.004)
Chernomyrdin 0.248 0.095 0.828***
(0.242) (0.284) (0.201)
Primakov 0.529** 0.266 0.680***
(0.210) (0.225) (0.165)
Stepashin 1.201*** 0.417 0.793***
(0.324) (0.368) (0.247)
Putin 1.154*** 0.412 1.776***
(0.416) (0.508) (0.355)
Kasianov 1.570*** 1.069 1.596***
(0.562) (0.844) (0.465)
Lagged Event 0.473*** 0.121*** 0.067***
(0.125) (0.034) (0.016)
(continued)
Table 3.4. (continued)
(1) Days of (2) Number of (3) Number of

Hunger Strikes Hunger Strikes Other Events
2 Month Lagged Event 0.328 0.021 0.005
(0.201) (0.040) (0.020)
Summer 0.474** 0.146 0.070
(0.184) (0.194) (0.133)
Constant 9.285*** 1.200 2.497
(1.694) (6.208) (3.961)
Log-likelihood 2412.193 507.794 807.946
Standard errors in parentheses. * Indicates significant at p=.1, ** Indicates significant at p=.05,
*** Indicates significant at p=.01.
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 benefits,
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 find, 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 governors relations with Moscow, the size of the governors
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 significant.
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
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 find
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 conflict 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
superficially. 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 difficult in the post-
Communist era than in late Communism, when collapsing production, private management,
and pervasive lawlessness make grassroots labor organizing even more difficult 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 filled 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 significant presence, but the legacies of authoritarian corporatism are likely to
be felt in places like Mexico and others (Bensusn 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 find. 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.
4
A Time for Trouble
All of us [have] been obliged to suffer the consequences of Russias latest attack
of freedom and the lice that inevitably accompanied it.
The Altai Krai (Altai Territory) lies in southern Siberia, along Russias border
with Kazakhstan. The Krai has a population of around 2.6 million people and
is known for its significant 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 officials 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 figures.
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
100
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
specific 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.
Specifically, I address two empirical puzzles: First, why did Boris Yeltsins
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 first 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 influence over who mobilizes and
when.
Protest and Time

What are the empirical patterns I am trying to explain? Let us look first at
strikes and the pattern of working days lost to strikes in Figure 4.1.
The first peak of strikes comes at the very beginning of 1997, when the
monthly totals lost to strikes were around 600,000700,000 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 financial 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 confirmed by the official Goskomstat data.
900,000
800,000
700,000
600,000
500,000
400,000
300,000
200,000
100,000
0
7
0
97
98
99
00
7
0
7
0
-9
-9
-9
-0
r-9
r-9
r-9
r-0
l-9
l-9
l-9
l-0
n-
n-
n-
n-
ec
ec
ec
ec
Ju
Ju
Ju
Ju
Ap
Ap
Ap
Ap
Ja
Ja
Ja
Ja
D
D
Figure 4.1. Working days lost to strikes in the Russian Federation, 19972000.
Source: MVD Dataset.
data, exceeded even the highs of 1997. The huge strike waves of the fall and
winter of 199899, 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 five 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
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.
9,000
Strikes/100
Hunger Strikes
8,000
7,000
6,000
5,000
4,000
3,000
2,000
1,000
0
Ap 97
Ap 8
Ap 9
Ap 0
O 7
O 8
O 9
O 0
Ja 7
Ja 8
Ja 9
0
Ju 7
Ju 8
Ju 9
Ju 0
9
0
l-9
l-9
l-9
l-0
-9
-9
-9
-0
r-9
r-9
r-9
r-0
n-
n-
n-
n-
ct
ct
ct
ct
Ja
Figure 4.2. Patterns of days lost to strikes and hunger strikes in the Russian
Federation, 19972000.
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 19971998 witnessed the most acute
phase of Russias post-Communist economic crisis. The tight macroeconomic
policy pursued for most of the 1990s had kept inflation 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 conflicts are combined with the hierarchical organization of labor,
250
Others
strikes
hunger
200
Number of Events
150
100
50
0
M -97
M -97
Ju -97
Se l-97
N -97
Ja -97
M -98
M -98
Ju -98
Se l-98
N -98
Ja -98
M -99
M -99
Ju -99
Se l-99
N -99
Ja -99
M -00
M -00
Ju -00
Se l-00
N -00
0
-0
n
ar
ay
p
ov
n
ar
ay
p
ov
n
ar
ay
p
ov
n
ar
ay
p
ov
Ja
Figure 4.3. Patterns of protest events in the Russian Federation, 19972000.
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 Yeltsins 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
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 inflation, generate investor
confidence, and produce economic growth. However, by 1997, despite the rosy
optimism of official 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 firms. Moscows
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 firms 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 unprofitable 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
official Goskomstat estimate of 9 percent, to the Russian Economic Barometer
estimate of 51 percent.5 Other government figures showed that 15 percent of
sales by major taxpayers were paid for by bartering, an extraordinary figure
for an industrial economy (Desai and Idson 2000: 1745). 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 figure 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 sufficient 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 countrys workers owed back
wages, the potential for unrest was clear.
An additional consequence of demonetization and arrears was that fiscal 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
profit 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, significantly 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
presidents staff To sit in a regional governors office 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 benefits due directly to citizens, bringing these
broader publics directly into the negotiations.
As we might expect, therefore, the pattern of growing arrears was clearly
reflected 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
120
Wage Arrears (Billions)
Working Days Lost (10000s)
100
80
60
40
20
0
M -97
M -97
Ju -97
Se l-97
N -97
Ja -97
M -98
M -98
Ju -98
Se l-98
N -98
Ja -98
M -99
M -99
Ju -99
Se l-99
N -99
Ja -99
M -00
M -00
Ju -00
Se l-00
N -00
0
-0
n
ar
ay
p
ov
n
ar
ay
p
ov
n
ar
ay
p
ov
n
ar
ay
p
ov
Ja
Figure 4.4. Temporal patterns of strikes and wage arrears in the Russian Federation,
19972000.
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 confidence in the central plank
of economic policy: the strong ruble. The Central Banks 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 deficit. Already weakened by the
Asian financial crisis of the fall of 1997 that undermined investor confidence
in emerging markets worldwide, Russias 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 financing instruments, most famously
short-term treasury bills known as GKOs (gosudarstvennie kaznacheiskie obli-
gatsii), in order to fill growing gaps in its finances. 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 profit. In short, the day-to-day financing 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 financial 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 significant 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 Conflict Over Rules and Resources

If the economic crisis was problem number one facing Russia in Yeltsins sec-
ond term, the political weakness of the center that accompanied it was not far
behind. In particular, the weakness of the Kremlins influence 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.
Russias 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: 89). 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 first 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 five 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-profile 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 Chechnyas 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, Ulianovsk, 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 five 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 extra-constitutional
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 Kremlins 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 Russias 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 profile of the formerly docile upper house of the Federal Assembly, the
Federation Council, where regional governors sat ex officio. It also made it con-
siderably harder in practice for the Kremlin to remove a governor.
8
As Anatol Lieven (1998) notes, Yeltsins 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, Yeltsins obvious striving, and public failure, to remove the
Primorskii Krai governor, Evgenii Nazdratenko, greatly undermined Kremlin
influence 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 conflict had its roots in the
desire of Moscow-based financial 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 fired 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 Kremlins 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 Nazdratenkos support, workers at the Zvezda
submarine repair plant and the Progress aviation plant in the Primorskii Krai
towns of Bolshoi 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 Kremlins 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 influential 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 isnt order in the country. We dont even know who is the
countrys head, for Gods sake. As mayors from the region debated price
10
Authors 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 well 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 officials 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.
Primakovs 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 Ministers office
on September 11, 1998 changed the dynamics of Moscows relations with the
regions. As a man of Yeltsins 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 fired on May 12, 1999) but nonetheless significant 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.
Primakovs 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 influenced by political affiliations 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 reflected
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 significant strikes for the first time. Given the relatively short period
of Primakovs tenure (only eight months), that this effect shows up in the data
is a strong confirmation of the degree to which elite politics influenced protest
patterns.
In this section, I illustrate this political dynamic at work in the strike patterns
of 19979. I break the periods of mobilization down into two separate protest
waves, one under pro-Yeltsin prime ministers in 1997 and another in 19989
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 significant 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-five) were active in both
strikes waves, six participated in the wave of 1997 only, and ten in the wave
of 19989 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 significant 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 confirms the findings 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
Significant mobilization is defined as more than .01 working days per capita lost to strikes
in any given month. Although any definition of significant is somewhat arbitrary, this level is
useful for our purposes since it is sufficiently high as to isolate cases in which there had to have
been significant coordination of strikes across different workplaces.
15
Measures of size that were significant (industrial output and population) are excluded since the
dependent variable is normalized by population.
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., Altaiskii Krai, Brianskaia,
Astrakhanskaia, Bashkortostan, Buriatiia, Cheliabinskaia,
Belgorodskaia, Dagestan, Evenkiskii A.O., Chitinskaia, Chukotskii A.O.,
Evreiskii A.O., Ingushetiia, Kabardino- Irkutskaia, Kareliia, Kemerovskaia,
Balkariia, Kaliningradskaia, Kalmykiia, Khabarovskii Krai, Khakasiia,
Kaluzhskaia, Karachaevo-Cherkessiia, Kirovskaia, Komi, Kostromskaia,
Khanty-Mansiiskii A.O., Komi-Permiatskii Krasnoiarskii Krai, Kurganskaia,
A.O., Koriakskii A.O., Krasnodarskii Krai, Magadanskaia, Orenburgskaia,
Kurskaia, Leningradskaia, Lipetskaia, Primorskii Krai, Sakha,
Mordovia, Moskovskaia, Moskva, Nenetskii Sakhalinskaia, Smolenskaia,
A.O., Nizhegorodskaia, Novgorodskaia, Sverdlovskaia, Tulskaia,
Omskaia, Orlovskaia, Penzenskaia, Vologodskaia
Riazanskaia, Samarskaia, Sankt-Peterburg,
Saratovskaia, Severnaia Osetiia-Alaniia,
Stavropolskii Krai, Taimyrskii A.O.,
Tambovskaia, Tatarstan, Tverskaia,
Tiumenskaia, Tyva, Ust-Ordynskii Buriatskii
A.O.,Vladimirskaia, Voronezhskaia,Yamalo-
Nenetskii A.O., Yaroslavskaia
total: 47 total: 25
Regions in 1997 Strike Wave Only Regions in 199899 Strike Wave
Only
Amurskaia, Chuvashiia, Kamchatskaia, Altaiskaia Respublika,
Murmanskaia, Permskaia, Volgogradskaia Arkhangelskaia, Ivanovskaia,
Marii-El, Novosibirskaia,
Pskovskaia, Rostovskaia, Tomskaia,
Udmurtiia, Ulianovskaia
Total: 6 Total: 10
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 affiliations of those regions that
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 0100 scale according to both their general level of
reformism and their specific connections with Moscow.
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)
Urbanization .06**
(.03)
Constant 3.94**
(1.74)
Observations 78
Wald Chi2 11.38***
Pseudo R2 0.28
Standard errors in parentheses. * p < 0.1, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01.
left the protest wave and of those that joined it for the first time. Thirty-one
regions experienced significant mobilization in the 1997 strike wave and thir-
ty-six did in the 19989 wave. Twenty-five 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 19989 openly identified themselves as Kremlin opponents and allies of
Primakov.18 By contrast, of the ten regions experiencing major mobilization
in 19989 but not in 1997, seven were openly affiliated 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 Russias 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 unaffil-
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 reflect 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),
Strikes in Wave 2 Only Regions
0.12
Primakov
Appointed
0.1
Working Days Lost Per Capita
0.08
0.06
0.04
0.02
0
May-98 Jun-98 Jul-98 Aug-98 Sep-98 Oct-98 Nov-98 Dec-98 Jan-99 Feb-99 Mar-99 Apr-99 May-99
Altaiskaia Respublika Arkhangelskaia Ivanovskaia Marii-El Novosibirskaia

Pskovskaia Rostovskaia Tomskaia Udmurtiia Ul'ianovskaia
Figure 4.5. Strikes in 19981999 wave regions only.
their first significant 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 Primakovs appointment. As Figure 4.6 shows, all had experienced wage
arrears before, and in cases such as Tomsk and Ulianovsk, 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 Primakovs 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 first thing to note is
that controlling for participation in the first 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 unaffiliated governors to lead regions
experiencing a major strike wave in late 1998early 1999, with the effect
Tomskaia (Unity), Udmurtiia (unknown), Ulianovskaia (unaffiliated). With the exception of

Udmurtiia and Ulianovskaia, the governors of all of these regions had openly sided with the
Kremlin early in the Duma election campaign.
0
0.01
0.02
0.03
0.04
0.05
0.06
0.07
Ja Ja
n n
0
0.02
0.04
0.06
0.08
0.1
0.12
M -97
a M -97
ar
M r- 97 M -97
ay ay
Ju -97 Ju -97
Se l-97
p Se l-97
N -97 p
ov N -97
Ja -97 ov
n Ja -97
n
A Time for Trouble
M -98
a M -98
M r-98 ar
figure 4.6. (Continued)

ay M -98
Ju -98 ay
Primakov Appointed
Se l-98 Ju -98
Primakov Appointed
p Se l-98
N -98
ov p
N -98
Ja -98 ov
n Ja -98
M -99 n
ar M -99
M - 99 ar
ay
J u -99 M -99
ay
Se l-99 Ju -99
p Se l-99
N -99
ov p
Ja -99 N -99
n ov
Strikes and Arrears in Arkhangelskaia

M -00 Ja -99
a n
M r- 00 M -00
ay ar
Strikes and Arrears in The Altaiskaia Republic
Ju -00 M -00
ay
Se l-00 Ju -00
p
N -00 Se l-00
ov
-0 p
0 N -00
ov
-0
0
Per Capita
Wage Arrears
Strikes Per Capita
Per Capita
Per Capita
Working Days Lost to

Wage Arrears
Working Days Lost
117
Strikes and Arrears in Marii-El
0.03
Working Days Lost
Per Capita
Primakov Appointed
Wage Arrears
0.025 Per Capita
0.02
0.015
0.01
0.005
0
M -97
M -97
Ju -97
Se l-97
N -97
Ja -97
M -98
M -98
Ju -98
Se l-98
N -98
Ja -98
M -99
M -99
Ju -99
Se l-99
N -99
Ja -99
M -00
M -00
Ju -00
Se l-00
N -00
0
-0
ov
ov
ov
ov
n
ar
n
ar
n
ar
n
ar
p
ay
ay
ay
ay
Ja
Strikes and Arrears in Ivanovoskaia
0.018
Primakov Appointed Working Days Lost
0.016 Per Capita
Arrears Per Capita
0.014
0.012
0.01
0.008
0.006
0.004
0.002
0
M -97
M -97
Ju -97
Se -97
N 97
Ja -97
M -98
M -98
Ju -98
Se -98
N 98
Ja -98
M -99
M -99
Ju -99
Se -99
N -99
Ja -99
M -00
M -00
Ju -00
Se -00
N 00
0
-0
p-
p-
p-
n
ar
ay
l
ov
n
ar
ay
l
ov
n
ar
ay
l
p
ov
n
ar
ay
l
ov
Ja
Figure 4.6 (Continued)

0.005
0.015
0.025
0.002
0.004
0.006
0.008
0.012
0.014
0.016
0.018
0.01
0.02
0.01
0.02
0
0
Ja
Ja n
n M -97
M -97 ar
ar M -97
M -97 ay
ay Ju -97
Ju -97 Se l-97
Se l-97 p
p N -97
ov
N -97
ov Ja -97
A Time for Trouble
Ja -97 n
n
Figure 4.6 (Continued)

M -98
M -98 ar
ar M -98
M -98 ay
ay Ju -98
Primakov Appointed
Ju -98 Se l-98
Primakov Appointed
Se l-98 p
N -98
p ov
N -98 Ja -98
ov
n
Ja -98 M -99
n ar
M -99 M -99
ar ay
M -99 Ju -99
ay
Ju -99 Se l-99
p
Se l-99 N -99
p ov
N -99 Ja -99
Strikes and Arrears in Novosibirskaia
ov n
Strikes and Arrears in Pskovskaia

Ja -99 M -00
n ar
M -00 M -00
ar ay
M -00 Ju -00
ay Se l-00
Ju -00 p
Se l-00 N -00
ov
p -0
Per Capita
0
Per Capita
N -00
ov
-0
0
Working Days Lost

Working Days Lost
Wage Arrears Per Capita

Wage Arrears Per Capita
119
Strikes and Arrears in Rostovskaia
0.035
Primakov Appointed
0.03
Working Days Lost
Per Capita
0.025 Wage Arrears Per Capita
0.02
0.015
0.01
0.005
0
M -97
M -97
Ju -97
Se l-97
N -97
Ja -97
M -98
M -98
Ju -98
Se l-98
N -98
Ja -98
M -99
M -99
Ju -99
Se l-99
N -99
Ja -99
M -00
M -00
Ju -00
Se l-00
N -00
0
-0
n
ar
ay
p
ov
n
ar
ay
p
ov
n
ar
ay
p
ov
n
ar
ay
p
ov
Ja
Strikes and Arrears in Tomskaia
0.02
Primakov Appointed
0.018 Working Days Lost
Per Capita
0.016 Wage Arrears Per Capita
0.014
0.012
0.01
0.008
0.006
0.004
0.002
0
M -97
M -97
Ju -97
Se -97
N 97
Ja -97
M -98
M -98
Ju -98
Se -98
N 98
Ja -98
M -99
M -99
Ju -99
Se -99
N 99
Ja -99
M -00
M -00
Ju -00
Se -00
N -00
0
-0
p-
p-
p-
n
ar
ay
l
ov
n
ar
ay
l
ov
n
ar
ay
l
ov
n
ar
ay
l
p
ov
Ja
figure 4.6. (Continued)

Strikes and Arrears in Udmurtiia
0.025
Primakov Appointed
Working Days Lost

0.02 Per Capita
Wage Arrears
Per Capita
0.015
0.01
0.005
0
M -97
M -97
Ju -97
Se -97
N 97
Ja -97
M -98
M -98
Ju -98
Se -98
N 98
Ja -98
M -99
Ju -99
Ja -99
M -00
M -99
Se -99
N -99
M -00
Ju -00
Se -00
N 00
0
-0
p-
p-
p-
l
ov
ov
ov
ov
n
ar
n
ar
n
ar
n
ar
ay
ay
ay
ay
Ja
Strikes and Arrears in Ul'ianovskaia
0.014
Primakov Appointed Working Days Lost

0.012 Per Capita
Wage Arrears
Per Capita
0.01
0.008
0.006
0.004
0.002
0
M -97
M -97
Ju -97
Se -97
N -97
Ja -97
M -98
M -98
Ju -98
Se -98
N 98
Ja -98
M -99
M -99
Ju -99
Se -99
N 99
Ja -99
M -00
M -00
Ju -00
Se -00
N -00
0
-0
p-
p-
n
ar
ay
l
p
ov
n
ar
ay
l
ov
n
ar
ay
l
ov
n
ar
ay
l
p
ov
Ja
Figure 4.6. Strikes and wage arrears in 19981999 wave.

Table 4.3. Determinants of Participation in Second

Protest Wave (19981999) Logistic Regression
Model 1 Model 2
Wave 1 2.92*** 3.12***
(0.67) (0.71)
Kremlin 1.15*
(0.61)
OVR 1.54*
(0.93)
KPRF 2.21**
(0.91)
Unaffiliated 1.34**
(0.61)
Change in arrears 2.31 1.98
(4.75) (4.65)
Urbanization .003 -0.01
(0.02) (0.03)
Constant 2.02 (0.47)
(1.95) (2.13)
Obs. 78 76
Wald Chi-square 20.70*** 21.60***
Pseudo R2 0.32 0.34
statistically significant at close to .05. Model 2 confirms this by breaking the

non-Kremlin-affiliated 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 Primakovs Fatherland-
All Russia party (OVR), the effect is significant at .1, whereas for Communists
and governors of unannounced or unclear affiliation, the effect is significant at
the .05 level.
The graphs and regression analysis presented in this section show once more
the political dynamics underlying protest in Yeltsins 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.
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 Yeltsins second term as President a tempestuous period
in the streets and factories of many of Russias 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.
5
Elections and the Decline of Protest
Reality is the material world as it is shown on television.

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 office
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 Yeltsins taste, so Primakov was fired. He was replaced in May by a young
security official from St. Petersburg, Sergei Stepashin.1 But Stepashin struggled
to establish his authority, opening his first 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 fired.
The catalyst for Stepashins 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 FatherlandAll Russia (OVR), brought Yeltsins
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 Yeltsins entourage on the other. On the Kremlin
side were Stepashins 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. Yeltsins 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).
124
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 flocked 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 conflict was enough to demobilize political protest.
The second factor contributing to protest decline was the incentive structure
created by the specific 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 specifics of the Russian case. In the first 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 finding
the election to be competitive and pluralistic, were critical of the medias failure to pro-
vide impartial and fair information. Following Putins victory, Gusinskii was forced to pay
for his opposition, being first 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 Kremlins 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 fluid 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
specific institutions on the incentives for protest. Whereas the study of institu-
tions has come to dominate most subfields 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 first 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 reflecting 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 influential
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 figures with a record of difficult relations with Yeltsin.
With such a formidable lineup, OVR immediately jumped into second place
in opinion polls behind the Communist Party, and Yeltsins supporters looked
likely to lose control of the Kremlin for the first 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 influential
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 Yeltsins group and
the regional governors. However, Titov split with Luzhkov and Primakov
over Primakovs appointment to the prime ministers office in 1998, and in
February 1999, he announced the creation of his own party, Golos Rossii
(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: 1613).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.
60
Marches, Rallies
etc.
50
Hunger Strikes
40
Number of Events
30
20
10
0
Jun-99 Aug-99 Oct-99 Dec-99 Feb-00 Apr-00 Jun-00 Aug-00 Oct-00 Dec-00
Figure 5.1. Temporal patterns of protest in the Russian Federation, 19992000.
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 reflected 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.
250,000
200,000
150,000
100,000
50,000
0
99
00
0
00
99
00
9
0
-9
-0
-9
r-0
-0
g-
g-
b-
n-
n-
ec
ec
ct
ct
Ap
Au
Au
Fe
Ju
Ju
O
O
D
D
Figure 5.2. Working days lost to strikes in the Russian Federation, 19992000.
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
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 reflected 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 definition, 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: 25960).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 influenced 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 specific 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 identifies the effect of

formal rules and the practices they generate and a signaling model that identi-
fies signs that activists look for as an encouragement for mobilization. Clearly,
the operationalization of these variables is context-specific, 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,
Putins 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 Putins 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.
Putins 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 Putins meteoric rise from
obscurity to heir apparent between August and October 1999. In this section,
I demonstrate empirically that Putins 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 Putins rise in the late summer and fall of 1999
are well known.9 Following the firing of Prime Minister Stepashin on August 9,
Yeltsin nominated the relatively unknown career KGB officer 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 confirmed in the post by the
Duma with only seven votes to spare (Colton 2008: 432). After the confirmation,
he went rapidly to work on two related tasks. The first 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 find
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 officials in the
regions back under Moscows control and, in particular, to force governors
to leave such opposition blocs as FatherlandAll 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 financial 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 fighters into the neighboring republic
of Dagestan. Soon after, three mysterious and murderous apartment bombings
9
The politics of Putins rise are well covered in many accounts and are treated only briefly 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 figure, frequently appearing on television in dramatic situations
bringing help to victims of Russias 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, Putins 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, Putins arrival had moved all these issues to the backburner and
placed security questions front and center (Avdonin 2004: 434).
The campaign strategy that accompanied the policies also built on Putins
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 influenced 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.
Table 5.1. Effect of Putins Popularity on Protest Events (Conditional Negative

Binomial Regression with Fixed Effects)
(1) Working Days Lost to Non-Strike Protest

Strikes Events
Putins Popularity .016** .015***
(.007) (.006)
Wage Arrears .526** .147
(.243) (.499)
Change in Wage Arrears .358 1.997
(1.317) (1.667)
Change in Industrial Output .074** .001
(.035) (.026)
Change in Unemployment .159 .243
(.187) (.158)
Urbanization .039** .004
(.019) (.034)
Population .313** .111
(100 000s) (.158) (.210)
Lagged Event .024 .044
(.008)*** (.030)
Constant 4.741*** .649
(1.329) (2.234)
Observations 153 238
Number of groups 31 50
Log-likelihood 613.863*** 211.140*
Standard errors in parentheses. * Indicates significant at p=.1, ** Indicates significant at p=.05,
*** Indicates significant at p=.01.
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 Putins 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, significant 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
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 significant 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 significant.
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 reflect 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 findings 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 significant
and substantively large effect on the number of working days lost. According
to the model, for every 10 percent increase in Putins approval rating, working
days lost to strikes in the regions declined on average by 15 percent. This fig-
ure, of course, is illustrative. For one thing, it is unlikely that the effect of falling
uncertainty is uniform. Initial small improvements in Putins 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 fifty 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 first-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 figures, such as Moscow Mayor Iuri Luzhkov, regional governors
had little power to influence either the selection of candidates or the cam-
paign in the proportional representation seats. By contrast, they enjoyed enor-
mous influence 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 influence 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 difficult 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 significant 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 definitive 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
reflected 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 influence 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 Russias regional bosses, was heavily Moscow-based. OVRs
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 fielded candidates
in as many as 100 SMD districts (Colton and McFaul 2003: 289). 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 regions 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 specific 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
affiliation (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 officials played an over-
whelming role. Colton and McFaul (2003) find 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 significant 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 officials simply added extra ballots to the ballot boxes (156).19
18
Sergei Popov, Unitys Deputy Campaign Manager, cited by Colton and McFaul 2003: 56.
19
Even in the party list vote, the influence 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 influence 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
significant support was provided by local elites.20
OVRs 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 affiliations 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: 956).
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 affiliations 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). Yargomskayas laconic
presumably reflects the reality that it was not institutions alone but rather
the relative absence of parties with strong influence 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
first 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 influenced by national political
cleavages, became quite divorced from national politics precisely during national
elections when one might expect the national influence 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 influ-
ence, normative pressure, signaling the efficacity 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 influence protest in
one place can have on protest elsewhere. In this section, I analyze protest dif-
fusion specifically. I show that the protest waves of 1997 and 19989 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 find 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.
Table 5.2. Weekly Event Diffusion, January 1997June 1999 (Conditional

Negative Binomial Regression with Fixed Effects)
(1) Working Days (2) Days of (3) Other Protest

Lost to Strikes Hunger Strikes Events
Other Regions t-1 .003*** .189*** .010***
(.0002) (.049) (.002)
Wage Arrears .611*** .585*** .208***
(.027) (.041) (.027)
Change in Wage Arrears 2.450*** 7.976*** 3.351**
(.925) (1.448) (1.365)
Change in Industrial .013 .035 .033
Output (.027) (.045) (.029)
Change in .369*** .083 .012
Unemployment (.079) (.115) (.075)
Urbanization .026*** .017*** .011***
(.003) (.004) (.003)
Population .216*** .239*** .122***
(100 000s) (.022) (.041) (.019)
Lagged Event .0000638*** .002*** .0004***
(.000001) (.0001) (.00001)
Constant 5.609*** 4.995*** 5.529***
(.180) (.313) (.186)
Log-likelihood 21940*** 7547*** 15879
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
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, reflecting a regular finding in the literature that,
all else being equal, protests are more likely to take place in the capital and other major cities.
Table 5.3. Weekly Event Diffusion in July-December 1999: Geography and

Politics (Conditional Negative Binomial Regression with Fixed Effects)
(1) Working Days (2) Days of (3) Other

Lost to Strikes Hunger Strikes Protest Events
Other Regions t-1 .003 .507 .000001
(.005) (.6859) (.00003)
Wage Arrears .347*** .399 .096
(.121) (.314) (.212)
Change in Wage Arrears 3.054 17.328 10.829
(2.922) (11.709) (15.457)
Change in Industrial .118** .270 .220**
Output (.060) (.181) (.097)
Change in Unemployment .743** .469 .757**
(.296) (.647) (.382)
Urbanization .033*** .007 .020***
(.011) (.021) (.010)
Population .336*** .074 .352***
(100 000s) (.078) (.184) (.067)
Lagged Event .0002*** .005*** .0004***
(.00001) (.001) (.00005)
Constant 5.285*** 4.187 3.133***
(.807) (1.477) (.631)
Log-likelihood 2464*** 313*** 1226
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 find in Russia looking at
the 19972000 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 findings are striking. Moreover, when combined with the qual-
itative evidence on the separation of the two elections, the quantitative findings
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.
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 findings on the decline of protest in Russia in 1999 fit well with the
broader argument of this book; that in hybrid regimes, patterns of protest
are closely influenced 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 significant
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 Hales (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 configurations, both at the broad regime level
and at the rather detailed level of specific 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.
6
Vladimir Putin and Defeat-Proofing 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.
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 first-round
votes. However, the elections hardly represented much of a choice, pitting Putins
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-
dents office, 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-
fied 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).
147
There was also debate over what Vladimir Putin had actually achieved while
in the presidents chair. Opinion was bitterly divided on whether Putin had
in fact fulfilled 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 19972000, it is clear that protest remained
low for the rest of Putins first term as president. If we can take the official
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 19979.4 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-
tions 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 Putins own high personal approval ratings.5 The goal of this chapter,
however, is to look at another crucial element: specific 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 19979 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 identified as one strike, unless the MVD officials 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-Proofing the System 149
implemented during his presidency that solidified Putins position and helped
bind the elite together to insulate the incumbent leadership against fluctuations
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-proofing 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

Putins 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 official 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 officials are really agents in chains of patron-
client relationships and can develop considerable autonomy from their bosses,
especially where monitoring is difficult 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 Putins popularity, see Colton and Hale (2009) and Lukin (2009).
6
Putins 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 reflected 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 verticalwas to find 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 first 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 Kremlins system.
For the first ten years of Russias 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 first government draft of a new labor code presented to the Duma was
closely based on a version prepared by the IMF and would have significantly
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,
reflected the views of the liberal independent unions such as Sotsprof; the
Avaliani draft, submitted by the KPRF Duma faction, reflected 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,
reflected 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
Zashchitas Oleg Shein and OVRs 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 fierce 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 specified limits, under the vertical than they did under Yeltsin. See Russia Profile,
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 official 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 Kagarlitskiis 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 conflicts 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 five
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 affiliate can exclude competitors simply by not
talking with them.
Third, the Labor Code requires that strikes need to be confirmed 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 difficult 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 official 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 first step in reconfiguring the
structure of power. The primary task in creating a new vertical in Russia
lay in reconfiguring 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 Russias regions. The reforms

were undertaken in two stages: before and after the Beslan school hostage
taking of 2004. In the first period, the Putin administration made significant
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 centers and the governors
incentives in a way that, to a significant 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-proofing 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 financial stress and weakness at the center, had
increasingly tended to slip under the influence of the regional governors. The
first 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 influence 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 Russias 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 difficulty 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 unified
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 financed 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 office in
July. This meant that governors lost the immunity from prosecution that they
had enjoyed as ex officio 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, financial, 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 unspecified measures would be taken if he continued to
oppose Putins 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 Kremlins fiercest 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 Mexicos 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 Putins presidency. Patronage in Russia, instead, operated
largely through regional governors offices (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 influence extends to the disbursement of state funds, the
ownership and profitability 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-five of the seventy-nine governors who sought reappointment
between the introduction of the appointment system and April 22, 2008 were
fired.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 Putins 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,
five 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 influence 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 fired (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 first 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 influential Putin ally. Barinov, who was the
last governor in Russia to be elected, became the first to be arrested in office
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 office, 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 dont 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 falsified, but correct, election results, virtual imple-
mentation of orders from the Centre, and say the right things on television.19
Defeat-Proofing 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-proofing 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 office 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 Kremlins 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: 22933).
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 (Peoples Deputy and Russias 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 benefits
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
Russias 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 significant 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 significantly increased barriers
to entry for new parties and reserved the right to nominate candidates only for
officially 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: 1868).
The key moment, however, in the establishment of United Russia as the
dominant party in Russia was Putins endorsement of the party in the 2007
Duma elections. Though Putin had long followed Yeltsins 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 Putins
years in office. 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.russiaprofile.org, November 23, 2007, Russia Profile 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 justified 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 Russias 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 difficulty 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 office.
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 Putins 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 partys 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 SRs 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 first 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, Putins decision to lead the United Russia list dealt a signifi-
cant blow to SRs hopes. No longer would it be possible to run a campaign that
simultaneously backed Putin while criticizing United Russia. Following Putins
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 significant
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 significant than its leaders expected it to
be when Putin welcomed the partys 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 Profile, 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 significant 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 officially 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 first veto point is the process of registering as a political party.
Participation in the new electoral system is limited to political parties, defined
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
Russias 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 fifteen 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 first stage comes with the certification
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-five 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 financial 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 official 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 flexibility 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 office can be barred from
running.31
Clearly, the electoral commissions charged with verification 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 fifteen members are appointed to renewable four-year terms, with
five members appointed by the President, five by the Duma, and five 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 Mayors
office, 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 Churovs 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 Profile, August 2, 2006, JRL
2006174.
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 find 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 fifty-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 profile exclusion came in St. Petersburg, where the locally
strong Iabloko party was refused registration by local officials (along with the
Peoples 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 officials blamed St. Petersburg Governor
Valentina Matvienko for the decision to refuse their party registration, and
local reporters pointed to Iablokos opposition to the construction of a new
office 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-five 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 Rogozins
Great Russia party. Several technical grounds were cited by officials, including
spelling mistakes in financial 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 significant 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 fifteen officially 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 finance 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 office, whereas those who do not, have
little chance.
Nevertheless, the new system provides not only for broad contestation, but
where significant 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 personified 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
Putins 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. Russias design
for defeat-proof competition is unlikely to be an exception to this rule. In this
final section, I consider briefly 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 find 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 first Solidarity government only came to power after the defection of
regime satellite parties, The United Peoples 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, todays loyal partner can easily become tomorrows
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
identified 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
field, 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 difficulty 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 Russias regions immediately become the
Kremlins 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.
7
Protest, Repression, and Order from Below
Tatarsky of course hated most of the manifestions of Soviet power, but he still
couldnt understand why it was worth exchanging an evil empire for an evil
banana republic that imported its bananas from Finland.
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 Olga
Kurnosova of the United Civil Front (Obedinennyi 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 offices 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 five busloads of OMON. The dissenters had strict instructions: Carry
white flowers 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 flag of the banned National Bolshevik Party (Natsional-bolshevistskaia
partiia, NBP). Arrest them all, someone called out, and in short order, the
protest organizers and some 150 participants were arrested.
167
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 35, 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 significant 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;
Olga 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 significant 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: 2425).
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 significant
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 significant independent opposition whose protests have become a fre-
quent sight on Russias 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 Putins 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 regimes 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 conflicts 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 incumbents 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 Kuchmas
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 field 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: 3552). 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 regimes 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 difficulty 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 first 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, 19691972, Journal of Conflict Resolution
39, no. 2 (June 1995): 33052; and on structural versus behavioral repression, see Edward N.
Muller and Erich Weede, Cross-National Variation in Political Violence, Journal of Conflict
Resolution 34, no. 4 (December 1990): 62451.
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 deficiencies (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 difficult 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 significant 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 Oberschalls (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 influencing
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 Russias very own
color revolt consisted of a wave of largely spontaneous protests on the part
of pensioners against changes in the benefits 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 benefits
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 benefits with cash payments for a range of items. This would generate an
inflow 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
OBrien 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 sacrifices 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 benefits 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 benefits 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 benefits, bringing detailed local knowledge to bear on issues
with significant local wrinkles. In addition, decentralization had the political
9
Versiya, No. 1 (324), January 1016, 2005.
benefit 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 benefits of decentralization came with significant, and unan-
ticipated, costs. One was that regional authorities had little incentive to fully
replace in-kind benefits 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 Russias 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 benefits 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 benefits reform. In advance
of the demonstration, Druzhininskii turned his tram into a touring political
propaganda machine, offering free rides and handing out flyers for the pro-
test. There was a willing audience among St. Petersburgs 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 official 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. Leaflets 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 57000 people participated in the action. According to the police,
700. Either way at 11 oclock the traffic jam on Leningrad Shosse stretched
for several miles.11 Five hundred pensioners also gathered in Tolyatti, orga-
nized by the local movement, National Alliance. Singing revolutionary songs,
they blocked roads, broke through armed guards into the mayors office, and
demanded the return of benefits. Similar protests took place in Almetevsk
(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 Druzhininskiis 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. Petersburgs central street, Nevskii Prospekt. Only the last of these had
been sanctioned by city officials. 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 figure that the more sober Kommersant also published.14 At
11
12
13
Novyi Peterburg, No. 2 (713), January 20, 2005.
14
Kommersant. Druzhininskii estimated the crowd at 5,00010,000 (Authors 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 Borbe s Organizovannoi
Prestupnostiu, 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 satisfied the pensioners,
and the slogan of the day was Ne verim! [We dont 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 1416,
2005 in St. Petersburg. There were ten points, extending well beyond stop-
ping the monetization of benefits 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
offices 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 fight broke out between demonstrators and officers of the 18th UBOP,
and arrests were made by uniformed officers 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 filling 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 officers, 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 pensioners protest of more than 500 that blocked
the citys 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
17
18
RFE/RL, January 25, 2005, and authors interview with Reznik, June 2005.
19
RAI Novosti, Johnsons 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 Russias local party
organizations were issued with instructions to outdo the protesters in numbers
participating in demonstrations and marches. The weekend of March 1213
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; Komsomolskaia 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 Partys response to womens mobilization against
collectivization in the 1930s. For more on womens 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 didnt 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 film Fedorova
supports Viktor Anpilovs 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
Tiulpanov, 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 fined 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 five 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 Deans office, 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, theyve just fi nished their shift and arent 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 flattery 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 dont 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 officials 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, official 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
Tiulpanov 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
Komsomolskaia Pravda v Sankt Peterburge, No. 2(77)-p/6(23400), January 17, 2005.
26
Kommersant, No. 16, February 1, 2005.
27
28
29
Perhaps the best summary of the governments 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 first 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 benefits. 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 regimes response that we now turn.
After the Revolution: The New Politics of the Streets

Although the January protests dwindled away, they had a significant 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
Authors interview, July 2005.
The events of January had suggested the limits of Putins 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
Putins artificially 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 significant 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 streetfighters. Neither the KPRF- nor the FNPR-affiliated
unions joined the PGS.33 The approach of the PGS and its member organiza-
tions was to campaign around a flexible 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
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 official 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. Authors
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 NBPs 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 flowers at prominent figures 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, film director Nikita Mikhalkov, Mikhail
Gorbachev, and Great Britains Prince Charles, to more sophisticated forms
of direct action, including blocking highways and flash mobbing.36 Perhaps
the most infamous of NBPs flash mobbings came on August 2, 2004, when
NBP activists occupied the offices 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 difficulty 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
Authors 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 defined as a large group of people who appear at a predetermined location, perform some
specific action, and then disappear. The tactic is believed to have first 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 Savages
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/flash_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 dont know what theyre talk-
ing about or theyre 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 five 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 effigies 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 difficult 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 regions governor.39 The protests were organized by Freedom of
Choice, a motorists lobbying group, claiming to represent the backbone of
society: people between twenty-five and fifty 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
39
The governors 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 30September 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
office.
On the other hand, the elite is now extraordinarily unified, and unless the
protestors can attract to their side significant elements of the ruling elite, pro-
test is likely to remain limited to those excluded from or dissatisfied 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 benefits 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
flocking 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
Authors 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-profile repression, institutional channelling, and attempts to fi ll the
organizational space with licensed, pro-regime social organizations, just as
the electoral space is filled 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 significant
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 filling 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 administrations 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
significant 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 difficult 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 Peoples 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 (olodezhnoe Pravozashchitnoe Dvizhenie, MPD), was
harassed by officers 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 521, 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-stifle-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 officers of the FSB and the regional anti
organized crime unit (Regionalnoie Upravlenie po Borbe s Organizovannoi
Prestupnostiu, RUBOP), their computers and literature were confiscated, 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 Russias
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 prosecutors office 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 find 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 flow
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 officials. Hence the economic and social
consequences of openly disobeying the regime were potentially catastrophic,
and the threats and intimidation of Brezhnevs 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
benefits 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 filling
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
significantly, 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 Putins administration, the changes were ambiguous in
nature, on the one hand promising to put NGO activities on a firmer 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-
fidence 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 benefit to the development of the NGO sector in the medium term.
However, the other part of the administrations 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
significantly increased. In particular, NGOs are required to report all funds
received from foreign sources and to provide details on how these are used.
Government officials 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 organizations 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
difficulties. 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-Profit Law, at www.icnl.org/KNOWLEDGE/news/2006/0119_
Russia_NGO_Law_Analysis.pdf (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 significant sums in state
support potentially available, civil society groups will have strong incentives
to maintain good relationships with the Public Chamber and the state officials
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 influence 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 figures 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 regimes
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 Kremlins 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 conflation of self-interest and ideology.57 Through a series of
seminars and focus groups, a new approach was devised, and in March 2005,
Moving Together announced the creation of a new organization, Nashi (Ours).58
Since its first 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 administrations 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: 5860).
58
For a detailed analysis of Nashis ideological positions, see Buchacek (2006: 2131).
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 significant membership across the Russian Federation but also significant
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, its 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: 5761).
Nashis 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, Nashis 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 Putins watchful eye, and matching the efforts
of the opposition demonstration for demonstration. Moreover, in case of
any mishaps, Nashi had prepared leaflets 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 Nashis leading figures took their reward of higher office, 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 Nashis fortunes, and
the arrest of some fifty overzealous Nashi protesters at demonstrations in
front of the European Commission offices in Moscow seemed to confi rm the
organizations fall from grace.63
59
Currently, Nashi lists thirty cities in which it claims significant representation. See www.nashi.
su (last accessed May 15, 2009).
60
As cited (Buchacek 2006: 62).
61
Ten sokrushitelnoi 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 Presidents Messenger contour, and a
schoolchildrens 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 field, such
movements are much more than simply branches of the state. Instead they are
ersatz social movements. They partly fit 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 authoritarians overt tools of control or the
democratic regimes 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 Putins Russia are reminiscent of approaches adopted by ear-
lier authoritarian regimes. Putins 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 difficulty 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 difficult 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 democracys 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 incumbents
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 afflicted more classical closed regimes like the USSR. Rulers in
these regimes face a singular dilemma: How to accommodate significant 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 difficult 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).
8
Implications for Russia and Elsewhere
Agitprop is immortal. It is only the words that change.

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. Specifically, 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 conflicts are likely to use their influence
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 significant
1
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0211/p01s03-woam.html
200
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 significant 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 regimes first
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 findings

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 significant split in the
elite. If such a split does occur, however, we should expect that the intraelite
conflict 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 difficult. 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, firing 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 official 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 significant,
large-scale mobilizations took place, but protesters were closely controlled and
influenced 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 first 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 unified 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 find. The table does two
things. The first 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 fit 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 definitive.
204
Table 8.1. Varieties of Contention in Hybrid Regimes
Organizational Ecology State Mobilization Public Elite Nature of Contention Possible Cases
Strategy Competition
State dominated Mobilizing High Large scale, elite-led mobilizations, Russia 19972000
isolated pockets of direct action Kyrgyzstan 2005
Balanced Mobilizing High Frequent large scale, highly polarized Venezuela, Mexico,
protest, with significant state and Ecuador, Bolivia
independent involvement
State dominated Demobilizing Low Little public protest Russia 20012004
Kazakhstan
Azerbaijan
Balanced Demobilizing Low Little public protest Unlikely
State dominated Mobilizing Low Large state-controlled rallies, significant Russia 20052008
repression of opposition
Balanced Mobilizing Low Large scale controlled rallies, heavy state Algeria after 1992, Egypt
repression of non-state actors, high
likelihood of non-state violence
State dominated Demobilizing High Low mobilization with elites refraining Unlikely
from using mobilization potential
Balanced Demobilizing High Large scale anti-government mobilization Georgia 2003
Serbia 2000
Ukraine 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 superficially 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 first 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
conflict 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 (Putins 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 significant 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 difficult 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 fleshed 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 significant 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 influence. 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 influenced 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 influenced by them
that elite conflicts 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 influence 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 conflicts.
We saw this explicitly in the changing profile of protesting workers in Russia
as elite political conflicts 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-defined 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 predefined political agendas, and fluid and poorly defined 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 fluid, cleavages are poorly
defined, 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 conflict
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, OBrien 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 reflect 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
Ukraines 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 Kuchmas involvement in the mur-
der of journalist Heorgy Gongadze.4 Similarly, in Russia, potential opposi-
tion presidential candidates include Vladimir Putins 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 regimes strategy for promoting elite unity. Repression is
not just about fighting 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_files/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 influential 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
fleeting, 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 finance laws to abuse of administrative resources, the
5
Electoral revolutions are cases in which significant 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).
disqualification/intimidation of potential opponents, ballot stuffing, 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 significant
elements of the elite had already split from the ruling coalition and stood to
benefit 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 sufficiently 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 influence 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 influence the choices presented to voters. And when
these methods fail, there is always the tried and tested variant of using the pros-
ecutors office, 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 significant 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 finding fits 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 final 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 difficult to find. 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 figures, 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 Henrys
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 Russias 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/files/doklad_-engl-verstka.pdf
7
Sarah Lindemann-Komarova, The Effect of Being: The Trickle-Up Strategy for Building
Democracy in Siberia 19942006, 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 specific 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 Putins 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 Russias obligations under the European
Convention on Human Rights.10 However, others take a more sanguine view,
8
Authors 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-Profit Law (http://www.icnl.org/).
arguing that the law is necessary improve the quality of the NGO sector, to reg-
ularize the finances of NGOs and to encourage private individuals to donate
money. Many NGOs were unregistered before, making them subject to the
whims of local officials who often had little or no understanding of the NGO
sector. Moreover, NGOs often take an extremely casual or irregular approach
to financial management, which leaves them vulnerable and makes it difficult
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 difficult it will be for small organi-
zations and those without near state funding to operate unless significant
modifications are made. The Agora Interregional Human Rights Association
reported at the end of 2006 that some 80 percent of NGOs had not fulfilled
the new registration requirements. However, Pavel Chikov, Agoras 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 first 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 administrations 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 officials 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 first 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 influence 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 influence (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 significant of the laws regulating civil and local
input into policy.15 Law 131 mandates a number of very significant 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 define 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

significant opportunity for active citizens to take initiatives in the kind of local
matters that are of real importance in peoples 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-profile, 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 flow 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 benefits 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 20057, 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
influence 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 significant
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 countrys 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.
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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
237
238 Appendix 1: Event Protocol
26 One-day strike
27 Selling RNE newspaper/leaflets
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 Graffiti
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 natsionalnoe edinstvo)
26 Trade Unionists
27 Anarchists
28 Union of Officers
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-traffic 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 natsionalnyi 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 childrens rehabilitation center and his deputy
111 U.S. citizen
112 Demokraticheskaia Rossiya
113 Committee to defend the constitution of Dagestan
114 Lipa
115 Mayors 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 Officers
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 fight 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 Natsionalnaia Obshina
185 Russian Union of Cossaks
186 Supporters of B. R. Kasimov
187 Forest fi re fighters (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 pensioners 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 individualnykh 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 Peoples Deputy A. D. Portiankin
216 Assembly of the Peoples of Karachaevo-Cherkassiia
217 Zhenshchiny Rodnogo Krasnoiaria
218 Investors of Severno-zapadnogo komercheskogo banka
219 Organization Stalin
220 Armed militiamen
221 Cherkessians, Abazins, other nationalities, and Cossaks
222 Raduzhnaia Gerilia
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 krasnoiaria
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 ratification 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
certificates
44 Support for enterprise
45 Demanding compensation for damage done by earthquakes in Jan-
Feb 1999
46 Compensation for losses incurred during fighting 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 unification 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 officer 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 official recognition and organization of their

business
134 Protesting mine closure
135 Against disruption of unified, 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 Lenins birthday
143 Protesting Rosugols 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 flotation 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 Kalmuks (189)
191 Demanding housing
192 Objecting to housing Chechens
193 Resignation of hospital executives
194 Protesting against plans to move Lenins 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 Nemtsovs housing reform
207 Opposing construction of underground garages
208 Resignation of city government
209 Demanding Chechen government take measure to control move-
ment of fighters
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 Bolshoi
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 unofficial University of the Volga
224 Dissatisfaction with a newly elected raion administration and the
crime situation
225 Protesting against prohibition on handing out Marychevs leaflets
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 Cherepkovs
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 latters 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 governments 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 benefits
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 benefits
269 Improving position of pensioners
270 Protest directors 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 Dagestanis 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 Klimentev
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 Sibiravia
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 Pakistans 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 reconfiguring of bottom floor 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 fight 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 fulfill 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 profits
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 mayors 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 natsionalnyi sabor
429 Unification 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 fight
435 Objective investigation of the shooting of a local man by ROVD
officer
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 governments 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 fishing
496 Against arrest of local LDPR
497 Promoting a candidate for governor
498 Close garbage processing plant
499 Speed up investigation of Daniialovs 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 fishing
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-Cherkessiias 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 Stavropolskii 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 flag 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
Stavropolskii Krai. The Chechen representatives agreed
527 Medical and fi nancial support for a citizen of Bolshaia 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 fleet
542 Claiming appointment of acting head of Karachaevo-Cherkessiia
and acting minister of interior by Moscow as unconstitutional.
Calling for Semenovs assumption of power.
543 Against construction of a power plant

544 Blocking arrival of 14 forced refugees of Ingush nationality
545 Payment of invalidity benefit
546 Punishment of local Nogai people for starting a fight 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 floods
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 benefits 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 Semenovs taking office
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 governments 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 fit-
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 Stavropolskii 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 Teatralnyi Square (Moscow)
9 Solovetskii Kamen at Lubyanka (Moscow)
10 Polish Diplomatic property
11 FSB offices
12 Marinskii Theater
13 Hotel Metropol
14 Latvian diplomatic property
15 Main square of town
16 Polling station
17 Prosecutors office
18 Offices of Yugbank
19 Moscow Metro
20 Yabloko offices
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 Offices of Soiuz Chernobyltsev
30 Polpreds office
31 Kurgan State University
32 Palestinian diplomatic property
33 Turkish diplomatic property
34 Court Property
35 Offices 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 Dalnevostochnyi 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 Office 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 Oktyabrskii Zh.D.
84 Khasavyurt-Tlokh highway
85 Progressprombank office
86 Unemployment office
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 Vasilevskii 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 office
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 administrations office
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 Offices of Kondpetrolium
146 Aleksandrovskyi Sad
147 Supreme Court of Republic
148 Pushkin Square

149 Ploshchad Revoliutisii
150 Tverskaia
151 Triumfalnaia Ploshchad
152 Regional military committee
153 Dom Pravitelstva
154 Church
155 Metro station 1905
156 Krasnaia Presnia
157 Federal treasury building
158 Georgian Embassy
159 Kiev station
160 Offices 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 specific 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
benefit 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/specific:
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/specific
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/specific
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/specific
14, 30, 73, 134, 143, 144, 173, 235, 238, 270, 301, 349, 355, 361, 372, 377,
395, 408, 472,
commercial/market related demands: undefined
124, 419
commercial/market related demands: national
150, 414,
commercial/market related demands: regional
commercial/market related demands: local/specific
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 groups: national
229, 342, 558, 559, 591

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 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/specific
31, 38, 58, 85, 99, 100, 105, 177, 179, 182, 208, 224, 226, 228, 234, 244,
338, 345, 353, 406, 457,
elections/ irregularities: unspecified
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/specific
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/specific
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
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
official 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 officials 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 official 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 reflect the well-known participation of miners
269
270 Appendix 2: Sectoral and Seasonal Strike Patterns
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 5 603 855
Health 600 660 158 130 46 475 4 486 809 751
Miners 840 121 1 261 169 1 004 401 28 578 3 134 269
Others 1 417 710 1 084 784 273 787 57 138 2 833 419
total 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 45.3
Health 12.5 3.3 1.9 1.6 6.5
Miners 17.4 26.1 40.9 10.4 25.3
Others 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 0 100
Industry 918 137 690 450 111 971 1 384 1 721 942
Services 433 297 377 300 159 297 55 742 1 025 636
Unspecified 66 176 17 034 2 519 12 85 741
total 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 60.8
Services 30.6 34.8 58.2 97.6 36.2
Unspecified 4.7 1.6 0.9 0.0 3.0
in the strike wave. Most interesting, though, in Table A2.1 is the category
others, which reflects 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 significant 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 A2.3. Industrial Strikes
1997 1998 1999 2000 19972000
Industry (unspecified) 91 046 179 331 2 838 796 274 011
Oil and gas 8 300 5 558 9 770 0 23 628
Light industry 20 594 12 619 7 248 518 40 979
Electricity Production 24 1945 117 026 7 928 0 366 899
Chemicals 1 262 1 946 800 0 4 008
Wood Processing & Forestry 63 376 39 941 185 0 103 502
Construction Equipment 15 931 28 328 81 340 70 125 669
Metallurgy 10 481 211 187 1 570 0 223 238
Machine Building 461 452 94 514 56 0 556 022
Defense 3 750 236 0 3 986
Total 918 137 690 450 11 1971 1 384 1 721 942

Industry (unspecified) 9.9 26.0 2.5 57.5 15.9
Oil and gas 0.9 0.8 8.7 0.0 1.4
Light industry 2.2 1.8 6.5 37.4 2.4
Electricity Production 26.4 16.9 7.1 0.0 21.3
Chemicals 0.1 0.3 0.7 0.0 0.2
Wood Processing & Forestry 6.9 5.8 0.2 0.0 6.0
Construction Equipment 1.7 4.1 72.6 5.1 7.3
Metallurgy 1.1 30.6 1.4 0.0 13.0
Machine Building 50.3 13.7 0.1 0.0 32.3
Defense 0.4 0.0 0.2 0.0 0.2
271
Table A2.4. Service Sector Strikes Outside Health and Education
1997 1998 1999 2000 Total
Municipal 302 732 299 943 131 813 40 821 775 309
Transport 130 445 77 357 27 334 14 641 249 777
Others 120 0 150 280 550
Total 433 297 377 300 159 297 55 742 1 025 636
Percentage Percentage Percentage Percentage
Municipal 69.9 79.5 82.7 73.2 75.6

Transport 30.1 20.5 17.2 26.3 24.4
Others 0.0 0.0 0.1 0.5 0.1
Unfortunately, for some 16 percent of the working days lost to strikes in

industry, the specific industry or sector is not readily identifiable. 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 Moscows 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
Appendix 2: Sectoral and Seasonal Strike Patterns 273
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 10 572 961
Non-Budget 984 533 707 484 114 640 1 676 1 808 333
Workers
Non-Budget 20.4 14.7 4.7 0.6 14.6
Percentage
Non-education sector strikes in Russia (1997-2000)

1000000
900000
Working Days Lost
800000
700000
600000
500000
400000
300000
200000
100000
0
Ju 97
Ju 98
Ju 99
Ju 00
N -97
Ja -97
N -98
Ja -98
N -99
Ja -99
N -00
0
M -97
M -98
M -99
M -00
M -97
M -98
M -99
M -00
Se 7
Se -98
Se 9
Se 0
-0
l-9
l-9
l-0
-
-
ay
ay
ay
ay
p
ov
p
ov
p
ov
p
ov
ar
ar
ar
ar
n
n
l
Ja
Non-education strikes All strikes
Figure A2.1. Seasonal patterns outside of education.
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 figure 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 Russias economic crises of
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.
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 confidence 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 governors 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 significant
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.
275
276 Appendix 3: A Statistical Approach to Political Relations
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 .043
(.089) (.086)
Ethnic Peace .32** .37**
(.13) (.13)
Communist Governor 36** 35**
(4.4) (4.6)
Republic 3.4 2.6
(5.1) (5.3)
Capital 11** 7.8
(4.1) (5.0)
Support for BNY 93 .42* .45
(.21) (.24)
Change in support for BNY 96-93 .53* .66**
(.21) (.25)
Days lost to strikes 94 .10*
(.067)
Days lost to strikes 95 .045
(.056)
(.027)
(.018)
Days lost to strikes 98 .096**
(.037)
Constant 22 23
(15) (15)
Observations 78 77
R2 0.60 0.66
* indicates significant at the .05 level, ** indicates significant at the .01 level.
percentage point improvement in Yeltsins support in a region between the

referendum of 1993 and the presidential election of 1996, the governors 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 governors relations with
Moscow. This also confi rms that the MFK analysts making the judgments
on relations were not influenced 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 confident that
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 significant. 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.
Yeltsins level of support in 1993 becomes marginally less significant statisti-
cally, though the size of the coefficient 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 confidence 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.
Index
Anti-Extremist Division of the Anti- Caucasus

Organized Crime Squad, 178, 190 and election of 1999, 134
Aiol, Aleksandr, 179 center-region relations
Allianza Civica, 28 and protest, 10912
Altai Krai, 100 and the replacement of governors, 15455
Altai Republic governors capacity, 83
wage arrears and strikes, 116 measurement, 81
Amur, 110 Putin reforms, 15255
Astrakhan, 47, 110, 150 Central Election Commission
Aushev, Ruslan, 141 and party registration, 16061
Avantguard of Red Youth, 181, Chavez, Hugo
189, 239 and state mobilization, 28, 33
Azerbaijan, 211 Chechnya
and hybrid regimes, 5, 24 and Khasavyurt agreement, 110
and organizational ecology, 205 and opposition to war, 186
and the 1999 elections, 134
Barinov, Aleksei, 155 Cheliabinsk, 71, 153
Basaev, Shamil, 134 Chernomyrdin, Viktor, 94, 156
Belarus, 8, 186, 191, 211 Chubais, Anatolii, 111, 127
economic cooperation treaty, 110 Churov, Vladimir
Berezovskii, Boris, 124, 125 and the Central Election Commission, 161
Bloody Sunday massacre, 176 Committee of Soldiers Mothers, 28
Bolshoi Kamen, 54, 78, 111 Communist Party
Bolivia, 3, 169 and protest, 47
and organizational ecology, 205 protest participants, 57
Brezhnev, Leonid Confederation of Labor, 181
and channeling, 190 contention
and hunger strikes, 55 and blame attribution, 176
and repression, 174, 18889 and electoral fraud, 21112
and the social compact, 175 and formal institutions, 98
budget sector and identity, 65
and strike reporting incentives, and institutions, 10
57 and political signalling, 13437
and strike waves, 269 and regime dynamics, 3839
and strikes, 51 and social movements, 20708
determinants of mobilization, 85 defi nition, 18
Buriatiia, 111 diffusion, 14245
279
280 Index
contention (cont.) and party registration, 160

flash mobbing, 185 Federation of Independent Trade Unions
in closed autocracies, 22 (FNPR)
in democracies, 20 and independent unions, 80
in hybrid regimes and organizational ecology, 27
and regime dynamics, 31 and reform of the labor code,
repertoires, 42 15051
theory, 24 and the 1999 elections, 141
in post-Communism, 44 and the Communist Party, 66
in Russia, 1416 and the Petersburg Civic Opposition,
and social movements, 66 184
demands, 5960 and wage arrears, 43
direct actions, 55 and Yeltsin, 74
MVD data, 4549 property, 76
protest participants, 5559 Federov, Nikolai, 153
symbolic, 53 formal institutions
movement societies, 202 and organizations, 98
political process model and hybrid and protest decline, 13133
regimes, 97 electoral rules and protest decline, 13742
protest participants and organizational France
ecology, 59 and protest, 20
regime and opposition in hybrid regimes, strikes in comparative perspective, 4950
17074 Freedom of Choice, 186
Dagestan, 134, 162 Gazprom

debt default, 10708 Astrakhan blockade, 47
democratization tower in St. Petersburg, 162
and color revolutions, 21011 Georgia, 3, 8, 29, 30
and contention, 13 and color revolutions, 127, 168, 193, 202,
and Russian politics, 21018 210
Deripaska, Oleg, 127 and democratization, 211
Dissenters Marches, 16768, 186, 187 and elite competition, 206, 212
Dissenters Marches, 1 and youth movements, 195
Druzhininskii, Mikhail, 176 contacts with Russian activists, 186
Dubinin, Valentin, 111 Glaziev, Sergei
and Motherland, 164
East Germany Golos Rossii, 127
protest repertoire, 52 Gongadze, Georgiy, 210
Ecuador, 3, 169 gosudarstvennie kaznacheiskie obligatsii,
and organizational ecology, 205 108
elections Gozman, Leonid, 167
and protest 1999, 12830 Great Russia
elite competition denied registration, 162
and democratization, 34 Gurov, Aleksandr, 134
in hybrid regimes, 1011, 3435, 20307 Gusinskii, Vladimir, 125
in Russia, 7
Estonia Hicks, John, 84
and hybrid regimes, 5 Hungary
Evenk Autonomous Okrug, 110 post-Communist protest in comparative
perspective, 4950
Federal Agency for Youth Affairs, 196 protest repertoire, 52
Federal Law 131, 21617 protest under Communism, 21
Federal Registration Service hunger strikes, 5455
and NGOs, 213 determinants of, 97
Index 281
hybrid regimes Karelin, Aleksandr, 134, 140

and legitimation, 19899 Karimov, Islam, 191, 202
and repression, 13, 16870, 17274 Kasianov, Mikhail, 94, 185, 210, 212
in post-Cold War era, 45 Kasparov, Garry
instability as an emergent property, 197 and the 2008 presidential elections, 162
regime and opposition, 14546 arrest, 168
sub-categories, 56 Kemerovo
varieties of contention, 20307 and independent unions, 58
without hegemonic parties, 154 and ruble devaluation, 111
coal miners, 54
Iabloko, 139 strikes, 69
and protest, 167, 178, 179, 180, 181, 189 Khakasiia
and the labor code, 150 and strikes, 69
in St. Petersburg, 162, 184 Khimki, 176, 177
Youth section, 177, 183, 195 Khrushchev, Nikita
Iakemenko brothers and repression, 188
and Moving Together, 195 Kirienko, Sergei, 54, 93, 96, 97
Iakemenko, Vasilii Kirov, 110
and creation of Nashi, 195 Komsomol, 195
and funding Nashi, 196 Kondratov, Viktor, 111
and the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs, Korzhakov, Aleksandr, 111
196 Kostroma, 110
Iakovlev, Vladimir, 112, 141 Kozak, Dmitri
IMF, 150 and Vladimir Churov, 161
Industrial Workers union Krasnoiarsk
and 1999 elections, 141 and preventive arrest, 168
Interior Ministry, 16 Krasnoiarskii Krai, 110
and protest control, 167 Kuchma, Leonid
and protest in Primorskii Krai, 41 and opposition, 29
reorganization, 152 and Viktor Iushchenko, 210
Iran Kudrin, Alexei, 180
and hybrid regimes, 5 Kurnosova, Olga, 167, 184
Isaev, Andrei, 150 Kursk, 111
Italy Kyrgyzstan, 3, 173, 193, 210
fascist regime, 30 and color revolutions, 127, 168
strikes in comparative perspective, 4950 and democratization, 13, 99, 211
Ivanovo, 110 and elite competition, 212
wage arrears and strikes, 116 and organizational ecology, 205
Just Russia labor

and 2007 Duma elections, 159 social partnership in Russia, 7479
and potential defection, 160 labor code
and the management of elections, 16364 reform, 15051
and the problem of defection, 16465 labor unions
creation, 158 fi nancing, 7677
pro-Kremlin opposition, 156 independent, 73
Independent Union of Mineworkers
Kagarlitskii, Boris (NPG), 73
on the labor code reform, 150 state dominated, 7479
Kaliningrad, 111, 165 Latyshev, Petr, 153
Kalmykiia, 140 Law on Political Parties
Kamchatka, 111 and veto points, 157
Karachaevo-Cherkesiia Law on Voters Rights
and disputed election, 58 and restricting ballot access, 157
282 Index
Liberal Democratic Party of Russia human rights groups, 193, 194

and bombing of Yugoslavia, 60 Other Russia forum, 189
and Kremlin support, 158 Moscow region, 140
and monetization protests, 181 Movement in Support of the Army, 181
protest participants, 57 Moving Together, 195
Livshits, Aleksandr, 54 and Nashi, 195
Lukashenko, Aleksandr, 8, 191 Moving Without Putin, 181, 195
Luzhkov, Iuri, 124, 125, 127, 138, 139, 140, Murmansk, 110
141, 154, 260, 261 MVD
and elections of 1999, 134
Malaysia MVD data
and hybrid regimes, 5 and hunger strikes, 54
and labor unions, 27 and marches and rallies, 128
Marii-El, 110 and miners strikes, 87
Mashkovtsev, Mikhail, 155 and protest participants, 5758
Matvienko, Valentina and published sources, 57
and Iabloko in St. Petersburg, 162 and social tension, 53
and pensioners protests, 178 and strikes, 51
May Day and working days lost to strikes, 102
and co-opting protest, 77 strengths and weaknesses, 4549
Medical Insurance Fund, 152
Medvedev, Dmitri, 147, 161, 196 Nash Dom Rossii, 156
Mestnye, 197 Nashi, 1, 19597
Mexico and state mobilization, 33
Allianza Civica, 28 creation of, 195
and authoritarian corporatism, 98 National Bolshevik Party
and democratization, 169 and charges of extremism, 180
and hegemonic party rule, 154 and imprisonment, 188
and labor unions, 27 and pensioners protests, 177, 181
and organizational ecology, 205 and uniting the opposition, 18486
protest and democratization, 23 and youth, 195
miners arrest of members, 178
and 1999 elections, 141 as excuse for arrest, 167
and collapse of USSR, 73 repression of, 189
and independent unions, 28, 58 Naumov, Sergei, 182
and ruble devaluation, 54 Nazarov, Aleksandr, 153
in Primorskii Krai, 40 Nazdratenko, Evgenii, 78, 91, 112
repertoire, 44, 51 battle with Yeltsin, 111
versus railroad workers. see Rostov Nemtsov, Boris, 54, 111
Mironov, Sergei, 155, 164 Nikolaev, Vladimir, 182
and Just Russia, 158 Nizhny Novgorod
Molodaia Gvardiia, 33, 197 and Dissenters March, 1
monetization, 175, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182 and protest, 182
Moscow, 197 North Caucasus
and bombings, 134 and ethnic protest, 58
and development, 184 North Korea, 3, 33
and monetization, 176 Novosibirsk, 58, 179, 182, 216
and OVR, 140 and 1999 elections, 140
and party lists 1999, 13839 and independent unions, 58
and protest, 1, 47, 63, 168, 177, 178, 181, and preventive arrest, 168
196 and repression, 179
and strikes, 92 protest and state mobilization, 182
Dissenters March, 186 wage arrears and strikes, 116
Gorbaty Most, 51 Nyazov, Saparmurat, 3
Index 283
Oborona, 183, 186 and relations with Moscow, 91

OMON, 1, 167, 174 and ruble devaluation, 111
Orl, 91, 110, 113 and strikes, 71
organizational ecology privatization
and democratization, 99 and support for strikes, 81
and survivor organizations, 9799 Public Chamber, 194, 213, 214,
defi nition, 26 21516, 217
ersatz social movements, 2728 Putin, Vladimir
in closed regimes, 26 and determinants of protest, 37
in democracies, 26 and Duma elections 2007, 157
in hybrid regimes, 2630, 20307 and labor unions, 15051
in Russia, 7 and NGOs, 21317
early post-Soviet extinction, 29 and protest decline, 13337
in the sociology of organizations, 25 and protest levels, 148
of labor in Russia, 7379 and strike patterns, 94
post-Communism, 28 and the vertical of power, 14950
survivor organizations, 27 and the reemergence of protest, 18488
Otechestvo, 242 and the succession to Yeltsin, 135
Otechestvo-Vsia Rossiia, 122, 124, 129, 133, erzatz social movements, 33
134, 138, 139, 140, 141, 150, 156 nature of the regime, 1516
formation, 127
predicting the vote for, 140 rail wars, 53
Other Russia, 162, 184 and ruble devaluation, 54
participants, 54
Pavlovskii, Gleb Rakhimov, Murtaza, 141, 153
and Moving Together, 195 repression
Pension Fund, 152 and authoritarian regimes,
Peoples Democratic Union, 189 17072
Peoples Will Party and elite competition, 20910
denied registration, 162 and hybrid regimes, 16870, 17274
Petersburg Civic Opposition, 184 and promoting elite unity, 210
pluralistic ignorance, 171, 187 channeling and erzsatz social movements,
Poland 19497
and party defection, 164 channeling and NGOs under Putin,
and post-Communist protest, 44 19294
and protest under Communism, 21 channeling in the USSR, 19192
protest in comparative perspective, 49 coercion under Putin, 18990
protest repertoire, 52 in the USSR, 18889
political opportunities Reznik, Maksim, 167, 179
and protest, 126 Rodina
in hybrid regimes, 20809 and Just Russia, 158
Ponomarev, Lev, 168 pro-Kremlin opposition, 156, 158
Portugal Rogozin, Dmitri
attitudes to protest, 20 and Motherland, 164
Primakov, Evgenii, 94, 96, 101, 104, 112, party denied registration, 162
124, 133, 135, 138, 139, 140 Rossel, Eduard, 153
and Konstantin Titov, 127 Rostov
and protest dynamics, 11222 and strikes, 71
and succession, 12425, 138 miners versus railroad workers,
and wage arrears, 136 65
Primorskii Krai ruble devaluation, 46, 103
and co-opting labor unions, 77 and protest, 54, 97
and co-opting protest, 77 and strikes, 101
and protest, 40, 41 Rutskoi, Aleksandr, 153
284 Index
Sakha, 111 Starodubtsev, Vasilii, 155

Sechin, Igor state mobilization
and Just Russia, 159 in democracies, 33
Serbia, 8 in hybrid regimes, 3132, 20307
and color revolutions, 168, 210 in Russia, 7, 3233
and elite competition, 206 Stepashin, Sergei, 94, 124, 133
and youth movements, 195 and regional governors, 134
contacts with Russian activists, 186 strikes
Shaimiev, Mintimir, 154 and center-region bargaining, 7983
Shein, Oleg, 150 and elite competition, 8184
Shmakov, Mikhail and grievances, 85
and the Communist Party, 66 and information, 84
Shoigu, Sergei, 134, 140, 156 and organization, 85
Shurskov, Aleksandr, 183, 186 and state mobilization, 7981
Siberian Civic Iniative Support Center, 213 comparative data, 4950
sitsevaia revoliutsiia, 174 implications for strike literature, 11
Slovakia in advanced industrial economies,
protest repertoire, 52 8487
Smolensk, 71, 111 measurement, 8788
Social Democratic Party patterns in Russia, 6972
and Petersburg Civic Opposition, 184 wildcat, 86
and Sotsprof, 73 Stroev, Egor, 91, 110, 113, 250
Social Insurance Fund, 152 Surkov, Vladislav
social movements and Just Russia, 159
and contention and Moving Together, 195
in hybrid regimes, 10 and the creation of Nashi, 195
defi nition, 65 Sverdlovsk, 63, 71
Solidarity, 21, 28
and party defection, 164 Taimyr Autonomous Okrug, 110
Soskovets, Oleg, 111 Tarkov, Aleksandr, 179
Sotsprof Tatarstan, 109, 110, 111, 126, 140
and illegal strikes, 45 Almetevsk, 177
and protest, 47 Tax Code, 152
and reform of the labor code, 150 teachers
as a measure of union organizing, 85 and cost of strikes, 53
fall from power, 73 and seasonal variation in strike
Spain patterns, 88
attitudes to protest, 20 and state mobilization, 181
authoritarian regime, 31 and strikes, 51
Spiritual Heritage, 139 in Altai Krai, 100
St. Petersburg, 140, 167 in Primorskii Krai, 40, 111
and channeling, 17980 Tikhonov, Vladimir, 155
and coercion, 179 Titov, Konstantin, 127
and monetization, 182 Tiulpanov, Vadim, 181, 182
and Petersburg Civic Opposition, 18485 Tiumen, 127
and protest, 168, 17678, 179, 180 Tolmacheva, Galina, 179
and strikes, 92 Tomsk
Dissenters March, 186 wage arrears and strikes, 116
party registration, 162 Trudovaia Rossiia
preventative arrest, 189 protest actions, 47, 63
Stalin protest participants, 57
and hunger strikes, 55 Tuleev, Aman, 140, 154
and repression, 188 Turkmenistan, 3
and resistance, 21 Tuva, 140
Index 285
Ukraine, 3, 30, 187 and organizational ecology, 205

and color revolutions, 127, 168, 193, 210 and state mobilization, 28, 33
and democratization, 99, 211 high levels of mobilization, 8
and elite competition, 31, 202, 206, 212 Veshniakov, Aleksandr, 161
and elite splits, 210 and the National Bolshevik Party,
and hybrid regimes, 5 185
and organizational ecology, 29, 218 Veterans of Chernobyl, 28
and youth movements, 195 and protest, 63
contacts with Russian activists, 186 Vladivostok
Orange Revolution and Russian reaction, and labor unions, 77
15, 201 and protest marches, 40
Ulianovsk, 110 Voronezh, 110, 181, 182
wage arrears and strikes, 116
Union of Christian Democrats of Russia, 181 wage arrears, 10507
Union of Officers, 63 and protest, 108
Union of Right Forces World Bank, 73, 87, 272
and ballot access, 162
and Dissenters March, 167 Yakunin, Vladimir
and monetization protests, 181 and patriotic NGOs, 28
protest participants, 57 Yaroslavl 63, 98, 110, 111
United Civic Front, 167, 189 Yeltsin, Boris
United Russia and determinants of protest, 37
and monetization, 175, 182 and Evgenii Primakov, 94, 104
and Nashi, 196 and prime ministers, 94
and organizational ecology, 165 and the miners, 73
and protest mobilization, 18082 and the Ministry of Labor, 73
and the 2007 elections, 196 demands for resignation, 64
creation, 156 nature of the regime, 6, 15
endorsement by Putin, 157 protest and devaluation, 54
party of power, 156 succession and protest, 12628
United Socialist Party of Russia succession to, 12425
denied registration, 162 Yeltsin era and the study of protest, 8
Unity, 134 Youth Civil Rights Movement, 189
and Aman Tuleev, 140 Yugoslavia
and the 1999 elections, 13435, 138, 139, and color revolutions, 193
140 and protest, 60
and United Russia, 156
fi rst party conference, 141 Zapatista uprising, 169
predicting the vote for, 140 Zurabov, Mikhail, 182, 185
Zvezda
veksels, 105 and protest, 41
Venezuela, 3 and rail blockade, 54
and hybrid regimes, 5, 24 strike, 111

Graeme B. Robertson-The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes - Managing Dissent in Post-Communist Russia-Cambridge University Press (2010)

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Graeme B. Robertson-The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes - Managing Dissent in Post-Communist Russia-Cambridge University Press (2010)

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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

Graeme B. Robertson is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the

Cambridge University Press

Graeme B. Robertson 2011

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 2011

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data

isbn 978-0-521-11875-0 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

List of Tables page xi

7 Protest, Repression, and Order from Below 167

1.1. Summary of Regimes and Their Contention page 36

2.1. MVD and Goskomstat estimates of working days lost

4.4. Temporal patterns of strikes and wage arrears in the Russian

friendship and support, not to mention terrific advice on political science. In

set of problems than his or her twentieth-century predecessors. A world that is

Such states, in which authoritarian control coexists with legally sanctioned, if

recently, scholars have sought to categorize regimes in the middle according

Russian Lessons and a Theory of Protest in Hybrids

Literature on Contentious Politics and Social Movements

combined with a repressive state and a lack of a preexisting autonomous orga-

Hybrid Regimes and Repression

to unite and make an electoral challenge. Similarly, a weak performance in

threaten all authoritarian political regimes. Competition may be less some-

Politics in Russia through the Lens of Protest

To show this, I look at a range of groups and organizations including the

Structure of the Book

Protest and Regimes

Yeltsin-schmeltsin. What do I care so long as they dont go smashing my face

How Regimes Affect Contention

Protest in Closed Autocracies

As a result, in highly repressive regimes, the most pervasive forms of pro-

OBrien and Li (2006) describe tolerated protest in Communist China, where

Protest in Hybrid Regimes

In this book, I take a somewhat different approach to the idea of organi-

individuals. Examples include mobilizational neighborhood associations and

A good illustration of the environmental difficulties faced by independent

involved. Clearly of importance too is looking at sources of organizational

State Mobilizing Strategies

Summary of Regime Effects on Contention

Table 1.1. Summary of Regimes and Their Contention

Regime Type Organizational Ecology State Mobilization Public Elite Contention

Table 1.2. Organizational Ecology, State Mobilizing Strategies, and Elite

Period Organizational State Public Elite Contention

How Contention Affects Regimes

Protest and Regime in Russia

institutional politics. Much of the protest, I argue, bore a strong resemblance to

Post-Communism and Protest

development. The paradox is as follows: Market reforms were thought to harm

duration. Using these different dimensions, it is possible to generate a more

technical definition of a strike through to establishing the number of workers

One means of checking the quality of the MVD data is to compare it to

institutionalization of labor and the nature of protest in Russian politics.

What, Who, and Why

the post-Communist group in this period, clearly, is Russia, according both to

Nevertheless, strikes and demonstrations seemed to many to be a waste of

Table 2.1. Repertoires of Protest in Russia, 19972000

Type of Event Number of Events Percentage

As with other forms of protest, those in which protesters inflict costs

Figure 2.5. Participants in protest events excluding workers, 19972000.

assumed.24 More surprising is the finding that protest in industrial sectors

(Beissinger 1998a, 1998b, 2002). The majority of protests involving specific