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СМИ об исследованиях

| 06 декабря, 2012

Protests postponed until the National Elections

'Kommersant Daily' publication

By Irina Nagornikh

Today Konstantin Kostin’s Foundation of Civil Society Development presents a report on the anniversary of the mass rallies in 2011-2012. The report states that the new wave of rallies fizzled out, but if the socio-economic situation continues to worsen, then we can expect to see protests having a significant impact across the entire country come the next round of national elections. However, most of these protests will not, say the report be directed against Vladimir Putin.

One conclusion of the report was that rallies will be mobilized via social networks as a political tool at the beginning of the 2016-2018 election cycle and that they are expected to rock not only Moscow but the entire country. The lack of public rallies at the present moment, says the report, is not due to lack of unrest in general but is a result of certain political factors, one of which is the absence of strong leaders and the gap between their rhetoric and the real motivation of the protestors.

The report claims that a significant portion of the so called ‘angry men’ who came to the rallies did not agree with the revolutionary slogans and associated President Vladimir Putin with stability in the country. (This, it says, is according to the results of surveys among various focus groups). According to the report, the political reforms, which followed the elections to the State Duma, has had a calming effect on the protesters. So much so that they are now only ready to attend protest rallies if both the organizers and the government guarantee them security. They do not like the way this country holds its elections; nor the fact that corruption is still rife and the housing and socio-economic situation remains lamentable. But most of their unrest stems from the fact that they believe that their opinions are not taken into account by politicians and that they have no influence on politics.

The report points out that a significant group of activists have no real representatives in government who could act as a voice to air their grievances. A survey carried out by sociologists – in particularly VTsIOM (All Russia Centre for the Study of Public Opinion) – shows that 60% of the protesters in the Duma elections voted for the opposition parties: ‘Yabloko' (27%), the Communist Party (17%) and ‘Fair Russia’ (16%). There were approximately five thousand activists protesting on the streets in Moscow, according to the report. Despite the fact that the type of people who came to the rallies changed with each one, the report paints a picture of a typical ‘new wave’ of disgruntled Russian: he is a middle aged man with higher education, average income, a liberal democratic viewpoint, not religious and living Moscow, St Petersburg or another large city such as Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Nizhni Novgorod and Kazan.

However, the authors also point to the diversity of the protesters by dividing them into nine active groups: nationalists, leftists, students, creative class (artistic profession), the educated middle class (doctors, teachers), middle level business-man, office workers, liberal activists and socially vulnerable groups of the population ( senior citizens and people with disabilities).

The report notes that most city authorities acted correctly – keeping the protestors calm, agreeing on venues for the rallies and keeping them hemmed in. One notable exception was in Nizhni Novgorod where all the rallies took place in areas which had not been agreed on and there were arrests

Konstantin Kostin, head of the Foundation told us that the main reason for a possible surge in protests at the next elections would be both the socio-economic situation and what the ‘angry citizen’ perceives to be his own lack of political clout.

The leader of ‘Yabloko’, Sergei Mitrokhin was critical of the report, particularly with regard to the suggestion that the protestors were supportive of Vladimir Putin. ‘No normal public opinion pollster would take a survey at a protest rally – it’s unscientific. If anyone has ever been to a rally he knows how emotional and passionate people get. I’ve been to protests myself and I can say that the one thing I didn’t actually like was the fact that everyone was obsessed with hatred of Putin - both as a person and as a politician. Unfortunately, this hatred was all that united them.’

Sergei Obuhkov, Member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation also said he hadn’t noticed any ‘fans of Putin’ at the protest meetings last year. He explained that he was one of the organisers at a meeting in Krasnodar on 10^th December 2011 and was surprised that the ‘angry men’ – or to use Marxist-Leninist terminology the ‘petty bourgeois’ – expressed such derision for Putin. ‘They were even more passionate than the people who normally attend Communist rallies’ he said.