Keep Your Eyes on the Protests in

Russias Provinces
While the world watches Moscow for signs of unrest, hundreds of
small-scale protests are heating up in Putins heartland.

BY AMIE FERRIS-ROTMAN-APRIL 28, 2017

GUKOVO, Russia Each morning, just before 11 a.m., Igor Litvinov

leaves his work gutting chickens and sets off for the main square
in this town of about 65,000 people in southern Russia. There he
meets his wife, Irina, and together they join the group that has
gathered every day for the past year on the cracked gray asphalt
in front of the offices of Kingcoal Ltd., their former employer.

On a good day, when theres no frost and the sun is bright,

around 200 people protest; on colder days, like when I visited in
early April, there are around 60. The mining company went
bankrupt and closed two years ago, leaving 2,300 people in the
Rostov region without a job. Even worse: The company stopped
paying its workers in 2013, two years before the bankruptcy. The
protesters are demonstrating for their back pay.

What happened here is simple: The government stole our

money, Litvinov, 33, said, exposing a mouth full of gold crowns.
Since closing, Kingcoal has settled its debts with about three-
quarters of its former employees, but 78 million rubles, or around
$1.4 million, of unpaid salaries remain unaccounted for, and
Litvinov, a former miner, is one of the 600 still waiting. Irina
Litvinova, who met her husband at the coal company, where she
also worked, recalls coming to the protest site when she was
pregnant. Now, the couples daughter is 10 months old. The 28-
year-old currently stays at home looking after their child; shed
like to start working again in a few months but doubts she will find
a job anytime soon.

The disgruntled former workers have made protesting part of their

daily schedule, as routine as fetching a loaf of bread. They stand
with their backs to Kingcoal. In front of them is a dilapidated
statue of Lenin; his back, too, is turned toward the Kingcoal
offices. It is in this position that they protest, Monday to Friday, for
precisely one hour the time allotted to them by the local
government, who have granted permission to assemble. We will
come here in solidarity until the final person is given whats owed
to them, said Larisa Antipova, 48, who had worked as a quality
control inspector for the company.

Such scenes are becoming increasingly common across Russia,

which is only now emerging from a two-
year recession precipitated by Western sanctions and historically
low oil prices. Last year saw more than 200 Russian protests over
work-related issues, according to research by the Center for
Economic and Political Reform, an independent Moscow-based
organization. Protests were up by 34 percent in 2016 compared to
2015, according to monitoring by IHS Markit, a London-based
analytics group. Just over half of these, like the one in Gukovo,
came about as a result of missed or withheld salary payments.
The world took notice last month, when, unexpectedly, large-scale
anti-corruption protests organized by opposition leader Alexei
Navalny rocked cities across Russia, leading to hundreds of
arrests, including of many young people. The protests were widely
seen as the first real challenge to the Kremlin in Russia in years.
But it is the ongoing protests in President Vladimir Putins
traditional heartland places like Gukovo and elsewhere which
may be the better measure of how deep current discontent runs
in Russia.
***
Anyone who wants to see the breadth of anger in Russia can
consult the interactive map that researchers at the Center for
Economic and Political Reform have put online. On any given day,
it shows bursts of activity erupt across the countrys 11 time
zones like fires that need putting out. In cities and towns from the
Kaliningrad exclave on the Baltic Sea to more remote outposts in
deep Siberia, there are more Igors, Irinas, and Larisas protesting
their missing pensions or skipped paychecks.

These protests dont necessarily pose a threat to the regime

yet. More often than not, in fact, the protesters appeal to Putin
directly to intervene on their behalf, holding up signs saying
Putin, help us. They use the informal form of address in Russian,
making the request sound somewhat friendly. Last September,
unemployed bus drivers in the city of Belgorod, midway between
Moscow and Rostov, spelled out the phrase Putin pomogi with
their yellow and white buses, and made a video of it from several
hundred feet up, using a drone; the clip was viewed tens of
thousands of times. Some say the direct overtures to Putin signal
the strength of the Kremlin-approved narrative that Russians
suffering stems from external factors such as Western sanctions
and Russophobia or, at the very worst, the malfeasance of the
countrys oligarchs but that the Russian president himself is
never to blame.

Putin has become invincible. Hes the countrys supreme

arbiter, said Alex Kokcharov, a country risk analyst at IHS Markit.
This is extremely effective propaganda, similar to that of the
1930s, he said, referring to a time when those being abused by
Soviet security services sought the ear of Joseph Stalin, believing
that if the head of the Soviet Union only knew what was
happening, he would put a stop to it. Its an echo, too, of the
medieval-era Russian mantra: The tsar is good, it is the boyars
that is, the local aristocrats who are bad. Putins latest
approval ratings are a case in point: In March, the 64-year-old
presidents popularity slipped ever so slightly to 82 percent, but
remains at record levels, according to the Levada Center, an
independent pollster.

But in Gukovo, the pleas to Putin have long since turned to anger
directed against him and his ruling United Russia party. Our
country has become consumed by slavery and corruption, retired
miner Valery Dyakonov told me in his apartment, proudly
decorated with photos of his grandchildren, in the small town of
Zverevo in the Rostov region. Though he was unaffected
financially by Kingcoals turmoil he lives off his modest state
pension the fiercely patriotic and charismatic 66-year-old has
become the de facto leader of the Gukovo demonstrators. Last
summer, he was charged with threatening a police officer at a
Gukovo rally with an air gun. Today, he is still under house arrest,
and treats his black ankle monitor as a badge of honor. For 20
years I didnt see the sun, only rats, he said in his small kitchen,
where large jars of pickled cabbage reflect the morning light. And
now Im a criminal. Dyakonov cant leave his town and is banned
from traveling to nearby Gukovo.
The plague has come to Russia, and people are at breaking
point. But I am against blood. We need a peaceful way to install a
new government.
The plague has come to Russia, and people are at breaking
point. But I am against blood. We need a peaceful way to install a
new government.

The continuing standoff in Gukovo, which began in May last year,

is considered one of the longest-running protests in the country, if
not the longest. Staging an ongoing protest in modern Russia for
this long is not easy: permission from local authorities is required
if more than one person wants to participate in a public
demonstration, and there is little tolerance for dissent; a green
light, in other words, is hard to secure. Those who disobey the
laws face fines and possible jail terms. In Gukovo, Kingcoals
former employers are regularly filmed by policemen from several
feet away, despite being within their rights.

The problems in Gukovo reflect the troubles in the broader Rostov

region as a whole. In this former mining region near eastern
Ukraine, snaking conveyer belts belonging to shuttered coal
mines loom over barren landscapes. Occasionally, the scenery is
punctuated by a solitary goat-herder. The few paved roads in the
area are riddled with potholes.

Former miners say these protests strictly regulated though they

may be are their sole recourse against Kingcoal. The only
reason they received any of their money at all, they say, is
because of the hunger strike they organized last summer, which
captured national headlines.

Now the striking miners have started to receive flour and sugar
handouts from the local Communist Party, which officially opposes
the Putin government in parliament, but in practice is largely
complacent. Dyakonov keeps in regular contact with the local
Communist branch, and has formed a friendship with Valery
Rashkin, the head of the Moscow branch of the Communist Party.
Rashkin is a supporter of the Gukovo miners and is often critical of
Russias widespread graft. Rashkin has brought some of the
protesting miners to Moscow for talks with Communist lawmakers,
though it remains to be seen if those meetings will bear fruit.

The large-scale demonstrations that stunned Russia last month

and the small, localized protests like the one in Gukovo that have
been taking place under the radar encompass two very different
groups of protesters. Many of those who turned out in response to
Navalnys campaign were internet-savvy youths whom Putin has
ruled since they were children; those protesting in the countryside
and small towns tend to be older Russians who remember Soviet
times and are more afraid of the Kremlins might. But the gulf
between these two groups could be narrowing: On both sides of
the spectrum, young and old, educated and working class, recent
unrest has focused on the issue of corruption. In a poll released
this month by Levada, Russians described Putins greatest
achievements as strengthening the military and the countrys
standing in the world; thats in contrast to polls a decade ago,
when he was applauded for his management of the economy. The
Levada survey also found that 38 percent of Russians approved of
the Navalny-organized protests, which focused on the ill-begotten
riches of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

Representatives for Kingcoal could not be reached for comment,

and its website has disappeared. In mid-April, the companys
founder and CEO Vladimir Podizhdaev was sentenced by a
regional court to five years in prison for failing to pay his workers
and abuse of authority. For the miners, who view him as a thief,
this brought a semblance of justice. But the most politically active
among them say they believe Podizhdaev is low down on the
pecking order, and that the real culprits are banking oligarchs
connected to Putin who control most of Rostovs mining industry,
or what is left of it. U.S. and European sanctions slapped on
Russia after Moscows involvement in the Ukraine crisis, including
the 2014 annexation of Crimea have taken their toll on Russian
oligarchs, many of whom have been banned from doing business
in the West, and there are fears that cutting off this source of
money has led to ramped-up corruption within Russia itself.
Inequality in Russia runs deep, and is possibly the worst in the
world according to Credit Suisse, with an estimated one-tenth of
people holding almost 90 percent of the countrys wealth.

Putin has taken steps to crack down on the political rallies

organized by Navalny. Hundreds were arrested for taking part in
the unsanctioned anti-corruption rallies in March, including
Navalny himself, who was put behind bars for 15 days. Russias
parliament has now said it is considering a law that would allow
security forces to shoot protesters at unsanctioned rallies,
reminiscent of Ukraines Maidan protest massacre in early 2014,
when sniper forces belonging to the Russia-backed
government opened fire on huge crowds, killing more than 50
people. In a word of warning to the West, this month Putin said he
would not allow the sort of color revolutions seen in Central Asia
and the Caucasus to occur in Russia.
An early test of the Kremlins commitment to stamping out
protests could come this weekend, when opposition activists loyal
to former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who lives in exile in
London, are also planning to rally, despite being banned by the
federal government.

The Kremlin has not yet signaled that it is losing patience with
economic protests of the sort taking place in Gukovo. If these two
very different groups of protesters do eventually find common
ground, however, that could change. Following his release this
month, Navalny released a new video, urging more protests to
take place nationwide on June 12th. Corruption is the biggest
reason for poverty, Navalny said in the short film. Salaries are
so low that people need to buy even shoes on credit.
Navalnys video is one that the Litvinovs, and many others like
them, can relate to. Our apartment, our car, our everything is on
credit, Irina said with a bemused half-smile. She pointed to the
car where their baby was sleeping. I came back to protest a
week after giving birth. And I will continue to bring her every day.
Were exercising our rights. She and I both are.
Photo credit: VASILY MAXIMOV/AFP/Getty Images
Posted by Thavam