An overwhelming challenge to Putin’s power vertical in the Far East

We can expect that tomorrow, August 1, there will be a huge protest in the Far East region of Russia, in the city of Khabarovsk. We can’t know if it will continue to swell in numbers following the trends of the last three weekends – with one out of every six city residents showing up on July 25th – and we don’t know if the police are going to continue to stand by without a show of force. These protestors will represent a cross-section of the city’s population, and some might continue the rallying cries, “Freedom!” and “Resign, Putin!” of the weeks prior.

How did we get here? How did this incredible oppositional wave rise in this country with such a carefully suppressed populace? To begin with, let me first explain how things should work – beginning with what is called the Russian power vertical. The idea is that, at the end of the day, Putin is always at the head of any decision made by anyone; if someone independently makes a decision that he would not agree with, they change their mind and conform. No matter what a politician’s party membership, they follow what the Kremlin wants, because they know that is the only way to get the small wins for their constituency that the Kremlin might care less about. In elections, there is the Kremlin’s party candidate, and then there is the candidates of the “systemic opposition” parties, including the communists and the nationalists. The consequences of acting out include having real or fabricated crimes brought up to take them down. They criticize the President lightly; they run in elections; and then, they lose.

Starting in 2013 and 2014, though, people started actually voting for these parties and their candidates. Kremlin decided this could not be; and so, governor races were changed to weaken the chances of these opposition parties. The changes included single-mandate elections, similar to the US, in which the candidate with the most votes wins. Previously, these elections would be determined in run-off elections, in which the highest vote-getters would run against each other again, and often minority groups would consolidate against the Kremlin’s party. Most dramatically, governors are now mostly appointed by legislative assemblies comprised mostly of the Kremlin’s party, United Russia. This means that they follow Putin’s lead on who to appoint. In 2018, only seven of the 83 regions in Russia have direct election of their governors.

How Sergei Furgal accidentally broke the electoral system in 2018

In 2018, Sergei Furgal, formerly a scrap metal trader, and later a politician in both local legislature and in the Duma, ran for governor in Khabarovsk. By “run,” I mean he put up campaign advertisements that told the voters that he was a politician and he was running. Apparently, they didn’t even say what he was running for. The region, though, was sick of Moscow running things from nearly 6,000 miles away – and voted for the one name they recognized on the ballot who wasn’t the United Russia incumbent.

After Kremlin’s candidate lost, they retaliated against the city by stripping the city of its capitol city distinction and making Vladivostok, their rival city, the capital of the Far Eastern District. To further punish this city’s rebelliousness, federal officials opened up a criminal investigation into Viktor Ishaev, the former governor who supported Furgal’s candidacy. The people of Khabarovsk were further angered: they had voted in the governor, and it felt like the Kremlin was insinuating that the former governor had engendered the opposition’s win. These attempts to suppress the voice of the people had made Furgal into the embodiment of popular resistance in the region.

Furgal had incredibly high ratings among his constituents, and perhaps acted a bit more boldly than other oppositional-candidates-turned-real-politicians had before. According to this article by The Economist, he slimmed down local government, reduced his own salary, and sold the official governor yacht. He was filling the shoes of a populist governor. In 2019, he refused to rig the elections, and United Russia was disseminated in the local parliament. As mentioned before, the control of this local parliament is intrinsic to the maintenance of Putin’s power vertical – anything that the President could want he could get through the local governance. At this point, the Kremlin needed to act. They started by arresting a former business partner of Furgal, Nikolai Mistryukov, on 15-year-old murder charges, and then set up a case against the governor.

Arresting the governor

The last straw came after a seven-day national referendum on whether the people approved of the constitution being changed to allow Putin to stay in power until 2036. The referendum was a pretense of democracy – the parliament had already voted and approved the constitutional changes three months prior. But everyone was expected to vote. And to vote yes. In Khabarovsk, people not only did not show up to vote, but they voted “yes” at a significantly lower rate than the national average. On July 9, A SWAT team ripped the governor out of his car and brought him straight to Moscow to stand for the same charges as his former business partner. With the business partner cooperating, it sounds like he’s going straight to prison.

The Russian newspaper Meduza, in 2018, foresaw Furgal’s arrest as a feasible possibility. Back in 2018, they wrote an article immediately after Furgal was elected anticipating some possible future paths based on what other oppositional leaders did following their surprising election. The first was his joining United Russia, abandoning his movement for personal safety. Others include immediately getting dismissed by Putin, serving under the radar and not being as radical as they promised, as well as Kremlin changing the electoral system so that a vote outcome like this one could never repeat.

Only two politicians have been arrested while serving their terms: former Arkhangelsk governor Aleksandr Shamkov in 2005 and former Yaroslavl mayor Evgeny Urlashov in 2012. Within a year of their respective elections, both of these men were charged and imprisoned. However, the similarities between these two situations end there: Barinov was the first acting politician to be taken into custody in a criminal case, and no protest was given, either in person or on the Internet. Urlashov in 2012, despite extensive ballot stuffing by the United Russia party, won with over two and half times the number of votes of the Kremlin-backed candidate. He was called “the most famous independent official in Russia” from his heavy critique of the United Russia party, of which he was a member until 2011. After announcing his intention to run in the next gubernatorial elections, though, he was prompted arrested with minor protest from college students and activists. As you can see from these two examples, the public generally stays silent when law enforcement gets involved.

The public does not stay silent

For once, a governor spoke for the people, making measurable change in a place so far removed from Moscow that it almost felt to the people that they could have control in their democracy. In response to their governor being whisked away to Moscow, they show up to protest in hundreds of thousands, coming from all walks of life. They demand that Furgal faces trial in Khabarovsk instead of Moscow. They shout, “Shame on the Kremlin!” and “We are the ones in power!”.

It’s too many people for the police to control, so they watch them march and shout. They hand out face masks. The only peep from the official news is to detail how doctors are being flown into the region to address the virus’ surge. The replacement governor Mikhail Degtyarev, while technically part of the nationalist party Firgal was representative of, acts as the perfect Kremlin pawn. He follows the Kremlin’s line of refusing to address the surging demonstrations. His first response to the protests aired on Instagram, where he posted a video speaking with “protestors” (who looked like plain clothes cops) hours after the protests ended. One commentator responded,

• На кого расчитан спектакль? Митингующие давно дома!!! Who are you putting this show on for? The protesters long ago went home!!!

One potential fear is that the Kremlin will eventually harshly suppress the protests. They have begun sowing seeds for a terrorist narrative, with Degtyarev warning that protestors had brought “several knives and even an axe” to the latest demonstration (If you ask me, several knives and even an axe from a crowd of tens of thousands seems unbelievably peaceful). A news site reported allegations of a man being arrested for planning to lead a terror attack in the area, further supporting a potential suppression in the name of counterterror.

One wonders what the potential (or even the end game) is for an ongoing protest that is ballooning in number every weekend. The people of Khabarovsk (and of Vladivostok, who are showing up in their city in solidarity) are fighting against what they consider a colonialist Moscow. They don’t feel any communality or even connection to the city that is their capital. In particular with the reticence that Putin has shown during the coronavirus pandemic, trying to avoid blame for the outcome, they are in a situation of heightened independence from Moscow. When this far-away capitol then tries to implement the top-down power vertical, taking away their first breath of fresh air with their populist governor, they protest on a never-before-seen scale. As The New York Times states,

It’s exposing deep wells of public anger as Russia struggles with the economic damage left by the coronavirus pandemic and growing fatigue with political stagnation.

It was only 1991 that the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed and the unstable Russian democracy took its place. The average age of a Russian citizen being 39 years old, meaning half the population grew up in the Soviet Union and even more lived through the tumultuous 90s. Putin’s power is unstable, especially in the Far East. It is at its most unstable due to its failure to react during this pandemic. What can the biggest protest in the history of this young nation create? I think the marchers are wondering the same thing. Twitter user @KaffeinInferno tweeted on July 26,

• Мне было сложно представить, что есть такой политик в России, даже будучи честно избранный гражданами, который мог бы быть удостоен 15-дневных многотысячных митингов (это как миллион в СПб). Пыня отфургален. И черт побери, но я скажу — Фургал арестован, да здравствует Фургал! It was hard for me to imagine that there's such a politician in Russia, even being honestly elected by citizens, who could be favored with fifteen-day rallies of many thousands (this is like a million in St. Petersburg). Putin has been Furgal’d. And damn it, but I'll say - Furgal is under arrest, long live Furgal!

Moscow can’t stand down now, but with the way the protests are spreading in the Far East and multiplying every weekend, what can Putin do but return their former governor to stand trial in his own city? With the brazen anti-Moscow and anti-Putin rhetoric last week, I wonder if they would fight.