Protests bubble up across Russia in sign of public discontent

Russia is witnessing a spate of sporadic, locally organised popular protests in a sign of profound public dissatisfaction with the authorities, despite sky-high support ratings for President Vladimir Putin over the past year.

Hundreds of people demonstrated in Petrozavodsk, a city near the border with Finland, on Thursday, to demand the resignation of Alexander Khudilainen, the Kremlin-appointed regional governor, after a number of opposition politicians were arrested or prosecuted on what they say are trumped-up corruption charges.

Many of the protests appear to be triggered by local grievances.

More than 2,000 people took to the streets of Novosibirsk, Russia's third-largest city, on Sunday, to demand cultural freedom of expression after the authorities cancelled a performance of the Wagner opera Tannhauser which the Orthodox Church had attacked as offensive to believers.

According to the Institute of Collective Action, a non-governmental group of sociologists which records activism across the country, there has been a clear uptick in unrest over the past few months. They are often small-scale protests over personnel cuts in hospitals, which threaten to undermine the already precarious state of the healthcare system in many regions.

There is little to suggest a contagion that could grow into broader, countrywide political protests. Although tens of thousands of Muscovites joined a march last month condemning the murder of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov - the place where he was shot in central Moscow has also become an unofficial memorial site - his violent death failed to rekindle the broad-based protest movement which shook Moscow in late 2011 and early 2012.

And yet these local protests are a reminder of how quickly the underlying mood can change.

"Since the beginning of the crisis in Ukraine, the social-economic priorities of the population have switched back to survival mode," says Mikhail Dmitriev, an economist and sociologist who predicted the 2012 protests. "But over the past decade, this mood has become highly volatile, and it can swing back very quickly."

After several years of rapid economic growth, Russia's population had begun to focus less on issues of mere economic survival such as wage payments and job security and more on the quality of life issues, such as education, the environment or political representation, according to long-running opinion polls.

This was mirrored by a big shift in patterns of protest, documented in a research paper by Graeme Robertson, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina. Between 1997 and 2000 the majority of protests recorded by the police were strikes about jobs and pay. By the end of the 2000s, 84 per cent of protests were demonstrations as opposed to strikes.

The geopolitical upheaval of the past year seemed to have reversed that trend. Amid patriotic fever following the annexation of Crimea in early 2014, the war in eastern Ukraine and western sanctions, people rallied around Mr Putin and protested less, and when they did, it was largely about the economic crisis gripping the country.

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He says sociological research he conducted over the past two years clearly indicates that there were high levels of discontent in the Russian population in late 2013 over the situation in the economy as well as the general direction in which the country was moving, and that dissatisfaction was just obscured by concern over the Ukraine crisis.

If the Ukraine crisis continues to escalate, Mr Dmitriev expects a worsening of Russia's economic crisis. "Then we are looking at more economically motivated protests as a result," he says.

Next week, the focus will be back on political protests: on April 19, opposition activists are organising a "March for Peace and Freedom", in an attempt to reinvigorate the downbeat opposition movement. Many members of the opposition expect little impact. "Everybody is quarrelling, and nobody really knows what we are demonstrating for," says Marina, a student in Moscow who has been laying flowers at the spot of Mr Nemtsov's murder.

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