Twenty years have now passed since Boris Yeltsin appointed the little-known head of the FSB, Vladimir Putin, to be his prime minister in early August of 1999. The political system subsequently created by Putin has been able to weather economic busts, mass protests, and international sanctions. Recently, however, stability has begun to resemble stagnation as the regime struggles to deal with new challengers emerging from outside the political establishment. Over the last seven years, opposition activists and politicians have developed novel tools to address the obstacles that have traditionally excluded them from organized politics. Progress has been slow but evident at the local and regional levels and is starting to yield electoral results. In this talk, Dr. Gorokhovskaia discusses the evolution of strategies adopted by opposition politicians and activists – with examples from three of the most recent rounds of regional elections – and the impact these strategies may have on Russia’s political landscape in the last years of the Putin regime.

Dr. Yana Gorokhovskaia is a political scientist studying civil society and activism in Russia. Her research has been published in Post-Soviet Affairs , Democratization , and Russian Politics.  Her commentary has appeared in The Washington Post , Voice of America , Al Jazeera , The Moscow Times , and The Huffington Post . From 2016 to 2019, she was the Russian Politics postdoctoral fellow at the Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian and Eastern European Studies at Columbia University.