Who played whom in the overlapping battles over the mayor of Moscow, the Khimki forest road, and the presidential race of 2012?
This question is not (just) a convenient platform to shamelessly promote my new article about The New Civic Activism in Russia, out in the latest edition of The Nation (still, why not check it out…? you know you want to!): it’s also an important opportunity to take stock of the strength and limitations of the opposition movement today.
Now that Moscow’s new Mayor Sobyanin has been anointed as a Putinite technocrat, previous speculation that the sacking of Luzhkov could be the platform for a Medvedev power-play appear to have been proven wrong.
But what role did the massive protests against the Khimki forest highway development play in Luzhkov’s ouster?
Leaders of the protests were obviously keen to play up its impact. After all, on the fact of it, anti-highway Medvedev teamed up with activists against pro-highway Luzhkov and Putin.
But it’s not so simple. Putin had been angling to get rid of Luzhkov for ages, and the new mayor is hardly the sort of person the opposition would have wanted. And while Medvedev did the firing, Sobyanin’s appointment makes it clear that he did not defy the prime minister at all (otherwise he would have installed someone from his own team).
So, did the Khimki activists, as Boris Kagarlitsky maintains, cannily leverage the conflict between Luzhkov and the Kremlin to force an end to the highway construction, or did Putin use the Khimki activists to do his dirty work in removing an old political rival?
The answer to this question depends on the long-term fate of Khimki itself. If, after the dust settles, the bulldozers eventually return, then the activists will count themselves played. This, being Russia, remains a very likely scenario.
But a more interesting outcome would be if the road does not end up going through the forest. In that case, it would be a win for both the Kremlin, who now has their man in Moscow, and the opposition activists, who got to save their forest.
If this happens, it would be a huge advertisement for a new, savvy activism that’s not afraid to get its hands dirty by strategically bargaining with the elites, rather than trying to quixotically bring them down with charge of the light brigade tactics.