Protest and Elite Strategies in the Oil Capital of Russia: Surgut in Transition

• In Event: The Pluralistic Politics of Resource Extraction

Abstract

What happens to the development of civil society and labor relations when countries decide to privatize vital and strategically important extractive industries, like oil? As oil industries become increasingly independent from the state, do the well-known consequences of rentierism (such as, repression and co-optation of the masses and labor) dissipate? This paper seeks to answer these questions by studying the experience of such a transition in Russia’s so-called “oil capital,” Surgut. During the chaos of the 1990s transition, how did locals and oil workers react to the myriad political, economic, and social crises felt broadly across Russia? What strategies did elites employ to maintain social order? Surgut presents an interesting case because resource extraction is a particularly fraught sector due to the highly volatile nature of the global commodity market into which Russia’s oil industry was thrust. Nevertheless, the reorganization of the oil industry in the early-1990s allowed Surgutneftegaz to consolidate a vertically-integrated company under the leadership of Vladimir Bogdanov (Surgutneftegaz’s oil tycoon). Although production crashed dramatically in the early-1990s, Surgutneftegaz stabilized in the mid-1990s, and consolidated and rebounded in the late-1990s. Simultaneously, Surgut’s political institutions became more democratic with the creation of a directly elected City Duma and Mayor, and the administrative apparatus became more open to societal input and collaboration on projects to improve conditions in the city. However, the protest waves Surgut experienced neither neatly coincide with oil prices, nor are the majority of protest events directly connected to the oil industry. The within-case variation in Surgut’s economic prospects, level of dependence on the central state, and local political reforms allows for the comparison of protest patterns within a company town to isolate causal factors leading to the protest patterns observed. Drawing on interviews with local scholars as well as content analysis of local newspapers and archival documents, this paper will clarify the effects of the transition to a capitalist economy, privatized oil industry, and semi-democratic political regime on protest and civil society in one of Russia’s most strategically important cities.

Author

• Allison D. Evans, University of Nevada, Reno