On 7 September 2011, a
Yak-42D airliner crashed in Yaroslavl during take-off. Besides the crew, on board was the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl hockey team. The club had been scheduled to play against Belarusian team Dinamo in Minsk. According to open-source data, at an altitude of five metres the plane’s wing hit the building housing a radio transmitter. The pilots were unable to land the plane. Part of the plane was found 900 metres from the airport, while another part was discovered in the Tunoshna River. Of the 45 people on board, only one person survived. The Interstate Aviation Committee reported following its investigations that crew error had caused the crash.
Not everyone agreed with the official account. Local politician
Yevgeny Urlashov even
resigned from the United Russia party after the accident. He claimed that one of the possible reasons for the crash was the Yaroslavl Political Forum, which was held in Yaroslavl on 7-8 September 2011 and hosted the country’s top leaders. It was because of the forum that the Yak-42D liner’s crew had rushed to take off. The plane needed to free up the runway as soon as possible for attendees flying in to the forum.
Yaroslavl political consultant Mikhail Krasulin believes that that was precisely when ordinary residents of Yaroslavl gained further impetus for their opposition sentiments. “Then, in December 2011, a Russia-wide wave of opposition kicked off in many Russian cities. But in Yaroslavl it also coincided with the local tragedy which residents also connected with the authorities’ actions.”
Yevgeny Urlashov, born and raised in Yaroslavl, was an aide to a regional legislator in the early noughties. Later he became a municipal councillor himself. In late 2011 he decided to run for mayor of Yaroslavl. He won the race in the second round, beating the United Russia candidate.
The power vertical that had started to take shape in Russia since Vladimir Putin had assumed the presidency had already cemented itself by that time. A political analyst from the
Black Earth region, who agreed to speak with 7х7 on condition of anonymity, said that at first the centralisation process seemed moderate. It also fit into the concept of restoring the government’s capabilities after the systemic crisis of the 1990s. But it was by the mid-noughties that those processes took on the features of what we call the power vertical—in other words, when regional leaders are essentially arranged in a hierarchical system as if they were federal officials.
Stanislav Andreichuk, co-chair of the Golos movement adds, “The power vertical process went in waves, but it had to reach the bottom at a certain point. First the authorities fought the regional opposition, then they took on the local opposition. The noughties of course were marked by the attempt to rein in regional government. So, abolishing gubernatorial elections was a key point in this.”
Russia abolished direct elections of regional governors in 2004. The regions came to be controlled from the Kremlin. So, the only way to resist the Moscow authorities was to unite at the local level. That’s what Urlashov succeeded in doing in 2012; other candidates managed it in various Russian cities over the next decade.
Like some other Russian cities, Yaroslavl had a strong Communist Party branch. Political consultant Mikhail Krasulin claims that the Communist Party’s popularity was due less to people’s liking communist ideas and more to former regional party leaders (Alexander Vorobyev, who had led the Yaroslavl branch of the Communist Party for many years, died in 2021) and to the fact that it used to oppose United Russia.
“[Opposition leader Alexei]
Navalny’s call in February 2011 to ‘Vote for any party but the party of crooks and thieves’ aligned well with how the Communist Party was positioning itself in the run-up to the elections. People who didn’t want to see United Russia party members in power started to vote for the Communists as well simply because the Communist Party was not United Russia. The ruling party then received the lowest number of votes in the country, 29%, in the Yaroslavl Region. Later, when local politicians—communists, liberals and democrats—needed to unite against the United Russia party members, they did so on a non-ideological basis,” Krasulin said.
Stanislav Andreichuk also argues that one shouldn’t focus on party brands when analysing regional politics.
“Regional politics is more complex in that sense. That’s because the most unexpected people can run in the regions for parties such as A Just Russia, the Communist Party, the Liberal Democratic Party and others. It’s not just black-and-white politics with good and bad guys. Most of these guys are lacklustre. They have their own influence and interest groups, so even now they continue to compete with each other.”
After the
2012 protests on Bolotnaya Square, the authorities decided to make concessions and bow to democracy. Direct elections for governors made a comeback, but in a special form. The Black Earth region political analyst says that the current gubernatorial elections can best be termed “voting organised to approve the Kremlin’s candidate.”