Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 15 – For the second
month in a row, the Moscow Institute of Regional Expertise reports on the
pattern of protest across the Russian Federation, identifying the chief issues
that caused people to go into the streets, the regions where protests were most
frequent and why, and the organizations responsible for demonstrations.
In its rating for February 2019, the
institute pointed to ten issues that comprehended almost all the protests that
occurred in Russia: ecological issues, the government’s anti-social policies,
city problems, pension reform, commemoration of Boris Nemtsov, support for
political prisoners, calls for ouster of regional heads, support for taxi
driver strike, possible hand back of the Kurile Islands, and the freeing of
whales trapped in the Pacific (irex.group/articles/reiting-protestnoi-aktivnosti-regionov).
The institute found that protest
activity, defined quantitatively and qualitatively, rose in Krasnoyarsk kray,
Orenburg, Sakhalin, Vladimir, and Ivanovo Oblast, and Buryatia but fell in
Moscow. Two super-regions remained relatively protest free – the North Caucasus
and the Far North – not because there aren’t problems but because of repression
in the first case and the difficulty of assembling people in a low population area
in the second.
As to organizers, the institute said
that the KPRF remained the most important but that local groups played a larger
role in February than the month before and that in many places, where officials
sought to prevent all protests, individual actions became more important.
Assuming that the institute will
continue to issue these monthly surveys, they will constitute a better picture
of the protest climate in Russia than does the media which often focuses on
high-profile demonstrations than on more widespread but perhaps less intriguing
kinds, at least in the view of the Moscow media.
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