Leaked government reports shed light on political protest in Russia

While analyzing the massive data leak from the Russian censorship agency Roskomnadzor, the investigative journalism project iStories discovered that the state censor has been compiling internal reports on protest incidents across Russia.

The leak occurred in November 2022, when the Belarusian hackers who call themselves Cyberpartisans accessed one of Roskomnadzor departments’ data and turned it over to journalists, including iStories.

The publication has now studied hundreds of internal reports on protests registered by the authorities around Russia over the span of 116 days in 2022, mostly in the spring and early summer.

Among those, the greatest number of demonstrations (109) took place in the Khabarovsk region. Most of them (91) were in support of the region’s former governor Sergey Furgal, the target of a highly dubious prosecution. Khabarovsk also protested the invasion of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s policies.

St. Petersburg came in second in the number of protests (61); Moscow (41) and Bashkortostan (41) shared the third place.

More than 90 percent of all protests in Russia occurred in regional capitals. Krasnodar and Arkhangelsk regions were leading in the number of local demonstrations beyond the capital. A total of 96 local protests were reported across Russia.

Almost half of all protests in Russia are single-person demonstrations, and only one in five gathers more than ten participants. War-related protests make up a fifth of all public demonstrations in Russia, based on the leaked sample. The greatest number of antiwar demonstrations were registered in St. Petersburg (30), Moscow (20), Yekaterinburg (15), and Irkutsk (10).

The main triggers of protest were the invasion of Ukraine (180), dissatisfaction with officials and political persecutions (162), environmental degradation (71), and infrastructure problems (67).