They said mass protests were impossible in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The coercive apparatus is too strong. The regime’s propaganda is all-pervasive. The people are apathetic and zombified.

And then, on January 15, 17, and 19, the impossible happened.

Thousands of Bashkirs, a Turkic nation with their own autonomous republic, Bashkortostan, took to the streets, first in the town of Baymak and then in the republic’s capital, Ufa, and proved the nay-sayers wrong. The number of participants was especially striking, starting with a few thousand and then growing to 10,000 in Baymak, followed by some 2,000 in Ufa.

The reason for their outrage was the sentencing to four years in prison of Fail Alsynov, an environmental activist and promoter of Bashkir language and culture who opposed plans to mine for gold in a mountain range Bashkirs consider holy and criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The protestors chanted “Freedom” (whose, one wonders: Bashkortostan’s or Alsynov’s?) and “Shame” and staged folk dances and sang songs in Bashkir. They were, in effect, expressing their identity and challenging Russian rule.

Although the riot police responded with tear gas and batons and made a few arrests, the Bashkirs remained undaunted. They showed that the regime is not as invincible as Putin and misguided Western analysts say it is. They showed that there is discontent, that people will, if sufficiently angered by some random event, challenge the dictatorship, and that the regime, despite its totalitarian aspirations, isn’t entirely in command of a vast country with a very diverse population.

The unpredictability of the spark is worth underlining. Alsynov was no cult figure, and his arrest and sentencing were business as usual for the repressive Putin regime. And yet, that event triggered the outrage that led to the protests. That could only have happened if there had been pent-up resentments and an inchoate though widespread anger that served as the tinder that burst into flames once the match was lit.

Such sparks often play a key role in the mobilization of protests. Rosa Parks, no revolutionary herself, was arrested for refusing to go to the back of a bus and quickly became a cause célèbre for the civil rights movement in 1955. In 1972, an earthquake devastated Nicaragua, revealed the extent of the Anastasio Somoza regime’s corruption, and furthered the Sandinista cause. A sudden sharp increase in gas prices led to several days of violence in Kazakhstan in 2022. A young girl’s death while in police custody led to weeks of violent protests in Iran that same year.

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and then of the Soviet state in 1991 was preceded by similar sparks. The tinder was amply available. Most East Europeans and Soviets had long since lost faith in their communist masters; economic conditions were visibly getting worse; and the regimes obviously had no idea of how to extricate themselves and their people from the mess.

Then came the sparks. Pope John Paul II’s visit to Poland in 1979 empowered Poles to establish the Solidarity movement one year later. The Chornobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 exposed the mendacity of the regime while the failed hardliner coup of mid-1991 exposed Gorbachev’s weakness and played a critical role in mobilizing non-Russians in support of independence. Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was booed at a public rally in 1989, and the momentary confusion that was evident on his televised face revealed the weakness of the regime. A misstatement by an East German official led East and West Berliners to storm the Wall on November 9, 1989.

Putin personally witnessed the humiliating end of communist rule in East Germany. He’s sufficiently knowledgeable of Russian and Soviet history to be able to read the writing on the wall. He probably also knows that what he once termed the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20^th century—the collapse of the Soviet Union—may be about to repeat itself in the Russian Federation.

It's in this light that the recent remarkable decision by four Russian regional governors to fight separatism has to be seen. According to the Johnstown Foundation’s  Vadim Shtepa, “On December 29, 2023, several regional governors in Russia initiated the establishment of headquarters ‘to prevent separatism, nationalism, mass riots, and extremist crimes.’ Those working at the headquarters include all senior regional officials and security officials from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Federal Security Service (FSB), and Russian National Guard (Rosgvardia). Thus far, the creation of four such headquarters has been confirmed in the Republic of Buryatia, Altai Krai, Voronezh Oblast, and Oryol Oblast.”

Buryatia borders on Mongolia and has experienced very high casualty rates in the war against Ukraine. Altai Land borders on Kazakhstan, which has embarked on a campaign of de-Russification. Voronezh Province borders on Ukraine,  and Oryol is right next door. None of these places is known for separatism or nationalism, yet if the need to fight separatism was felt to be great in these areas, then the need to combat it must be so much greater in such regions as Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, and Sakha-Yakutia, all of which declared sovereignty in 1990. Indeed, Chechnya, run unconstitutionally according to Sharia law by a homegrown dictator, Ramzan Kadyrov, is arguably already independent, especially as he also has his own armed forces.

If the non-Russians proceed to raise hell in other regions of the Russian Federation, it will be in no small measure due to the fact that Putin, like Mikhail Gorbachev and most Russian leaders, has never fully appreciated the importance of the “nationality question.” Gorbachev believed, almost until the very end of the USSR, that the non-Russians had no serious grievances. He was wrong, and it was the non-Russians—in particular, the Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians—who embarked on national liberation struggles, delegitimized the Soviet regime, and ultimately brought down the Soviet empire.

Putin is even blinder to the importance of the non-Russians than Gorbachev. After two years of a bloody war that has produced at least 350,000 Russian casualties, he still believes the Ukrainians inflicting these losses don’t exist. No less important, he still believes that the Russian Federation’s non-Russian peoples can be pushed around and their institutions, cultures, and languages can be controlled and eviscerated as part of his grand vision of a renewed Russian empire.

The Bashkirs demonstrated that Putin’s assumptions about non-Russians are dead wrong. Will the non-Russian nations set an example for the quiescent Russian masses to follow? They did in the latter half of the 1980s, when Gorbachev unleashed glasnost and perestroika. But thanks to Gorbachev’s reining in of the secret police, people were less afraid to state their views and protest publicly. At present, Putin’s police state is arguably stronger and more ruthless than ever. And yet, when hundreds of Dagestanis stormed an airport in 2023, the police mostly watched. When Yevgeni Prigozhin staged his failed coup, the secret police and army also watched. And when thousands of Bashkirs took to the streets, repressions were minimal. Clearly, the lesson of these three cases is that, if sufficiently large numbers of committed protesters protest, the police will be cowed.

That’s where sparks come in. Rationally thinking Russians will weigh the pluses and minuses of protest and likely conclude that the chances of being arrested or killed are greater than the chances that whatever cause they may support will succeed. But the response to sparks is usually emotional. People protest because, to quote a line from the 1976 film, Network, they’re “mad as hell and won’t take this anymore.”

What might trigger a Russian protest? The aging and increasingly incoherent Putin could easily pull a Ceausescu. Dissident Alexander Navalny’s death might also outrage Russians. A major defeat in some battle in the war against Ukraine or, better still, a total defeat in the war would almost certainly do the trick.

Sparks can’t be predicted, of course, but their chances of occurring can be increased. The tinder is in place and it’s getting drier with every day, as Russians’ prosperity takes a nosedive and their undernourished, underequipped, and undertrained men die needlessly in Ukrainian mud. If the West is serious about Putin Russia’s geopolitical threat to the international order, it needs to create more sparks. And that means promoting a Ukrainian victory as the best way of promoting Putin’s departure, the relative liberalization of his fascist regime, and the progressive return of Russia to some degree of normalcy.

About the Author: Dr. Alexander Motyl

Dr. Alexander Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia, and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires, and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, including Pidsumky imperii (2009); Puti imperii (2004); Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (2001); Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities (1999); Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism (1993); and The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919–1929 (1980); the editor of 15 volumes, including The Encyclopedia of Nationalism (2000) and The Holodomor Reader (2012); and a contributor of dozens of articles to academic and policy journals, newspaper op-ed pages, and magazines. He also has a weekly blog, “Ukraine’s Orange Blues.”