Protest in the provinces: Patterns of contentious politics in post-communist Russia

With the collapse of communism came brilliant displays of protests against totalitarian rule. The prevailing image was that civil society in Russia and the post-Soviet world had somehow reawakened and democracy was on the march. However, the optimism in both the West and East was short lived; in less than a decade, the dominant narrative was that of a quiescent population unwilling to challenge authorities in the face of growing economic difficulties and weakening social safety nets. This dissertation explores how sub-national factors influenced protest in post-Soviet Russia during the turbulent 1990s. In the midst of rapid and often confusing and painful reforms, why did some Russian cities experience large and intense protest, while others remained relatively quiet? This project answers this question using archived documents, newspapers, and interviews based on extensive fieldwork. The project examines the socio-political histories of four provincial Russian cities: Biysk, Cherepovets, Komsomolsk-na-Amure, and Volzhskiy. Through process-tracing and cross-case comparisons, this study reveals that local factors, such as elite strategies, local institutions, and dependence on the central state, caused the structure of protest observed. This study finds that in cities with highly concentrated economies, protests are more extreme, well attended, and make radical demands when the primary industry is in decline and highly dependent on central state authority. This is because elites choose a strategy of convergence with the population to mobilize protesters as a way to bargain with the central state. However, in cities where the primary industry is doing relatively well or not dependent on the central state, elites use strategies of co-optation and suppression to push potential political opposition out of the system. This leads the opposition to stage smaller and more locally-targeted protests. In contrast, in cities with diversified economies, protest activity is influenced by the interaction between political elite strategies and local institutional architecture. When a city has a hybrid political opportunity structure, where elite strategies are out of alignment with the local institutional architecture (i.e. elites do not engage with citizens despite democratic city institutions), protest tend to be large and intense