14 December 2011: free elections protest in Moscow. CC misha maslennikov / Flickr. Some rights reserved.On 4 December 2011, Russia voted in nationwide legislative elections. But as the results came in over the next 24 hours, so did dozens, then hundreds of reports of fraudulent activities at polling stations. The next evening, several thousand people gathered at Moscow’s Chistye Prudy metro station for a meeting against electoral fraud. People present shouted “This is our city!” and “We will win!” in a call-and-response with opposition leaders, presenting the world with the first images of a distinctly different Russian protest.
These demonstrations, as well as the public discussions that accompanied them, catalysed pre-existing opposition activity in Russia, giving birth to protest movements across the country — often city-focused, and with links to environmental and local-issues groups. Though the numbers of attendees were hotly debated, the mass protests and actions that emerged in Moscow (the March of the Millions) dominated the news for months before eventually faltering through inertia and state-targeted repression. On Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square, the events of 6 May 2012, the inauguration of president Vladimir Putin, set off a chain of arrests, interrogations and jail sentences that continue to this day.
Five years on, the idea of an independent mass political protest in Russia seems a distant (if not entirely unthinkable) prospect. Reading social media and the slogans at recent protests, at least, it is unclear whether the hardening of anti-state sentiment suggests future activity on the scale of 2011-2013. Meanwhile, “social” protest, that is, protests directed at clear aims such as unpaid wages (at official measurements, 3.6 billion roubles), city planning conflicts or infrastructure problems are on the rise.
