Environmental Activism, Often a Seedbed of Political Movements, Continues to Expand in Russia Despite Increasing Repression

Paul Goble

    Staunton, Apr. 4 – Despite the Putin regime’s increasing repression, environmental activism continues to spread across the Russian Federation, a trend that must be of serious concern to the Kremlin because in the past, such activism often has been the seedbed for the emergence and growth of political movements.

    The classical example of this was in Estonia where protests about phosphate mining grew into the Popular Front, sparking the drive to the recovery of independence in 1991 (region.expert/mari-ann/) and being a pattern neither activists nor the Kremlin have forgotten (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/11/ecological-protest-in-russia-becoming.html).

    That makes environmental protests worthy of far more attention than they typically receive. While the anti-trash actions in Shiyes and the ecological movement in Bashkortostan did attract some, most other actions, typically smaller and situated in most cases further from the center have not.

    That makes an article in The Insider which catalogues what it describes as increasing environmental protests across the Russian Federation despite ever greater repression by the authorities especially important given not only what this means for civil society now but also for what it may mean in the future (theins.ru/obshestvo/279734).

    Acknowledging that increasing repression against environmental activists has typically limited the size of protests, the article points out that it hasn’t stopped them and that “ecological activists in Russia are trying to save the environment despite repressions” often taking action in ways that the authorities find difficult if not impossible to stop.

    These actions have had some successes, and the environmental portal Kedr.media has provided a guide for how activists can “defend nature in Russia without risking their freedom,” methods that it says are “accessible to everyone” and that should allow even more Russians to protest the destruction of the environment (kedr.media/explain/priberi-svoyu-stranu/).