Three Factors Explain Why There are Environmental Protests in Some Russian Regions but Not in Others, HSE Study Concludes

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 10 – On the basis of an analysis of 1896 environmental protests in the Russian Federation between 2007 and 2021, researchers at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics say that three factors determine which regions protest and which ones don’t and help explain why regions that may appear quite similar behave so differently.

            First of all, they say, regions are more likely to respond to a specific action rather than to a problem that has been growing over time. Such events act as “triggers” and send people into the streets. Second, some governors are more ready to use repression than others; and those that do face fewer protests (kedr.media/explain/soprotivlenie-mozhet-uvenchatsya-uspehom/).

            And third, the HSE investigators conclude, poorer regions who are asked to help solve the problems of wealthier ones are especially likely to go into the streets to protest. Thus, plans to establish dumps in the Russian north for trash from Moscow have been especially powerful in generating protests.

            The study says that indigenous numerically small peoples are at the very top of this list because “their way of live is closely connected with the environment. Their main types of economic activity to the present remain fishing, hunting and reindeer herding. Moreover, their faiths and folklore” is based on the links between nature and people.

            But ethnicity is not the only such force. Strong regional or other communal identities can also play this role. The scholars give as an example protests in Voronezh Oblast against nickel mining. There, Cossacks played a key role streeting the links between the world around them and Cossack national traditions.

            The HSE researchers also suggested that the theories of American sociologist Sidney Tarrow on the cyclicity of protest are relevant in Russia and point to the ways in which protests have ebbed and flowed across all categories.  And they end by concluding that the war in Ukraine is giving rise to “a new form of ecological protest.”

            This involves videos by Russian soldiers in Ukraine highlighting environmental problems in their home areas that they send to officials and fellow citizens even while remaining on the front lines. (For background on the trend of which this is a part, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/06/soldiers-in-russian-army-in-ukraine.html.)

            The HSE study said that many of the protests succeeded in whole or in part, with one of the authors suggesting that is only one case where environmental protests cannot hope to succeed: in those cases, where what the protesters want stopped or done instead touch on the interests of Putin or his friends.