As the Electric Yerevan protests in Armenia enter their third week, the fate of the latest “people power” movement remains uncertain. While the numbers have ebbed and flowed, the protestors are still showing signs of vitality and resolve. Their relations with the regime, however, seem increasingly deadlocked, and the protesters are now looking to apply new pressure on the government to accede to their demands.
While the government has struck a conciliatory tone and won a few morsels of help from its wary patron Russia, a happy resolution to the conflict looks less likely by the day. The protesters may have kept their demands relatively narrow, while denouncing notions that they seek to emulate the watershed “Euromaidan” protests that toppled ex-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, but this has not kept Moscow from seeing all the ingredients of a color revolution in Armenia. It is not hard to imagine elites in both Moscow and Yerevan concluding that rewarding protesters with further concessions would only harm their positions in the long term. If that happens, an escalation is likely.
But regardless of the near-term outcome of Electric Yerevan, the weeks of protest have revealed the fragility of Russia’s hold over its constellation of clients on its periphery. Armenian protesters may chafe at comparisons to the Euromaidan, and perhaps rightly so, but the events in Ukraine and Armenia nevertheless highlight the effects of the burden of Russian writ: creaking, post-Soviet systems beset by rent-seeking and graft. Making allowances for Russian domination may be politically expedient or even economically attractive to local elites in the short-term, but regional governments have little room for maneuver between domestic political demands and Moscow’s diktat.
In the case of Ukraine, Yanukovych’s regime came under heavy domestic pressure after submitting to Russian demands to reverse its decision to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union. Not unlike Armenia’s protests now, the Euromaidan movement settled into a tense phony war after the initial outpouring of protest sentiment; only later did the anti-government tide crest, as Yanukovych’s security forces increasingly resorted to violence, egged on by Moscow (and, according to some reports, in spite of Yanukovych’s misgivings). The Yanukovych regime, increasingly autocratic but nonetheless dependent on domestic political stability, saw Moscow as the constituency most in need of accommodation—no doubt due in large part to Ukraine’s macroeconomic frailty and dependence on Russia—and thus sowed the seeds of its own undoing.
In much the same way, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan performed his own about-face in September 2013, breaking plans to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union and instead opting to join the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union, to which it acceded in 2014. While small numbers came out to protest Sargsyan’s announcement, the country was not as sharply divided as Ukraine; many Armenians saw it (albeit with a skeptical eye) as a pragmatic gesture, given the country’s comprehensive military and economic dependence on Moscow.
The Electric Yerevan protests highlight the limits of Armenian faith in such “pragmatism.” Yerevan’s membership in the EEU was sold to the Armenian people as a fair exchange of some measure of sovereignty for the continuance of its military alliance with Russia, as well as a basket of economic benefits. This latter promise has been largely left unfulfilled, however. Russia did reward the Armenian government’s about-face on the agreement with the EU by offering dramatically improved gas prices, but this did little more than reverse a major price hike imposed by Gazprom earlier that year, when Armenia was still heading toward an EU Association Agreement. And the price increases that jump-started the Electric Yerevan protests were not isolated events: in July 2014, the Russian-owned Electric Networks of Armenia also pushed a 10 percent rate increase.
From a broader perspective, Armenia’s economic ties with Russia have rapidly gone from vital asset to major liability over the past year. The Russian economic slowdown triggered massive currency devaluation, a sharp drop in hugely important remittances inflows, and a rise in consumer prices. Without Russia hovering suspiciously over its shoulder, the Armenian government might have acceded to popular demands and reversed the rate hike, punished the police who violently attacked protesters on June 23, and considered lowering prices—all in all, relatively reasonable requests. But the Armenian elite has been forced to view the protests through the prism of Russian paranoia over yet another “colored revolution.”
For all of its oddities, there is a degree of internal logic to the EEU. For small, post-Soviet countries like Armenia, it is not unreasonable to see the EEU as a transnational club with real economic value. The EEU—Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia, and soon Kyrgyzstan—represents a large and relatively prosperous internal market for which many post-Soviet states are already economically primed. But if the European Union’s integrity is increasingly challenged by a yawning accountability gap between a supranational bureaucracy and national governments, this problem is even more magnified in the EEU, which is dominated by Moscow and comprised of member states with, at best, highly problematic levels of accountability. Local populations have few outlets for expression as it is; they are left with even fewer as their countries codify the EEU (read: Russia) as the institutional hegemon.
When the dust settles, the recent events in Armenia are bound to produce geopolitical repercussions. Win or lose, Moscow has probably already decided to tinker its near-abroad strategy to compensate for the increased risk of popular unrest. But the severe accountability gap produced by Russian geopolitical directives, on one end, and public expectations, on the other, can only be managed by increased use of coercion or even force. By Russia’s calculation, offering more than the slightest of concessions will merely encourage further unrest, and greater accountability or political liberalism will invite Western encroachment. After these options are excluded, the only thing left is force. And it is force—not Eurasian “values,” not some new economic perspective, and not some chimerical post-Soviet civilization—that is the lifeblood of Russia’s imperial project.