“Pomor’e ne Pomoika”: Framing the Protest Campaign against the Landfill Project at Shies Station in Russia’s Arkhangelsk Region

Abstract

This chapter explores the protest movement Pomor'e ne pomoika, which took on the construction of the Shies landfill in Arkhangelsk region. 1 The movement began in 2018 and lasted about two years, becoming one of the most visible Russian environmental protests of the last decade ("Kak protestuiut rossiiane" 2020). This reaction to the use of unoccupied land -specifically, the creation of a giant "ecotechnopark," which was more a dump for waste from Moscow than a modern and sustainable waste utilization project -started at the local level, but quickly attracted regional and even national attention. Rallies and pickets in support of the Shies protesters were organized from Kaliningrad to Novosibirsk, and even abroad, in Oslo and Cologne (Iadroshnikov 2018). Despite the authoritarian system of government in Russia, protests of various scope are in fact common. Between 2007 and 2016, around 9.5 percent of all protests had an environmental agenda (Lankina and Tertytchnaya 2020). Usually, these protests remained localized (Wu and Martus 2021). What is peculiar about the Shies protest is that a seemingly local issue attracted massive, countrywide support. In this chapter, I analyze how protest coordinators and activists framed their opposition in order to better understand what allowed the Shies campaign to resonate on the national level, attract thousands of supporters, 1 "Pomor'e is not a dump." (All translations are my own, unless stated otherwise.)Pomor'e is a territory along the White Sea in Russia's European North.