In Russia Today, Protests about the Environment, Human Rights and Indigenous Peoples Increasingly Overlap and Re-Enforce One Another, Kirill Medvedev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 30 – In the final decades of Soviet power, environmental protests were often the first stage toward more radical political movements. Because protecting the environment was superficially apolitical and attracted a wide variety of people, such protests allowed activists to acquire skills they later deployed in other, more political ways.

            Many have wondered whether environmental protests in Russia now like those in Shiyes against the Moscow trash dump plan and in Bashkortostan in opposition to the despoiling of a symbolically important monument could play a similar role. (See Mari-Ann Kelam’s comments on what happened in Estonia in region.expert/mari-ann/).

            Because of that possibility and the fact that the Internet works as an accelerator of this transformation, Tatyana Chestina, head of the EKA Environmental Movement, says, Moscow has been taking steps to prevent it (7x7-journal.ru/articles/2020/11/02/ekologicheskaya-povestka-obedinyaet-lyudej-s-raznymi-vzglyadami-lider-ekodvizheniya-eka-tatyana-chestina-o-politizacii-protesta-pobedah-na-shiese-i-kushtau-i-trende-na-ekopotreblenie).

            But in an essay for the Posle.Media portal, Russian commentator and activist Kirill Medvedev says Moscow has largely failed and that environmental protests are often the seedbed for other broader political actions given the centrality of defending land for many outside of Moscow (posle.media/article/protestuya-my-zashchishchaem-zakon).

            Last year, approximately 300 protest campaigns took place in 40 federal subjects of the Russian Federation, he points out. Most were about environmental or urban planning issues, nominally non-political issues. But in many cases, they became political especially when non-Russian ethnic groups are involved.

            Medvedev drew that conclusion on the basis of a close study of the Shiyes protest which took place at the border of a Russian and a non-Russian federal subject, the Bashkortostan environmental actions, and a campaign launched by a Chechen woman who was living in St. Petersburg but returned to her native republic.

            The activist says that this trend reflects the growing number of environmental disasters across the RF, the over-centralization of political power, and the lack of meaningful regional autonomy; and consequently, it is natural that when people protest one thing, they link up with others who are concerned not only about that but about other political issues as well.

            “When protest options are becoming ever fewer, when old protest structures are gone, and when post-Soviet resistance traditions are broken, those who want to speak up have only a few tools left,” especially given that “almost everyone tries to act within the narrowing framework of the law and almost everyone insists their actions are ‘apolitical.’”

            But “no matter how much one distances oneself from politics,” Medvedev says, “the need to create a broader framework for discussion local issues remains.” And now “instead of competition between major political programs … we see the reinvention or creation of collective and sometime personal rituals, a struggle for the interpretation of official symbols.”

            One of the most important of these is the defense of land, in various senses of the work including as the state salutes the defense of the RF’s newly-expanded borders, its actions are perceived by many in the regions as an attack on their land, whether it be their private plots, their protected forest and mountain areas, or the administrative borders of their minority republics.”

            According to Medvedev, “engaged citizens from various regions of Russia are re-learning how to do politics under the new conditions. They are being forced to forge new connections across barriers erected by the authorities and to take state-supported rituals and then re-code them” be they about historical issues, environmental concerns or their own borders.

            “Is it possible to create a political space in which the struggle for land against federal officials and corporations becomes a common front and outdated patriarchal traditions ceased to be a means of terrorizing, dividing and paralyzing society?” the activist and commentator asks rhetorically.

            “Perhaps, but that will require not only that local activists display courage and ingenuity but that they also receive non-dogmatic attention, support and solidarity across all kinds of borders” and not just those that Moscow has imposed in the first place or is playing with under Putin’s rule.