Paul Goble
Staunton, Sept. 26 – Residents of various places in the Russian Federation are talking about organizing protests against Moscow’s falsification of the Duma elections (echofm.online/news/v-semi-regionah-rossii-zayavili-akczii-protiv-falsifikaczij-na-vyborah), but the very first has taken place in Syktyvkar, the capital of the Komi Republic.
The meeting of approximately 100 people was put together by KPRF activists upset that the Putin regime had orchestrated the defeat of their comrades by first excluding some of them and then falsifying the results in other cases so that the KPRF candidates lost – even though the authorities didn’t give them permission (vkrizis.info/russia/komi-miting-po-michurinski/).
That the Komi Republic should have been the first is in many ways not especially surprising: its KPRF units have acted more like a banned regionalist party than any others (https://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/03/despite-law-against-regional-parties.html), and Komi residents have long objected to Moscow policies.
They have voted against Putin in the past, they were active in the successful protests to kill Moscow’s plans to build a trash dump at Shiyes, and they are currently among the leaders in protesting Moscow’s amalgamation of smaller metropolitan districts into larger ones (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/07/by-criticizing-putins-war-komi-deputy.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2026/05/komi-activists-say-liquidation-of-local.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/01/public-power-law-nail-in-coffin-of.html).
Perhaps equally important, Komi activists have a long tradition of acting on their own regardless of what opposition figures in Moscow say, something that explains why they have acted while others are only talking (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2026/08/moscow-opposition-figures-tried-to-tell.html).
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