Environmental Protest in Russia Again a Seedbed of Political Opposition
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Executive Summary:
- Nominally “apolitical” ecological protests are becoming seedbeds of political activism in Russia because of the importance of the environment to Russian citizens and Moscow’s clumsy approach to its maintenance.
- The Vladimir Putin regime is increasingly aware of the threat posed by environmental activism and is attempting to buy off activists, an approach that is unlikely to be more successful than its use of repression.
- Politicization of the environmental movement is likely to grow and may prove a more important agent of change in Russia than more explicitly political movements.
Both the Vladimir Putin regime and the Russian people have traditionally divided protests into two categories, political and apolitical. The first includes those that explicitly challenge the regime, against which the Kremlin typically successfully cracks down. The second is about issues such as environmental damage, which includes actions the regime does not like but has declared non-political and thus reacts against with less force. Participation in apolitical protests is less dangerous and therefore attracts larger crowds, though it rarely attracts the same degree of attention. The problem for the regime, as events at the end of Soviet times demonstrated and as the current government is beginning to recognize, is that environmental protests can become a powerful political threat to the regime. The classic example of this was the anti-phosphate and anti-shale oil protests in Estonia from 1987–1988, which the Estonians referred to as “wars,” which helped power the rise of the independence movement there (Region Expert, January 28, 2019; Estonian Public Broadcasting, May 23, 2024). Now, in places such as Shiyes and Bashkortostan, a similar process appears to be underway, in which nominally apolitical protests about environmental issues are becoming political. This process is growing in speed and intensity, not only because environmental disasters are becoming more frequent but because blanket, intensifying Kremlin repression is destroying the earlier distinction between the two categories of protests (Window on Eurasia, November 4, 2020). This process of politicizing environmental protests under Putin has not attracted much attention, but it may ultimately prove, as it did in Mikhail Gorbachev’s time, more significant in bringing political change to Russia than explicitly political movements.
The current scope of environmental activism in the Russian Federation is considerable. During 2024, there were some 300 protests in over 40 regions outside of the capitals. Protests were typically about local issues, most often about government and business activities threatening the environment or ignoring local concerns about land use (Horizontal Russia, December 23, 2024). These protests have continued to grow despite increasing government repression because environmental issues attract widespread public support and are difficult for the government to attack. Moreover, regional officials often find it easier to compromise on environmental and urban planning issues than on political questions, so environmental protests can be more effective (Kedr Media, April 1; The Insider, April 2). When the regime does crack down on environmental protests, the population typically supports the activists against the regime, politicizing the issue further. Environmental leaders then have the potential to become political ones and pose a challenge to the regime, most notably in the regions around Shiyes, the Komi Republic, within the last decade, and more recently in Bashkortostan.
The most dramatic example of how environmental activism can become political and challenge the government has been in the Komi Republic, where residents organized to block the opening of a landfill for Moscow’s waste (Window on Eurasia, June 20, July 6, 2019). Opposition to the landfill mobilized the population and led them to vote against Putin and his constitutional amendments as well as resist the Kremlin’s draft. Most importantly, because Oleg Mikhaylov, a Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) deputy in the regional parliament, was closely involved, these protests led to the formation of an essentially regionalist party (The Moscow Times, March 15; Region Expert, March 17). Mikhaylov denounced Moscow’s plans as “a colonial policy” and his party faction organized protests from across the political system, putting itself at odds with both KPRF leaders in Moscow and the Kremlin. Mikhaylov became so popular through his anti-landfill advocacy, however, that the KPRF was forced to nominate him as a candidate for the Duma, a position he won in 2021.
When Mikhaylov was elected to the Duma, he was replaced as head of the KPRF faction in the Komi Republic assembly by Viktor Vorobyov, a lawyer and rights activist who was not even a member of the KPRF (Region Expert, March 17). Vorobyov denounced Putin’s war against Ukraine and the government’s closure of Memorial, a prominent human rights organization, and backed more rights for the federal subjects and a new Scandinavian-style republic flag. For his outspokenness, Moscow labeled Vorobyov a foreign agent and forced him to resign from the Komi legislature by passing a law barring foreign agents from serving in government. He was then replaced by Nikolay Udoratin, who was also part of the Shiyes protests and is as reformist as his predecessors. Environmental activism in Komi led to the emergence of a kind of regionalist party in all but name. Similar regional movements are emerging elsewhere in Russia and suggest potential for true federalism rather than neo-imperialism in a post-Putin Russia (Window on Eurasia, October 15, 2019).
The most prominent of these other politicized environmental protests are occurring in Bashkortostan. There, protests against plans by a Russian corporation to destroy a mountain sacred to the Bashkirs to extract minerals sparked massive protests (Window on Eurasia, January 21, 26, 2024). The Kremlin’s harsh response, with hundreds of arrests and trials that continue to this day, radicalized many Bashkirs and boosted the national movement there (see EDM, February 8, 27, 2024). Putin’s repression in Bashkortostan is creating a new class of Bashkir nationalist leaders and disposing the population to support them (Smola, January 22, 2024; The Insider, October 3, 2024).
Even Putin has become worried that repression alone, his favored tool in most cases, is not enough when it comes to environmental protests, unintentionally opening new possibilities for environmental organizations. The government set up the Foundation for Ecological and Natural Resource Projects, which will have an annual budget of $10 million, to provide grants to environmentalists in the hopes of winning them to the government’s side (President of Russia, February 29, 2024). Kremlin officials and businessmen dominate the foundation—there is not a single ecologist or activist among them—and is thereby unlikely to be an effective instrument for cooperative control of grassroots environmental activism (Kedr Media, March 11). Still, the fact that Putin has given the foundation so much money at a time of budgetary stringency brought on by his war in Ukraine indicates just how seriously he views the threat of politicized environmental activism.
As with environmental protests at the end of Soviet times, the politicization of environmental activism is likely to take place first and foremost outside of Moscow and in predominantly non-Russian areas. Protests in reaction to the recent oil spill along the Kerch Strait, however, demonstrate that ethnic Russians are similarly swayed by environmental damage and that politicization of environmentalism could pose an even larger challenge to Putin than he now imagines (The Moscow Times, April 12).
