When Bread And Circuses Fail In Russia

RIA Novosti, Sergey Korobko

Laura A. Henry, Newsweek: Could Garbage Bring Down Putin?


A steady stream of garbage-laden trucks moves the waste of Russia’s capital to landfills in the surrounding region. The resulting mountains of refuse emit noxious fumes and leach pollutants into nearby waters, endangering the residents of the region around Moscow.

Citizens living near these landfills have had enough.

Protests against garbage dumps have erupted in at least eight towns and villages around Moscow in the last six months. As a scholar who studies contemporary Russian politics, I believe these garbage protests reveal a crisis of basic governance that potentially poses a greater challenge to Putin’s government than pro-democracy activism.
Russian activists have come under increasing pressure since Putin returned to office in 2012. Protests have been relatively scarce after the 2011-2012 Bolotnaya demonstrations in response to election fraud. Long-standing nongovernmental groups working on environmental and human rights issues, which relied in part on funding from abroad, have been labeled “foreign agents” by Russia’s Ministry of Justice.

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WNU Editor: I am fortunate in that my family has not been impacted by these illegal dumps around Russia. And when I was living in Russia .... this was one of my two causes that I was (and still am) passionate about (the other being to raise public awareness on the crimes that were committed by the state on its citizens during the period of the Soviet Union). The environment and its impact on public health has always been an issue in Russia since Chernobyl. The public has learned to be distrustful of the state when it comes to pollution/environment/health .... and these reports of illegal landfills only feeds into this distrust. It also galvanizes local populations to protest and change local governments .... which the Russian political establishment disdains. For the Kremlin .... its Achilles Heel has always been the economy, corruption, quagmires like Syria, and the environment. They have put a lid on the economy, conflicts like Syria, and corruption .... but the environment is something that they just cannot get their hands on to solve nor being able to satisfy those who have been impacted by them.