Shiyes Protests Continue Because Russians Don’t Trust the Regime, Activists Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 3 – Polls show that Russians trust their rulers less than ever before, but perhaps the clearest indication of that is not what they say but what they do: Even though the regime has promised that it has cancelled plans to build a dump at Shiyes, activists there continue to stand guard at the site because they don’t believe a word of it.

            Instead, they see these promises as something the regime will ignore as soon as people stop trying to hold it to account, participants in the tell Novaya gazeta journalists Anna Shulyatyeva and Tatyana Britskaya (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2020/07/03/86131-samaya-bolnaya-tochka-v-rossii-nedoverie-naroda-k-vlasti).

            As time has passed and people in the North have come to be convinced that regional officials may say they support them in order to win votes but that Moscow will override that when it needs to, those still protesting say, “the ecological protest has been transformed into a political one.”

            They want their own candidate for governor, but the powers that be are using the electoral filter to block that, yet more evidence that those in power both regionally and in Moscow in fact plan to start up the construction of the dump for trash from the capital as soon as media attention fades and the protesters give up.

            “We think that they do not intend to give up on this project,” one of their number says. “The government of Arkhangelsk Oblast has rejected it, but this doesn’t mean that Moscow powers have. There is the view that this is all a PR move of the oblast government before the elections.”

            And protesters point to the fact that the people who want to build the dump keep about 100 guards in place, something that costs them about 20 million rubles (300,000 US dollars) a month. They wouldn’t do that if they didn’t expect a return on their money: they’d simply pull them out.

            Another demonstrator says that he is “the only one in our group who believes that the dump will not be built.” That isn’t because he believes the oblast leadership or Putin but rather because “if construction is restarted, the people will massively return” to protest against it. And the authorities don’t quite know what to do.

            What the powers that be will do, he and other participants say, is play for time, use the courts with their appeals, and change the laws as they have changed the constitution to work for their benefit rather than that of the people. But people around Shiyes have seen through this smokescreen. They will continue to defend the purity of their land for their children.