Abstract

Babushkas vs. Putin

The article focuses on protests in Russia. In February 1917 bread riots, led by women, many of them elderly, broke out in the center of Saint Petersburg. In January 2005 few Russians anticipate actual revolution--or even a change in Kremlin leadership. But in one of the most significant developments in Russia since 1998, when disgruntled coal miners went on strike and blocked railroad tracks to protest unpaid wages, thousands of pensioners are demonstrating across the country, protesting the abolition of a wide range of social benefits. The spreading protests, the largest, angriest and most passionate since President Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, began quietly on January 9 and now stretch from Russia's Far East to Moscow and even to Putin's hometown, the still-iconic capital of 1917, Saint Petersburg. The conventional view is that these spontaneous and somewhat chaotic protests will not pose a serious challenge to the stability of Putin's regime--unless, through strategic leadership and ties to opposition parties, the pensioners' protests ignite a general strike.