During the whole month of December Russia has been on the verge of a transformative change. The rigged election that brought the ruling United Russia party slightly less than 50% of the votes created a lot of anger among people who never thought of themselves as being political before. There have been several demonstrations, lots of discussions, and as much as 75000 people came on the streets on the 24th of December. However, their main ideology was to be peaceful and to demand fair elections. This is not a revolution.
 
We are yet to see how the situation will evolve. What’s clear is that there are several forces that are pushing in different directions. The ruling party headed by Vladimir Putin is largely ignoring the people’s demands. They did offer some handouts like the promise of easier political party registration and free regional governor elections, but did not agree to initiate the new elections. This angered people even more. The opposition, on the other side, is divided: there are some who believe that it’s still possible to negotiate and there are some who are calling for decisive (and often violent) actions. A recent interview of the former Putin’s economic advisor Illarionov made it very clear that there are groups who are pushing on the current government to take violent actions because the imminent collapse would clear up the stage for the new players.

It’s almost like they are interested in the violent development in order to get done with it quicker (often at the expense of people on the streets).
 
The protest movement was largely organized through the internet and Facebook. We decided to look into its nature and analyze some of the groups involved into demonstration planning and anti-Putin campaigns in order to see how they are structured and who the most influential participants really are. The full research conducted by Way to Russia and Nodus Labs is available on Nodus Labs’s Website.
 
A very interesting finding was that the Facebook protest groups were quite well interconnected. Mainly comprised of 3 to 4 distinct communities (indicated with different colors on images), they were fit enough to propagate information through the whole network. On average each person who is a member of such group would already be friends with 4 to 5 people who were also members of the same group. In addition to that the power seemed to be quite equally distributed in the network. If you look at the images (to the right), you can see that the bigger nodes are quite equally distributed among communities.

The only problem is that in all of them about 40 to 45% of members did not know anyone else from the group, which makes it harder for information to propagate also because Facebook tends to push the news that are “liked” or shared by the individual’s “friends”.
 
So one of the strategies that these groups could take on in order to improve their work is that the more active members start introducing their friends who are also part of the group but don’t yet know each other. This would allow for a more interconnected structure that propagates information quicker and more efficiently. Also, all the “loners” could be integrated into the existing groups if they are specifically invited to join into discussions.
 
We could not show the actual names for privacy concerns. However, it was interesting to see that the groups formed around a specific practical goal, such as volunteer action and meeting organization were led by the people who had little to do with politics: event organizers, scientists, researchers, media and creative industries workers, activists of minority rights organization. Only the “Putin must leave” group was clearly led by a cluster of people who also belong to opposition political parties and had a strong cluster of people from Georgia (who probably support the group’s activity because of the recent war).

It was interesting to see that the actual groups who are doing useful things and organize meetings are not led by any political ideology or agenda. They are, rather, “normal” people who want justice. It’s important that this fact is clear: most of the people actively involved in protests do not want to take over the power or to organize revolutions. Rather, they just want that the government does its job in a fair way. If the government hears the message, there is a possibility for a transformation in a peaceful way. If not, the more politicised and extremist groups will slowly take over.
 

Read the full research on Nodus Labs’ website