Mobilising for Regional Protests on Russian Social Media: The Case of Khabarovsk

The 2020 protests in Khabarovsk Krai, triggered by the arrest and subsequent detention of the governor Sergey Furgal on allegations of organising killings in the early 2000s, continued for several months; at their peak, the demonstrations and rallies had more than ten thousand participants in the region’s capital alone. This ZOiS Report offers several possible explanations for the longevity and mass character of the protests.

First, it discusses pre-existing socioeconomic and political developments in the region. Territorial disparity, one of the major structural factors driving social inequality in Russia, affects Khabarovsk Krai on several levels. Second, the report explores the framing (interpretation) of events around Furgal’s prosecution and the protests on Russian social media. Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques were used to reconstruct the long-term dynamics of positive, negative and neutral social media coverage, and, for two selected periods, to identify clusters of similar texts and main frames supporting mobilisation.