In the preceding chapter, I showed that conventional wisdom portraying Russians as patient and long-suffering in the face of the hardships of economic transition is very misleading. Instead, people all across Russia responded to hardship with strikes, hunger strikes, marches, demonstrations, and road and rail blockades. Nevertheless, despite intense protest activity at certain times and places, many did remain passive and there was no major national protest movement. In part, as we have seen, this was the result of protest demands that tended to be framed in economic and local terms, giving them a zero-sum character; satisfying one group's demands would mean less money to satisfy another's, and so coordination across groups was difficult. However, as I will show in this chapter, deeper reasons lie not in the kinds of demands made but in the nature of organizational life in post-Communist Russia, in decisions made by state actors about mobilizing others, and in competition among the political elite for resources.

To show the effect of organizations, state mobilizing strategies and elite competition, I look in more depth at the interaction of protest and politics during the protest wave of the late 1990s.