Urban Protest. Arve Hansen

collapse. The 15 newly born post-Soviet states had to reorient their economic models towards a new reality and create new political systems while struggling with severe scarcity of consumer goods and social security, explosive crime rates, rampant corruption, and uncontrolled privatisation. At the same time, wars and uprisings for independence broke out frequently in the Caucasus (notably in Abkhazia, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South-Ossetia) and in the Transnistria Region of Moldova, triggering several, often unpopular, military interventions by Russia and other countries. Just when the economic situation started to recover, the 1997 financial crisis in Asia hit the former Soviet Union hard, particularly Russia and its trade partners Ukraine and Belarus. It should be noted that the Russian authorities support the use of the term Likhie devianostye, as it focuses on the negative aspects of the unstable decade between the Soviet Union (stability) and Putin (new stability), although for many Eastern Europeans, the decade was seen as one of freedom and possibilities rather than anarchy (see for example Rusin 2016; Boldyrev 2018; Osipov-Gipsh 2019).

7 In Russia in 2000, the presidency changed from the unpopular, ageing and sickly Boris Yeltsin to the comparatively young, reasonably sober and physically very fit Vladimir Putin, who for several reasons enjoyed high levels of popularity well into the mid-to-late 2000s (9.2). In Belarus, too, the economy had been growing since the early 2000s, and mass protests were mostly ideological (driven by Belarusian nationalists) or constitutional (against the policies of President Aliaksandr Lukashėnka). Yet none of these protests resulted in a colour revolution (8.2).

8 The 2006 protests in Minsk and the 2011–2012 protest movement in Moscow were suppressed so harshly that the opposition of both countries was effectively disabled for several years to come (8.3.2, 9). In both cases, the protesters were met with violence, hundreds of demonstrators were arrested, and the leaders of the opposition received long prison sentences.

9 The revolution has greatly affected both regional and global power politics. Russia has accused the EU and US of orchestrating what they perceive to be a coup d’état, and the Ukrainian revolution became Russia’s pretext for occupying the Crimean Peninsula and supporting the separatist movements in the Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine. Thus, the revolution indirectly became one of the triggering events for the deteriorating relations between Russia and the West today.

10 Since 2014, protests in Ukraine have for the most part been aimed at the policies of President Petro Poroshenko (2013–2019) and President Volodymyr Zelenskyi (since 2019). In Belarus, little has changed, and protests are usually suppressed in much the same manner as before. In Russia, following the annexation of Crimea, a surge in patriotic sentiment led to members of the opposition being labelled traitors, and discontent has remained at low levels. Since 2016, there has been an upswing in public protests in the country. A variety of economic and social problems have motivated hundreds of thousands of Russians to participate in numerous collective actions in cities across the country (9.2.1).

11 The research group RSCPR (Russian Space: Concepts, Practices, Representations) “is engaged in a multidisciplinary study of Russian attitudes to their own and other people’s/nations’ spaces […] which can provide insights into the interdependence of Russian space and Russian identity, both at an individual and a state policy level” (UiT n.d.). Ukraine and Belarus are often (and especially in Russia) perceived as integral parts of a “Russian” world.