Can climate activism survive in Russia? A conversation with Arshak Makichyan

Arshak Makichyan is an Armenian activist who grew up in Russia. In 2019, he participated in the march in memory of Boris Nemtsov, discovering organized demonstrations as a form of political participation. Later that year, inspired by Greta Thunberg, he would start a long streak of , rapidly attracting the attention of the media and the civic society in his country. His personal story is closely tied to the events that have unfolded in Russia over the past five years: a period marked by unrest, global crises, and growing domestic repression. After he spoke out against Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he was  by the Russian authorities. His experience allows for a broader reflection on the current state of climate activism in Russia and its possible future survival strategies.

Unsurprisingly, organizing a grassroot movement in Russia today proves to be anything but simple. This is not only due to repression from the top, but also to the difficulty of bringing citizens to engage in active participation. Nevertheless, as Arshak told us, neither the increasing State repression nor the reluctance of Russian citizens prevented Fridays For Future Russia from emerging as an established and recognized social movement.

It was “really hard,” said Makichyan. 

There was almost no climate movement at all […]. We didn't have that culture in our society, people didn't know how activism worked.

The  faced by FFF Russia are , as Russian citizens are comparatively less inclined to prioritize climate change and environmental issues. Contrarily to what one might expect, attitudes among younger generations don't seem to be radically different: in 2019, when Arshak Makichyan started organizing the movement, environmental issues were not even in the top 5 concerns of Russian millennials, while climate change and natural disasters topped the list of concerns for millennials around the world.

Despite the potential barrier of depoliticization, the activists of FFF Russia soon began to gain . “Our actions were quite successful. Even though we were a small movement, somehow we were able to use social media to organize a real grassroot movement, which was a miracle for Russia. It was something new for Russia I would say, and it was kind of working.” 

For Russian environmental movements, one of the major is the capacity to use various forms of media to gain visibility; namely, it is crucial to be able to utilize conflict situations as informational triggers attract attention. As Arshak confirmed, the hurried repression of their actions gave a significant boost to the growth of FFF Russia. “In countries like Russia, the climate crisis was not taken very seriously, but when you are getting repressed for something, then it's getting a lot more attention and trust.”

A grassroot movement can’t rely on controversy alone if it wants to avoid a complete crackdown. Another crucial factor contributing to their initial success was its international dimension, described by Makichyan as “really helpful for activists in authoritarian regimes.”

It gave us some kind of safety; I was arrested, and people [abroad] were protesting in our support, and it was helping us to grow as a movement.

By 2020, FFF Russia had gained substantial visibility and credibility, navigating through both top-down restrictions and bottom-up reluctance in a rather surprising way. What came next, however, would catch everyone unprepared. 

In Russia, the last five years have been characterized by an increasingly tighter authoritarian grip. Repression of key activists and movements can become much more successful when it reaches more extreme levels.  This is particularly feasible when contingencies allow for major shifts in attention and concerns in both citizens and activists, as it happened with the pandemic first and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine next. As Makichyan recounts, these events have represented a two-step slide into a new level of repression. 

For an authoritarian state, one could say that it was going quite well, and, before the pandemic, the movement was growing […]. With the pandemic, the scale of repression started to increase, and it was impossible to continue to do activism […]. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, any form of peaceful activism offline has become impossible in Russia.

Not only have the citizens (and the regime) , but the activists themselves have turned their attention and resources to the current war in Ukraine, as many of them spoke up against it. Arshak himself, who fled the country right after the full-scale invasion, faced very serious consequences for speaking up, as he was  in late 2022. 

When asked about the state of the movement today, Makichyan didn't sound too optimistic. “I would say that it's not a movement anymore. The priorities have changed, Russia is waging this terrible war, and people are worried about other things”. As he recognizes, however, the FFF Russia experience undeniably set a precedent in Russian history. “Even though I was deprived of my citizenship, I'm now part of the Russian civil society and I'm a recognized activist. Climate activism is now part of our history. Whatever will happen in the future, it exists”.

Are phenomena like FFF Russia just a precedent relegated to the past, or is there room for new developments? The recent crackdown on activists, fueled by securitization around the war in Ukraine, has led most of the remaining independent actors . As Makichyan told us, “The climate has changed drastically,” and the Regime is undergoing a rather qualitative transformation: “It's a dictatorship now, it's not an authoritarian regime anymore.” In such harsh conditions, three ongoing processes might offer climate activism an opportunity to survive: social media activism growth, localized (ethnic) mobilization, and risky top-down politicization efforts.

Social media activism

A first viable option for survival might be online activism. Given the transnational nature of the contemporary media environment, could the large community of exiled Russian activists be a resource? Once again, the experience of Arshak Makichyan can be a useful example to better grasp the potential as well as the limitations of social media activism. On the one hand, his large audience allows him to stay relevant and contribute to public discourse around the main topics concerning his activism. On the other hand, according to Makichyan, this is far from sufficient: “If we don't do something on the streets, we won't be able to achieve anything.”

It's really important for us to do something in the streets as well, to do some kind of action: it's not just protests on the streets, it's also meeting with politicians, building new alliances, and many other things. Just posting something online is not going to work. We should be on the streets, support other struggles, find allies and protest.

Even though Makichyan’s skepticism is perfectly justified, the potential of social media platforms must not be underestimated either. Social media still offer an important tool for Russian climate activists to pursue their goals in at least three ways. First, they still allow for online advocacy and public diplomacy, promoting both their cause and their organizations domestically and abroad. Second, they will represent a crucial tool for promoting and expanding relationships and coordination between exiled activists in the next few years. Lastly, false regime narratives can’t spread undisturbedly if they are contested by a bottom-up network, especially on key domestic issues like climate and environmental processes.

A local, ethnic dimension

While still highly demobilized on global environmental issues, Russian citizens are known to be quite sensitive to local problems and dynamics. Arshak, despite being the face of a global movement, benefited from focusing on localized questions. “It works when it's kind of combined [...]. As a climate movement we were trying to raise awareness about the climate crisis, but obviously we were connecting it with some local problems.” 

In a depoliticized society, however, the connection to global struggles is not an easy one to make. Rather than mobilizing citizens around core political values, the protracted relevance of local factors alone is likely to reproduce wider depoliticization. 

The salience of locally driven mobilization lays in the ways in which the preservation of local ecosystems might overlap with broader questions of ethnic relations. “As a climate activist,” Arshak Makichyan says that he is himself “trying to work more with indigenous people.”

The concentration of economic interests and centralization of the Russian State-power often produce exploitative dynamics related to the extraction economy in peripheric regions, where indigenous people see their ecosystems and ways of life disrupted by economic goals of the center. In such contexts, local issues might interact with national identities and decolonial perspectives, potentially moving the focus from the outcomes to the process in a  way.

This issue was being ignored by the Russian civil society and the international institutions, but it's obviously connected, and we should do something about it, also to be able to mobilize people in the future.

 This doesn’t come without obstacles, he recognizes, as according to him “the decolonial movement and indigenous people are being marginalized [within the Russian civil society].

Nevertheless, the aforementioned obstacles must be overcome. Far from just representing a moral refrain, the emergence of a truly decolonial movement within the Russian civil society will be a key factor in transforming localized conflicts into nationwide movements, which could make the difference for the survival of climate and environmental activism.

The risks of mobilization

The third and final major process that might latently open a window of opportunity for climate activism is closely related to the  by Putin's regime to mobilize large parts of the Russian population to sustain the military effort in Ukraine.

For a long time, the regime’s legitimacy has revolved around passive, depoliticized compliance rather than active support. Coherently with the qualitative shift outlined by Makichyan, however, an increasing endeavor to overcome this lack of mobilizational ideology might be soon taking place.

In this possible transition from an authoritarian state to a regime, new windows of opportunities might emerge, as citizen's sense of political efficacy could be enhanced without the certainty of including them in the new dominant ideology. Were such opportunities to emerge, activists shouldn’t hesitate to act, redirecting renewed efficacy towards concrete environmental and climate goals. In doing so, such an agenda should be linked to and negotiated with broader social and political goals, to effectively engage with civil society more widely. 

The Russian climate movement finds itself now at a crossroads, but new opportunities could soon arise from salient processes driven from both below (local and national issues) and above (regime transition efforts). If activists can seize such opportunities, climate activism in Russia might be able to survive or even become part a meaningful, grassroots alternative force in the long term. Social media, domestic ethnic struggles, and reckless mobilizational efforts offer the potential to do so.