Dysfunctional orders: Russia’s rubbish protests and Putin’s limited access order

ABSTRACT

How do regimes based on limited access orders respond to socially driven discontent? What are the drivers of contentious politics in a state where the authorities assert control over society? This article analyses patterns of protest, repertories, and organization of the “rubbish protests” (musornye protesty) – a phrase coined by the Internet news outlet Zona Media during the Moscow region protests of 2018–2019. The article draws on social movement theories to explain mobilization, framing, and regime repression, and engages with the model of limited access orders to flesh out the specifics of interaction between social protest forces and the Putin regime. Finally, the case is used to tentatively classify the Russian regime as a “dysfunctional” order – where grievance communication and petitioning to the head of state evolves from being an opportunity to being curtailed by bureaucratic red tape and political repression.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental protests
• Russia
• mobilization
• framing
• limited access orders

Introduction

In late December 2016, the Presidential Council for Strategic Development of Russia adopted an action plan called “A Clean Country” (Chistaya strana), which targeted the mounting problem of recycling household waste from Moscow. The government program stipulated the construction of four large-scale incinerator complexes in Moscow Oblast between 2017 and 2025. A massive state investment program would involve the re-cultivation of 1,500 hectares of land from former dumping sites, and a total reduction of household refuse dumped in the Moscow region by 30%. To facilitate this process, the government program proposed establishing “an interactive information system …, to secure the termination of illegal dumping. The system will be based on communication between citizens and public organizations” (Government.ru 2016). If successful, the pilot project would improve the living conditions for some 23 million people in the Moscow region and should be implemented in other regions in the Russian Federation.

Six months later, on 15 June 2017, frustrated citizens from the small town of Balashikha close to the Kuchino dump in the Moscow region aired their grievances in a directly televised transmission with the Russian president. Via direct video link feeding into his “Direct Line” (pryamaya liniya) broadcast, they complained that they were living “in suffocation, pain, and constant nausea,” and were appealing to him as a last resort. Putin admitted that the problem was “a pressing one,” and declared that he would “clean the mess up” (1tv.ru. 2021). At a subsequent government session on 22 June 2017, transmitted by TASS and published on YouTube, he dismissed the mayor of Balashikha, and demanded that the rubbish dump be closed down. Putin reprimanded the local mayor on direct television from a government meeting:

[… Interrupts the local official’s attempt to defend himself] No, you listen [to me], and I will say this so that Vorobiov [governor of Moscow Oblast] gets it too: close this site within a month. The documents needed for this—and I do not want to waste time on preparing minor and insignificant things myself—should be ready in the shortest possible time. (Tass.ru 2017)

The rubbish dump was closed down the next day, and the Moscow regional branch of the Ministry of Ecology posted a video on YouTube, stating that the site would be “reconstructed into an alpine ski resort” (Tass.ru 2017). The stench from Kuchino did not disappear, however; in late 2017, when Putin was inspecting a National Guard exercise at the Kuchino training field, local news sources reported that aerosol devices had been placed around the site, to perfume the air (Newsru.com 2017).

Putin’s alleged clean-up proved to be short-lived and with massive consequences. During the summer of 2017, household waste piled up all over the Moscow region, and existing dumps were utilized to compensate. In the midst of the presidential campaign in February–March 2018, a new wave of mass protests erupted. Following an emission of poisonous gases from the Volokolamsk site in March 2018, some 200 school children were rushed to hospitals, suffering severe respiratory problems (Mediazona 2018b).¹ Despite what seemed to be an ecological catastrophe, the Ministry of Emergency Situations (MChS) did not find sufficient grounds to introduce a state of emergency in the region (Mediazona 2018a) – a fact that fueled anger and frustration in the local population. When the governor of Moscow Oblast, Andrei Vorobiov, visited the region in March 2018 for a “feedback” meeting with the population, he was confronted by incensed locals throwing snowballs and eggs and yelling “fascist” at him (YouTube 2018).

Why did these protest actions erupt? How has sustained collective action been possible over such a long time – and with what consequences? These are the questions that this article seeks to answer. It analyzes the background and effects of the rubbish protests that erupted throughout the Moscow region and Arkhangel’sk from 2018 and onwards. These collective actions have been among the more massive eco-protests in Russia to date, in terms of sustained collective action over time, regional diffusion, and innovative, culturally sensitive framing. From 2018 to 2020, protests spread rapidly, with villagers mobilizing around the massive dump site Yadrovo (Volokolamsk village, Moscow Oblast), Aleksinskii kar’er (Klin), Zavolen’e (Orekhovo-Zuevo), the planned dump site at Shies (Arkhangel’sk), and the Volovichi dump (Kolomna village).

This article fuses two strands of theories – social movement theories and the model on limited access orders (North, Wallis, and Weingast 2013) – to show how these spontaneous protests spurred large-scale police crackdowns on local communities, and revealed a dysfunctional limited access order. The protests have not framed corruption as a primary grievance but seem driven by media investigations that identify this as the core problem, as well as public oversight and open access to government to mitigate grievances. Using the traditional tools of social movement studies, the article traces the eruption of protests, discusses their causes, and categorizes regime violence and retributions to show how the regime partially unsuccessfully, suppressed collective action.² In fact, the resilience shown by protesters and local communities has served as more than a simple “feedback” mechanism: it has revealed the enormous gap between promises and the realities of a dysfunctional limited access order. The major assumption supporting this conclusion is the fact that from 2015 onwards, centrally placed individuals in Putin’s limited access order have been granted hefty state contracts to solve the problem of overfilled garbage dumps around Moscow – and the regime has shown no inclination to cancel these contracts, let alone admit how these serve as lucrative rent-seeking schemes for centrally placed public officials. In the end, massive protests and Putin’s re-election in 2018 coalesced, and media sources revealed how the campaign had direct links to the local governors and siloviki who had been responsible for the emergency situations.

Social mobilization and limited access orders

In contrast to transition theories and theories on hybrid regimes, North, Wallis, and Weingast (2013) argue that all social orders should be studied as if in a certain referential “isolation” and as systems that evolve over time. In addition to following its own path of historical development, every natural state seeks to control violence by “granting privileges and policy benefits to individuals and organizations with violence potential so that they are better off cooperating with one another than fighting” (North, Wallis, and Weingast 2013, xii). Further, through inertia, these limited access orders restrict access to the flow of resources, in order to protect the rent-seeking schemes vital to the balance of the system.

Arguably, this model captures some dominant features of Putinism, as well as its evolution.³ With the recent amendments of the Constitution allowing two new terms for Putin from 2024, the Russian system would appear to replicate what Hale (2015) identified as the core of patronal politics:

[…] a social equilibrium in which individuals organize their political and economic pursuits primarily around the personalized exchange of concrete rewards and punishments, and not primarily around abstract, impersonal principles such as ideological belief or categorizations that include many people one has not actually met in person. (Hale 2015, 20)

But is Putin’s Russia in a “social equilibrium”? Can we expect that social behavior will replicate the norms and standards of a patronal structure? North, Wallis, and Weingast nuance this by holding that a main feature of a limited access order is an elite equilibrium based on personal contacts between elites and an emerging monopoly on violence:

Face-to-face interaction among individuals in small groups created personal knowledge, trust (or distrust), and coordination. The limited access order builds on personal relationships and repeated interaction: a hierarchy of personal relationships among powerful individuals at the top of the social order (North, Wallis, and Weingast 2013, 32).

Since 2000, this interaction has become a central pillar in the Putinite system’s way of organizing domestic economic affairs. The economic order characterized as the obshchak – where a closed network of Putin allies carved up the Yukos company, and thereafter the Gazprom financial giant – is one such aspect (Belton 2020). The financial operations following the take-over of Yukos involved the creation of a “slush fund” for financing the president’s luxury palace in the Caucasus – a kind of personalized state coffer, securing control over rent distributions from the valuable resource sector in Russia (Belton 2020, 319–20). This “Kremlin Inc.” consists largely of a network of former FSB officers, and individuals closely linked to Putin’s political evolution.

However, terming this system a classic “limited access order” involves some caveats. The first problem is that North, Wallis, and Weingast (2013) hold that limited access orders may evolve over time, and – if the order establishes a viable monopoly on violence – develop into an open access order, where interpersonal relations are supplanted by institutional exchanges. This process takes more time than the period of Putin’s reign, and we cannot project its future trajectory. To be sure the transition to an open access order is definitely not in sight. Such an order is based on clear-cut rules of the game, impersonal, legal-based oversight, and transparency – complex institutionalized orders that reflect traditional social structures. One condition is that this order is based on certain fundamental organizations, beliefs, and incentives that support transparency, and a complex, rule-based government, capable of mediating conflict and communicating with public structures and society (North, Wallis, and Weingast 2013, 110–125). Hypothetically, we might assume that in Russia such an order would involve open government structures, an empowered and functional Audit Chamber, functional societal mediation (public chambers), and institutions providing for citizens’ access to initiate legal initiatives, air grievances, and influence political processes. Even if these are established, there are basic uncertainties attached to their functioning and their capacity for pushing Russia towards a more open order.

We may suggest that elite equilibrium is a central prerequisite for securing a transition towards a more open order. This transition is based on elite equilibrium, North, Wallis, and Weingast (2013) hold, but is not driven by it. As they posit, elite equilibrium is maintained by monopolizing the use of violence; the viability of networks depends on this, and – subsequently – that the main arbiter in the system is capable of upholding this order. One aspect of this is to provide access to rents by “granting privileges and policy benefits to individuals and organizations with violence potential so that they are better off cooperating with one another than fighting” (p. xii). But the central issue is controlling violence. “Systematic rent-creation through limited access in a natural state is not simply a method of lining the pockets of the dominant coalition; it is the essential means of controlling violence” (North, Wallis, and Weingast 2013, 17) [my emphasis].

The second problem is linked to the role of society. It follows from the model that as society expands, societal demands will require more complex institutional structures for good governance. These structures evolve alongside society and should – ideally – reflect a mode of organization not alien to that society. This evolution is driven by modernization, which again feeds into public expectations and demands. “Natural states [limited access orders] are stable, but not static” (North, Wallis, and Weingast 2013, 136); with the expectations created by modernization, society will expand as if by default – or: “in larger societies, individual relationships cannot be based solely on personal knowledge and trust; they must be reinforced by the web of interests created by the social order … ” (North, Wallis, and Weingast 2013, 136) – i.e. either institutions, or some sorts of inter-personal interaction that maintain stability.

To summarize: “Putinism” has promised modernization and economic growth, but does it provide social order? Is access for popular grievances provided, and are grievances defused? I offer two counterarguments here, before turning to how the limited access order relates to the problem of social grievances.

First, persistent lack of transparency over processes where elites line their pockets, accompanied by fears of losing control over access to vast resources, has – in the Russian case – led to excessive concentration of power, and a monopoly of power agencies in the hands of the incumbent: Vladimir Putin. The patron may still use his power to enforce order, calling for stability and the upholding of traditional values, thereby maintaining checks on a system deemed advantageous (for want of other alternatives).⁴ At the same time, the patron may be trapped by the system, and his assumed capacity for controlling violence will abate. The myth that Putin holds the power to protect former members of the Yeltsin entourage was crushed by the assassination of Boris Nemtsov in 2015; moreover, since the establishment of the National Guard in 2016 (led by Putin’s erstwhile bodyguard, Viktor Zolotov), the monopoly of violence has been thoroughly personalized: after running as an independent candidate in the 2018 elections, Putin cut all links to party institutions, and since 2012, he has insisted on retaining “the presidential filter” – the right to appoint governors (Aleksashenko 2019, 143). Finally, the 2020 constitutional amendments allowing Putin to run for two new consecutive terms have effectively sidelined all possible limitations on his power. Does this strengthen or weaken control over violence?

Second, while North, Wallis, and Weingast suggest that a limited access order may be based on a parliamentary structure or a presidential one, in the case of Russia, we have a super-presidential system that allows for massive concentration of formal (and informal) powers in the hands of the person that embodies this function. Hale (2015) has theorized extensively over Russia’s system of patronal governance; he finds that “equilibrium” is maintained along two axes – social expectations, and responsiveness to the political order (socially generated expectations that a patron will keep the system in check), and expectations among the elite that the fundamental tenets of the systemic order will be respected. In other words, as long as the main arbiter (the patron) operates within the system’s fundamental, rule-based limitations on power (rent distribution, protection, and the constitutional limitation on sequential presidential terms), stability and equilibrium are upheld. Subsequently, while recognizing the significance of resource distribution, volatile law enforcement, and elite monitoring, Hale argues: “expectations … turn out to be a more fundamental determinant of patrons’ power than either resources or organization,” and concludes, “when clients believe their network is strong, therefore, it is strong” (Hale 2015, 34).

Here I do not assess whether or not the elites believe the system to be strong, but I assume that this depends on the patron’s ability to distribute rents; and – subsequently – that collective protest action may put this order to a serious test. What is needed for analysis are: (a) hypotheses that indicate how a limited access order will handle large-scale social mobilization around a given issue (here: household rubbish); and (b) how this will affect the system’s equilibrium. Below, I offer some points to bridge theoretical assumptions with the empirical material of this article – data from the large-scale mobilization against the construction of a new system for re-cycling the enormous amounts of household waste generated by Moscow. All these points are case-relevant, but possibly transferable to other cases.

• A limited access order may grant popular access to the head of state, but this is done by means of mediated direct communication (the presidential direct line).

• Major tenders in a limited access order will generally follow patterns that are non-transparent, designed to secure a system of more or less equal distribution of rents to the elites embedded in the system’s order (contracts on household waste handling).

• Major tenders will replicate the system’s reliance on personalized communications and subsequent elite expectations to the patron (see above).

• Social mobilization may disrupt a limited access order and lead to chaotic crisis management, buck-passing, and blaming. This may – or may not – affect elite equilibrium, depending the use of violence against contenders.

If social mobilization were to take place in an open access order, a different scenario could be expected. The points below serve as tentative hypotheses and will not be treated in greater detail here, with the exception of what I term the Audit Chamber replay below.

• An open access order would involve citizens in institutions that are capable of mediating grievances and securing transparency in governance.

• Major tenders in an open access order would be rule-based, transparent, and subject to public and parliamentary scrutiny by the Duma, the Audit Chamber, and the courts.

• Social mobilization would be effectively absorbed and mediated by a system of social communication embodied by NGOs and public chambers – not involving arbitrary use of violence against protesters, political repression, or widespread use of extrajudicial persecution, political intimidation, and violent oppression.⁵

In the discussion below, I begin with an empirically based overview of the diffusion of collective action in the rubbish protests of 2017–2020. An event calendar will be used to outline how protests spread, and also how the authorities activated mechanisms of extrajudicial persecution and violent oppression against demonstrators. Symptomatically, these protests were unleashed by the unsolicited direct access for residents of Balashika to Putin in the summer of 2017. This served as a first political opportunity structure for citizens to frame their grievances and entailed a collective action buck-passing process where town-dwellers in the Moscow region mobilized to prevent the construction of new sites in their region, or the utilization of old ones. The authorities cast their eyes on the Shies station in Arkhangel’sk Oblast as a new construction site – not for recycling, but for burying the massive rubbish surplus from Moscow. This spurred a regional crisis: incensed citizens of the North mobilized against Moscow, and the governor of Arkhangel’sk, Igor Orlov, was forced to resign in the summer of 2020.

Next, I analyze how collective action fueled extensive media research on the politico-economic structures behind the household rubbish tenders of 2012–2014, and how the media linked these to the funding of Putin’s 2018 campaign. This section will flesh out the political context of the protests, aligning it with expectations as to how a limited access order is maintained in a period of social unrest and protracted collective action. I rely heavily on media reports, as access to information on these structures is limited. My major hypothesis here is that Putin’s limited access order has faced a dilemma of legitimizing violence against domestic protests that cannot be framed as events of Western influence.

In conclusion, I offer an “open access order” replay – the Audit Chamber’s attempt in autumn 2020 to address the issues of household waste. The element of “replay” is crucial here, as the Audit Chamber had not been involved in the process of checking the tenders; and once it was, Putin’s order seems to have reacted by silencing those who called for the problem to be taken up anew.

A Russian “bunt”: Russia’s rubbish protests in 2017–2020

Collective action is, as observed by Tarrow (2013), deeply cultural, and linked to culturally loaded concepts, ideas, and linguistic constructions. Activists construe stories and narratives about their protest as part of “a broad, dynamic, and interactive repertoire of contention that is both behavioural and discursive” (Tarrow 2013, 16). Subsequently, both framing processes and public resonance are deeply connected with concepts that circulate in a specific linguistic context, and as “signs” derived from a broader cultural context of interpretation. As Tarrow observes, this is not limited to the strategic actions and concepts developed by activists in collective action. Reflecting over “strategic modulation” – the diffusion of concepts from one cultural setting to another – he states:

[…] the durability of contentious language is assisted within a particular setting by a common language, by forms of organization that “remember” it and are organized to repeat its use, and by routines of interaction with public authorities. … In different countries, organizations have different traditions of protest; moreover, police and public authorities are used to dealing with protesters with different routines of facilitation and repression. (Tarrow 2013, 18)

Structurally, the protests may also have been ignited by a very specific “opportunity structure” – that of a mediated petitioning of Russia’s head of state, in his annual media address. However, this structure was not a permanent one: it was a specific occasion to exercise supreme authority and crack down on local elites. Signals were also transmitted to members of the core group of elites. Later, rumors emerged that the closure of the Kuchino site was PR stunt enacted by Putin to ensure that the contract for the government’s four incinerators should go to Rostekh and Putin protégé Sergei Chemezov, Putin’s former boss at the FSB in Dresden, now director of the corporation. Subsequently, Putin’s display of power served as a signal to the government not to meddle with his vision of how future state contracts on incinerator complexes should be distributed (Rukov 2017).

As the protests mounted, culturally specific organizational patterns and frames came to the fore. After the 2017 “access” to the head of state, activists received a mediated “signal” that spurred massive protests, also at sites intended to serve as reserve dumps for the Kuchino site. Kuchino was closed immediately – but within weeks, protests erupted elsewhere where storage capacities were already severely limited. Since 2013, the government had closed down 24 of 39 dumping sites in the Moscow region, resulting in overloads at the remaining 15. Further, an activist reported, the annual amount of rubbish produced by Moscow was estimated at 11.7 million tons; at the 15 dumps, there were more than 70 million tons of household waste (Rodulova 2018). According to some estimates, Kuchino took about 25% of all household rubbish from Moscow; residents were increasingly concerned about where wastes would be dumped in the future.

The overfilled dumps were already at the core of a substantial public health problem. After the closure of Kuchino, the health authorities found that the amount of hydrogen sulfide in the emissions was 625 times higher than health recommendations (Dubrovskii 2017). In what seemed to become a routine disclaimer, the MChS in December 2017 declared that these emissions did not constitute a risk to public health (Novayagazeta.ru 2017). But villagers did not believe the authorities and were not willing to run the risks. In July, villagers at Klin were apprehensive that the Aleksinskii kar’er site would be used to get rid of the surplus. They petitioned Putin directly; and, like the Kuchino villagers, they held public demonstrations and appealed via video footage (Chertkov 2017). Some 3,000 signatures were collected, and activists established Facebook groups (Rukov 2017). Later that summer, fears spread even further. Villagers at Orekhovo-Zuevo were increasingly concerned that authorities would use their site as a reserve dumping site; 43,000 signatures were collected against the excessive dumping at the Zavolen’e site (Baidakova 2017). The Moscow Oblast governor, Andrei Vorobiov, had to back down, and look elsewhere for a solution (Rukov 2017). Grievances were expressed along peaceful lines: residents petitioned the local public chamber and the presidential administration, and made plans to hold demonstrations in the village (Gavrilin 2017).

However, household service companies kept on dumping; in the summer of 2017, the Kulakovskii dump in the Chekhovskii region in Moscow was closed for sanitary violations, and litter piled up outside the site (Rbc.ru 2017b).⁶ In the summer of 2018, illegal dumping resumed at Zavolen’e (Nikitin 2018). The authorities had lost control already in 2017; in August that year, the manager of the enormous Timokhovo site was arrested and charged with massive embezzlement and extortion (Zona.media 2017). The Moscow region was reported as experiencing a “household rubbish collapse” in the summer of 2017 (Rbc.ru 2017a). According to Meduza.io, in 2017, sites that received an annual 1.3 million tons of household refuse had been closed down. Moreover, Meduza.io continued, Moscow produced more than 8 million tons of household waste annually, 4.6 million tons of which were designated for sites in the Moscow region (Golunov 2018). None of the eight companies that had responsibility for deliveries of services disclosed information on where they had dumped the waste, the article concluded.

With the rubbish piling up, protest spread to new sites. In early 2018, residents of Fillipovskoe village in the Vladimir region were alarmed about plans to construct yet another relief dump in an area of ancient forests. After Putin’s Direct Line speech, the local administration had proposed this land (to be sold off at the ridiculous price of 200 rubles per 100 square meters) for a new site, covering 57 hectares and with a capacity of 150,000 tons of rubbish annually (Girin and Sinyakov 2018). Villagers mobilized immediately and threatened the local mayor with a vote of no confidence, thus obliging him to hold a local referendum on the issue. “This is our Stalingrad,” activists stated. Luckily, local experts could prove that the area had strategic significance, as there were huge water reservoirs situated in the region – reservoirs that would be useful in times of war.

Notably, protests were local – not organized by NGOs or eco-activists. True, as opportunities opened up, a migration of eco-activists from Kuchino to other dumping sites started. Anatolii Bashaev, one of the Kuchino activists, flagged that he would open a website for the non-governmental organization Ekosila50 and transfer his knowledge to Yadrovo to help the local population there prevent the widening of the site’s capacity by 600,000 tons (Lenta.ru 2018). If national NGOs were meant to pacify protests and mediate, they had no role, however. In Volokolamsk, close to the mega-sized Yadrovo site, things were already above the boiling point, and NGOs and buffer organizations had no control over local population initiatives and did not serve as intermediaries.⁷ Rather, the gas emissions at Yadrovo in the spring of 2018 served as a rallying call for a massive protest wave, where local initiative groups and citizens organized spontaneously, and mobilized behind a broad protest repertoire, encompassing public demonstrations, collective protest actions (roadblocking, permanent protest camps), and contentious framing. In Kolomna, close to the Volovichi site, citizens also blocked the road for trucks arriving with household rubbish, and police arrested some 30 protesters and organizers (Reprintseva 2018).

The petitions from 2017 were history – now, villagers were furious. The events sparking the rubbish protests in the Moscow region were like a forest fire, ignited by a malfunctioning and corrupt system of household services. With each event, protesters were better organized. In Table 1 below, data from the event calendars of Zona.media and OVD-info are listed to chronicle the eruption of a collective action cycle – these musornye protesty. Villagers had first attempted to pass the buck to other sites, but collective action incidents became more organized during 2017–2018. The spark (which also ignited media reports) was the Volokolamsk incident in the spring of 2018, in the midst of Putin’s presidential campaign.

Table 1. Event calendar for the rubbish protests (2017–2019)

Date	Event	Number of participants
15 June 2017	Citizens of Balashikha complain of nausea and reduced quality of life near the Kuchino site.	200
July–August 2017	Numerous dumps are closed down in the Moscow region, causing volatile dumping of household waste, and new complaints.
3 March 2018	Residents of Volokolamsk (population ca. 20,000) take to the streets to protest against the over-filled Yadrovo dumping site.	5,000
7 March 2018	Oblast authorities introduce state of emergency at Yadrovo.
8 March 2018	Citizens organize blockade of transport routes to Yadrovo. Police authorities arrest demonstrators and employ violence.	20–30
9 March 2018	Police instigate charges against demonstrators.	11
11 March 2018	Police instigate new charges against demonstrators.	10–11
20 March 2018	Local courts re-open Yadrovo and fine the company 150,000 RUR for failing to uphold sanitary standards.
21 March 2018	Approx. 60 adults and schoolchildren seek medical assistance after emissions of poisonous gas from Yadrovo.	60
21 March 2018	Moscow Oblast governor is harangued by activists screaming “fascists” and “killers” at a public meeting outside the hospital.
24 March 2018	Demonstrators hold public meeting in Volokolamsk, demanding that Putin appear. Organizers are arrested.	1,500
25 March 2018	Protests diffuse to Kolomna in Moscow Oblast; activists block the road to the Volovichi site.
28 March 2018	Police arrests three organizers of the Kolomna protests.
30 March 2018	Health authorities find that gas emissions are more than 12 times higher than permitted; MChS still finds no reason to declare a state of emergency in Volokolamsk.
1 April 2018	MVD arrests one organizer of the Volokolamsk protests, Artiem Lyubimov, and activists from “Another Russia”; Lyubimov is put under administrative arrest for 15 days.
4 April 2018	The governor of Moscow Oblast, Vorobiov, announces that he will grant the family of a young girl who made a profane gesture against him an excursion to the Netherlands.
14 April 2018	New massive gas emissions from Yadrovo; residents of Volokolamsk wear gasmasks and hold new meetings to counter increasing police violence. Demonstrators hail Andrei Zhdanov, who spent 14 days in solitary confinement (SIZO) for obstructing traffic.
June 2018	The Moscow region Audit Chamber and local governor Vorobiov initiate a case against the operator of the Kuchino site, demanding that he pay 6.3 billion rubles for ecological damages.
June 2018	The regional administration in Volokolamsk files a complaint with the Moscow region Audit Chamber, demanding that Yadrovo be closed; the request is dismissed.
28 July 2018	Activists in Arkhangel’sk learn that a massive dumping site will be bult at the Shies railway juncture in Arkhangel’sk Oblast. The first construction workers arrive 31 July; 5,000 hectares of forest are to be cut down.
26 August 2018	Eco-activists hold the first collective action meeting at Urdom village, under the slogan “hands off Shies” (ruki proch’ ot Shiesa)	1,500
7 October 2018	Villagers at Urdom set up commemoration cross to protect the forest areas around Shies; local police call action “political extremism.”
18 October 2018	Arkhangel’sk governor Igor Orlov confirms publicly that the Shies will be built; the contract is for 20 years, at an estimated 10.5 billion rubles.
20 October 2018	The first protests in Arkhangel’sk and Severodvinsk take place; on 21 October, activists in Komi block the road for trucks transporting construction material to the site.	300
24 October 2018	Protesters in Arkhangel’sk register a demand for holding a referendum on Shies; the slogan “The Arctic North is not a rubbish dump” (Pomor’e ne svalka) is launched.
28 October 2018	Protests spread to Severodvinsk, where 400 people demonstrate against a new rubbish site close to the city.	400
July 2019	Violence erupts between protesters and OMON police in Orekhovo-Zuevo over the construction of a new dumping site.
9 January 2020	An Arkhangel’sk court rules the start-up of construction works at Shies as illegal as analyses of potential environmental damages to subsoil and surroundings had not been conducted; eco-activists celebrate with fireworks.

Sources: (Stopshies.ru 2020b; Znak.com 2020; Zona.media 2020).

Framing and repertoires: regime and protesters

As the event calendar indicates, collective action started with the closure of the Kuchino site. It ended with massive protest actions all over the Moscow region – and in the Russian Arctic. As soon as activists learned that the Moscow problem would be “solved” by constructing a massive dumping site at the Shies railroad juncture in the Arkhangel’sk region, the slogan “The Arctic North is not a Rubbish Dump” (Pomor’e ne pomoika) was distributed widely, and a site with the name was set up in VKontakte, under the headline “liberate our precious Arctic from the rubbish-mafia!” (VKontakte 2018).

The chronology indicates that the Moscow region authorities had no way of solving the massive problem than to re-direct it out of the region. In the more ecologically minded North, however, they met fierce and well-organized resistance. Activists employed a broad repertoire of action derived from the Volokolamsk events, evolving from petitions and the expression of grievances, to road blockades, setting up permanent camps to protect sites, and separate news channels that covered central developments. Protesters were especially innovative in finding new outlets for protests, and framing strategies. Widely used were bessrochka – permanent, peaceful protests and citizen awareness campaigns designed to protest against “officials that have no intention of listening to the will of the people” (Stopshies.ru 2020a). Using the stopshies.ru site as an informational hub, activists launched an interactive map, where the VKontakte sites of all related collective actions were available.

Already in the opening phase of the process, activists and local journalists realized that they were running out of time, and that the local authorities were spreading blatant lies in public. The governor of Arkhangel’sk, Igor Orlov, kept telling local residents and the Arkhangel’sk regional legislature that the Shies site would be a modernized site for waste recycling, but journalists rebuked these claims. As one Arkhangel’sk journalist wrote:

[…] re-cycling means massive and time-demanding financial investments. Households should also have a possibility to be trained in sorting waste before it is carried out of the apartments. If we are to follow civilized countries, it will take decades. Although some people have managed to learn this in the last couple of years, they are rare exceptions to the rule. And Moscow has not had time for it. They have to clean the capital of surplus litter piles immediately. (Kuleshov 2018)

The sense of urgency made activists react quickly, and protest frames went straight to the core of the problem: Moscow wanted to use the forests of Shies to bury an unpleasant problem – surplus rubbish from the Moscow region. A Meduza.io article confirmed this, disclosing that waste would not be incinerated at the site, but simply buried, without prior sorting (Golunov 2018).⁸

Villagers and activists were protesting with two objectives in mind: to have their local dumps closed, and to prevent the construction of new sites or the expansion of existing ones. Whatever objectives protesters might have had, the regime’s repertoire was a familiar one – administrative arrests, fines and select violence – but sometimes, the authorities yielded to local demands. In the summer of 2019, police used excessive violence against protesters at Orekhovo-Zuevo in the Moscow region, where one of the major contractors for household services – the company Khartiya, of which Igor Chaika owned 60% – planned to construct a new site (Raspopov 2019). Residents of small villages of the Moscow region were resolute, but they had fewer ways of making their protest visible. Elsewhere, the authorities tried to emerge victorious. Later in 2019, the 25^th rubbish dump to be shut down was in the village of Klin, where the Volovichi site had been operative since 1990, receiving some 2.3 million tons of household waste from Moscow (Interfax.ru 2019).

However, Moscow could not subdue Arkhangel’sk; the Shies campaign was highly sophisticated and well organized. For instance, adapting crowd-sourcing techniques from sites like OVD-info, Shies activists collected data on persons who had been arrested or fined and posted the information on the Stopshies site. The data collected by Stopshies in 2019 revealed that 87 persons had been fined a total of 2.3 million rubles (USD 29,000) for various violations. The most frequent charge was that of organizing mass protests without official approval (Article 20.2.2 in the administrative codex), which concerned violations in “the organization of mass events and/or movements of citizens at public places that lead to a violation of public order.” Other violations of Article 1.19.3 in the administrative codex pertained to civil disobedience: resisting orders from the police (Stopshies 2020a).

Protests were peaceful, and local politicians also used inter-regional forums to adopt resolutions against the illegal dumping of Moscow litter at Shies. In November 2018, 27 deputies from 12 municipalities in southern Arkhangel’sk Oblast adopted a resolution demanding an immediate halt to all imports of rubbish from other regions in the Federation (Kotlas-info 2018). Protesters also organized a “Day of Protest” (edinyi den’ protesta) on 2 December 2018, echoing the official “Day of Elections” institutionalized by the Duma. The event gathered more than 5,000 protesters; on 22 December 2018, a permanent protest camp was established at Shies, to monitor construction work.

Protesters used multimedia outlets to provide information about major collective action events. One such event was a mass meeting in Arkhangel’sk on 3 February 2019, attended by some 10,000 people. An hour-long YouTube video captured the sense of frustration that was driving residents to the streets. An older woman stated bluntly that the actions of the authorities had “insulted my dignity as a citizen of Arkhangel’sk,” by not giving the demonstrators a possibility to present their demands in the center: “but we have still come out, because we are citizens of Arkhangel’sk,” she declared.

[…] we pride ourselves on being citizens of Arkhangel’sk. And the fact that the authorities blatantly reveal their ignorance, their lack of respect and love for the people, the citizens, is simply appalling. (Sotavision 2019)

Others referred to governor Igor Orlov as a person “without a residence permit” (propiska) – an alien from Kaliningrad, with no connections to Arkhangel’sk.⁹ “We are Northerners,” they insisted; “we have always been free, women have had a special position here, and we have never had serfdom” (Sotavision 2019). And the northerners were resilient. In 2019, the Stopshies campaign held seven demonstrations, attracting over 3,000 demonstrators. These were in Arkhangel’sk and Severodvinsk, but were tightly coordinated with local communities in the oblast. When regime control tightened in the spring of 2019, the campaign declared the start of a permanent campaign of civil disobedience (bessrochka) at a collective action meeting in Arkhangel’sk and Severodvinsk in April. Police responded by sealing off the permanent camp at Shies; throughout the summer, police used excessive violence to break up peaceful citizen protests at the site.

As in all contentious protest cycles, instances of violence occurred. Table 2 summarizes information collected from OVD-info, Mediazona, and Rosbalt.ru, covering 264 news events involving regime action against eco-protesters, from January 2017 until March 2020. Four variables are categorized as coercive violence/regime repertoire, and one as “major protest events” – collective action events with more than 50 participants.

Table 2. Regime repression and protest events (2017–2020)

Arrests	Violence	Raids	Intimidation/fines	Major protest events
72	21	11	75	36

In addition to punishing select activists, police and MVD forces concentrated on preventing viable alliances between regional protests, and between protesters and representatives of the non-systemic opposition. In March 2018, Kseniya Sobchak, by many seen as the “preferred Kremlin candidate” from the opposition, made an appearance at a spontaneous meeting in Volokolamsk which attracted some 4,000 villagers (Bryzgalova 2018). Riding on the protest wave, Sobchak demanded that Vorobiov should be fired, but in her speech, she admitted that she had taken seriously the words of the president (Putin) that Yadrovo should be closed; “they will continue to lie” – she stated – ”unless you change the rules of the game” (Dozhd’ 2018). However, in December 2018, one of her allies, Dmitrii Gudkov, could report that he had been warned against continuing his work on shedding light on the structures behind the Volokolamsk scandal (Fn-volga.ru 2018). Rubbish-handling was big business, his contacts claimed – worth more than 150 billion rubles – and the security structures (siloviki) had secured carte blanche to handle it. Symptomatically, in August 2019, Vedomosti.ru could report that Yadrovo had a new owner – the nephew of Aleksandr Bortnikov, head of the FSB under Yeltsin (Mereminskaya and Nikolskii 2019).

Regime repression notwithstanding, protests continued, reaching a preliminary peak in 2020. On 16 March 2020, activists at various places in the Russian Federation gathered to mark the “Day of Ecological Protests” – again, an allusion to the “Day of Elections” introduced by the authorities. The protest wave that was ignited by the Pomor’e protests, and Shies, had given greater impetus to what Novayagazeta.ru referred to as the regional eco-protest wave (Britskaya 2020b). The newspaper noted that the repertoire had broadened: eco-protesters had started a new bessrochka – collective action events involving small-scale marches, single-pickets, marches and camps with volunteers, organizing events at construction sites, or assisting with legal aid and funding, and they united more than 40 cities in Russia.

As noted by Novayagazeta.ru’, these events marked a new turn in the struggle against the mega-dumps, one driven by “love for one’s homeplace; for the black earth, the marshes, the tundra and the taiga” (Britskaya 2020b). In Arkhangel’sk, some 2,000 demonstrators were allotted a place outside the center to demonstrate (the center was occupied by people marking the anniversary of the “Crimea spring”); 3,000 gathered in Severodvinsk, 4,000 in Kotlas, and approximately 1,000 in Urdom (Britskaya 2020b). Framings echoed the ongoing process of allowing Putin endless presidential terms; one held that the authorities should “nullify the construction of Shies,” echoing a similar frame used in Moscow, where eco-activists maintained that “nature should not be nullified” – a tacit reference to the annulment of Putin’s earlier presidential terms. A local Arkhangel’sk music group calling themselves “Orlov’s tears” (slezy Orlova) – again, a frame referring tacitly to Putin shedding tears upon his re-election in 2012 – held that the governor should be put in jail.

By 2020, the ecological protest movement had attained all the characteristics of “WUNC” – worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment (Tilly 2006, 53–54). To some extent, their repertoires aligned with a limited access order. At first, appeals were directed directly to the head of state – Vladimir Putin – and their content was that of traditional Russian petitioning, not blaming and shaming. Thus, instead of following the traditional scale of action indicated in the social movement literature – the move from “the balcony to the barricades” (Corrigall-Browne 2012) – or from diagnostic framing to motivational action framing in contentious collective action, Russian activists developed strategies for bypassing local bureaucrats, appealing directly to the central authorities, or even the head of state. Subsequently, as Sveta Klimova notes, their message was one directed at receiving response: “petitioning is a communicative act … but protesters may write a petition in order to communicate a demand, or [my emphasis] to seek protection from higher authorities” (Klimova 2005, 106).

But the protests were met with violence and ignorance. Although the Shies protests led to the departure of Orlov in the summer of 2020, the regime has effectively blocked the politicization of the movement and continued its pressure on activists and outlets. In the summer of 2019, the procurator’s office announced that it had found “extremist information” on the StopShies site, and demanded that the site be closed down (Mediazona 2019). Moreover, attempts to create linkages to political parties were thwarted. In the summer of 2020, the StopShies movement and the local Yabloko Party nominated Oleg Mandrykin as their candidate in the upcoming elections, but in August 2020, the local electoral commission annulled his candidacy, alleging invalid signatures (Britskaya 2020a). Although the movement had failed to secure political representation, it had at least opened a door for the media to dig deeper into the nature of Putin’s limited access order. Protests concerning the funding linked Putin’s campaign to donations from elite groups deeply involved with the handling of rubbish in the Moscow region.

A limited access order and the rubbish protests: the political context

In 2018, when the protests in Volokolamsk peaked, Novayagazeta.ru published an article putting the problem in clear terms: “the political crisis around Yadrovo emerged as a consequence of the fight for state funds, and it has spilled over to become a fight for power” (Sukhotin 2018). As protests spread, journalists started to investigate the financial structures of big politics: the re-election funding of Putin himself.

Initially, the regime’s approach to dealing with the problem developed along the lines of a limited access order: to preserve equilibrium by securing more even rent distribution (state contracts) among bidders (leading elite clusters). After the re-election of Sergei Sobyanin as mayor of Moscow in 2013, the Moscow government had contracted household service companies for more than 140 billion rubles, and many of these were owned by protégés of centrally placed individuals in Putin’s limited access order. Drawing on a Foundation for Fighting Corruption (FBK) post published in 2015, Rbc.ru could reveal that the tender totalled 142 billion rubles, with 15-year contracts awarded to several companies owned by central Putin protégés – including the Khartiya Company, with links to Igor Chaika, the son of the Procurator General, Yurii Chaika (Golunov and Napalkova 2015).

Thus, Chaika’s patronage network, with its massive powers to press charges against any given individual, was directly involved in what was becoming the most lucrative business in the Moscow region – household services. In 2012, the Khartiya company was registered with a meager 10,000 rubles in start-up funding: by 2015, it was a multi-billion company. As Rbc.ru stated, in the course of the years 2012–2015, Chaika-affiliated companies had won tenders in the Moscow region for more than 50 billion rubles (Golunov and Napalkova 2015).¹⁰ Rbc.ru journalists identified other central figures in patronage networks as well. Contracts had been given to the company Ekoline, owned by the son of the former Minister of Transport, Sergei Frank – Gleb Frank, who also happened to be the son-in-law of Putin’s long-time oil-trader, Gennadii Timchenko, a central figure behind Bank Rossiya’s takeover of Gazprom, and also Putin’s right-hand man in some murky privatization businesses from the St. Petersburg period (Belton 2020).

The first round of tenders from 2012–2014 was followed by a second, where seven companies competed for supplying services in the Moscow region. The tender was closed in the spring of 2018, won by the Rostekh company of Sergey Chemezov and the Khartiya of Igor Chaika (Lyauv and Bryzgalova 2018). This involved a 10-year contract totalling 191 billion rubles; companies were to replace over 300 smaller companies that had operated in the region. Subsequently, in the course of 2018, Chemezov’s Rostekh had positioned itself to control rubbish-handling in the Moscow region as well as the construction of incinerator complexes elsewhere in the Russian Federation. Fronting this ambition was Andrey Shipelov, the director of RT-invest – a businessman “without a track record,” according to Vedomosti.ru (Lyauv 2018). However, Shipelov had business connections to the Rotenberg brothers, and had won a contract for operating the Platon road-toll system, apparently without a tender – a fact he dismissed by saying that “if it hadn’t been for Platon, foreign companies would have collected road tolls for the utilization of Russian roads” (Lyauv 2018).¹¹

Thus, the networks behind contractors involved in the expanding house and utility services were deeply embroiled in the patronage rentier-networks of Putin’s limited access order. This was in line with the assumption that natural states “create a pattern of interlocking economic, religious, and social interests that provide powerful individuals with incentives not to use violence … Rent-creation combines with the internal structure of organizations within the dominant coalition to limit violence in a natural state” (North, Wallis, and Weingast 2013, 258). However, coercion, arbitrary arrests, and extrajudicial persecution against demonstrators were rampant throughout the protest cycle, and the companies did not act in the interests of social movements. Indeed, as Putin’s re-election campaign approached, investigative journalists could disclose economic ties that also implicated the head of state – as with the Volokolamsk protests that rocked the Moscow region.

On 14 December 2017, the day after Aleksei Naval’nyi was denied registration as an independent candidate, Putin announced at his annual press conference that he would run independently, and with the financial support of 22 allegedly non-commercial funds linked to United Russia. A total of 400 million rubles served as his campaign base. These 22 funds had been registered as belonging to United Russia in 2015, but by 2018 had been re-registered as “funds for regional developments.” As Meduza.io revealed, many of these funds had received massive revenues from 2015 to 2018, mainly through state contracts (Shleinov 2018). In 2016, GOLOS and Transparency International (TI) – both labeled “foreign agents” from 2014/2015 – delivered a report showing that 80 of 90 companies surveyed had strong connections to United Russia, and several had received enormous state contracts. Examples included the Perm’ Factory for Silicate Panels, owned by Nikolai Demkin, a secretary of the regional branch of United Russia. In 2016 it had contracted building projects for 800 million rubles of a total of 2 billion rubles allocated for construction of housing complexes in Perm’ (Chizhova and Lyubov’ 2016). A Moscow-based company, “Monarkh,” had donated 20 million rubles to United Russia in 2015–2016, thereafter contracting state-funded projects for over 5 billion rubles. Transparency International concluded that the bulk of the funds for regional developments surveyed were created for one purpose only: to collect and re-direct state funding to local United Russia electoral campaigns. Stanislav Andreichuk, a regional TI official, indicated that the regional development funds functioned as a non-transparent layer (prokladka) between the sponsors of the electoral campaigns and the individuals who received funding (Krutov 2016).

Re-directing regional funds to serve as campaign funding was often used for regional United Russia campaigns; in 2018, this was employed in Putin’s campaign. Although presented as a non-partisan campaign, it drew heavily on the funding of re-labeled proxy United Russia funds, and the structure of using “development funds” to funnel campaign funding was replicated in a complex scheme. Drawing on research from the Center for the Investigation of Corruption and Organized Crime (OSSRP), Meduza.io found that the main “umbrella” for Putin’s re-election campaign in 2018, the National Fund for Regional Cooperation and Development (NFPR), had formerly been a support fund for United Russia. While the fund had contributed only 2 million rubles to the 2018 Putin campaign, Meduza.io disclosed that the fund’s contact telephone number had formerly belonged to the governor of Moscow Oblast, Andrei Vorobiov, once also known as a protégé of the Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu (Shleinov 2018). The linkage seemed obvious, as Meduza.io could reveal that Vorobiov had crossed paths with Shoigu at an early stage in his career, and moved on to develop a massive United Russia fund:

[…] in 2000, Andrei Vorobiov left business for politics. At first, he became an assistant to Shoigu [then deputy prime minister, later minister of emergency situations], and for five years, he led the support fund to United Russia (known as NFPR). (Shleinov 2018)

With rubbish dumps in the Moscow region overfilled, and villagers suffering from poisonous gas emissions, Vorobiov was among the main donors to Putin’s re-election campaign – all while being responsible for communicating with victims of the Volokolamsk incident. The only mechanism for tentatively pacifying town-dwellers was the use of coercive mechanisms, or selective payoffs. The media situation was totally out of control. Residents with smartphones filmed the incident of Vorobiov’s “mediation” with Volokolamsk citizens and posted this on YouTube and other channels. The Moscow region governor was reprimanded; a young girl made a rude gesture at him, and the governor was sent off in a cascade of snowballs and abusive terminology (Grishin 2020). Later on, he tried to gloss over the public humiliation by offering the girl and her family a “trip to the Netherlands” (Svoboda.org 2018). That did not pacify protesters into subordination, however, and the regime sought to re-direct the problem northward to Arkhangel’sk and Shies.

The protests in the Moscow region had hit the regime at a critical juncture – the re-election of Putin. But the major social patterns of political preferences were not changed. Elderly citizens of Volokolamsk exclaimed, “we are not against Putin; on the contrary – we attach our hopes to him” (Zotova 2018). In what sense then, did the protests represent a direct challenge to the limited access order of Putinism? Primarily by providing grounds for massive media framing of the events, and also, the economic structures causing them to happen. While the Putin order was not challenged, citizens did make use of the mechanisms for feedback that the order provided, making it more difficult for regional elites to handle protests. In this perspective, the regional funds and donations to Putin’s campaign may have served to buffer the wrath of the people and uphold the image of the supreme leader.

On the other hand, the unruliness of popular protests has had consequences for the power vertical, with the dismissal of the Arkhangel’sk governor, Igor Orlov, and the public assailing of the Moscow Oblast governor, Andrei Vorobiov. In the upshot, the protests fueled investigative journalism, with public exposure of closed economic and political elite networks in a krugovaya poruka – a circle of collective responsibility for public mismanagement. The rubbish handling was clearly not the work of an open access order, and the attempts that were made to address the issue in public institutions only confirmed the regime’s impunity.

Conclusion: the prevalence of the limited access order

This article has argued that Putin’s order displays all the characteristics of a dysfunctional limited access order. The dysfunctionalities of this order have been put on display as collective action in the protests has diffused – and, subsequently, as central law enforcement agencies have been employed harshly against protest camps and demonstrations, creating a vicious circle of reinforced distrust in local authorities and Moscow. Citizens seem to engage in framing processes unique to the Russian case: they have not drawn on Western scripts for collective action. The spark is the regime’s version of “access”; and the target is the underlying system of economic rent distribution. This version of Russian collective action has proven more challenging for the regime than alleged Western-sponsored civil society activity. The growing amounts of rubbish produced by the modernizing exhibition window of Moscow are suffocating nearby communities. And in Putin’s Russia, rubbish handling means big money.

This article had assumed that an open access order would address this issue directly, but has not provided evidence of this. However, the issue has been revisited and tentatively addressed in one of Russia’s major institutions for public oversight – the Audit Chamber, headed by former Minister of Finance, Aleksei Kudrin. The Audit Chamber remains – at least pro forma – the main institution for oversight over budgetary matters and over budgetary laws (Noble 2019). Although the Chamber played no visible role in the tenders of 2012–2014, it came to the fore later. In October 2020, the head of the Audit Chamber, Mikhail Men’ – son of the liberal Orthodox priest, Aleksandr Men’, who was brutally murdered in 1990 – lamented that the problem would continue to shake the foundations of social stability in the Moscow and Arkhangel’sk regions: “only 7% of the rubbish is utilized; 90% is still dumped at the sites,” he stated, and termed the situation “critical” (Kozlova 2020). Within days, he was dismissed from his post, charged with embezzlement (Pertsev and Rustamova 2020).

This confirms that public criticism of rubbish-handling is not tolerated and risky, and that state oversight agencies have limited oversight into informal siloviki structures around Russia’s president. Indeed, as of 2019, Rostekh, led by Victor Chemezov, holds a near monopoly on the construction of incinerator complexes in Russia, and in December of that year, Chemezov was adamant that the country needed 25–30 such new complexes in the years to come (Podobedova and Kalyukov 2019). The creation of a new state supervising organ called Rosmusor in 2019 has not altered this reality, and although the Russian political scientist Ekaterina Shulman has described it as a ministry of some sorts, and one with potential normative powers, she also noted that it too stood the risk of becoming yet another profitable state agency with its own board of directors, income, and business priorities (Shies.rf 2019) . In fact, when asked by Rbc.ru whether this new coordinating organ would introduce tenders that made monopolies like Rostekh’s less prevalent, the new head of this state organ, Igor Gudkov, remarked that this was not a priority. Moreover, media have already established the fact that Gudkov and the Rotenberg brothers have had close career connections (Podobedova and Dzyadko 2020).

This fact points to the prevalence of Putin’s order, and not necessarily to immediate problems in maintaining elite equilibrium. However, as collective action has revealed the massive mistreatment of government contracts, public corruption and rubbish-overloads appear set to continue to shake the foundations of the Putinite system, revealing also its structural limitations. Attempts to shift the problem out into the open, through the mediation of institutions that might balance the murky trades of contracts and wastes, have failed. The regional authorities have replicated a policy derived from practices of a limited access order – granting select privileges to residents hard-hit by the eco-catastrophe. For instance, in early 2020, the Moscow Oblast governor promised that all villagers within a 5 km radius of Yadrovo would be exempt from paying for utilities and housing services for 2020 – they would have their household waste removed for free (Astafurova 2020).

These select incentives and co-optations describe the irony of it all: Moscow produces enormous amounts of household waste, and Men’s “crime” was that he stated what was evident to all: large sums of money from state coffers were being distributed to a closed patronage network of utility service providers – with no visible results for the citizenry, and no public oversight.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Norges Forskningsråd [288428].

Notes

1. According to local medical authorities, during 21–29 March 2018 more than 500 residents appealed to the hospitals for medical assistance (418 children and 101 adults).

2. Since 2011, Russian media sources have provided excellent event calendars over protests. This article draws on a corpus of texts (news items) collected from OVD-info, Zona Media, and Novayagazeta.ru, as well as material posted on social media sites on the internet (YouTube and Russian-language sources). These provide unique Russian-language event chronologies, with valuable statistical information on police raids, crackdowns, and regime-initiated violence.

3. Some central events are milestones in building this order. After the havoc of the Yeltsin period, Putin initiated a state-saving military campaign in the early 2000s that involved using unconstrained power to impose a monopoly on violence. The Chechen campaign demonstrated what was to be understood as a campaign to counteract the disunity of the state. Putin employed excessive force in a struggle against what state organs labeled “terrorism,” and his popularity soared (Pain 2001). In the following years, the security sector was revamped and brought under strict control of the executive (Taylor 2011). The redistribution of rents derived from the hydrocarbon industry, illustrated by the ouster of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003, and the subsequent re-distribution of control over his assets from 2004 and onwards, sealed the fate of the new Russian oligarchy. It could not but accept the terms of Putin order: either subordinate or face the consequences.

4. Since 2014, the Putin order has demonstrated this monopoly by launching highly publicized “signal trials” against contravening elites. Most dramatic were the cases raised against the former Minister of Economic Development, Aleksei Ulyukaev, and the former Minister of Open Government, Mikhail Abyzov. Both of these can be associated with attempts to create a more open government system. Ulyukaev was sentenced to eight years in a labor colony for “accepting” a bribe from Putin’s right-hand chekist, Igor Sechin. He was probably framed, and Sechin – unsurprisingly – was never charged. The case against Abyzov, who was behind the Open Government portfolio in Medvedev’s government, is still pending.

5. These terms are categorized and defined by OVD-info as vnesudebnoe presledovanie and politpressing (see Ovdinfo.org 2014).

6. This was documented by local villagers on VKontakte (VKontakte 2017) .

7. In a later YouTube video, Bashaev, who apparently had some contacts with higher officials, tried to explain why he had been given such an attractive office. He argued it was quite “attractive” to be an eco-activist, and that he had made some 230 trips to various rubbish sites in 2018.

8. The author of this article, Ivan Golunov, was arrested in June 2019, only nine months after its publication.

9. Orlov was originally from Debal’tsevo in Ukraine, but from 2008 served as deputy director of the shipyard Yantar’. The activists’ claims were not accurate, however. Orlov spent the years 1994–2008 in Severodvinsk at the strategically important Zviozdochka shipyard.

10. Igor’ Chaika was also connected to Moscow Oblast governor Andrei Vorobiov, having served as his advisor on culture and sports in 2014.

11. Shipelov actually claimed that the road system was critical infrastructure, and that Russia could not permit foreign technology to register and operate a taxation system on the country’s critical transport infrastructure, with military vehicles passing regularly. He told this to his protégé, and obtained the contract.