Evgenia Chirikova entered politics to protect a forest near her home from a highway project. Source: Photoshot / Vostock Photo
Not
many knew about Evgenia Chirikova, a resident of Khmiki in the Moscow
Region outside her circle of friends and family. But the 34-year-old
mother of two has now transformed into one of Russia’s best known
activists crusading against ecological degradation.
The
narratives differ, but the story of Chrikova should strike a chord in
India which has recently witnessed huge mass protests led by Anna
Hazare, a 74-year-old Gandhian activist who became a national icon after
the parliament agreed to accept his demands for a stronger
anti-corruption legislation.
Armed with three college degrees,
Chirikova ran a small business with her engineer husband, and had no
interest in politics. “I didn’t think it was possible to change
anything, so politics seemed a senseless endeavour,” she says. The
turning point came in her life after the Moscow city government decided
to bulldoze the forest by her house to build a highway to St
Petersburg. She became interested in the forest after her second
daughter was born. “Suddenly I had time to look around, and I realised
that while I was working and paying taxes, somebody else was using that
money to destroy my habitat.”
Chirikova gathered local residents
together and spoke out in favour of rerouting the highway; ecologists
later came up with 11 alternative routes. Bureaucrats reacted to this
initiative with bewilderment, while many local residents were
suspicious: an international multimillion-dollar project had never been
stopped by concerns over a forest before. “The Khimki administration
didn’t understand what we wanted,” she explains. “‘If you want to live
in the woods,” they said, “go to Siberia.” During the conflict over the
Khimki Forest, 10 activists were injured by unknown assailants.
Chirikova, too, received anonymous threats, but she refused to give up.
“It’s the bureaucrats who turned me into an opposition leader. I became a citizen very late, at 30,” she says.
During
his presidency, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin approved the
construction of the highway in 2009. That same year Chirikova, with the
opposition’s support, ran for mayor of Khimki on a single platform –
the rerouting of the highway.
She came third, but the views of
her supporters show that there is a demand in Russian society for
specific problems to be solved, says Alexei Mukhin, head of the Centre
for Political Information. “That’s why traditional opposition movements,
afraid to switch from slogans to actions, are losing popularity,” he
adds. The fight for Khimki Forest ended in a decision to narrow the
route from 600m (1,970ft) to 100m (328ft), and prohibit commercial
construction on either side of the highway.
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Alexei Navalny, a lawyer and blogger, has become Russia's celebrity anti-corruption crusader. Source: PhotoXpress |
One of the people
who doubted Chirikova’s chances of success was Alexei Navalny, a lawyer
and blogger who has become famous for fighting corruption in state
companies. Several years ago, he was a member of the liberal party
Yabloko, and worked on a committee to protect Muscovites. “People came
to me complaining about the construction of a highway in Khimki,” he
says. “My answer then was that it was senseless to get involved. "
Today,
he is an active supporter of the Khimki movement, and helps members
make sense of the competitions to build the highway, in which, according
to Elena Panfilova, head of the Russian branch of Transparency
International, “corruption is a large component”.
Navalny became
famous through actions rather than words, defending the rights of
minority shareholders in large state companies. He and she are the same
age; neither of them are affiliated with any political party; both
prefer to work independently as activists, attracting supporters from
across the political spectrum.
They are a new kind of opposition in Russia, orientated toward solving
real problems, says Nikolai Petrov of the Moscow Carnegie Centre. “If
with Evgenia it’s the transformation of a civil position from a private
protest, then Alexei targets political activity at the outset,” he said.
Mukhin says both Chirikova and Navalny “have the image of a popular
leader responding to public
despair”.
They are now ready to share their experience. In June, they participated
in a four-day workshop in the Khimki Forest that attracted more than
3,000 people of all political shades. The workshop aimed at creating a
dialogue between different political and civil forces, and to “give
Russian citizens real knowledge about how to defend their honour,
dignity and rights in this country”. The organisers want the workshop
to be an annual event.
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