During and after the Crimean annexation in March 2014, Russia witnessed a huge increase in support for President Vladimir Putin (Hale, 2018). More importantly for events on the ground, however, this rally was not limited to changes in political approval: it extended to the mobilization of large numbers of volunteers, donors and sympathizers in support of military action outside the country’s borders. Both online and offline, a surge of activism was unleashed to strengthen, militarily and ideologically, the claim that Crimea and eastern Ukraine were somehow a natural part of Russia that had been accidentally and wrongly alienated by the idiosyncrasies of the collapse of the USSR (Matveeva, 2018). Two names that came to be adopted by the movement, “Russian Spring”/“Novorossiya,” reflect the intertwined ideas of a revival of ethnic Russian consciousness, the return of a previously dormant Russia back onto the international stage, and the tsarist-era basis of the Russian claim to much of what is today southern and eastern Ukraine.

If few people outside of the Kremlin had heard of Vladimir Putin in August 1999, by the time he stood down as President in May 2008, the former KGB colonel was a household name. Moreover, in stepping down and transferring power to an elected successor, Putin was taking a historic step: Executive power in Russia had changed hands through the ballot box for only the second time in history.

Well, yes and no. The ballot box had played a role in that the new president, Dmitri Medvedev, had won the elections with 70 percent of the first-round votes. However, the elections hardly represented much of a choice, pitting Putin's chosen successor and the enormous resources of the Russian state against two veteran politicians with four presidential election defeats between them and a little-known liberal allegedly with close ties to the Kremlin. Furthermore, not only was the manner of the transfer of power controversial, it was unclear whether power had really changed hands.

By the summer of 1999, the Russian elite was deeply divided and in political disarray. President Boris Yeltsin had one year left on his second term in office and no clear successor had yet emerged. In April of that year, then-prime minister Evgenii Primakov had looked the most likely candidate for the presidency, given his success in stemming the effects of the economic crisis and his high approval ratings. But Primakov was both too Soviet in style and too popular for Yeltsin's taste, so Primakov was fired. He was replaced in May by a young security official from St. Petersburg, Sergei Stepashin. But Stepashin struggled to establish his authority, opening his first cabinet meeting by declaring, “In order to avoid various sorts of talk of who is the boss in the government, I state that its chairman (the prime minister) leads the government, and he is responsible for all that happens with the government.” On August 9, Stepashin too was fired.

The catalyst for Stepashin's removal was the announcement that Primakov and Moscow Mayor Iuri Luzhkov had formed a bloc to compete in the December Duma elections. This bloc, called Fatherland–All Russia (OVR), brought Yeltsin's main challengers together with a range of powerful regional governors. The formation of OVR crystallized competition for the succession between Primakov and Luzhkov on one side and Yeltsin's entourage on the other.

The Altai Krai (Altai Territory) lies in southern Siberia, along Russia's border with Kazakhstan. The Krai has a population of around 2.6 million people and is known for its significant raw material reserves including valuable metals such as manganese, bauxite, and gold. On September 1, 1997, 263 teachers at 11 schools in two different districts of Altai Krai began a strike demanding the payment of back wages. On the following day, they were joined by a further 4,802 teachers in 211 schools spread across 20 districts. The strike lasted a month and, at its peak, included nearly 6,000 teachers.

Also on September 1, in the Altai town of Zmeinogorsk, two workers at a gold prospecting enterprise “Kolyvan'” went on hunger strike demanding back pay. On September 17, in the same town, eight women with three children aged between nine and eleven broke into the administration building of the mine to demand payment of wages and to protest a decision to close the mine. The occupation lasted more than a week. Overall for the month, some 117,653 working days were lost to strikes in the Krai. The unrest lasted on and off for more than a year. In September 1998, for example, a further 101,115 working days were lost to strikes.

The main subject of this book is political protest: a range of actions, including strikes, hunger strikes, sit-ins, blockades, occupations, marches, and other actions used by groups of people from time to time to make demands on the state or on other private people whose behavior can be influenced by the state. These are the kinds of actions known to social scientists as contentious politics. As Charles Tilly (2004) and others have shown, what kinds of contention we see in a given place depends to a significant extent on the nature of the political regime in which protest takes place, and in particular on whether the country in question is democratic and provides a high degree of legal protection for protest, or is authoritarian and does not. Protest in turn often has significant effects on the nature of the broader political regime and usually plays a major role in both transitions to democracy and in transitions away from democracy (Collier 1999, Bermeo 2003).

However, in the contemporary world, many political regimes do not fit neatly within this picture of democracies that permit protest and autocracies that repress it. Instead, there are a great many countries that possess some attributes of democracy and some of autocracy; places in which protest is often allowed, but in which the state goes to considerable lengths to control, manipulate, and channel it in ways not consistent with democratic principles.

In Chapter 3, I gave some theoretical reasons why it is unlikely that protest activity is driving the quality of governors' relations with Moscow, and why it is much more plausible to assume that the opposite story, the one told in this book, is true. In Table A3.1, I present powerful statistical support for this view.

In Model 1, I test a range of hypotheses in which political relations are determined by a combination of structural factors (republic or capital status) and political factors. The political factors are whether the governor is supported by the Communists (as measured using data from Gimpelson and Treisman 2002), levels of support for Yeltsin in the region in 1993 (as expressed in the referendum of that year on confidence in the President), and the change in the level of support between 1993 and 1996 (as measured by the difference between the vote for Yeltsin in the first round of the 1996 Presidential election and the 1993 referendum). I also include the MFK measure of ethnic conflict potential (with the scale reversed to represent ethnic peace) and their measure of elite stability. The results are impressive. Without including any measure of protest, we explain 60 percent of the variance in the seventy-eight observations. The single most important factor driving relations between the regions and the Kremlin, as we might expect, is whether the governor is a Communist or not.