Subnational dissent in Russia: constraints and opportunities in a hybrid authoritarian system

Abstract

In the decade following the end of the Soviet Union, a multitude of regional centres of power emerged within the new, severely weakened, Russian state. This allowed regional elites to extract wide-ranging concessions from Moscow, entrench their local power, and indeed play a crucial role in influencing federal politics. In the years following Vladimir Putin’s rise to the presidency a series of reforms, political initiatives, and more favourable economic conditions, have manged to rein in the centrifugal potential of the de facto autonomous regions, turning their leaderships into loyal supporters of the federal State. The efficiency with which federal power is propagated into the lower, local levels of government is frequently referred to as the Kremlin’s “power vertical” and serves today as perhaps the main underpinning of Putin’s authoritarianism. An analysis of the opposition that focuses on dissent near the federal centre is therefore in danger of missing the most promising challenges to State power. Thus, this thesis will study the causes and dynamics of two “local”, seemingly spontaneous manifestations of dissent: the 2019 protests against the construction of a cathedral in a popular Yekaterinburg park, and those that erupted in Khabarovsk after the removal of Governor Furgal in the summer of 2020. The thesis will find that, despite the apparent strength of Putin’s “power vertical”, the Russian regions remain a fertile ground for discontent against State power.