The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

Since the end of the Cold War, more and more countries feature political regimes that are neither liberal democracies nor closed authoritarian 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 determining 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 The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes builds on previously unpublished data and extensive fieldwork in Russia to show how one high-profi le hybrid regime manages political competition in the workplace and in the streets. More generally, the book develops 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 governance 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

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521118750 Graeme B. Robertson 2011 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Robertson, Graeme B., 1969 The politics of protest in hybrid regimes : managing dissent in post-communist Russia / Graeme B. Robertson. p. cm. isbn 978-0-521-11875-0 (hardback) 1. Dissenters Russia (Federation) 2. Protest movements Russia (Federation) 3. Russia (Federation) Politics and government 1991 I. Title. dk510.763.r63 2010 322.40947dc22 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 List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction

Hybrid Regimes Russian Lessons and a Theory of Protest in Hybrids Theoretical Implications Literature on Contentious Politics and Social Movements Industrial Conflict Hybrid Regimes and Repression Politics in Russia through the Lens of Protest Structure of the Book

page xi xiii xv 1
4 6 8 8 11 11 13 16

Protest and Regimes: Organizational Ecology, Mobilization Strategies, and Elite Competition
How Regimes Affect Contention Protest in Democracies Protest in Closed Autocracies Protest in Hybrid Regimes Organizational Ecology State Mobilizing Strategies Elite Competition Summary of Regime Effects on Contention How Contention Affects Regimes

18
19 19 20 22 24 30 34 35 38

Protest and Regime in Russia

Post-Communism and Protest Data on Protest What, Who, and Why Protest Repertoires

40
42 44 49 51
vii

viii Protest Participants Nature of the Demands Made Conclusion: Protests without Movements

Contents
55 59 62

The Geography of Strikes

Strike Patterns The Ecology of Organizations and Protest Labor: Trading Cooperation for Survival Social Partnership at the Regional Level Mobilization Strategies, Elite Competition, and Strike Patterns Hypotheses and Measures Political Power Other Resources Capacity Alternative Explanations: Business Cycles, Information, and Hardship Strike Data Models and Results Other Forms of Protest Organizational Realities and Hybrid Regimes

67
69 72 73 75 79 81 81 82 83 84 87 88 94 97

A Time for Trouble

Protest and Time Demonetization, Wage Arrears, and Protest Center-Periphery Conflict Over Rules and Resources Primakovs Appointment and Protest Dynamics Conclusion

100
101 105 109 112 123

Elections and the Decline of Protest

Political Protest and the Paradox of the 1999 Elections Theories of Protest Decline Putins Political Strategy and Protest Decline Parallel Elections and the Separation of the National and the Local Denationalizing Protest Conclusion: Bandwagons, Protest, and Regime

124
126 130 132 137 141 145

Vladimir Putin and Defeat-Proofi ng the System

Incorporating Labor into the Vertical Enlisting the Regional Political Machines Defeat-Proofing the Electoral System A New Electoral Party of Power Political Product Differentiation: Sponsored Parties The Insertion of Veto Points Potential Problems, Sources of Weakness

147
149 151 155 156 157 160 164

Contents 7 Protest, Repression, and Order from Below

Managing Contention in Hybrids Putin, Protest, and Print Dresses The Response: Coercion and Channeling Coercion Channeling After the Revolution: The New Politics of the Streets Coercion in Russia: Brezhnev and Putin Channeling under Putin Licensing Civil Society Filling the Organizational Space: Ersatz Social Movements Russian Repression in the Broader Context

ix

167
170 174 178 179 179 183 188 190 192 194 197

Implications for Russia and Elsewhere

Implications for Other Cases Social Movements, Political Opportunities and Repression in Hybrids Implications for Russian Politics Democratization from the Ground Up?

200
202 207 210 212

Bibliography Appendix 1 Event Protocol Appendix 2 Sectoral and Seasonal Strike Patterns Appendix 3 A Statistical Approach to Political Relations Index

219 237 269 275 279

Tables

Summary of Regimes and Their Contention page 36 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

1.1. 1.2.

xi

Figures

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 Federation, 19972000 62 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 Federation, 19972000 71 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

2.1.

xiii

xiv

Figures

4.4.

Temporal patterns of strikes and wage arrears in the Russian Federation, 19972000 4.5. Strikes in 19981999 wave regions only 4.6. Strikes and wage arrears in 19981999 wave 5.1. Temporal patterns of protest in the Russian Federation, 19992000 5.2. Working days lost to strikes in the Russian Federation, 19992000 A2.1. Seasonal patterns outside of education

107 116 121 128 129 273

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 political 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 SprayRandleigh 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 especially 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 recommend 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 family: 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 anyone 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. 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

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 practical 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 contemporary 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 preemptively) and are matched by government-organized pro-incumbent mobilizations. 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 competition 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 democracy 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

4 5

Igor Romanov and Aleksandr Samarina, Dont Oversleep the Country. Young People Stand Up Against the Rotten West, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, March 26, 2007. Section 1, Chapter 2, Article 31. 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

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 isolating 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 democratic 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) contemporary 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 postmodern 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 techniques 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 primarily 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 authoritarian 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 opposition 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.

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 integrated 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 quantity 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) patterns of elite political competition. However, the relationship between regime and contention is not unidirectional; 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 wildcat protests nor elite-managed demonstrations often leave behind strong, independent 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 contemporary 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 strategies 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 authoritarian 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

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 considered only some twenty-five countries, or 13 percent of the total, to be completely 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 limited.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 patterns 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 subcategories 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 minority, 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 represents 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, JulyDecember 2007. Available at: http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/EUR01/001/2008/en

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 competitive 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 deliberalizations 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 organizational 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 mobilization 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 reasonable 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, LindemannKomarova and Javeline (2010), McFaul and Stoner-Weiss (2008), and Pravda (2005).

Introduction

Russia is an interesting case in part because of its size and political importance 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, protest 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 underlying 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 organizations 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 elsewhere, despite a generalized economic crisis. In the first Putin term, regional governors stopped using protest as a tactic against the center but instead competed 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, resulting in a more harried but more active and coherent opposition. Finally, the periods also differ considerably with respect to the third variable: 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

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

in Chapters 3 and 4. In sharp contrast, under Putin the elite has become dramatically 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 conflict, 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 proand 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 patterns of contention and the nature of the political regime in which contention

Introduction

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 commitment on the part of social movements are a central element of mainstream politics. So mainstream has contention become, in fact, that many see the longstanding 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 suggests 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

10

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

combined with a repressive state and a lack of a preexisting autonomous organizational infrastructure, it is extremely difficult to develop the broad, sustained 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 movements 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 authoritarian regimes. The nature of the organizational world what I call the organizational 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 opportunities is of a regime opening and closing and so creating or eliminating opportunities 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 identity of protesters and the geography of where protest takes place. Second, as I show, the opening of elite competition does not straightforwardly lead to the diffusion of protest. Protest diffusion is only likely to take place when national and local political competition and elite cleavages coincide 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 practices 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 competition 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 unexpected 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 representation. 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 mobilizing strategies, and elite competition provides insight into patterns of industrial 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 interest 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 official 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 presence 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).

12

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 coordination 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 subnational 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 scholars analyze authoritarian regime stability in terms of state strength and opposition 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 politics. Protesters signal to political leaders the potential benefits of changing allegiances, and elite defections or alliances signal to protesters the effectiveness (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 something 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 support, 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 succumb 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 techniques to license civil society and manage NGOs in ways that provide the state with information while limiting the capacity of groups to organize opposition. Managing competition, however, is a difficult and ever-changing challenge 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 protesters 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 transfer of property rights in history. Analysts, scholars, and international institutions consequently spent countless hours and millions of dollars on the task of understanding and developing frameworks for the creation of effective property owners and efficient (and occasionally equitable) capital markets.12 Other
11 12

On the historical difficulties of succession in Russia, see Raanan (2006). For an annotated bibliography of the voluminous literature on the economics of the transition, 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).

14

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

scholars of the region leapt at the chance to study the emerging representative institutions that Russias third revolution brought into being. This meant focusing on elite politics, the presidency, parliaments, political parties, elections, 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 political 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 politically. 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 transformations taking place in their country, I demonstrate that this is a very misleading 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 antipathetic to the Kremlin exploited weak control over financing, the absence of the rule of law, and an organizational ecology that put inherited labor organizations 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 independent 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 consolidation of democracy.
13

14

The literature on electoral politics and elected institutions is vast. For a brief sample on elections, 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). 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 political 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 pensioners 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 outside 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 appropriate 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 presidency, 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 cities 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 perspective 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 political 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

16

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

1991, Kurzman 2004). To combat this tendency, the Kremlin has introduced further political innovations in an attempt to create institutions that generate 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 unintended 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 mobilization 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 organizational 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 postCommunist 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 combines 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 protest 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 institutional 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 creating 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 comparative 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 significant changes under Putin that are likely to influence the development of independent 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

16

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. 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 protest 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, manipulate, 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, contention, 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 autocracies, and hybrids. I then discuss each of the three key variables in turn, analyzing 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 sociologists, 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 protest in democracies that Meyer and Tarrow (1998) consider contemporary liberal democracies to be movement societies in which the diffusion, institutionalization, and professionalization of protest have turned formerly controversial 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 institutionalized 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

20

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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, notwithstanding 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 consistently 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 repression 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 protest is both rare and dangerous. In the most extreme case, totalitarian regimes attempt to establish a monopoly of all public participation, often criminalizing 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).

Protest and Regimes

21

As a result, in highly repressive regimes, the most pervasive forms of protest 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 thinking about totalitarian and post-totalitarian states. In these states, the monopoly 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 campaign. See Kraus (2007).

22

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 tolerate 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 effective, 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 outside 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 egalitarian, 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

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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 institutions 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 incentives 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 protest 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 democratization. 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 democratization of Mexico, but also focuses heavily on violent insurgency (Trejo forthcoming). 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 opportunity 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 democratization in El Salvador and South Africa.

24

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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, following Tilly, we should observe peaceful protest growing as legal protections grow. If this is the case, full-blown liberal democracies would have the highest 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 corresponding 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 democratizing 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 curvilinear 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

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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 picture 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 organizations 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 availability of financing (Minkoff 1999), to the structure of discursive opportunities (Koopmans and Olzak 2004).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 constitute elements of the organizational ecology. Goldstone lists: (1) other movements and countermovements, (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.

26

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

In this book, I take a somewhat different approach to the idea of organizational 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 organization 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 characterizing 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 influence, 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 longstanding liberal democracies, there are extensive de jure and effective de facto rights to organize outside of the state, a broad array of independent organizations and groups capable of aggregating interests and mobilizing constituencies, 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, supposedly 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 creating 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 activity not sanctioned by the state. Laws requiring state registration and monitoring 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 analyzed 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.

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27

targeted at potential political opponents of the regime and often at the relationship 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 competitive 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 advantages and political connections, they can make life difficult for potential competitors. 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 existing 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.

28

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 president 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 support 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 independent 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 dockers 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 conditions, 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 9

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

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A good illustration of the environmental difficulties faced by independent organizations in hybrids is the great extinction of independent organizations 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 dedicated 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 political 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 organizations 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 important implications for protest patterns in different hybrid regimes. For example, 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 opposition 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 consider 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, organizations that are holdovers from a previous authoritarian regime, and especially holdovers that formerly had been responsible for containing mass participation, 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

30

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 subordinate 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 pensioners 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 elsewhere. 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 movements, 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 protesters. 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

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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 authoritarians 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 supporters. However, since they lack the political monopoly enjoyed by their totalitarian 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, including 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 incumbent rulers could succeed. This may encourage important players in the existing 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 turning 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.

32

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 advantage 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 contrast, 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 economies than their predecessors, which limits the extent to which the state can link participation in approved organizations with economic advantage, making it harder to mobilize supporters.10 Taken together, the absence of an organizational monopoly and more limited 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 mobilization 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 regionallevel 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 significant 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.

Protest and Regimes

33

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 government 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 democracy. 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 citizens 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 political 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.

34

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 compete 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 perception 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 usually 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

Protest and Regimes

35

public elite political competition is high. At the other end, in closed authoritarian regimes, the vast majority of politics takes place in private, and public divisions 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 mobilization (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 independent organizations, along with ersatz organizations that mix state and independent 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 contention 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 Democratic Organizational Ecology Independent organizations dominant State/ersatz organizations dominant, but independent organizations exist State-sponsored organizations monopoly State Mobilization Strategy Low levels of state mobilization Mix of state and independent mobilization State mobilizational monopoly Public Elite Competition High Contention Nature: Mostly peaceful demonstrations of WUNC Level: High Nature: Some managed and mostly peaceful. Other isolated, and confrontational Level: Varies Nature: Hidden, violent, direct action Level: Low

Hybrid

Either High or Low

Closed Authoritarian

Low

Protest and Regimes

Table 1.2. Organizational Ecology, State Mobilizing Strategies, and Elite Competition in Post-Communist Russia
Period Organizational Ecology State dominated State Mobilization Strategy Regional mobilizing Public Elite Contention Competition High

37

Russia 19972000

Nature: Large scale, elitesponsored mobilizations, isolated pockets of direct action and extreme protest Level: High in places, low in others Nature: Isolated direct actions Level: Low Nature: Large scale statesponsored rallies, frequent but repressed opposition protests Level: Moderate

Russia 20002004

State dominated

Demobilizing

Low

Russia State dominated, 20052008 but emergent opposition

Central state mobilizing

Low

20058). Across these three periods, we see considerable variation in the underlying variables that condition the nature of protest politics. Simplifying considerably, 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 demobilizing 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 public 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

38

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 correlates, 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 contention 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 demonstrated 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 politics in ways that can damage democracy, even if underlying political preferences 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 coalition 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 enlisting 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.

Protest and Regimes

39

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 experiences 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 undoubtedly 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 organizational 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 apparent openings and closings in the nature of the regime, though without necessarily 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 amounting 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, fishermen, 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 salaries 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 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 desperate over the absence of the child support payments to which the law entitled 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 uncoordinated 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 station. 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 participated 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, demonstrations, hunger strikes, and blockades that was among the largest in the postCommunist 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 protesters 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. MVD dataset.

42

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 superficially like the kind of protest we would expect in democracies, the vast majority 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 protest 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 wisdom on protest in the post-Communism space in general and in Russia in particular. 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 authoritarian 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 coordinated, sustained social movements.

Protest and Regime in Russia

43

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 representative institutions and the legalization of political protest. Consequently, many expected workers to use their new freedoms to protest their losses, leading to frequent policy reversals and crises that would jeopardize both marketization 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, official economic output fell by approximately 50 percent, and though unemployment 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 continued, 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 extraordinary 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) examined 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 individuals 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 7

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

44

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 railroad (131). Similarly, Ekiert and Kubik (1998) analyzed rebellious civil society 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 agricultural society.8 Moreover, even when it does not lead to a great social revolution, 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 hypotheses 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.

Protest and Regime in Russia

45

the author, the President of Sotsprof, one of the new alternative unions, estimated 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 systematically 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) departments 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 protest (e.g., Red Square, Trans-Siberian Railroad, etc. 164 categories), and
9 10

11

Interview with S. V. Khramov, Moscow, November 13, 2000. Crowley (1997) asks why steel workers are passive and coal miners militant, Ashwin (1999) why miners are passive. See, for example, Franzosi (1989), Gerner (1994), Mueller (1997), Rucht and Koopmans (1999), Tarrow (1989), White (1993).

46

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 different 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 significant 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 parliamentary 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 established 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 extraordinary 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.

Protest and Regime in Russia

47

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 exaggerate. 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 usually 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 surprise 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 people (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 international 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 14 15

Knowles (1952). Beissinger (1998b). Coverage of the Astrakhan events can be found at www.greenleft.org.au/back/2000/420/420p2. htm (last accessed May 26, 2009).

48
1200 MVD GKS

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

1000 Working Days Lost (1000s)

800

600

400

200

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 officially 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 particularly 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 different regions and use this analysis to draw important conclusions about the

Fe bAp 97 rJu 97 nAu 97 g O -97 ct D -97 ec Fe -97 bAp 98 rJu 98 nAu 98 gO 98 ct D -98 ec Fe -98 bAp 99 rJu 99 nAu 99 gO 99 ct D -99 ec Fe -99 bAp 00 rJu 00 nAu 00 g O -00 ct D -00 ec -0 0

Protest and Regime in Russia

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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 pattern 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 elections, 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 relatively 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, respectively), 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.

50
140

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

Days Lost to Strikes Per 1000 Employees

120

100

80

60

40

France Italy Hungary Russia Poland Russia MVD

20

0 1997 1998 Year 1999 2000

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, rising and falling, often very rapidly. Given this, the analyst must be careful to take into account the broader political context that will help establish which periods in which countries are genuinely comparable. If Figure 2.2 suggests that the conventional wisdom is misleading with regard to the extent of strikes in Russia, the MVD data I examine in the rest of this

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chapter give us even more of the story. Whatever the size of the strikes in the late 1990s, they were widespread across different sectors of the economy. Most prominent in the media among the strikers of this period were the miners, who took to blocking railroads and who occupied the Gorbaty Bridge in Moscow during the summer of 1998. However, the MVD data suggest that, in terms of numbers at least, the leading role in this wave was actually taken by budget sector 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 dimensions: 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 longstanding democracies, and they make up more than 70 percent of the repertoire 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

18

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

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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 constituted 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 remarkable 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 majority 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 protest 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 management, 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.

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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 profitable 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 possibility in the summer of 1998 (Yeltsin 2000: 205), and his assistant for economics 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 20

Interview with the author, Irkutsk, June 2000. On June 9, 1998, the MVD reports began reporting separately on the situation in the coalproducing regions of the country.

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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

Table 2.1. Repertoires of Protest in Russia, 19972000

Type of Event Symbolic Actions Demonstrations Marches Strikes Selling Illegal Newspaper total Direct Actions Hunger-strikes Railroad Blockade Highway Blockade Sit-ins/Occupations Self-immolations/Suicides Other disruptive actions total total
Source: MVD datasets.

Number of Events 1914 26 2377 32 4349 843 94 356 40 30 110 1473 5822

Percentage 32.9 0.4 40.8 0.5 74.7 14.5 1.7 6.1 0.7 0.5 1.9 25.3 100

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 suicide. There were also reports of self-maiming. Much more common, however, 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 protest events, as Table 2.1 shows. Hunger strikes were most often undertaken by relatively small groups of around ten participants, rather than by individuals, and often the numbers of participants would fluctuate as different people joined or left the strike. Though some hunger strikers took major risks to protest, 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

22 23

Interview with Ivan Rogovoi, Deputy from Bolshoi Kamen in Primorskii Krai regional assembly, Vladivostok, June 2003. Interviews with journalists, Vladivostok, June 2003. Though, of course, in such cases, the very duration of the protest without demands being met suggests the weakness of the symbolic strategy.

Protest and Regime in Russia

55

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 authorities 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 implicated (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 pressure 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 element. 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.

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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

Military 0.4% Women 3.0% Others 4.4%

Trade unions 1.1% Ethnic 3.0% Locals/environmental 8.7% Organized political groups 4.8% Pensioners 2.9%

Workers 71.7%

Figure 2.3. Participants in protest events, 19972000.

Other Transport 1% 2% Miners 25%

Agriculture <.01% Industry 14% Municipal Services 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, education accounts for a much smaller proportion of protest events than is often

Protest and Regime in Russia

Investors 3% Pensioners 10%

57

Others 10% Women 10% Military 1% Trade unions 4% Ethnic 11%

Students 3%

Organized Political Groups 17%

Local/environmental 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 multisectoral 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 context, 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 relatively 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.

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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

(Beissinger 1998a, 1998b, 2002). The majority of protests involving specific ethnic groups came, unsurprisingly, in the North Caucasus.25 More than onethird 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 different 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 leadership. 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

26

27

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. 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). 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.

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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 organizing 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 economic 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, political 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 oriented 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 paying 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

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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 processes 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 perpetrators 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 interested 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 studied 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 existing 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 campaign 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

Protest and Regime in Russia

Election irregularities 1% Personnel changes 5% Criminal justice 2% Ethnic politics 1% Ownership 1% Commercial/market 3% Wages/work conditions 1% Social spending/material distribution 6% Law: security <1% National festival <1% Historical commemoration <1% Foreign affairs 3% Nationalist demands <1% Environmental/NIMBY 1% Other <1%

61

Law: material 74%

Figure 2.6. Categories of demands made at protest events in the Russian Federation, 19972000.

Nationalist demands 1% Foreign affairs 12% Historical commemoration 2% National festival 1% Election irregularities 5%

Environmental/ NIMBY 5%

Other Law: security 2% 1%

Social spending/material distribution 23%

Wages/work conditions 4%

Commercial/market 12% Personnel changes 18% Criminal justice Ethnic politics 5% 6% Ownership 4%

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,

62

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

Undefined 3% National 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 resignation 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.

Protest and Regime in Russia

Undefined 10% Local 44%

63

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 simultaneously 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 different 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 invalids. The mobilization success of the Chernobyltsy resulted directly from their small numbers (most actions involved 30 or so protesters, with the largest being the 200strong 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

64
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

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

Figure 2.10. Number of demonstrators in the Russian Federation, 19972000.

For the millions protesting against the non-payment of wages, these conditions 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 pattern 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. Myre 1998; Will the President Hear the Voice of the People? 1998; and Barrie 1998.

29

Ja nM 97 ar M 97 ay Ju -97 lSe 97 pN 97 ov Ja -97 nM 98 ar M 98 ay Ju -98 lSe 98 pN 98 ov Ja -98 nM 99 ar M 99 ay Ju -99 lSe 99 pN 99 ov Ja -99 nM 00 ar M 00 ay Ju -00 lSe 00 pN 00 ov -0 0

Protest and Regime in Russia

65

between 1997 and 2000 added up to something that could really be called a social movement. Social movement scholars reserve [the term social movement] for those sequences of contentious politics that are based on underlying 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 displays 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 collectivities involved were local and based on a sense of identity embedded in the particular workplace or local community. Communities participating in protest 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 difficult 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 coordinating 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 meaning 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 authorities often encouraged and supported strikes in the hope of attracting subventions from central authorities. This phenomenon is reflected in the regional

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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 generally 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 movement 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 authoritarian regime. Moreover, these strikes, demonstrations, and marches are different 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. Viktor Pelevin, Buddhas Little Finger

In the preceding chapter, I showed that conventional wisdom portraying Russians as patient and long-suffering in the face of the hardships of economic transition is very misleading. Instead, people all across Russia responded to hardship with strikes, hunger strikes, marches, demonstrations, and road and rail blockades. Nevertheless, despite intense protest activity at certain times and places, many did remain passive and there was no major national protest movement. In part, as we have seen, this was the result of protest demands that tended to be framed in economic and local terms, giving them a zero-sum character; satisfying one 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 during 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 organizations 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 governors 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

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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 methodological 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 taxation. 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 interest 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 inextricably 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 central theoretical variable in the argument, the ecology of organizations. The relevant 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 remarkable geographical variation in strikes that this chapter will explain. I then analyze 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 looking 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 understanding 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 postCommunist 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 thousand 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 distribution 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). 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.

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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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. 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). Astrakhanskaia (1 070), Komi-Permiatskii A.O. (1 083), Saratovskaia (2 008), Taimyrskii A.O. (2 101), Leningradskaia (3 711), Sankt-Peterburg (4 470), Bashkortostan (4 737), Evenkiskii A.O. (4 987), Krasnodarskii Krai (5 200), Moskovskaia (9 207). Yamalo-Nenetskii A.O. (10132), Tverskaia (10 688), 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). Novosibirskaia (103 703), Udmurtiia (105 896), 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). 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).

Less than 1000 days (10)

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

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

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

More than 500 000 days (7)

Source: MVD Dataset.

The Geography of Strikes

Working Days Lost to Strikes By Region 1997-2000

71

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 survey data, Javeline (2003) finds that, whereas workers in Russia in this period generally had great difficulty in allocating blame for their problems, those

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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 clarity 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 longstanding democracies, where the vast majority of research in social movements 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 specifically as political vehicles for state-sponsored projects. Here I consider a different 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

The Geography of Strikes

73

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 workers 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 competing 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 important branches, such as dockers and air-traffic controllers, were also able to create 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 representatives of industrial interests. As a result, the Social Democratic party soon disappeared 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.

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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 supposed 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 holdings 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 agreements at the Federal, branch, regional, and enterprise levels.6
4 5

The property rights of the unions were confirmed in the Law on Trade Unions 1996. The most important are Presidential decree number 162 of October 26, 1991, On the provision 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. 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.

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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 AllUnion Central Council of Trade Unions (VTsSPS) sitting at the top of a bureaucratic 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 representatives 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) eightynine regions by 2000.10 Agreements varied from region to region, but in general 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 concerned with the formulation and implementation of agreements than with the
7

10

See in particular, Cook 1997: Chapter 3; Ashwin and Clarke 2003: 13248; Christensen 1999: 1225. 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). 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.). Authors interview with officials at the Ministry of Labor in Moscow, November 2000. See also Ashwin and Clarke (2003: 152).

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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 administration 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 regionallevel 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 organizations 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

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organizations of the FNPR (Ashwin and Clarke 2003: 90). While much of the value of these properties was lost through a mixture of incompetence, corruption, 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 commercial 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 administration 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 representation 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 extension of the regional administrative apparatus. In these cases, administrationunions 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 authority 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, including 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 conditions. 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

13

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. Authors interview with T. B. Vadileva, Primorskii Krai Administration, Vladivostok, June 2003.

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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 workers 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 independent 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 considerable distance to the railroad, and ensured that the police did not act to prevent the illegal blockade. Instead, police provided security for protestors.
14

15

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 troublesome 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 overcome substantial obstacles to collective action as they face the combined weight and coercive potential of employers, the state, and often of organized crime. Authors interviews with journalists in Vladivostok, JuneJuly 2003. Such events are also referred to by Ashwin 1999 and others.

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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 widespread. 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 official 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 governors, 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 potential bargaining strategies available to governors in a state divided into different regions that lobby the capital for money and other resources. Broadly, governors 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 disbursing monies that are transferred from the center. By contrast, noisy strategies 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 generated. 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 17 18

Interviews in Vladivostok, June 2003. Interviews in Vladivostok, June 2003. These are analogous to loyalty and voice in Hirschman (1970). There is no obvious corollary for exit by governors.

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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 interregional 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 deprivation is worse, official efforts to prevent protest are less likely to be successful. 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 challenge 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, private employers in small enterprises and new post-Communist start-ups are not

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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 employers and the state is often hard to make in practice. In strikes involving teachers 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 semimarketized 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 bargaining 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 particularly 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 patrimonial 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 getting 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 political 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 distinctive political party labels are absent. Moreover, political relations cannot simply be reduced to measures of policy because bitter political opponents might very often pursue the same policies. Instead we need a measure that combines

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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 according 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 players. 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 follows: 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 provides 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 information 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 contextual information and in that it uses a decision rule that has limited theoretical leverage and is hard to apply in the Russian context.

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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 measured 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 center 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 strategy. 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.

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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 ethnic 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 carried out by economists rather than political scientists or sociologists. In part, this is because for economists strikes actually represent a deep logical puzzle: 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 without 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 transfers (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).

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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 enormous 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, notably 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 constructing 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 workers 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

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Table 3.2. Summary of Hypotheses and Measures

Hypothesis In regions with little bargaining power, strike activity will be a function of governors relations with Moscow Status as a Republic will decrease strike activity Capital cities will have less strike activity Economically important regions have fewer strikes More populous regions will have less strike activity Regions with politically dominant governors will have more strike activity, especially in an election period Ethnically polarized regions will have lower levels of strike activity Strike activity will be higher in regions with higher levels of urbanization Regions with significant independent union activity will have higher strike activity Strike activity will be higher in regions where labor markets are tightening Strike activity will be higher when revenues are more variable Strike activity will be higher in regions with higher levels of wage arrears Strike activity will be higher in regions where loss-making enterprises are a higher proportion of enterprises Strike activity will be higher when total funds are available for transfers are lower Measure MKF Renaissance Capital Index of Relations With Moscow

Republic status dummy Moscow and St.Petersburg dummy Goskomstat Industrial Output Data Goskomstat Population Data Margin of victory in first round of gubernatorial elections. 2 months before election and election month MFK Renaissance Capital index of potential for ethnic conflict Goskomstat data on regional urbanization levels Dummy variable for significant presence of alternative union confederation Sotsprof Monthly change in unemployment using Goskomstat data 3 and 5 month coefficient of variation in world oil price Goskomstat monthly data on wage arrears Goskomstat monthly data on proportion of loss-making enterprises World oil prices: average petroleum spot index of U.K. Brent, Dubai and West 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 spontaneous 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

The Geography of Strikes

87

not just of industry but of labor processes and their effects on group solidarity that matter. Looking at the postWorld War II U.S. auto industry, a context 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 dominant 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 percent 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 disappointed 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 reasons. 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 connections, 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 cannot take place elsewhere. Consequently, including miners strikes would artificially 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

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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 dependent variable. First, strikes in reality occur continuously rather than in separate observations. Consequently, strike counts in a given month are directly affected by continuing strikes from the previous month. Second, due to eventlevel 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 organized in terms of the broad theoretical perspectives outlined above: elite competition, hardship, independent organization, business cycles, and information. To recap, the elite competition theory has two main elements: political relations 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

22

23

An alternative is to use the ARPOIS routine in STATA that estimates a log-linear autoregressive 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. 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). 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 Governor Relations with Center Republic Status Capitals Industrial Output Population (100 000s) Margin Margin*Election Period Ethnic Peace Urbanization Independent Union Activity Change in Unemployment Variation in Oil Prices Wage Arrears Lossmaking Enterprises World Oil Price Chernomyrdin Primakov Stepashin Putin Kasianov Lagged Working Days Lost (1000s) 2 Month Lagged Working Days Lost (1000s) Summer Constant Observations Number of groups Loglikelihood .010** (.002) .301* (.151) 1.462* (.689) .050** (.018) .156* (.067) .002 (.002) .007 (.004) .035** (.009) .028** (.006) .007 (.120) .022 (.038) 3.54** (1.113) .661** (.088) .017** (.006) .002 (.004) .192 (.212) .670** (.194) .668* (.271) .374 (.318) 1.493** (.420) .020** (.002) .013** (.002) .405** (.136) 9.221** (1.124) 2093 59 6562** Percentage Change 20** 35* 77* 22** 20* 4 9 63** 40** 1 2 12** 67** 22** 6 21 95** 49* 32 78** 22** 14** 33** (2) Strong Regions .011* (.004) .391 (.264) 3.687** (.691) .015 (.017) .048 (.064) .001 (.004) .000 (.007) .020 (.010) .071** (.010) .092 (.251) .001 (.041) 1.925 (1.546) .192* (.076) .013 (.009) .008 (.005) .278 (.291) .366 (.262) 1.141** (.369) 1.433** (.446) 2.943** (.598) .019** (.002) .009** (.003) .392 (.193) 11.867** (1.300) 972 31 3140** Percentage Change (Strong) 22* 22 55** 8 8 2 0 45 192** 9 0 7 21* 17 36 24 44 68** 76** 95** 23** 10** 32 (3) Weak Regions .020** (.003) .815** (.061) .553** (.165) .005 (.003) .006 (.006) .045 (.024) .010 (.010) .400* (.168) .065 (.078) 6.195** (1.596) .948** (.244) .027** (.009) .003 (.005) .639* (.319) 1.101** (.297) .213 (.399) .103 (.441) 1.045 (.563) .018** (.003) .012** (.003) .443* (.194) .527 (2.652) 1199 35 3626** Percentage Change (Weak) 38** 20** 36** 15 7 17 8 49* 5 20** 43** 36** 10 90* 201** 19 10 65 18** 11** 36*

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

The Geography of Strikes

91

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 improvement 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 independent 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 consideration. 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 status and regions with industrial output above the mean for the year are considered strong. All remaining regions were included in the weak group. The results are impressive. Model 3 shows a clear, significant, and substantively important negative relationship between gubernatorial political relations with Moscow and the level of strikes in weak regions. Moreover, the substantive 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 political relations in strong regions appears, if anything, to be in the opposite direction 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

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the mean).24 More broadly, variation in strike levels within regions that have high bargaining power seems less well explained by the model than variation 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 important 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 different 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 differently. 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 bargaining 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 suggests 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 25

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

The Geography of Strikes

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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 bargaining theory and is striking, given that we are using a measure of working days lost that is not normalized by population. By contrast, increasing industrial 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 combination 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 lossmaking 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 grievances. 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 supported. 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 preliminary 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 periods 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.

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The results show that the peak of strike intensity came under Primakov, higher than under either Kirienko or Chernomyrdin. This period was immediately after the collapse of the ruble, and was the period of greatest weakness 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 vigorous 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 government 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 democracies. Theories based on business cycles, independent organization, and information 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 sensitive regions such as major cities and more populous regions tend to have lower levels of strikes, other things being equal. There is also considerable support 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

The Geography of Strikes

Table 3.4. Determinants of Non-Strike Protest Events (conditional negative binomial regression with fixed effects)
(1) Days of Hunger Strikes Governor Relations with Center Republic Status Capitals Industrial Output Population (100 000s) Margin Margin*Election Period Ethnic Peace Urbanization Independent Union Activity Change in Unemployment Variation in Oil Prices Wage Arrears Loss-making Enterprises World Oil Price Chernomyrdin Primakov Stepashin Putin Kasianov Lagged Event 0.006** (0.003) 0.330 (0.219) 1.175 (1.153) 0.020 (0.026) 0.087 (0.117) 0.013*** (0.003) 0.009* (0.005) 0.045*** (0.014) 0.007 (0.010) 0.070 (0.181) 0.058 (0.055) 1.972 (1.552) 0.352*** (0.125) 0.033*** (0.008) 0.009* (0.005) 0.248 (0.242) 0.529** (0.210) 1.201*** (0.324) 1.154*** (0.416) 1.570*** (0.562) 0.473*** (0.125) (2) Number of Hunger Strikes 0.010 (0.029) 0.178 (1.546) 0.009 (0.028) 0.313 (0.314) 0.015 (0.015) 0.005 (0.005) 0.112 (0.109) 0.138 (0.105) 0.819 (1.589) 0.007 (0.058) 0.587 (1.651) 0.113 (0.218) 0.015 (0.013) 0.008 (0.006) 0.095 (0.284) 0.266 (0.225) 0.417 (0.368) 0.412 (0.508) 1.069 (0.844) 0.121*** (0.034)

95

(3) Number of Other Events 0.011 (0.011) 0.659 (1.543) 2.203* (1.299) 0.015 (0.014) 0.292 (0.198) 0.002 (0.009) 0.007* (0.004) 0.021 (0.045) 0.008 (0.027) 0.946** (0.439) 0.030 (0.028) 1.919* (1.141) 0.116 (0.172) 0.002 (0.010) 0.009** (0.004) 0.828*** (0.201) 0.680*** (0.165) 0.793*** (0.247) 1.776*** (0.355) 1.596*** (0.465) 0.067*** (0.016) (continued)

96 Table 3.4. (continued)

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

(1) Days of Hunger Strikes 2 Month Lagged Event Summer Constant Observations Number of groups Log-likelihood 0.328 (0.201) 0.474** (0.184) 9.285*** (1.694) 1726 48 2412.193

(2) Number of Hunger Strikes 0.021 (0.040) 0.146 (0.194) 1.200 (6.208) 527 37 507.794

(3) Number of Other Events 0.005 (0.020) 0.070 (0.133) 2.497 (3.961) 657 53 807.946

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 organizations 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 measures of hunger strikes: an intensity measure that looks at the number of hunger 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 different from the strike patterns. Measures of wage arrears and loss-making enterprises 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 hunger 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

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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 application 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 movement organizations enjoy relative autonomy from the state, can be misleading once we move outside of liberal democracies. Instead, as we have seen, developing 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, matter, 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 factories and enterprises.27 Regional labor unions have tended to be incorporated
26

27

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

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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 cooperated 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 institutions 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 prospects 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 demonstrates 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 competitiveness, 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 different effects when the organizational environment is different. In terms of broader applicability, the patterns of protest mobilization I analyze 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 authoritarian 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 understand 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.

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survivor organizations are insulated from competition (or the threat of competition), they are more likely to retain existing relationships rather than seek new constituencies. Where existing relationships are with powerful state officials, 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 relationship 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 parties 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 pressure 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 progress. 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. Viktor Pelevin, Buddhas Little Finger

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 protest 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
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passivity at another? In Chapter 3, I analyzed the role of hierarchical organizations and elite politics in explaining why some regions and not others experienced 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 demonetization 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 dynamics 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 associated 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 protesters, 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, immediately 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.

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900,000 800,000 700,000 600,000 500,000 400,000 300,000 200,000 100,000 0

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 following 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 similar, 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. 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 different schools is one strike or many. However, the correlation between the data on working days lost and numbers of strikes is .95.

n98 Ap r-9 8 Ju l-9 8 D ec -9 8 Ja n99 Ap r-9 9 Ju l-9 9 D ec -9 9 Ja n00 Ap r-0 0 Ju l-0 0 D ec -0 0

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l-9 Ju

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9,000 8,000 7,000 6,000 5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000 1,000 0
nAp 97 r-9 Ju 7 l-9 O 7 ct -9 Ja 7 n9 Ap 8 r-9 Ju 8 l-9 O 8 ct -9 Ja 8 n9 Ap 9 r-9 Ju 9 l-9 O 9 ct -9 Ja 9 n0 Ap 0 r-0 Ju 0 l-0 O 0 ct -0 0 Ja

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Strikes/100 Hunger Strikes

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 dramatically 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 mobilization 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 context, 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,

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250 Others strikes hunger 200

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Number of Events

150

100

50

0
Ja n M -97 ar M -97 ay Ju -97 Se l-97 p N -97 ov Ja -97 n M -98 ar M -98 ay Ju -98 Se l-98 p N -98 ov Ja -98 n M -99 ar M -99 ay Ju -99 Se l-99 p N -99 ov Ja -99 n M -00 ar M -00 ay Ju -00 Se l-00 p N -00 ov -0 0

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 complex 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 temporarily forced President Yeltsin to appoint a government that had the support of the opposition Communists. As I show, the turnover in control of the government led to a change in the political personality of protesting regions. On the one hand, regions that were close to the left and Primakov, and which had

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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 industry, 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 insolvent at prevailing ruble prices. However, mass insolvency did not lead to widespread plant closures or mass redundancies. Instead, the insolvency was so comprehensive that no one had an interest in enforcing bankruptcies and closing 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

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). This figure included all non-cash deals between companies including barter in the strictest sense.

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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 relations 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 surrogate 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

A Time for Trouble

120 Wage Arrears (Billions) Working Days Lost (10000s) 100

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Ja n M -97 ar M -97 ay Ju -97 Se l-97 p N -97 ov Ja -97 n M -98 ar M -98 ay Ju -98 Se l-98 p N -98 ov Ja -98 n M -99 ar M -99 ay Ju -99 Se l-99 p N -99 ov Ja -99 n M -00 ar M -00 ay Ju -00 Se l-00 p N -00 ov -0 0

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 position 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

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Asian financial crisis of the fall of 1997 that undermined investor confidence in emerging markets worldwide, Russias thin stock market fell rapidly, losing 60 percent of its value between October 1997 and July 1998 (Shevtsova 1999: 247). To deal with the budgetary crisis, the government became increasingly dependent upon the sale of various short-term financing instruments, most famously short-term treasury bills known as GKOs (gosudarstvennie kaznacheiskie obligatsii), 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 anomalies. 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.

A Time for Trouble Center-Periphery Conflict Over Rules and Resources

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If the economic crisis was problem number one facing Russia in Yeltsins second 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 scientists, 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 institutionalized 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 provisions, 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 competence 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 constitutional 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 signing 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).

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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 network of decrees, laws, and separate often secret political agreements to provide 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 weakened by changes in the procedures for appointing regional governors. Initially, regional governors had been appointed by Yeltsin himself. However, by the summer 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 considerably 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). Constitutional Watch: Russia, East European Constitutional Review, 1998.

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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 pressure 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 economic 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 essential 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 11

Authors interviews, Vladivostok, June 2003. Vologda Oblast, Krasnodarsky Krai, Belgorod Oblast, Kursk Oblast, and Marii El Republic. Constitutional Watch: Russia, East European Constitutional Review, 1998.

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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 presidium of the government, inviting eight key regional leaders to participate.13 This made for the unprecedented situation in which a select group of governors were simultaneously sitting in three different branches of government: the regional executive, the Federal executive, and the Federal legislature. In addition, regional governors exercised control over treasury, tax, and even Central Bank officials in their regions, and over state property and many large enterprises. 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 popular 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 repeatedly 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 13

Vladivostok News, September 9, 1998. 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

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Consequently, the appointment of Primakov signaled to the regions a temporary (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 government. 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 experiencing it. The independent variables are those that were found to matter consistently 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/cgiwin/Russland/krono.exe?2767 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. Measures of size that were significant (industrial output and population) are excluded since the dependent variable is normalized by population.

14

15

114

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

Table 4.1. Protest Mobilization in Russian Regions: Strikes

Protest Mobilization Over Wage Non-Payment In Russian Regions Regions in Neither Strike Wave Adygeia, Aginskii-Buriatskii A.O., Astrakhanskaia, Bashkortostan, Belgorodskaia, Dagestan, Evenkiskii A.O., Evreiskii A.O., Ingushetiia, KabardinoBalkariia, Kaliningradskaia, Kalmykiia, Kaluzhskaia, Karachaevo-Cherkessiia, Khanty-Mansiiskii A.O., Komi-Permiatskii A.O., Koriakskii A.O., Krasnodarskii Krai, Kurskaia, Leningradskaia, Lipetskaia, Mordovia, Moskovskaia, Moskva, Nenetskii A.O., Nizhegorodskaia, Novgorodskaia, Omskaia, Orlovskaia, Penzenskaia, Riazanskaia, Samarskaia, Sankt-Peterburg, Saratovskaia, Severnaia Osetiia-Alaniia, Stavropolskii Krai, Taimyrskii A.O., Tambovskaia, Tatarstan, Tverskaia, Tiumenskaia, Tyva, Ust-Ordynskii Buriatskii A.O.,Vladimirskaia, Voronezhskaia,YamaloNenetskii A.O., Yaroslavskaia total: 47 Regions in 1997 Strike Wave Only Amurskaia, Chuvashiia, Kamchatskaia, Murmanskaia, Permskaia, Volgogradskaia Regions in Both Strike Waves Altaiskii Krai, Brianskaia, Buriatiia, Cheliabinskaia, Chitinskaia, Chukotskii A.O., Irkutskaia, Kareliia, Kemerovskaia, Khabarovskii Krai, Khakasiia, Kirovskaia, Komi, Kostromskaia, Krasnoiarskii Krai, Kurganskaia, Magadanskaia, Orenburgskaia, Primorskii Krai, Sakha, Sakhalinskaia, Smolenskaia, Sverdlovskaia, Tulskaia, Vologodskaia

total: 25 Regions in 199899 Strike Wave Only Altaiskaia Respublika, Arkhangelskaia, Ivanovskaia, Marii-El, Novosibirskaia, Pskovskaia, Rostovskaia, Tomskaia, Udmurtiia, Ulianovskaia Total: 10

Total: 6

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 several 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.

A Time for Trouble

Table 4.2. Determinants of Participation in First Protest Wave (1997) Logistic Regression
Relations with Kremlin Change in Arrears Urbanization Constant Observations Wald Chi2 Pseudo R2 0.02* (0.01) 15.04** (6.24) .06** (.03) 3.94** (1.74) 78 11.38*** 0.28

115

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 thirty-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

18

19

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 allegiances of governors in the run-up to the Duma election of 1999. Regional governors declaring 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 unaffiliated 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. 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. The regions were: Altaiskaia Respublika (SPS), Arkhangelskaia (Unity), Ivanovskaia (Unity), Marii-El (SPS), Novosibirskaia (Fatherland), Pskovskaia (Zhirinovsky), Rostovskaia (Unity),

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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 Arkhangelskaia Rostovskaia Ivanovskaia Tomskaia Marii-El Udmurtiia Novosibirskaia Ul'ianovskaia

Altaiskaia Respublika Pskovskaia

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 sudden 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 mobilization 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 levels of urbanization are no longer important determinants of participation in the second wave. Instead, politics matters. Model 1 shows pro-Kremlin governors 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.

0.01

0.02

0.03

0.04

0.05

0.06

0.07

A Time for Trouble

0.02

0.04

0.06

0.08

0.12

0 0.1 0

figure 4.6. (Continued)

Primakov Appointed Primakov Appointed Strikes and Arrears in Arkhangelskaia Strikes and Arrears in The Altaiskaia Republic
Ja n M -97 ar M -97 ay Ju -97 Se l-97 p N -97 ov Ja -97 n M -98 ar M -98 ay Ju -98 Se l-98 p N -98 ov Ja -98 n M -99 ar M -99 ay Ju -99 Se l-99 p N -99 ov Ja -99 n M -00 ar M -00 ay Ju -00 Se l-00 p N -00 ov -0 0

Ja n M -97 a M r- 97 ay Ju -97 Se l-97 p N -97 ov Ja -97 n M -98 a M r-98 ay Ju -98 Se l-98 p N -98 ov Ja -98 n M -99 ar M - 99 ay J u -99 Se l-99 p N -99 ov Ja -99 n M -00 a M r- 00 ay Ju -00 Se l-00 p N -00 ov -0 0
Wage Arrears Per Capita Working Days Lost to Strikes Per Capita Wage Arrears Per Capita Working Days Lost Per Capita

117

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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

Strikes and Arrears in Marii-El

0.03 Primakov Appointed 0.025

Working Days Lost Per Capita Wage Arrears Per Capita

0.02

0.015

0.01

0.005

0
Ja n M -97 ar M -97 ay Ju -97 Se l-97 p N -97 ov Ja -97 n M -98 ar M -98 ay Ju -98 Se l-98 p N -98 ov Ja -98 n M -99 ar M -99 ay Ju -99 Se l-99 p N -99 ov Ja -99 n M -00 ar M -00 ay Ju -00 Se l-00 p N -00 ov -0 0

Strikes and Arrears in Ivanovoskaia 0.018 Primakov Appointed 0.016 0.014 0.012 0.01 0.008 0.006 0.004 0.002 0
Ja n M -97 ar M -97 ay Ju -97 l Se -97 pN 97 ov Ja -97 n M -98 ar M -98 ay Ju -98 l Se -98 pN 98 ov Ja -98 n M -99 ar M -99 ay Ju -99 l Se -99 p N -99 ov Ja -99 n M -00 ar M -00 ay Ju -00 l Se -00 pN 00 ov -0 0

Working Days Lost Per Capita Arrears Per Capita

Figure 4.6 (Continued)

0.002

0.004

0.006

0.008

0.012

0.014

0.016

0.018

0.005 0.01 0.02 0.02 0

0.015

0.025

0.01

A Time for Trouble

Figure 4.6 (Continued)

Primakov Appointed Primakov Appointed Strikes and Arrears in Pskovskaia Strikes and Arrears in Novosibirskaia
Ja n M -97 ar M -97 ay Ju -97 Se l-97 p N -97 ov Ja -97 n M -98 ar M -98 ay Ju -98 Se l-98 p N -98 ov Ja -98 n M -99 ar M -99 ay Ju -99 Se l-99 p N -99 ov Ja -99 n M -00 ar M -00 ay Ju -00 Se l-00 p N -00 ov -0 0

Ja n M -97 ar M -97 ay Ju -97 Se l-97 p N -97 ov Ja -97 n M -98 ar M -98 ay Ju -98 Se l-98 p N -98 ov Ja -98 n M -99 ar M -99 ay Ju -99 Se l-99 p N -99 ov Ja -99 n M -00 ar M -00 ay Ju -00 Se l-00 p N -00 ov -0 0

Working Days Lost Per Capita

Working Days Lost Per Capita

Wage Arrears Per Capita

Wage Arrears Per Capita

119

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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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
Ja n M -97 ar M -97 ay Ju -97 Se l-97 p N -97 ov Ja -97 n M -98 ar M -98 ay Ju -98 Se l-98 p N -98 ov Ja -98 n M -99 ar M -99 ay Ju -99 Se l-99 p N -99 ov Ja -99 n M -00 ar M -00 ay Ju -00 Se l-00 p N -00 ov -0 0

Strikes and Arrears in Tomskaia 0.02 Primakov Appointed 0.018 0.016 0.014 0.012 0.01 0.008 0.006 0.004 0.002 0
Ja n M -97 ar M -97 ay Ju -97 l Se -97 pN 97 ov Ja -97 n M -98 ar M -98 ay Ju -98 l Se -98 pN 98 ov Ja -98 n M -99 ar M -99 ay Ju -99 l Se -99 pN 99 ov Ja -99 n M -00 ar M -00 ay Ju -00 l Se -00 p N -00 ov -0 0

Working Days Lost Per Capita Wage Arrears Per Capita

figure 4.6. (Continued)

A Time for Trouble

Strikes and Arrears in Udmurtiia 0.025 Primakov Appointed Working Days Lost Per Capita Wage Arrears Per Capita 0.015

121

0.02

0.01

0.005

0
Ja n M -97 ar M -97 ay Ju -97 l Se -97 pN 97 ov Ja -97 n M -98 ar M -98 ay Ju -98 l Se -98 pN 98 ov Ja -98 n M -99 ar M -99 ay Ju -99 l Se -99 p N -99 ov Ja -99 n M -00 ar M -00 ay Ju -00 l Se -00 pN 00 ov -0 0

Strikes and Arrears in Ul'ianovskaia 0.014 Primakov Appointed 0.012 Working Days Lost Per Capita Wage Arrears Per Capita 0.01

0.008

0.006

0.004

0.002

0
n M -97 ar M -97 ay Ju -97 l Se -97 p N -97 ov Ja -97 n M -98 ar M -98 ay Ju -98 l Se -98 pN 98 ov Ja -98 n M -99 ar M -99 ay Ju -99 l Se -99 pN 99 ov Ja -99 n M -00 ar M -00 ay Ju -00 l Se -00 p N -00 ov -0 0 Ja

Figure 4.6. Strikes and wage arrears in 19981999 wave.

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Table 4.3. Determinants of Participation in Second Protest Wave (19981999) Logistic Regression
Model 1 Wave 1 Kremlin OVR KPRF Unaffiliated Change in arrears Urbanization Constant Obs. Wald Chi-square Pseudo R2 2.92*** (0.67) 1.15* (0.61) 2.31 (4.75) .003 (0.02) 2.02 (1.95) 78 20.70*** 0.32 Model 2 3.12*** (0.71) 1.54* (0.93) 2.21** (0.91) 1.34** (0.61) 1.98 (4.65) -0.01 (0.03) (0.47) (2.13) 76 21.60*** 0.34

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

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 FatherlandAll 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 illustrate 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 multiregional 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 political 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.

A Time for Trouble Conclusion

123

In this chapter, I have examined the underlying political and economic conditions 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 support 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 strategies 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 contention, 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. Viktor Pelevin, Generation P.

By the summer of 1999, the Russian elite was deeply divided and in political disarray. President Boris Yeltsin had one year left on his second term in office and no clear successor had yet emerged. In April of that year, then-prime minister 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 responsible 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 formation 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 thenKremlin-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. 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

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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 political 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 institutionalized political parties meant that the elections effectively provided two separate contests; one in which Moscow-based presidential candidates fought a pseudoprimary 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 empirically, 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 provide 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.

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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 demonstrates that students of protest need to pay more attention to the effect of specific institutions on the incentives for protest. Whereas the study of institutions 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 alternative 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 uncertainty 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 section, 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 protest 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.

Elections and the Decline of Protest

127

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 (condition [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 effectively 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 unpopular 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 politics 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.

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60

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

50

Marches, Rallies etc. Hunger Strikes

Number of Events

40

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 number 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 particular, 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 important in limiting levels of contention later in the Putin era, in the fall of 1999, they were still in the future. It is clear from Figures 5.1 and 5.2 that the major decline in protest came not after the consolidation of power by the new Putin regime in 2000 and 2001, but rather before, between the summer and fall of 1999, at the apparent height of the succession struggle.

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250,000

129

200,000

150,000

100,000

50,000

0
00 99 9 00 99 00 9 0 0 -9 r-0 -9 gbnng-0 ec Ap Au Au Fe Ju Ju O O D D ec ct ct -0 0

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 protest was transformed into other forms of political participation. Russian elections 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 voting 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 significant 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

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

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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 elections 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 individuals relate to the collective, why they participate, and why they stop participating (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 declining (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 networks have different implications for the path of development of the movement. 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 opportunities), radicalization of a small group (changes in framing), and institutionalization 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 mobilizing 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. Oberschall (1973) also stresses the multivariate and complex nature of movement decline.

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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 explanation 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 motivations, 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 formal 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 protest 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 institutions such as whether cities were run by elected mayors or appointed managers 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.

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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 identifies 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 demonstrate 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 signaled his ability to cajole or coerce governors into supporting him, and demonstrated 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 representation (PR) election took place alongside 224 single-member district (SMD) elections, 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.

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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 political 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 position 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 anticorruption 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 bandwagoning with him was a much more prudent strategy than organizing against him. Consequently, on September 21, the Kremlin was able to announce the creation 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

10

11

The politics of Putins rise are well covered in many accounts and are treated only briefly here. See, for example, Shevtsova (2003). 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). 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.

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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 promises 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 culmination 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 opponents 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 telling 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.

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Table 5.1. Effect of Putins Popularity on Protest Events (Conditional Negative Binomial Regression with Fixed Effects)
(1) Working Days Lost to Strikes Putins Popularity Wage Arrears Change in Wage Arrears Change in Industrial Output Change in Unemployment Urbanization Population (100 000s) Lagged Event Constant Observations Number of groups Log-likelihood .016** (.007) .526** (.243) .358 (1.317) .074** (.035) .159 (.187) .039** (.019) .313** (.158) .024 (.008)*** 4.741*** (1.329) 153 31 613.863*** Non-Strike Protest Events .015*** (.006) .147 (.499) 1.997 (1.667) .001 (.026) .243 (.158) .004 (.034) .111 (.210) .044 (.030) .649 (2.234) 238 50 211.140*

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 administration, 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 capita 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.

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month. Levels are intended to capture the degree of hardship being experienced, 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 modelled 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 figure, 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 substantively important. Consequently, taken together, these models provide further evidence both of the importance of organizational ecology in trying to understand 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 preceded 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 technique to use in this case.

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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 bargaining 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 understanding 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 campaign in the proportional representation seats. By contrast, they enjoyed enormous 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 politics 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

16

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). 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).

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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 evidence 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 competitions, 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 elections. 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 eighteen 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).

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By contrast, the SMD elections were very local in terms of the nomination of candidates. In all, 1,134 independents ran in the 224 districts, making 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 ballots. 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 majority 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 representation 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 overwhelming 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 19

Sergei Popov, Unitys Deputy Campaign Manager, cited by Colton and McFaul 2003: 56. 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).

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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 others 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 governor 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 AllRussia 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).

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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 political 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 separation 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 ballot 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 several 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 protest 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

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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 election, then we would expect the political similarity effect in the regions to diminish. 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 influence, 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 diffusion 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 importantly for current purposes, there is strong evidence of diffusion across different 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.

Elections and the Decline of Protest

Table 5.2. Weekly Event Diffusion, January 1997June 1999 (Conditional Negative Binomial Regression with Fixed Effects)
(1) Working Days Lost to Strikes Other Regions t-1 Wage Arrears Change in Wage Arrears Change in Industrial Output Change in Unemployment Urbanization Population (100 000s) Lagged Event Constant Observations Number of groups Log-likelihood .003*** (.0002) .611*** (.027) 2.450*** (.925) .013 (.027) .369*** (.079) .026*** (.003) .216*** (.022) .0000638*** (.000001) 5.609*** (.180) 7265 62 21940*** (2) Days of Hunger Strikes .189*** (.049) .585*** (.041) 7.976*** (1.448) .035 (.045) .083 (.115) .017*** (.004) .239*** (.041) .002*** (.0001) 4.995*** (.313) 6081 52 7547***

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(3) Other Protest Events .010*** (.002) .208*** (.027) 3.351** (1.365) .033 (.029) .012 (.075) .011*** (.003) .122*** (.019) .0004*** (.00001) 5.529*** (.186) 9026 77 15879

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

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.

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Table 5.3. Weekly Event Diffusion in July-December 1999: Geography and Politics (Conditional Negative Binomial Regression with Fixed Effects)
(1) Working Days Lost to Strikes Other Regions t-1 Wage Arrears Change in Wage Arrears Change in Industrial Output Change in Unemployment Urbanization Population (100 000s) Lagged Event Constant Observations Number of groups Log-likelihood .003 (.005) .347*** (.121) 3.054 (2.922) .118** (.060) .743** (.296) .033*** (.011) .336*** (.078) .0002*** (.00001) 5.285*** (.807) 781 32 2464*** (2) Days of Hunger Strikes .507 (.6859) .399 (.314) 17.328 (11.709) .270 (.181) .469 (.647) .007 (.021) .074 (.184) .005*** (.001) 4.187 (1.477) 413 17 313*** (3) Other Protest Events .000001 (.00003) .096 (.212) 10.829 (15.457) .220** (.097) .757** (.382) .020*** (.010) .352*** (.067) .0004*** (.00005) 3.133*** (.631) 1064 44 1226

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

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 qualitative 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.

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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 succession crisis in the fall of 1999 to lead to high levels of contention and mobilization 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 uncertainty 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 struggled 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 increasing, 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 contingent 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 serious implications for patterns of protest.

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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 manipulate 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 strategies 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 democracy as was so widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The two words are merely homonyms. The old word democracy was derived from the Greek demos, while the new word is derived from the expression demo-version. Viktor Pelevin, Generation P.

If few people outside of the Kremlin had heard of Vladimir Putin in August 1999, by the time he stood down as President in May 2008, the former KGB colonel was a household name. Moreover, in stepping down and transferring power to an elected successor, Putin was taking a historic step: Executive power in Russia had changed hands through the ballot box for only the second time in history. Well, yes and no. The ballot box had played a role in that the new president, Dmitri Medvedev, had won the elections with 70 percent of the 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 presidents 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 qualified 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 Kremlinsupported 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).

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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 innovations 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 demobilize larger publics. Consequently, a key to ensuring social peace is to provide 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 adminstrations 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

4 5

For a range of views, see, among others, Appel (2008), Blank (2008), Easter (2008), McFaul and Stoner-Weiss (2008). 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). Data as reported to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), www.ilo.org. 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.

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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: restoring 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 institutions 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 patronclient 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). 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).

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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 marketization, 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 parliament, and successor and alternative trade unionists, were in agreement on one thing: The existing labor code was inappropriate for modern Russian conditions 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 leftist 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 including 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. See Glinski-Vassiliev 2001.

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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 majority 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 maintained 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 democratic 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 10

Moscow Times, December 18, 2001. 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.

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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 governors. 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 overall 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 according 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 governors. In addition, the new code cut by 75 percent the turnover tax on enterprises. This tax, which had financed regional road and housing budgets, was eliminated completely by 2003. Finally, the new code stipulated that the value

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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 governors 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 aftermath of the Beslan tragedy in 2004, Putin took further measures that not only increased control over regional governors but also decisively changed the political incentives of governors in ways that helped align their interests with those of the Kremlin. Most importantly, direct popular election of governors was
11 12

13 14

Constitutional Watch: Russia, East European Constitutional Review, Vol. 9.4, 2000. The chief executive in those regions of Russia with the status of Republics have the title President. Constitutional Watch: Russia, East European Constitutional Review, Vol. 9.4, 2000. Moscow Times, January 24, 2001.

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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 parties 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, creating 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 administration, 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

16

Reforms to the voting system in regional legislatures also increased the power of the President to influence these legislatures. Other governors replaced in this period include Mikhail Evdokimov (Altaiskii Krai) and Viktor Shershunov (Kostroma), who died in automobile accidents, and Valerii Kokov (KabardinoBalkariya) who resigned for legitimate health reasons. Sergei Sobyanin (Tyumen) was also not reappointed but was promoted, becoming Head of the Presidential Administration (Robertson 2010).

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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 trouble. 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 something that it previously lacked: an effective system for disbursing punishments and rewards in the regions.18 For most governors, too, this new situation represents 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 implementation 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 incorporating 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 authoritarian regime with elections. The core idea draws on my analysis of political protest, arguing that authoritarian 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

18 19

http://www.barentsobserver.com/aleksei-barinov-becomes-new-governor-in-nenets-ao.203218 16174. Accessed October 14, 2008. Magaloni (2006) calls such a system a punishment regime. Dmitri Oreshkin The Wheels Have Come Off the Putin Model. www.opendemocracy.net, August 26, 2009.

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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 electoral parties allows the Kremlin to increase its overall market share by differentiating 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 barriers to access that would be patrolled by politically malleable courts and electoral 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 elections 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 deputies (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 representatives 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

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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 registration, 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 somewhat 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 foreignsupported jackals who would return Russia to the days of dependence and humiliation experienced under Yeltsin. With such strong support from the popular 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

21

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. See www.russiavotes.org for full election results.

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for all 450 seats. This measure was moved in the aftermath of the Beslan tragedy 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 substantial 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 proportional, the Kremlin had previously relied heavily on the sundry independents 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 elections 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 contested 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.

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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 faithful 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 usually 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 environment 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 significant 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

24

25

New Party Says Kremlin Knows Best, Nabi Abdullaev, Moscow Times, October 30, 2006, JRL #243 2006. 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. I thank Henry Hale for pointing this out.

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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, referenda 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 members. 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 opportunity 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

27

28

Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation. http://www.cikrf.ru/cikrf/eng/ politparty/ 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 http://www.cikrf.ru/cikrf/eng/politparty/. This number is down from twenty-five two years earlier.

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party conferences and then submit those lists for approval to the CEC. In addition to the list of names, parties are required to submit additional documentation 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 statements 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 nowPresident 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

30 31

32

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 Summary of law on registration of candidates for the election is drawn from russiavotes.org. Dmitry Babich, A Dangerous Cocktail for Democracy, Russia Profile, August 2, 2006, JRL 2006174. See RIA Novosti, March 28, 2007. http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20070328/62746679.html

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If experience to date is a good guide, then the process of review and registration 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, director 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 signatures 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 participate 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 excluding 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 champion Garry Kasparov, was also denied registration and subjected to considerable 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 34 35 36 37

Vedomosti, March 15, 2007. See St. Petersburg Times, January 30, 2007, and Moscow Times, January 30, 2007. http://www.ipu.org/parline/reports/2263_E.htm http://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&amp;story_id=22463 http://www.theotherrussia.org/2007/12/14/blocked-in-all-directions-kasparov-dropspresidential-bid/

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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 registered 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 legislation 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 oppositions, 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.

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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 opposition 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 becoming 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 situation 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 transition 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.

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A third potential problem is suggested by the sociological literature on organizational 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 proliferation of oppositionist projects. The ultimate success of these opposition projects 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 shortterm 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 incumbents (Magaloni 2006). The decision to revert to central appointment of governors 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 cultivating 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 governor 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 40

This is known as resource partitioning theory. 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.

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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 intraelite 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 strategy 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. Viktor Pelevin, Generation P.

Early Sunday mornings are usually a pleasant, quiet time to stroll the streets of St. Petersburg. On Sunday November 26, 2007, however, one week before nationwide elections to the State Duma, opposition activists were planning a Dissenters March (marsh nesoglasnykh) to Palace Square in front of the former Winter Palace, and the atmosphere in the city center was busy and intimidating. The main avenues were fi lled with young men, and the narrow 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

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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 contrast, 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 sitting 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 weakness. 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).

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requires extensive coordination among elites over time. Ruling coalitions are politically constructed across a more or less broad range of players with different 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 permanence, and convincing other potential leaders and elites that their best hopes for advancement lie in continuing to work together with the incumbent 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 necessary, 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 elections has also played a major role. For example, in Mexico, where elections are generally credited with the liberalization of the national regime (OchoaReza 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 instability 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 document how the basic set of techniques used has evolved and become increasingly refi ned in response to the changing nature of the challenge. To do this, I

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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 frequent sight on Russias streets. In response, the state has increased its capacity both to repress opposition protesters and to mobilize pro-government activists. Consequently, we also see many protesters on the streets of Russia who are not oppositionists at all, but who are (typically young) people demonstrating 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 authoritarians 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 challenge 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 problem 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 different 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

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capacity than closed authoritarian regimes. As a result, leaders in contemporary 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 incumbent 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 protected by the legitimacy of high-quality electoral and representative institutions that normally make it easy to characterize mobilization outside of these institutions as illegitimate (Hardin 1999, Koopmans 1997). Authoritarian rulers 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 information relative to democracies, and so even small protests can signal weakness and quickly lead to elite defections that can put the survival of the incumbents 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 perceptions are more important for stability in authoritarian regimes than in democracies.3 This is because authoritarian regimes are generally characterized by pluralistic ignorance (Kuran 1991). In other words, people, both in

The so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine is a good illustration. By the time presidential elections 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 Bartels (1988) describes four psychological processes that create political momentum: contagion, 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).

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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 generate 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 protesters in the streets, even in the low thousands, can raise questions about an authoritarian regimes invincibility (Lohmann 1994). On the other hand, efficient acts of repression can subdue what might otherwise be major challenges. By the time major challenges arrive, requiring large-scale repression, the dictator 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 considerable, 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 organized 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

5 6

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. On the distinction between coercion and channeling, see Oberschall (1973). In both political science and sociology, the literature on repression is considerable. For a sampling on physical coercion, see Ekkart Zimmermann, Soziologie der politischen Gewalt: Darst. u. Kritik vergleichender Aggregatdatenanalysen aus d. USA (Stuttgart, 1977); on formal versus 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.

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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 authoritarian 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 particularly 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 elections, 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 likelier 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 without 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.

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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

Regan and Henderson 2002). Consequently, rulers in hybrids face a singular 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) distinction 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 extensive 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 participating. 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 pensioners 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).

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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 inkind 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 transportation.9 This meant eliminating rights long held by the most politically mobilized 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-Communism, 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 construction 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 employment, 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 significance. 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.

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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 dampening effect on protest (Javeline 2003). However, the benefits of decentralization came with significant, and unanticipated, 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 separate 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 massacre 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 protest. 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 opportunity 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.

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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, several 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 participants, 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, organized 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 important 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 protest, 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 several 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 14

Kommersant, No. 1, January 11, 2005. Kommersant, No. 2, January 12, 2005. Novyi Peterburg, No. 2 (713), January 20, 2005. Kommersant. Druzhininskii estimated the crowd at 5,00010,000 (Authors interview, June 2005).

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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 stopping 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 implementation 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.

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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 counterdemonstrations. Both of these techniques foreshadowed more developed repressive strategies that emerged over the next two years in the form of licensing opposition and filling the organization space. St. Petersburg had become, according 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 making 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 organizational 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 organizers 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 troublemakers 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 provocation 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 19

Kommersant, No. 6, January 18, 2005. Kommersant, No. 6, January 18, 2005. RFE/RL, January 25, 2005, and authors interview with Reznik, June 2005. RAI Novosti, Johnsons Russia List, 9045.

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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 complaints 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 extremists 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

21

22

Smena, No. 5 (23809), January 17, 2005; Komsomolskaia Pravda v Sankt-Peterburge, No. 2(77)-p/6(23440)-p, January 17, 2005. The rhetoric of innocent but irrational pensioners, predominantly women, manipulated by outsiders 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). RFE/RL, January 25, 2005. Despite these claims, it seems much more likely that national political 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 pensioners 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 rubbish. 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 personal 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.

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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 members, 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 resignation 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 establishments. 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 marchers 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

24

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. 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.

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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 demobilize 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 authorities. Federal Minister for Health and Social Development Mikhail Zurabov announced, with impressive precision, that almost all of the 14,442,298 people owed monetization payments from the Federal government had received them.26 At the local level, attempts were made to demobilize protest by bureaucratizing the confl ict. Speaker of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly Vadim Tiulpanov set up a committee of deputies and representatives of civil society 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 26 27 28 29

Komsomolskaia Pravda v Sankt Peterburge, No. 2(77)-p/6(23400), January 17, 2005. Kommersant, No. 16, February 1, 2005. Kommersant, No. 19, February 4, 2005. Kommersant, No. 24, February 11, 2005. Kommersant, No. 19, February 4, 2005.

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Perhaps the best summary of the governments tactics was offered by prominent 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 particular 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 demonstrators 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 oppositionists 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 31

Moscow Times, February, 2, 2005. Authors interview, July 2005.

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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 popularity, 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 opposition 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 administration. Some were principled liberals who saw themselves as one day working 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 organizations 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

Authors interview, July 2005. 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.

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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 visitors 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 35

36

37

Authors interview with Andrey Dmitriev, leader St. Petersburg NBP, July 2005. The NBP are infamous for a number of slogans, but perhaps most notorious is their chant, Stalin, Beria, GULAG! 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 talking about or theyre lying. However, the NBP and other youth groups in Russia have used it as a potent political tool. According to the NBP, eight activists are currently serving terms of two to four years for involvement 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).

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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 corruption, the war [in Chechnya] and terrorism and to see for themselves the connections 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 holding 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 quantitatively 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 organizational and political character of protest has changed considerably. No longer is protest dominated by workers with economic demands, involved in bargaining 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 carrying 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 cellular 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

40

Authors interview, July 2005. The governors Mercedes crashed into a tree, killing the governor, his bodyguard, and his driver. 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).

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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, making 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, protest 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 relative 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 handling 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, certainly, especially given the timing following events in Ukraine. However, without 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 themselves 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 administration 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.

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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 intensive 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 public 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 opposition 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 considerable 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 summoned 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 participants 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 intervention 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.

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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 detention 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 preemptively 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-summit/Russian Social Forum, or to Moscow for the oppositionist Other Russia forum.44 Human Rights Watch (HRW) noted tactics including summoning 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

44

45 46

47

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. 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. http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2006/07/12/russia-attempts-stifle-dissent-summit 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). The seven were: Daniil Vanchaev, Dmitri Dorosheko, Rita Kavtorina, Dmitri Treshchanin, Georgii Kvantrishvili, Elena Kuznetsova, and Mikhail Gangan.

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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes

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 oldage 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 movements in support of the regime.

48

49

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 connection with disrespect of the President, though the investigation was quickly closed due to the lack of evidence that a crime had been committed. Those who did manage to make it to St. Petersburg were, as is often also the case in longstanding 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.

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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 sponsored 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 allocation 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

51

It is important to distinguish both in the economy and society between legitimate and illegitimate activity, because there was considerable cultural, social, and economic activity taking 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). 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

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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 opportunities 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. 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 confidence 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 demonstrates, targeting of individual economic interests remains extremely important. 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).

52

53

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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 considerable 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 foreignfunded 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 registration 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 government 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 legislative 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 licensing 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 illustrates a strong pro-regime slant: forty-two members appointed directly by the President, who in turn appoint another forty-two members, and these eightyfour 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).

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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 accountability 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 organizations, 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 policymaking 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 suspicion, 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 organizational infrastructure that the state can call on to support its goals and to provide mass mobilization in favor of the regime, if needed, directly countering 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 organizations in particular, are nothing new in Russia, from a practical perspective, creating successful pro-regime organizations in the current era is a quite different task than it was under the communist regime. In the Soviet period, organizations were relatively easy to create and control. Appointments to all jobs of any political importance required approval from above (the nomenklatura
55

56

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, charities, 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. The potential of these reforms is considered in more detail in Chapter 8.

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system), so not only were organizers preapproved by the authorities, but membership 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 circumspect about how close their links are with the government. Consequently, the process of creating pro-Kremlin organizations has been subject to experimentation and learning over time. The Kremlins fi rst venture into the youth movement market was the organization 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 ideologically 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 participated 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 ambitious 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

58

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). For a detailed analysis of Nashis ideological positions, see Buchacek (2006: 2131).

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for pro-regime demonstrations, harassing foreign diplomats, and providing protection 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 militarystyle 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 running 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 mobilizing 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

60 61

62 63

Currently, Nashi lists thirty cities in which it claims significant representation. See www.nashi. su (last accessed May 15, 2009). As cited (Buchacek 2006: 62). 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). Ekspert, 617, no. 28 (July 14, 2008). 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).

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However, if the argument I have proposed is correct, then maintaining the appearance of support for the incumbent elite is important even outside of elections, 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 organization (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: linking 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 information and the importance of political perceptions, relatively small numbers of protesters can represent a serious political challenge. Consequently, instability 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

65

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). 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).

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(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 consolidation of the elite, the Putin administration presided over a period of apparent social peace, supported by subordinate labor organizations and a strong economic expansion. Since 2005, however, a range of groups have begun to cooperate 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 repertoire and seek to combine rather limited overt physical violence with extensive 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 experimentation 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 compete 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 society 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 importance 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 cooptation (Gershenson and Grossman 2001). Furthermore, many of the tactics implemented in Putins Russia are reminiscent of approaches adopted by earlier 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 providers and active efforts to create supportive content (Alexander 2004).

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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, rulers 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 censorship 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 censorship, 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 political 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 authoritarian 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 success 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 control 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

68

Censorship and self-censorship certainly exist in the Russian media. Rumors of lists of forbidden 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. 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. Viktor Pelevin, Generation P.

Patterns of political protest display distinctive features in different places and at different times. For example, people in different countries or cultural settings deploy symbols in protesting that do not necessarily travel well. Argentine protesters 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 patterns of protest in which elite politics plays a central role. Under these circumstances, 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 consolidation, by contrast, overall protest is much lower, though there may be significant
1

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0211/p01s03-woam.html

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Implications for Russia and Elsewhere

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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 organizations 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 protest, 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 development of organizational capacity, however, they are unlikely to turn into sustained 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 defeatproof 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 possibility 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 manage 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 context 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

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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 movements, 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 representing 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 largescale 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 political 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 democracies 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/

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Between these two extremes lie hybrid regimes in which we observe considerable 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 politically 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 genuinely 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 deliberate 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 statedominated 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 example, 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 interest 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.

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Table 8.1. Varieties of Contention in Hybrid Regimes

Organizational Ecology State dominated Balanced State Mobilization Strategy Mobilizing Mobilizing Public Elite Competition High High Nature of Contention Large scale, elite-led mobilizations, isolated pockets of direct action Frequent large scale, highly polarized protest, with significant state and independent involvement Little public protest Possible Cases Russia 19972000 Kyrgyzstan 2005 Venezuela, Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia Russia 20012004 Kazakhstan Azerbaijan Unlikely Russia 20052008 Algeria after 1992, Egypt

State dominated

Demobilizing

Low

Balanced State dominated Balanced

Demobilizing Mobilizing Mobilizing

Low Low Low

Little public protest Large state-controlled rallies, significant repression of opposition Large scale controlled rallies, heavy state repression of non-state actors, high likelihood of non-state violence Low mobilization with elites refraining from using mobilization potential Large scale anti-government mobilization

State dominated Balanced

Demobilizing Demobilizing

High High

Unlikely Georgia 2003 Serbia 2000 Ukraine 2004

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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 mobilization 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 limited (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 increasingly 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

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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 demobilizing state and high public elite competition. Where the organizational ecology is state-dominated, the state plays little role in mobilization, and elite competition 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 repression. 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.

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The extensions of the theory presented here are necessarily schematic and speculative. As the preceding chapters show, details matter a lot in the relationship between protest, politics, and regime, and the reduction of the main variables 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 different 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 conceptual approach of the book is fleshed out in Chapter 1 and in the empirical chapters and need not be repeated. Here instead, I turn to four important implications for social movement analysis that shed light on: (1) the relationship 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 movements, 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 movements (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 relationships 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.

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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 controlling 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 patterns 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 exercise 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 opportunities 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 movements. 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 create opportunities for protesters, but that elite competition and the mobilizing 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 incentives 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

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actors make their decisions. Another important task in the study of mobilization, 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 generally too ill-defined to offer a meaningful structure to political opportunities (Ekiert and Kubik 1998). Ekiert and Kubik conclude that under these circumstances, 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 democracies.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 generating 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 unitary 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.

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(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 interrelated. 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 murder of journalist Heorgy Gongadze.4 Similarly, in Russia, potential opposition 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 proregime 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 proregime 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 revolutions with adjectives (Bulldozer in Serbia, Rose in Georgia, Orange in Ukraine, and Tulip in Kyrgyzstan) are collectively known in the region as colored

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

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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 emulation (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 elsewhere. 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 political-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 meaningful 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 revolutions 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 contribute 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 widespread 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 participation, 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).

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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 documented, 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 beginning 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 prosecutors 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 natural 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 transitions (Collier and Mahoney 1997).

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A central premise of this book, however, is that pressure from below for change is unlikely without the emergence of genuine independent organizations 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 democratization. Consequently, developing strong and autonomous organizations representing 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 matter 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 encourage 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 conventional 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 noncommercial 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 difference 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 pensioners, 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 7

See http://www.oprf.ru/files/doklad_-engl-verstka.pdf 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.

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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 quality 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 administration 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, nonelectoral 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 controllable 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 information to help overcome the problems of governance in the absence of democracy. 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 information 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

10

Authors interview with Sarah Lindemann-Komarova, Siberian Civic Initiatives Support Center, Gorno-Altaisk, July 2008. On the role of substitutes for democracy more generally, see Petrov, Lipman, and Hale (2010). See International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (http://www.icnl.org/).

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arguing that the law is necessary improve the quality of the NGO sector, to regularize 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 organizations 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 correspondence 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 routinized 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

12

Igor Baradechev, Vice President of the Siberian Civic Initiatives Support Center, essay on trickle up, JRL, No. 160, 2006. 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.

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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 genuine 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, hoping 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 14

15

16

17

http://www.oprf.ru Responses in the regions to the creation of the Federal Public Chamber have varied considerably. 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 initiatives, whereas in still other places, such as Novosibirsk, there was a mixture of top-down and bottom-up involvement. The law was implemented in stages, with full implementation being completed on January 1, 2009. Federal Law 131, art. 27. Potential units of self-governance mentioned in the law include apartments 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 economic 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. Federal Law 131, art. 27.6.

Implications for Russia and Elsewhere

217

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, Moscowbased, and foreign-funded critics of the Putin administration have much to worry about. Although they have the resources to overcome reporting requirements, 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 improving 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 administration has been busily constructing and maintaining its vertical of power, organizational 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 experimenting 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 eliminate, 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 little coherent bottom-up pressure for change, if a succession struggle opened up divisions at the top, mass mobilization could follow. Contrary to the conventional wisdom on post-Communist Russian politics, my analysis of workers

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willingness to participate in protest actions that are organized for them, of the pensioners revolt of 2005, and of the widespread proliferation of protest movements 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 protesters. 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-oppositionist 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 preserve 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 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 21 22 23 24 25 Demonstration (piket, demonstratsiia, meeting, skhod) Strike Hunger strike Railroad blockade Road blockade Vandalism Occupation/Sit-in Self-immolation Presidential Elections Cutting off water supply March on Moscow Suicide Illegal airplane landing Tent city Mass Fight March to Yakutsk Delay airplanes March Three-day strike Two-day strike One-hour strike Two-hour strike Three-hour strike

237

238

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 One-day strike Selling RNE newspaper/leaflets Pogrom Arson * also desecration of synagogues Bombing Blocking ship Storming of theater Holding hostage of enterprise director and other leadership Handcuffed self to gate Human chain Civil funeral Graffiti

2. Number of participants: 3. Type of participants: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Pensioners Young People Workers Single Mothers/Mothers of many children Traders Unemployed Local Residents Environmental Activists LDPR members Students Invalids Women Members of the national democratic movement Vatan Director of College Member of Democratic Movement and Young Christian Democrats Chernobyl liquidators Political Candidates Great Patriotic War Veterans Trudovaia Rossiia Teachers Deceived Voters Mai Adygylara and Agyze-Khase members KPRF RNE (Russkoe natsionalnoe edinstvo) Trade Unionists Anarchists Union of Officers St. Petersburg Political Science Associations

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 Schoolchildren and their parents Azeris A Family National Bolshevik Party and Avantguard of Red Youth Journalists Inhabitants of the city of Pushkin Veterans of Chechen War Air-traffic Controllers Palestinians Doctors Nash Ostrov Villagers of Suvorovskii Orthodox Believers Supporters of candidate for head of raion administration Communist Union of Youth SPS members Cancer patients and their families Kurds RKRP Tax Inspectors Organization Sutyazhnik Spaseniye Rossii Lakski nationals Investors in bank Russkaia Nedvizhimost Congress of Soviet Women Investors in bank OiaR Commercial bank customers Investors in bank Russkii Dom Selenga Investors of bank Privolzkskii Fund for the defence of Glasnost Military rescue team Tekobank investors Enterprise general director Russian Radio Enthusiasts Women For Peace in the World Russkie natsionalnyi sobor Ossetians City Duma member and craftsman at the mine GUVD Kumyk nationals Chechens Union of Christian Renewal Broadcast workers Nightwatchman Taxi drivers

239

240

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 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

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167

241

Helicopter Pilots Supporters of A. P. Vavilov Russian National Party Anti-Bureaucratic Party Federation of Independent Trade Unions of the Unemployed of the Kuzbass Defense industry trade unions Nefteiugansk Solidarnost Soldiers Committee of mothers Women of Russia Residents of Kakashura Investors in Infrobank and Zolotobank Truckers Union of women Free Trade Unions Anarcho-syndicalists Committee for memory of victims of Sept/Oct 1993 Investors in Vossibkombank Youth patriotic movement Vozrozhenie and RCSM National front of working people, army, and youth Young Russia: Yaroslavl 98 strike organizing committee Workers committees from Yaroslavl Organization of Voters for Social Fairness Union for Defence of Entrepreneurs RCSM Head of local administration Yabloko Electoral bloc Soglasie Civilians Socio-ecological union of Russia Naval supplies factory of the Red Banner of the Northern Fleet National Bolshevik Party of Russia Working Party of the Chuvash Republic Fairness and Law157 Union of Soviet Officers Citizens of arab nationality Liberal democratic union of youth Chair of city soviet of education workers Movement ograblennogo naroda Bashkir national center Representatives of international trade enterprises Cancer patient Private taxi drivers League of Private Business and Association of Commercial Banks Veterans of war and labor

242

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 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 agricultural 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

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243

243

Cherkessians Nogaitsy Investors in private pension fund SPK Rossiiskii Kapital Supporters of head of Republican Administration of KarachaevoCherkassiia, Semenov Investors in Ekspressbank Duma social committee chairman United Front of Workers Peoples Deputy A. D. Portiankin Assembly of the Peoples of Karachaevo-Cherkassiia Zhenshchiny Rodnogo Krasnoiaria Investors of Severno-zapadnogo komercheskogo banka Organization Stalin Armed militiamen Cherkessians, Abazins, other nationalities, and Cossaks Raduzhnaia Gerilia Kuzbassprombank Various movements and parties of Tatarstan (Communists, trade unions, and rights organizations) Lezginy Womens organization Dostoinstvo Immigrant from Uzbekistan Committee of Soldiers Mothers Russian-speaking population Private bus owners Black Hundreds (orthodox, patriotic movement) Cherkessians Abazins Drivers Georgians Movement my sibiriaki Deputies of the Abazins, Cherkess, and other nationalities Movements Adyglara and Adyge-Khasa Zhenshchiny rodnogo krasnoiaria Organization Deceived Investors Za Vernyi Vybor Moscow Federation of Tus, Association of students, veterans organizations Supporters of SPS mayoral candidate Sergei Kirienko

4. Sector: 1 Industrial 1.1 Oil and gas production and refi ning 1.2 Coal mining

244

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.12 1.11 2 3 4 5 6 7 Electricity production Chemical industry Wood processing Construction equipment Light industry Metallurgy Machine building Light industry Food processing

Agriculture Forestry Construction Transport Communications Education 7.1 School or pre-school 7.2 University

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 71 87 811 711 17 18

Healthcare Science Retail Municipal/Domestic Services Water production Weather Service at Airports Budget Sphere Lawyers Defense Industry Education and Industrial Workers Teachers, Doctors and Communal Services Doctors and Communal services Teachers, miners and construction workers Dockers Prison/correctional facility

5. Demands: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Payment of back wages Payment of child support Removal of enterprise director Housing Market related issues End to Chechen war Freedom of arrested trade union leader Opposing a change in enterprise management Opposing a change in local bus routes

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

245

Against electricity supply cuts Against animal cruelty Against tax law Against garbage incinerator construction Wage increase Support of LDPR Increase in fuel supplies For a referendum on the immunity of Deputies and against compulsory service in military hotspots Pension issues Opposing construction of a nuclear power plant and import of nuclear waste Protesting a college closure Protesting exclusion of candidates from local election Medicines and improved living conditions A change in the chair of the local election commission Opposition to drug addiction treatment center Liberation of alleged bomber Increased budget for veterans of Great Patriotic War Resignation of President R.F. Free electricity, improvement of roads and public transport Implementation of RF laws with respect to the rights of Chernobyl liquidators Protesting staff cuts Resignation of Mayor In defense of former Partizan Kononov/ support of Russians in Latvia Meeting with election commission on participation in Presidential elections Against cadre policy of Semenov and demanding transfer of Cherkas and Abkhas land to Stavropol Krai Freeing of an arrested man Boycott elections Demanding expulsion of (unemployed and unregistered) Chechens In support of (former) mayor, Cherpkov Demanding that local elections be declared invalid/reviewed Protesting Duma ratification of SNV 2 Demanding free circulation of dollars in RF Protesting Agricultural Council decision on division of land Protest against punishments for trading without licences or medical certificates Support for enterprise Demanding compensation for damage done by earthquakes in JanFeb 1999 Compensation for losses incurred during fighting in autumn 1999

246

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 Maintaining payments for distant areas Against single social tax Against Ukraine joining NATO Against privatization Independent investigation of a death in an incident with RUBOP/ ROVD Lower bread prices and support for bread enterprise Reconstruction of monument to Felix Dzershinskii Restoration of electricity supply Protesting construction of commercial space Opposing construction Against raising prices of domestic services Supporting the fi ring of a head doctor Protesting decision of arbitration court Improving living conditions Opening of ice rink Protesting oil spills Raise the Kursk and bomb Chechnya Demanding closure of highway due to accidents Protesting closure of a workshop for invalid children Resumption of water supply Against the World Bank Restoration of gas supply Support of Milosevic/Serbia Demanding tougher registration requirements of those of Caucasian nationality Against Israel Demanding handover to crowd of two Chechens accused of rape Protesting sackings In support of a gubernatorial candidate Protesting Duma decision to remove privileges from Chernobyl liquidators Protesting construction of a Mormon church Restoration of heating Protesting unification of two separate faculties at a university Marking the October Revolution Against cancellation of local rail services Against local administration decision to require use of cash tills Against Palestinian violence Strict adherence to election laws in mayoral elections Against proposed changes to the Labor Code Protesting the removal of acting head of administration V.I. Tolkachev by Schchelkovskii city court Against adoption by Duma of new national anthem Against moving a radiology unit

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 88 89 90 97 98 99 100 101

247

In defense of Kurdish United Workers Party leader Ozalan Against taking agricultural land for private dachas Protesting the results of raion elections. Rebirth of Russian politics Resignation of Russian Government Discussed issues in connection with upcoming City Elections Protesting decision to declare elections invalid 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 company 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

248

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 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 kidnap 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 private 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

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211

249

Audit of enterprise and profkom Opposing construction of an auto repair shop Opposing construction of a university building Against persecution of ethnic minorities in Azerbaijan Resignation of city duma Demanding that a person accused of murder be turned over to the crowd In support of Lev Rokhlin Against planned resettlement of Ingush in the area Against closure of a market Resignation of head of city administration Improve search for a suspected murderer Explanation of the arrest of a policeman arrested for bribe-taking Resignation of republican government Protesting arrests at previous demonstration of 1 July 1997 Asking state to take control of majority of shares in an enterprise Demanding the extension of market leases Demanding the return of land to an Avar kolkhoz Rejecting return of the land to Kalmuks (189) Demanding housing Objecting to housing Chechens Resignation of hospital executives Protesting against plans to move Lenins mausoleum Demanding return of refugees and making territorial claims Support of all-Russian March on Moscow Letter to RF President and Security Council Secretary asking for peaceful settlement of Ossetia-Ingush problem Demanding CIS traders be banned from market Demanding to be allowed to trade Raising of invalidity pension and an end to annual medical assessment Protest against nuclear waste Demanding implementation of court decision to a worker his job back Challenging a decision to move people out of a hostel designed to house foreign workers Demanding a change in enterprise management Improved working conditions Against Nemtsovs housing reform Opposing construction of underground garages Resignation of city government Demanding Chechen government take measure to control movement of fighters A share of land for construction Against construction of a nuclear plant

250

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 Against construction of a market in a green zone Return of money in Progressprombank Return of money in Kavmedstrakh Against price increases for suburban trains Against construction of Katunskii hydroplant Demanding airtime on TV to present socio-economic questions Against forestry and demand for protection of mountain Bolshoi Tkhach Demanding release of arrested residents Against economic reforms Protesting the collapse of agriculture Demanding a meeting of Chechen and Dagestan governments to stop kidnapping of people and the stealing of transportation Renewed access to the unofficial University of the Volga Dissatisfaction with a newly elected raion administration and the crime situation Protesting against prohibition on handing out Marychevs leaflets In support of the head of a city administration Against Chechen separatism Resignation of local FSB head Calling on all nationalities to unite Commemorating October 1993 events Against Egor Stroev Calling for a Moscow commission on criminal investigations to examine a criminal case brought against them Demanding the return of a building to a climbers club Defense of Leninski-Kuznetsk Mayor G.V. Koniakhin New collective agreement Re-examine privatization of the enterprise Release of a militiaman kidnapped in Chechnya Take measures against those responsible for the economic collapse of a mine Demanding radical measures be taken to ensure security along the Chechen border A decision on the future of the Pechegorsk coal basin Demanding resiting of village further from gas plant Against local law on land reform Protesting against the distribution of new passports with Russian symbols Objecting to decision of RF Prosecutor to disregard Cherepkovs claim that local prosecutors were turning a blind eye to crime Formation of self-defence units for service along the Chechen border Decision on status of a theater

Appendix 1: Event Protocol

251

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

252

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 Abolition of legislation on child support To ban the sale of land Protesting genocide of Chechens by state security Lower taxes Defense of Ataman of Cossaks arrested for contempt of court Against plan to restructure local military garrison Investigation of crimes alleged during election for head of administration No changes to Republic constitution Against moving the market to the edge of town Calling for director of Rostovugol to be held responsible Environmental protection Financing of maternity wards and anti-TB programs Jailing Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin Protesting the removal of documents for a criminal investigation Special food and privileges for the job In support of Klimentev Improve the conditions of students and change the course of education reform Against Ukrainian independence Rights of invalids To accelerate court decision on use of telephone equipment To end ban on operations of TOO Sibiravia Against construction of a monument to Poles killed in the war Against taking atlas of Buddhist medicine to exhibit in the U.S. For abolition of education charges Arrest of militiaman for murder of trader Firing of OUR head for exceeding his powers in a search Nationalization of coal industry Protesting refusal of a work permit Meeting with vice P.M. Nemtsov To encourage more voters to turn out in gubernatorial elections Protesting widening of road near kindergarten Support of miners Call on miners strike committee to unblock railroads Revolutionary slogans Peaceful resolution of the situation in Dagestan Jobs not promises Defense of arrested militiaman Talks with President of Republic/Governor Against opening of an automobile market Against Pakistans nuclear tests Protesting kidnapping of local farm chairman Review of elections to GosDuma

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370

253

Investigation of the murder of a journalist Support of strikes at Zvezda plant Support for science Protesting Lukoil drilling Claims related to status and shares of oil companies Protests against a released prisoner living in the area Workers rights Against introduction of toll on Federal highway Protesting the murder of the mayor, calling for resignation of city duma and the nationalization of Yukos Against break-up of Gazprom Protesting court decision on illegal demonstration Demanding Yukos pay taxes to local budget Against Wahabbism and terrorism Free medicines Opposing Chechen land claims Supporting mayor and demanding investigation of his attempted murder Appointment of a government commission Against reconfiguring of bottom floor of dormitory Irregular delivery of empty wagons Blocking rails to mine refusing to support protest Against building a metallurgy plant Raise minimum wage Adequate sanitation in streets Resignation of head of local social security administration Marking death of the mufti of Dagestan Demanding to know where the money to pay workers who are breaking strike is coming from Investigation of the murder of the mufti Resolve hospital fi nances Resignation of Chernomyrdin General Strike Reduction in tariffs/duties Protesting bankruptcy of a company Reduced food prices Support for M. Khachilaev Medical examination of man who died in police custody Against Chubais Handover of 3 students suspected of murder Early Duma elections Closing of market near supermarket Criticising TUs for not participating in national day of action Reorganization of higher education and timely payment of wages and stipends

254

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390 391 392 393 394 395 396 397 398 5 year anniversary of events of 1993 Reinstatement of sacked members of strike committee Changes to Russian constitution Early elections Protesting violent curtailment of miners protest Return of Alaska To get their jobs back Pro-beer slogans Improve communal services In defence of Duma member A. Makashov Against ban on sale of alcoholic products at kiosks in town Arrest of local assemblyman who had a car accident and a fight with village man Draw attention to inadequate funding of healthcare, lack of medicines and low wages of doctors Demand to Altaiagroprod to fulfill obligation to deliver coal and food products to pensioners, teachers and others Abolition of the Presidency Control of rising prices Abolition of fees for medical services and education 81st anniversary of the October Revolution Against the policy of K. Ilyumzhinov to change status of Kalmykiia In support of the policy of K. Ilyumzhinov to change status of Kalmykiia Marking death of G. Starovoitova Referendum on construction of a plant for processing precious metals Against placing a tuberculosis clinic in the neighborhood Meeting with a representative of the Mayor to resolve problems with the water and heating supply Money to treat work-related injuries Confl ict with neighbors in dormitory Against the importation of nuclear waste from Bulgaria Demand that general and executive directors elected by the collective be freed from arrest for not complying with a court decision to fi re them Support for hunger-striking teachers Adherence to the constitution of the R.F. with respect to education and the rights of citizens Against bombing of Iraq Abolition of fi xed tax on profits Condemning inadequate measures taken to provide town with electricity and heating Defense of historic and revolutionary monuments

399 400 401 402 403 404

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 419 420 421 422 423 424 425 426 427 428 429 430 431 432 433 434 435 436 437 438 439 440

255

Indexation of wages In support of newly appointed mayor Kopilov In support of enterprise director Demanding release of wage fund from bank 76th anniversary of the founding of the USSR Recognition of Tatar as a state language Recognition of Bashkir as a state language 75th anniversary of the death of Lenin Designation of raion as a border region, and meeting with governor and Krai government Reduction in land taxes on places of business Freeing of arrested people Improvements in conditions for trade in the raion Cancellation of mayors decision limiting business Settlement of wage arrears upon sacking Protesting introduction of high taxes Reduced price access to public transport, free medical services and half price drugs Against US bombing of Iraq, blockade of Cuba and the coming aggression against N. Korea Improvement in security along Chechen border and stabilization of the criminal situation Free PKK leader Ozalan Objective investigation of shooting of head of administration by militiaman Defense of the Fatherland day Real participation of the work collective in the management of the enterprise Return of money from RAO UES for energy produced Russkii natsionalnyi sabor Unification of the Russian nation Free man charged with buying votes in local elections Demanding payment for timber Cancellation of results of national assembly elections Subsidies for those moved to other part of the country Objecting to a city court sentencing of a trader who killed another trader in a fight Objective investigation of the shooting of a local man by ROVD officer Audit of distribution of money to shareholders Against search and arrest of Chechens Give Chechens the right to join interior ministry services Right to move to empty homes in the area Demanding access to the 2nd round of elections to the National Assembly for a candidate excluded by the Election Commission

256

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 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 candidate 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 problems of students. Also against NATO aggression in Yugoslavia 471 Protesting introduction of highway tolls 472 Against decree of local administration on postponement of compensation for wages 473 Dismantling of statue of Peter 1 474 Dissatisfaction with KPRF head of administration 475 Preserve social guarantees

Appendix 1: Event Protocol

257

476 6th anniversary of April 1993 referendum 477 LDPR Party of Freedom, Fairness and Patriotism 478 Discussions over land disputed between local residents and neighbors 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

258

Appendix 1: Event Protocol meeting to discuss the organization of defences along the Chechen border Planning to hold banned meeting of Cherkess and Abazin youth 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 To include the Cherkess and Abazin regions of Stavropolskii Krai in Karachaevo-Cherkassiya elections Improving fi nancing of hospitals Careful investigation of a murder Demand Chechen President Maskhadov turn over murderers of local man and stop banditry Against privatization of a coal pit Promote the RNE Dissatisfaction with political and criminal situation Upset by murder of a militiaman, they set out to meet with people of a Chechen village Discuss crisis in Karachaevo-Cherkessiia Burned German flag marked with swastika Against use of rocket fuel in the city of Perm To demand that a Chechen, I.N. Aliroev, be banished from Stavropolskii Krai. The Chechen representatives agreed Medical and fi nancial support for a citizen of Bolshaia Kamen injured in an auto accident with the former U.S. consul An end to pollution of the Black Sea with oil products Observance of constitutional rights of Ingush refugees To allow delivery of 2 wagons as temporary housing for refugees Against death sentence for Ozalan Payment of holiday pay owed Return of refugees Protesting court decision to turn enterprise over to new owner Altsem Dismantling of parking lot Demanding bus service to village Demanding overturn of raion court decision to reinstate sovkhoz director Anniversary of death of Nicholas II 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 Protesting actions of law enforcement agency Support the military preparedness of the fleet Claiming appointment of acting head of Karachaevo-Cherkessiia and acting minister of interior by Moscow as unconstitutional. Calling for Semenovs assumption of power.

513 514

515 516 517 518 519 520 521 522 523 524 525 526 527 528 529 530 531 532 533 534 535 536 537 538 539

540 541 542

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 543 544 545 546 547 548 549 550 551 552 553 554 555 556 557 558

259

559

560 561 562

563 564 565 566 567 568 569 570

Against construction of a power plant Blocking arrival of 14 forced refugees of Ingush nationality Payment of invalidity benefit Punishment of local Nogai people for starting a fight in which 2 Dargins were injured Release of arrested Nogai, resettlement elsewhere of Dargintsy and change in militia leadership Firing head of enterprise Igraklinskoe and head of village militia both Dargintsy Demanding to be returned to their former settlements in Tarskoe Home of leading Semenov supporter fi re-bombed To close factory Roskontakt and stop production of bricks with elevated radioactivity Timely delivery of orders to Kristall factory Further medical tests on a man who died in city care Support after floods Demanding housing for an invalid friend Against local authorities decision to raise housing costs Protesting against local administration interfering in the economic activity of the enterprise 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 cooperation, as well as the establishment of a single center for coordinating policy in the region Setting up of passport control and medical examination point at the market itself and the prohibition of any agency other than the border patrol from checking passports Against MinTrud decision reducing benefits for Chernobyl liquidators Opposing setting up of base for Federal troops near village Opposing the Supreme Court of Karachaevo-Cherkessiia fi nding elections valid and appointing Semenov head of Republic administration Peace, order, respect for the will of the voters, unity and accord among nationalities An end to petrol price increases In support of armed forces taking part in action in Dagestan Against Chechen aggression in Dagestan Support of measures taken by RF in Karachaevo-Cherkessiia to stabilize the situation Against sending local conscripts to Dagestan Introduction of Federal troops to protect from Chechen attacks Cancellation of tax on carrying passengers

260

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 571 Attending swearing in of V. Semenov as head of KarachaevoCherkessiia 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 fitting 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 KarachaevoCherkessiya 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

Appendix 1: Event Protocol

261

605 Against unfair action of metallurgical investment company in taking ownership of Kuznetskii Metallurgicheskii Kombinat and Chernigorskii 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 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Regional government City/local government National government Enterprise administration KPRF Poland Minatom Election Commission President of RF International Economic Conference Siemens

7. Location 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Regional government building City/local government building Enterprise property Railroad Highway MVD property State Duma (Moscow) Karl Marx statue in Teatralnyi Square (Moscow) Solovetskii Kamen at Lubyanka (Moscow) Polish Diplomatic property FSB offices Marinskii Theater

262

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 Hotel Metropol Latvian diplomatic property Main square of town Polling station Prosecutors office Offices of Yugbank Moscow Metro Yabloko offices Moscow State University Foreign Ministry Trade Union Building Building of Kubanenergo Energy Ministry Red Square Defense Ministry Ministry of Labor and Social Development Offices of Soiuz Chernobyltsev Polpreds office Kurgan State University Palestinian diplomatic property Turkish diplomatic property Court Property Offices of independent trade unions Bridge over the Yenesei Outdoor market Kazan Cathedral City garbage dump Siemens H.Q. Embassy of Belarus British Embassy White House Tekobank Base for border guards West-Siberian Railway St. Petersburg-Murmansk highway Rostov-Baku highway Kavkaz Highway Krasnoyarsk-Kyzyl highway City telecoms department Arbat Street River boat port Magadan-Ust-Nera highway TV station Moscow-Brest highway Hotel

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 Karasuk-Zmeinogorsk highway Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk-Tymovskoe highway Dalnevostochnyi railroad Trans-siberian highway Yekaterinburg-Kurgan highway US consulate/embassy Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk highway Rostov nuclear plant Makhachkala-Astrakhan highway Kaliningrad-Warsaw highway Lenin statue Office of the head of the raion administration Landepokhya Uokkoniem highway Nakhodka-Vladivostok highway Vladikavkas-Tblisi highway Abakan-Adinsk highway Gorkovskii railroad Railway station Khasavyurt-Grozny highway Bridge Kostrom-Ostrovskoe highway Moscow station in St. Petersburg Railway Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk to Noglika Khasavyurt-Gudermes highway Alfa Bank Oktyabrskii Zh.D. Khasavyurt-Tlokh highway Progressprombank office Unemployment office Highway Makhachkala-Buinaksk Trans-Siberian railroad Tyumen-Tobolsk highway Tyumen-Khanty-Mansiisk Highway BAM GUM School Monument to victims of the repressions Sportsclub Ukrainian embassy St. Petersburg canals U.S. Embassy Rostov-Kiev railroad Ukrainian diplomatic property Military aerodrome Museum

263

264

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 Embassy of Pakistan TV station Gorbaty Most St. Petersburg metro Military barracks Power station Central bank Kuzbaspromstroibank airport Federation Council Cultural-Historical Center Severokuzbasugol Luianskaia Ploshchad Vasilevskii spusk Dvortsovaya Ploshchad Minatomenergo Statue of Peter 1 Former Lenin Museum Bank Rossiskii Kredit Ministry of Transport Leningradskii Shosse Liubinskaia Ulitsa Greek Embassy UN information office Israeli Embassy Chinese Embassy French Embassy German Embassy Inkombank Czech Embassy Republican Election Commission Don Public Library Yugoslav Embassy American Business Center Head of city administrations office Hotel Severnaia where NATO representatives were staying Building of Northern Fleet Private home Factory Shar Home of local campaign manager of Governor V. Semenov Theater Stadium Offices of Kondpetrolium Aleksandrovskyi Sad Supreme Court of Republic

Appendix 1: Event Protocol 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 Pushkin Square Ploshchad Revoliutisii Tverskaia Triumfalnaia Ploshchad Regional military committee Dom Pravitelstva Church Metro station 1905 Krasnaia Presnia Federal treasury building Georgian Embassy Kiev station Offices of Republic of Bashkortostan Ostankino Church of Christ the Savior (Moscow) Garbage Incinerator

265

Missing Data Where there is no data for a particular day, events that are reported as ongoing 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 particular 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

266

Appendix 1: Event Protocol

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

Appendix 1: Event Protocol

267

ethnic politics: removal, resettlement, land claim, exclusion of particular ethnic groups: national 229, 342, 558, 559, 591 ethnic politics: removal, resettlement, land claim, exclusion of particular ethnic groups: regional 34, 197, 227, 243, 245, 321, 389, 390, 410, 411, 413, 513, 515, 523, 563, 565, 566, 567, 576, 595, 598, 603, 609, ethnic politics: removal, resettlement, land claim, exclusion of particular ethnic groups: local 37, 70, 131, 141, 145, 153, 180, 189, 190, 192, 195, 344, 437, 438, 439, 441, 478, 486, 529, 530, 533, 544, 546, 547, 548, 549, 568 courts in general: 108, 161, particular criminal justice complaints 25, 35, 51, 59, 72, 118, 130, 137, 154, 158, 165, 170, 178, 183, 184, 186, 219, 222, 224, 232, 237, 247, 251, 265, 276, 291, 300, 311, 312, 314, 324, 330, 335, 338, 340, 347, 356, 364, 366, 375, 382, 396, 415, 424, 430, 434, 435, 462, 464, 485, 488, 489, 493, 496, 499, 501, 512, 517, 518, 522, 526, 540, 553 political parties/personnel changes at national level 15, 27, 98, 163, 231, 252, 273, 299, 315, 320, 358, 365, 367, 373, 374, 380, 460, 477, 484, 487, 490, 579, 588, 594, 615 political parties/personnel changes at regional level 74, 105, 111, 126, 164, 167, 168, 185, 244, 253, 294, 325, 354, 456, 474, 497, 514, 542, 550, 571, 572, 575, 595, 596, 599, 602 political parties/personnel changes at local level/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

268

Appendix 1: Event Protocol

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 probably 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 government, 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 Days Lost Education Health Miners Others total 1 962 921 600 660 840 121 1 417 710 4 821 412 Percentage Education Health Miners Others 40.7 12.5 17.4 29.4 1998 Days Lost 2 325 124 158 130 1 261 169 1 084 784 4 829 207 Percentage 48.1 3.3 26.1 22.5 1999 Days Lost 1 131 444 46 475 1 004 401 273 787 2 456 107 Percentage 46.1 1.9 40.9 11.1 2000 Days Lost 184 366 4 486 28 578 57 138 274 568 Percentage 67.1 1.6 10.4 20.8 Total Days Lost 5 603 855 809 751 3 134 269 2 833 419 12 381 294 Percentage 45.3 6.5 25.3 22.9

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

1997 Days Lost Agriculture Industry Services Unspecified total 100 918 137 433 297 66 176 1 417 710 Percentage Agriculture Industry Services Unspecified 0.0 64.8 30.6 4.7 1998 Days Lost 0 690 450 377 300 17 034 1 084 784 Percentage 0.0 63.6 34.8 1.6 1999 Days Lost 0 111 971 159 297 2 519 273 787 Percentage 0.0 40.9 58.2 0.9 2000 Days Lost 0 1 384 55 742 12 57 138 Percentage 0.0 2.4 97.6 0.0 Total Days Lost 100 1 721 942 1 025 636 85 741 2 833 419 Percentage 60.8 36.2 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 Days Lost Industry (unspecified) Oil and gas Light industry Electricity Production Chemicals Wood Processing & Forestry Construction Equipment Metallurgy Machine Building Defense Total 91 046 8 300 20 594 24 1945 1 262 63 376 15 931 10 481 461 452 3 750 918 137 Percentage Industry (unspecified) Oil and gas Light industry Electricity Production Chemicals Wood Processing & Forestry Construction Equipment Metallurgy Machine Building Defense 9.9 0.9 2.2 26.4 0.1 6.9 1.7 1.1 50.3 0.4 1998 Days Lost 179 331 5 558 12 619 117 026 1 946 39 941 28 328 211 187 94 514 690 450 Percentage 26.0 0.8 1.8 16.9 0.3 5.8 4.1 30.6 13.7 0.0 1999 Days Lost 2 838 9 770 7 248 7 928 800 185 81 340 1 570 56 236 11 1971 Percentage 2.5 8.7 6.5 7.1 0.7 0.2 72.6 1.4 0.1 0.2 2000 Days Lost 796 0 518 0 0 0 70 0 0 0 1 384 Percentage 57.5 0.0 37.4 0.0 0.0 0.0 5.1 0.0 0.0 0.0 19972000 Days Lost 274 011 23 628 40 979 366 899 4 008 103 502 125 669 223 238 556 022 3 986 1 721 942 Percentage 15.9 1.4 2.4 21.3 0.2 6.0 7.3 13.0 32.3 0.2 271

272

Appendix 2: Sectoral and Seasonal Strike Patterns

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

1997 Days Lost Municipal Transport Others Total 302 732 130 445 120 433 297 Percentage Municipal Transport Others 69.9 30.1 0.0 1998 Days Lost 299 943 77 357 0 377 300 Percentage 79.5 20.5 0.0 1999 Days Lost 131 813 27 334 150 159 297 Percentage 82.7 17.2 0.1 2000 Days Lost 40 821 14 641 280 55 742 Percentage 73.2 26.3 0.5 75.6 24.4 0.1 Total Days Lost 775 309 249 777 550 1 025 636

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 incidence 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 taking 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 division between budget and non-budget is necessarily somewhat arbitrary. The interweaving of transfers and arrears between sectors, extensive state shareholdings 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 government 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

Table A2.5. Strikes in the Budget and Non-Budget Sectors
1997 Days Lost Budget Workers Non-Budget Workers Non-Budget Percentage 3 836 879 984 533 20.4 1998 Days Lost 4 121 723 707 484 14.7 1999 Days Lost 2 341 467 114 640 4.7 2000 Days Lost 272 892 1 676 0.6 Total

273

Days Lost 10 572 961 1 808 333 14.6

Non-education sector strikes in Russia (1997-2000)

1000000 900000 Working Days Lost 800000 700000 600000 500000 400000 300000 200000 100000 0
Ja n M -97 ar M -97 ay Ju 97 l-9 Se 7 p N -97 ov Ja -97 n M -98 ar M -98 ay Ju 98 l Se -98 p N -98 ov Ja -98 n M -99 ar M -99 ay Ju 99 l-9 Se 9 p N -99 ov Ja -99 n M -00 ar M -00 ay Ju 00 l-0 Se 0 p N -00 ov -0 0

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 proportion 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 aggregate strikes in the summer was advanced in the press as a sign that the division of labor had been effectively repealed during Russias economic crises of

274

Appendix 2: Sectoral and Seasonal Strike Patterns

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 determined 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 observations. 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 100point 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

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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) Stability Ethnic Peace Communist Governor Republic Capital Support for BNY 93 Change in support for BNY 96-93 Days lost to strikes 94 Days lost to strikes 95 Days lost to strikes 96 Days lost to strikes 97 Days lost to strikes 98 Constant Observations R2 .074 (.089) .32** (.13) 36** (4.4) 3.4 (5.1) 11** (4.1) .42* (.21) .53* (.21) 22 (15) 78 0.60 Model (2) .043 (.086) .37** (.13) 35** (4.6) 2.6 (5.3) 7.8 (5.0) .45 (.24) .66** (.25) .10* (.067) .045 (.056) .0088 (.027) .00028 (.018) .096** (.037) 23 (15) 77 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 statistically, 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 discussed 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 AntiOrganized Crime Squad, 178, 190 Aiol, Aleksandr, 179 Allianza Civica, 28 Altai Krai, 100 Altai Republic wage arrears and strikes, 116 Amur, 110 Astrakhan, 47, 110, 150 Aushev, Ruslan, 141 Avantguard of Red Youth, 181, 189, 239 Azerbaijan, 211 and hybrid regimes, 5, 24 and organizational ecology, 205 Barinov, Aleksei, 155 Basaev, Shamil, 134 Belarus, 8, 186, 191, 211 economic cooperation treaty, 110 Berezovskii, Boris, 124, 125 Bloody Sunday massacre, 176 Bolshoi Kamen, 54, 78, 111 Bolivia, 3, 169 and organizational ecology, 205 Brezhnev, Leonid and channeling, 190 and hunger strikes, 55 and repression, 174, 18889 and the social compact, 175 budget sector and strike reporting incentives, 57 and strike waves, 269 and strikes, 51 determinants of mobilization, 85 Buriatiia, 111

Caucasus and election of 1999, 134 center-region relations and protest, 10912 and the replacement of governors, 15455 governors capacity, 83 measurement, 81 Putin reforms, 15255 Central Election Commission and party registration, 16061 Chavez, Hugo and state mobilization, 28, 33 Chechnya and Khasavyurt agreement, 110 and opposition to war, 186 and the 1999 elections, 134 Cheliabinsk, 71, 153 Chernomyrdin, Viktor, 94, 156 Chubais, Anatolii, 111, 127 Churov, Vladimir and the Central Election Commission, 161 Committee of Soldiers Mothers, 28 Communist Party and protest, 47 protest participants, 57 Confederation of Labor, 181 contention and blame attribution, 176 and electoral fraud, 21112 and formal institutions, 98 and identity, 65 and institutions, 10 and political signalling, 13437 and regime dynamics, 3839 and social movements, 20708 defi nition, 18 diffusion, 14245

279

280
contention (cont.) flash mobbing, 185 in closed autocracies, 22 in democracies, 20 in hybrid regimes and regime dynamics, 31 repertoires, 42 theory, 24 in post-Communism, 44 in Russia, 1416 and social movements, 66 demands, 5960 direct actions, 55 MVD data, 4549 protest participants, 5559 symbolic, 53 movement societies, 202 political process model and hybrid regimes, 97 protest participants and organizational ecology, 59 regime and opposition in hybrid regimes, 17074 Dagestan, 134, 162 debt default, 10708 democratization and color revolutions, 21011 and contention, 13 and Russian politics, 21018 Deripaska, Oleg, 127 Dissenters Marches, 16768, 186, 187 Dissenters Marches, 1 Druzhininskii, Mikhail, 176 Dubinin, Valentin, 111 East Germany protest repertoire, 52 Ecuador, 3, 169 and organizational ecology, 205 elections and protest 1999, 12830 elite competition and democratization, 34 in hybrid regimes, 1011, 3435, 20307 in Russia, 7 Estonia and hybrid regimes, 5 Evenk Autonomous Okrug, 110 Federal Agency for Youth Affairs, 196 Federal Law 131, 21617 Federal Registration Service and NGOs, 213

Index
and party registration, 160 Federation of Independent Trade Unions (FNPR) and independent unions, 80 and organizational ecology, 27 and reform of the labor code, 15051 and the 1999 elections, 141 and the Communist Party, 66 and the Petersburg Civic Opposition, 184 and wage arrears, 43 and Yeltsin, 74 property, 76 Federov, Nikolai, 153 formal institutions and organizations, 98 and protest decline, 13133 electoral rules and protest decline, 13742 France and protest, 20 strikes in comparative perspective, 4950 Freedom of Choice, 186 Gazprom Astrakhan blockade, 47 tower in St. Petersburg, 162 Georgia, 3, 8, 29, 30 and color revolutions, 127, 168, 193, 202, 210 and democratization, 211 and elite competition, 206, 212 and youth movements, 195 contacts with Russian activists, 186 Glaziev, Sergei and Motherland, 164 Golos Rossii, 127 Gongadze, Georgiy, 210 gosudarstvennie kaznacheiskie obligatsii, 108 Gozman, Leonid, 167 Great Russia denied registration, 162 Gurov, Aleksandr, 134 Gusinskii, Vladimir, 125 Hicks, John, 84 Hungary post-Communist protest in comparative perspective, 4950 protest repertoire, 52 protest under Communism, 21 hunger strikes, 5455 determinants of, 97

Index
hybrid regimes and legitimation, 19899 and repression, 13, 16870, 17274 in post-Cold War era, 45 instability as an emergent property, 197 regime and opposition, 14546 sub-categories, 56 varieties of contention, 20307 without hegemonic parties, 154 Iabloko, 139 and protest, 167, 178, 179, 180, 181, 189 and the labor code, 150 in St. Petersburg, 162, 184 Youth section, 177, 183, 195 Iakemenko brothers and Moving Together, 195 Iakemenko, Vasilii and creation of Nashi, 195 and funding Nashi, 196 and the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs, 196 Iakovlev, Vladimir, 112, 141 IMF, 150 Industrial Workers union and 1999 elections, 141 Interior Ministry, 16 and protest control, 167 and protest in Primorskii Krai, 41 reorganization, 152 Iran and hybrid regimes, 5 Isaev, Andrei, 150 Italy fascist regime, 30 strikes in comparative perspective, 4950 Ivanovo, 110 wage arrears and strikes, 116 Just Russia and 2007 Duma elections, 159 and potential defection, 160 and the management of elections, 16364 and the problem of defection, 16465 creation, 158 pro-Kremlin opposition, 156 Kagarlitskii, Boris on the labor code reform, 150 Kaliningrad, 111, 165 Kalmykiia, 140 Kamchatka, 111 Karachaevo-Cherkesiia and disputed election, 58

281
Karelin, Aleksandr, 134, 140 Karimov, Islam, 191, 202 Kasianov, Mikhail, 94, 185, 210, 212 Kasparov, Garry and the 2008 presidential elections, 162 arrest, 168 Kemerovo and independent unions, 58 and ruble devaluation, 111 coal miners, 54 strikes, 69 Khakasiia and strikes, 69 Khimki, 176, 177 Khrushchev, Nikita and repression, 188 Kirienko, Sergei, 54, 93, 96, 97 Kirov, 110 Komsomol, 195 Kondratov, Viktor, 111 Korzhakov, Aleksandr, 111 Kostroma, 110 Kozak, Dmitri and Vladimir Churov, 161 Krasnoiarsk and preventive arrest, 168 Krasnoiarskii Krai, 110 Kuchma, Leonid and opposition, 29 and Viktor Iushchenko, 210 Kudrin, Alexei, 180 Kurnosova, Olga, 167, 184 Kursk, 111 Kyrgyzstan, 3, 173, 193, 210 and color revolutions, 127, 168 and democratization, 13, 99, 211 and elite competition, 212 and organizational ecology, 205 labor social partnership in Russia, 7479 labor code reform, 15051 labor unions fi nancing, 7677 independent, 73 Independent Union of Mineworkers (NPG), 73 state dominated, 7479 Latyshev, Petr, 153 Law on Political Parties and veto points, 157 Law on Voters Rights and restricting ballot access, 157

282
Liberal Democratic Party of Russia and bombing of Yugoslavia, 60 and Kremlin support, 158 and monetization protests, 181 protest participants, 57 Livshits, Aleksandr, 54 Lukashenko, Aleksandr, 8, 191 Luzhkov, Iuri, 124, 125, 127, 138, 139, 140, 141, 154, 260, 261 Malaysia and hybrid regimes, 5 and labor unions, 27 Marii-El, 110 Mashkovtsev, Mikhail, 155 Matvienko, Valentina and Iabloko in St. Petersburg, 162 and pensioners protests, 178 May Day and co-opting protest, 77 Medical Insurance Fund, 152 Medvedev, Dmitri, 147, 161, 196 Mestnye, 197 Mexico Allianza Civica, 28 and authoritarian corporatism, 98 and democratization, 169 and hegemonic party rule, 154 and labor unions, 27 and organizational ecology, 205 protest and democratization, 23 miners and 1999 elections, 141 and collapse of USSR, 73 and independent unions, 28, 58 and ruble devaluation, 54 in Primorskii Krai, 40 repertoire, 44, 51 versus railroad workers. see Rostov Mironov, Sergei, 155, 164 and Just Russia, 158 Molodaia Gvardiia, 33, 197 monetization, 175, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182 Moscow, 197 and bombings, 134 and development, 184 and monetization, 176 and OVR, 140 and party lists 1999, 13839 and protest, 1, 47, 63, 168, 177, 178, 181, 196 and strikes, 92 Dissenters March, 186 Gorbaty Most, 51

Index
human rights groups, 193, 194 Other Russia forum, 189 Moscow region, 140 Movement in Support of the Army, 181 Moving Together, 195 and Nashi, 195 Moving Without Putin, 181, 195 Murmansk, 110 MVD and elections of 1999, 134 MVD data and hunger strikes, 54 and marches and rallies, 128 and miners strikes, 87 and protest participants, 5758 and published sources, 57 and social tension, 53 and strikes, 51 and working days lost to strikes, 102 strengths and weaknesses, 4549 Nash Dom Rossii, 156 Nashi, 1, 19597 and state mobilization, 33 creation of, 195 National Bolshevik Party and charges of extremism, 180 and imprisonment, 188 and pensioners protests, 177, 181 and uniting the opposition, 18486 and youth, 195 arrest of members, 178 as excuse for arrest, 167 repression of, 189 Naumov, Sergei, 182 Nazarov, Aleksandr, 153 Nazdratenko, Evgenii, 78, 91, 112 battle with Yeltsin, 111 Nemtsov, Boris, 54, 111 Nikolaev, Vladimir, 182 Nizhny Novgorod and Dissenters March, 1 and protest, 182 North Caucasus and ethnic protest, 58 North Korea, 3, 33 Novosibirsk, 58, 179, 182, 216 and 1999 elections, 140 and independent unions, 58 and preventive arrest, 168 and repression, 179 protest and state mobilization, 182 wage arrears and strikes, 116 Nyazov, Saparmurat, 3

Index
Oborona, 183, 186 OMON, 1, 167, 174 Orl, 91, 110, 113 organizational ecology and democratization, 99 and survivor organizations, 9799 defi nition, 26 ersatz social movements, 2728 in closed regimes, 26 in democracies, 26 in hybrid regimes, 2630, 20307 in Russia, 7 early post-Soviet extinction, 29 in the sociology of organizations, 25 of labor in Russia, 7379 post-Communism, 28 survivor organizations, 27 Otechestvo, 242 Otechestvo-Vsia Rossiia, 122, 124, 129, 133, 134, 138, 139, 140, 141, 150, 156 formation, 127 predicting the vote for, 140 Other Russia, 162, 184 Pavlovskii, Gleb and Moving Together, 195 Pension Fund, 152 Peoples Democratic Union, 189 Peoples Will Party denied registration, 162 Petersburg Civic Opposition, 184 pluralistic ignorance, 171, 187 Poland and party defection, 164 and post-Communist protest, 44 and protest under Communism, 21 protest in comparative perspective, 49 protest repertoire, 52 political opportunities and protest, 126 in hybrid regimes, 20809 Ponomarev, Lev, 168 Portugal attitudes to protest, 20 Primakov, Evgenii, 94, 96, 101, 104, 112, 124, 133, 135, 138, 139, 140 and Konstantin Titov, 127 and protest dynamics, 11222 and succession, 12425, 138 and wage arrears, 136 Primorskii Krai and co-opting labor unions, 77 and co-opting protest, 77 and protest, 40, 41

283
and relations with Moscow, 91 and ruble devaluation, 111 and strikes, 71 privatization and support for strikes, 81 Public Chamber, 194, 213, 214, 21516, 217 Putin, Vladimir and determinants of protest, 37 and Duma elections 2007, 157 and labor unions, 15051 and NGOs, 21317 and protest decline, 13337 and protest levels, 148 and strike patterns, 94 and the vertical of power, 14950 and the reemergence of protest, 18488 and the succession to Yeltsin, 135 erzatz social movements, 33 nature of the regime, 1516 rail wars, 53 and ruble devaluation, 54 participants, 54 Rakhimov, Murtaza, 141, 153 repression and authoritarian regimes, 17072 and elite competition, 20910 and hybrid regimes, 16870, 17274 and promoting elite unity, 210 channeling and erzsatz social movements, 19497 channeling and NGOs under Putin, 19294 channeling in the USSR, 19192 coercion under Putin, 18990 in the USSR, 18889 Reznik, Maksim, 167, 179 Rodina and Just Russia, 158 pro-Kremlin opposition, 156, 158 Rogozin, Dmitri and Motherland, 164 party denied registration, 162 Rossel, Eduard, 153 Rostov and strikes, 71 miners versus railroad workers, 65 ruble devaluation, 46, 103 and protest, 54, 97 and strikes, 101 Rutskoi, Aleksandr, 153

284
Sakha, 111 Sechin, Igor and Just Russia, 159 Serbia, 8 and color revolutions, 168, 210 and elite competition, 206 and youth movements, 195 contacts with Russian activists, 186 Shaimiev, Mintimir, 154 Shein, Oleg, 150 Shmakov, Mikhail and the Communist Party, 66 Shoigu, Sergei, 134, 140, 156 Shurskov, Aleksandr, 183, 186 Siberian Civic Iniative Support Center, 213 sitsevaia revoliutsiia, 174 Slovakia protest repertoire, 52 Smolensk, 71, 111 Social Democratic Party and Petersburg Civic Opposition, 184 and Sotsprof, 73 Social Insurance Fund, 152 social movements and contention in hybrid regimes, 10 defi nition, 65 Solidarity, 21, 28 and party defection, 164 Soskovets, Oleg, 111 Sotsprof and illegal strikes, 45 and protest, 47 and reform of the labor code, 150 as a measure of union organizing, 85 fall from power, 73 Spain attitudes to protest, 20 authoritarian regime, 31 Spiritual Heritage, 139 St. Petersburg, 140, 167 and channeling, 17980 and coercion, 179 and monetization, 182 and Petersburg Civic Opposition, 18485 and protest, 168, 17678, 179, 180 and strikes, 92 Dissenters March, 186 party registration, 162 preventative arrest, 189 Stalin and hunger strikes, 55 and repression, 188 and resistance, 21

Index
Starodubtsev, Vasilii, 155 state mobilization in democracies, 33 in hybrid regimes, 3132, 20307 in Russia, 7, 3233 Stepashin, Sergei, 94, 124, 133 and regional governors, 134 strikes and center-region bargaining, 7983 and elite competition, 8184 and grievances, 85 and information, 84 and organization, 85 and state mobilization, 7981 comparative data, 4950 implications for strike literature, 11 in advanced industrial economies, 8487 measurement, 8788 patterns in Russia, 6972 wildcat, 86 Stroev, Egor, 91, 110, 113, 250 Surkov, Vladislav and Just Russia, 159 and Moving Together, 195 and the creation of Nashi, 195 Sverdlovsk, 63, 71 Taimyr Autonomous Okrug, 110 Tarkov, Aleksandr, 179 Tatarstan, 109, 110, 111, 126, 140 Almetevsk, 177 Tax Code, 152 teachers and cost of strikes, 53 and seasonal variation in strike patterns, 88 and state mobilization, 181 and strikes, 51 in Altai Krai, 100 in Primorskii Krai, 40, 111 Tikhonov, Vladimir, 155 Titov, Konstantin, 127 Tiulpanov, Vadim, 181, 182 Tiumen, 127 Tolmacheva, Galina, 179 Tomsk wage arrears and strikes, 116 Trudovaia Rossiia protest actions, 47, 63 protest participants, 57 Tuleev, Aman, 140, 154 Turkmenistan, 3 Tuva, 140

Index
Ukraine, 3, 30, 187 and color revolutions, 127, 168, 193, 210 and democratization, 99, 211 and elite competition, 31, 202, 206, 212 and elite splits, 210 and hybrid regimes, 5 and organizational ecology, 29, 218 and youth movements, 195 contacts with Russian activists, 186 Orange Revolution and Russian reaction, 15, 201 Ulianovsk, 110 wage arrears and strikes, 116 Union of Christian Democrats of Russia, 181 Union of Officers, 63 Union of Right Forces and ballot access, 162 and Dissenters March, 167 and monetization protests, 181 protest participants, 57 United Civic Front, 167, 189 United Russia and monetization, 175, 182 and Nashi, 196 and organizational ecology, 165 and protest mobilization, 18082 and the 2007 elections, 196 creation, 156 endorsement by Putin, 157 party of power, 156 United Socialist Party of Russia denied registration, 162 Unity, 134 and Aman Tuleev, 140 and the 1999 elections, 13435, 138, 139, 140 and United Russia, 156 fi rst party conference, 141 predicting the vote for, 140 veksels, 105 Venezuela, 3 and hybrid regimes, 5, 24 and organizational ecology, 205 and state mobilization, 28, 33 high levels of mobilization, 8 Veshniakov, Aleksandr, 161 and the National Bolshevik Party, 185 Veterans of Chernobyl, 28 and protest, 63 Vladivostok and labor unions, 77 and protest marches, 40 Voronezh, 110, 181, 182 wage arrears, 10507 and protest, 108 World Bank, 73, 87, 272 Yakunin, Vladimir and patriotic NGOs, 28 Yaroslavl 63, 98, 110, 111 Yeltsin, Boris and determinants of protest, 37 and Evgenii Primakov, 94, 104 and prime ministers, 94 and the miners, 73 and the Ministry of Labor, 73 demands for resignation, 64 nature of the regime, 6, 15 protest and devaluation, 54 succession and protest, 12628 succession to, 12425 Yeltsin era and the study of protest, 8 Youth Civil Rights Movement, 189 Yugoslavia and color revolutions, 193 and protest, 60 Zapatista uprising, 169 Zurabov, Mikhail, 182, 185 Zvezda and protest, 41 and rail blockade, 54 strike, 111

285