Paul Goble
Staunton, Aug. 25 – To save money under Vladimir Putin’s much-ballyhooed “optimization” campaigns, officials in Russian cities across the country are eliminating trams and cutting back on bus routes. Russians are angry. Many have protested. And sometimes but not always officials have backed down lest these protests grow into something more massive.
Arkady Gershan, a Russian urbanist who founded the City for People project, says that such protests have become “a countrywide trend,” although he acknowledges that the reasons behind this or that public action vary widely (semnasem.org/articles/2023/08/25/stanciya-konechnaya-kak-rabotayut-transportnye-protesty-v-rossii).
The protests have taken various forms, including online petitions, demonstrations which suggest the authorities are “burying” public transport and thus public life, and the promotion of individual complaints to the authorities about what these cutbacks mean. The latter have proved especially effective.
On the one hand, because the authorities are required by law to answer such complaints, regional and urban governments are having to spend so much money doing so that it is cheaper to keep the trams and buses running. And on the other, the authorities can decide to keep some routes operating while closing others depending on how many people are protesting.
While transportation protests are not political in the usual sense, they can be a seedbed for political action. People who see that coming together and demanding change in this sector may soon decide that doing the same thing on other and more politically sensitive issues is no longer something they cannot imagine.
Consequently, transportation protests which have been going on in Russian cities the last several years may in fact be far more important than the extremely limited coverage they have received in the Moscow media might suggest.
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