This article revisits the beginning of Putin’s third term, which was characterized by the rise of opposition. Here the opposition means “non-systemic opposition,” who placed itself decisive opposition to the regime. One of the most prominent opposition activist was Alexei Navalny. Following the 2011 Duma election, the opposition gained power with the activation of post-election protest movements “For Fair Elections.” Since the protest movements soon declined, many researchers focused more on the regime’s coercive measures towards the opposition. However, it is no less important to ask why the opposition gained power and remained active for a while. This article explores the reason behind the rise of opposition, and reveals how the regime reacted to the opposition’s activities. In answering these questions, this article focuses on the regime’s effort to defend its legitimacy from the opposition’s attacks.

The article first explores why the opposition gained power. The answer can be found in the opposition’s active commitment to the politicization of regime legitimacy. Such topics include electoral integrity, distribution of power, corruption and others. The early example of the opposition’s commitment to the legitimacy issue was their initiatives in anti-corruption campaigns. Corruption issue became a trigger for the opposition’s further attack on the regime legitimacy. In addition, it should not be ignored that the opposition’s attack on the regime legitimacy well suited to a populist discourse. The opposition emphasized how the regime contradicts the interests of ordinary people, for example, by committing electoral fraud, contradicting the “rule of law,” or committing illegal enrichment. The regime had difficulty in refuting the opposition’s criticism.

Second, the article traces how the regime reacted to the opposition’s attacks. At first, the regime tried to discredit the opposition by mobilizing anti-western rhetoric and strengthening the patriotic mobilization. But the regime’s attempts had limited impact in discrediting the opposition. Then the regime tried to narrow the room for opposition activities by forestalling the opposition’s agenda. The regime actively participated in the anti-corruption campaigns, such as banning the high-ranking officials from possessing bank account abroad, and limiting the maximum amount of money for purchase of cars by officials. The regime’s active commitment to anti-corruption initiative narrowed the room for opposition activities.

The analysis on the “era of opposition” reveals the importance of discourse-level struggle over the regime legitimacy. Despite its significant disadvantage against the incumbent elites, the opposition could attack the regime by mobilizing the legitimacy issue. In order to avoid the opposition’s attacks, the regime could adopt limited measures: after a series of attempts, the regime took over the opposition’s agenda and itself began to commit to the legitimacy issue. The experience of Putin’s third term provides us with a useful perspective in predicting the future of Russian politics: once the opposition succeeds in mobilizing the legitimacy issue, it will not be easy for the regime to tackle the opposition’s attacks.

As a result of a series of centralization reforms, initiated in 2000, a great number of studies have discussed that the center entrenched its control over regional subjects in Russia. Yet, several regional unrests observed in the recent years demonstrates an urgent need for an overhaul of the Russian center-periphery relationship, to which only limited attention has been paid yet. This study explains this instability by the increase of outsider governor deployments. Exploiting an original dataset of all governors from 1991 to 2019, patterns of outsider deployments and the effect of such deployments on the regional political processes are examined. Although President Boris Yel’tsin initially held the right to appoint and dismiss most governors in the first half of the 1990s, he did not try to dispatch outsider governors not firmly embedded in the regional societies. Whereas governors began to be elected through the popular gubernatorial elections in almost all of the regions since 1995, outsider candidates rarely won the posts of governors. In Vladimir Putin’s first and second terms (2000-2008), the power balance between the center and regions radically changed in favor of the center. In addition, scholars have argued that the center’s dominance over regional elites increased rapidly due to the de facto appointment system of governors was introduced in 2004. Nevertheless, even then, outsider governor deployments remained exceptional cases. Since the influence of United Russia as a dominant party was limited at that time, federal elites had to receive the endorsement of governors, as regional bosses, to secure the stability of the regime. However, after the triumph of United Russia in the 2007 parliamentary election and the advent of President Dmitrii Medvedev, the Presidential Administration embarked on active replacements of regional bosses with outsider governors loyal to the center. Consequently, while the center got capable of controlling regional political processes more tightly, these radical cadre reorganizations caused dissatisfaction and protests of regional elites, as a result of which electoral performances in the 2011 parliamentary and 2012 presidential elections declined in the eyes of the center. As a compromise to massive protest movements brought about by the immense size of electoral frauds, popular gubernatorial elections were reinstated in 2012. However, the influence of the center over the recruitment of governors continues to be remarkable and the number of outsider governors is still growing. Yet, in the late 2010s, the decline of the regime’s popularity caused instability at the regional level, as demonstrated by the fact that several candidates backed by the federal government lost in gubernatorial elections. While outsider deployments have merits for the federal elites to control regional political processes through them as loyal agents of the federal government, their lack of embeddedness in local elite communities has detrimental effects on regional unrests. To test this argument, this study investigates the relationship between outsider deployments and regional electoral performances. The OLS estimate and Inverse Probability Weighted estimate demonstrate that outsider governors deliver fewer votes than local governors. Those findings imply that the center-periphery relationship in Russia is still in flux even though the rules of the game have changed since the 1990s.