PSCRP-BESA Reports No. 137 (June 26, 2025)
Compared to other Russian regions, Dagestan stands out for its relatively high level of grassroots protest activity, which has not yet been completely suppressed. The protests are spontaneous, frequent, and occur for various reasons—and, with rare exceptions, which we will explore in detail below—they do not result in serious repressions against participants. Still, their effectiveness is minimal.
Most often, spontaneous protests arise due to municipal infrastructure issues —primarily water and power outages. This is hardly surprising: the entire utility infrastructure in Dagestan, especially the electrical grid, is on the brink of collapse.
In such cases, residents of a neighborhood or village take to the streets, often blocking highways. Representatives from local administrations and utility companies immediately show up, pleading with residents to disperse and promising to fix the issue promptly. They do slap on a patch fix—until next time. Police generally behave appropriately, only detaining those who are genuinely aggressive—while threats from the republic’s leadership hang in the air.
Closely related are protests over environmental issues—such as the construction of a landfill near the UNESCO-protected Sary-Kum reserve—or the dilapidated state of rural schools. A relatively new twist in these familiar scenarios: video appeals from soldiers participating in the invasion of Ukraine, demanding local issues be addressed. However, a Dagestani activist focused on housing and utilities issues considers these videos “flashy but likely ineffective.”
Dozens—if not hundreds—of such protests happen every year. They remain small, local, and fragmented.
Land disputes remain just as contentious. A vivid example is the months-long protest in the village of Khubar in Kazbekovsky District, where residents oppose a development master plan they believe harms their interests and will lead to land confiscation. The standoff between locals and authorities is full of colorful details: two teacher strikes, one administrative staff strike; a village assembly resolution, recorded in official minutes, to “tear up and throw away” a letter from the district council chair demanding the recall of village deputies; a failed attempt to stage a picket in Moscow; a video message in which residents “prohibit” the plan’s signing; the district head swearing at locals, and in response, being challenged to a fistfight.
The Khubar protest is notable not only for its local flair, but also for the reaction it evoked from Dagestan’s elites. While republic head Sergey Melikov launched crude attacks (on the villagers, hinting at “enemy plots,” State Duma deputy from Dagestan Saygidpasha Umakhanov urged the republic’s prime minister Abdulmuslim Abdulmuslimov to “solve it on the spot,” saying, “you can’t treat your own people this way.” Abdulmuslimov did indeed visit Khubar, and the previously fired school director—a protest leader—was reinstated. Nevertheless, the conflict remains unresolved and the standoff continues.
It’s worth noting villagers show no fear of officials—they even publicly called on Melikov to “not post on Telegram about things he doesn’t know.” So far, no police crackdowns have followed.
Similar, albeit less theatrical, protests occur regularly—despite Dagestan’s vast territory, arable and especially grazing lands are scarce, making competition fierce[1]. Like utility protests, these remain confined to a municipality or, at most, a district. They typically involve town halls, video appeals, and yield no results.
One exception is the decades-long conflict over land for the indigenous Dagestani Chechens, the Akkin. In 1944, they were subjected to deportation on Stalin’s orders. Their home distict, Aukh, was given a new name — Novolaksky, — and part of its territory, including the large Chechen village of Leninaul (Akhtash-Aukh), was transferred to neighboring Kazbekovsky District. Upon return, Chechens were barred from settling on their ancestral lands, which had by then been populated by Avars relocated from mountain areas. In the 1990s, Chechens were promised the return of their homes and pastures, and the reestablishment of Aukh District—but that promise was never fulfilled.
Dagestan’s authorities have failed to find—or more importantly, implement—solutions acceptable to both Avars and Chechens. Partly due to funding shortages, but more so due to incompetence and corruption. Meanwhile, the Chechen leadership closely monitors the situation, raising concerns of a possible repeat of the “Ingush scenario”[2]. The conflict involves numerous actors—from multiple district administrations to developers, from the muftiate to Avars fighting in Ukraine. Due to its historical and political baggage, this is no longer just a land dispute. It could seriously escalate and deserves an in-depth analysis of its own.
Nevertheless, all of the protests above deal with daily, practical aspects of people’s lives. The authorities’ relative tolerance ends where things get political. Two major politically charged events in recent years were the spontaneous anti-mobilization rallies of September 25–26, 2022, and the antisemitic riot at Makhachkala airport on October 29, 2023.
The anti-mobilization protests in Makhachkala on September 25 and 26, 2022, drew several hundred people. The protests featured clashes with police, including violence against women and beatings of detainees in custody. In the aftermath, hundreds of administrative cases were filed and dozens of criminal cases were launched. At least five people were convicted, with one sentenced to prison.
Beyond Makhachkala, a significant protest—over 100 people—took place in the Kumyk village of Endirey in Khasavyurt District, and in Babayurt District, protesters blocked a highway.
While small by global standards, these protests were quite large by Russian standards. No other region saw anything comparable. Notably, people in Makhachkala returned to the streets on September 26—even after the previous day’s rally had been brutally dispersed.
The most obvious reason? In the early months of the full-scale invasion, Dagestan had one of the highest military death tolls[3]. That also helps explain why the Makhachkala rallies were largely driven by women.
The Telegram channel “Utro Dagestan” aggressively promoted these protests, which gained dozens of thousands of subscribers at that time. Former State Duma deputy Ilya Ponomarev—who had moved to Ukraine and received Ukrainian citizenship before the war—confirmed that he helped support the channel “organizationally and financially.” He called the Dagestani anti-mobilization protests a “full-fledged popular armed uprising” and claimed they supposedly stopped the mobilization in the republic. That’s false: according to “Vazhnye Istorii”(“Important Stories”) and Conflict Intelligence Team, 2.6% of eligible men were mobilized in just two weeks—a higher percentage than in all but four regions, including annexed Sevastopol.
The “Utro Dagestan” channel gained international notoriety about a year later when its Islamist and antisemitic posts incited the October 29, 2023, pogrom at Makhachkala airport—along with a string of smaller antisemitic incidents that same week in Khasavyurt, Karachay-Cherkessia, and Kabardino-Balkaria.
While “Utro Dagestan” wasn’t the only platform fanning antisemitic hysteria in the Caucasus, it was this channel that published the call to “greet” a flight from Tel Aviv flight. The message spread rapidly through local social media groups, followed by posts instructing rioters how to act—block the airport, inspect vehicles, and so on.
On the evening of October 29, about 1,500 people—almost exclusively young men—stormed Uytash Airport in Makhachkala just as a flight from Tel Aviv landed. Some waved Palestinian flags and held placards with pro-Palestinian and openly antisemitic slogans. They broke into the terminal and onto the tarmac, where they began “searching for Jews,” checking passengers’ documents, and demanding Jews be expelled from Dagestan. Police officers on the scene didn’t resist the rioters; they merely tried to calm them, saying they “understood” their anger. Realistically, the local police present before Rosgvardiya arrived probably couldn’t have stopped the mob anyway.
Immediately after the riot, PSCRP-BESA published a detailed analysis of the incident, its likely causes and instigators, and the authorities’ initial response. The team intends to revisit this topic in future reports.
The official position of the Russian authorities is that both the protests against mobilization and the riots at the airport were the result of Ukrainian propaganda aimed at destabilizing the situation in Russia.
There’s a kernel of truth in that, although Ilya Ponomarev later tried to distance himself from “Utro Dagestan.” Still this narrative is mainly a smokescreen—obscuring the deeper, far more troubling causes: the spread of global Islamism with its antisemitic strain, and the susceptibility of Russia’s Muslim population to these ideas. Notably, three times as many people stormed an airport hunting for Jews as turned out to protest against a war that literally gets them killed.
The version about the “Ukrainian hand” also diverts attention from the glaring incompetence of Russian law enforcement and security services. They failed not only to infiltrate extremist groups but also to stop a riot that had been openly planned for a whole day.
All the authorities could do afterward, to paraphrase the Russian saying, was wave their fists after the fight. The “airport case” became the largest mass riot case in Russia’s recent history. 1,200 people faced administrative charges; 142 faced criminal ones, including suspected organizers. As of mid-May, 110 had been sentenced to prison terms ranging from 4.5 to 10.5 years. Defense lawyers claim the investigation was biased and included people who hadn’t even participated.
After the riot at Uytash airport, no large-scale antisemitic incidents occurred in Dagestan or in the rest of Russia. But assuming the problem is solved would be incredibly naive. On June 23, 2024, armed men attacked Orthodox churches and synagogues in Makhachkala and Derbent, killing 17 police and 5 civilians (excluding five slain attackers). This came amid a general rise in Islamist underground activity in the North Caucasus. In this climate of radicalization of discontent, antisemitism may morph from casual prejudice to violent, religiously charged political extremism[4].
Still, beyond prosecuting those involved in the “airport case,” there’s been no general crackdown on public demonstrations in Dagestan. Several factors explain why grassroots protest remains alive here.
- Dagestan’s ethnic, cultural, and economic patchwork is its core trait. It’s a complex society that demands constant negotiation, compromise, and balancing of interests. At the same time, while separatist sentiment is virtually absent, Dagestanis tend to see their region as distinct—different from their neighbors and certainly from “ethnic Russian” Russia. It’s a place with its own norms and unwritten rules, hence the drive to solve local problems locally. This is supported by the prevalence of extended families, strong kinship ties, and the closeness of power structures to the people—especially in the countryside, where most of the population lives.
- Remnants of relatively independent civil society institutions still exist in Dagestan, and grassroots activists still operate here. Naturally, they operate in a rapidly shrinking space of what’s permissible—which means, for example, a strict ban on criticizing the political regime—but they are nonetheless actual civic actors, not nominal appointees. Among them are Shamil Khadulayev, head of the Public Monitoring Commission (which defends prisoners’ rights); Denga Khalidov, co-founder of the Russian Congress of the Peoples of the Caucasus; Arsen Magomedov of the “Our City” movement; and Ziyautdin Uvaisov, who runs “Housing Monitor” and “Patient Monitor” initiatives. Two moderately opposition-minded media outlets—Chernovik and Novoye Delo—still function, though Chernovik has been online-only since late 2022 due to pressure on printing houses. Worth noting: local journalists staged an unprecedented solidarity campaign for Chernovik editor Abdulmumin Gadzhiyev, imprisoned on bogus charges and recognized by human rights groups as a political prisoner. For over five years, they staged weekly solo pickets in his support.
- The republican government, meanwhile, is neither capable of running Dagestan effectively, solving the problems that enrage locals—especially municipal infrastructure failures—nor of repressing dissent with brute force, as in neighboring Chechnya. Dagestan’s head, Sergey Melikov, is half-Lezgin ethnically but comes from Moscow. He’s viewed as a Kremlin appointee and isn’t popular. Despite persistent rumors of his possible resignation, he remains in power—for now. His preferred strategy of ignoring the slow loss of control only makes his position shakier.
- Dagestan has a relatively young population: as of January 1, 2024, the average age was 34.35, more than five years younger than the national average of 40.97. A sizable cohort of young people, especially young men—the so-called youth bulge—is a well-studied driver of social unrest and protest across many countries.
And yet, there are no plausible scenarios in which Dagestani protests become a real threat to the regime. The same diversity that keeps Dagestan’s society “alive,” also prevents the rise of any unifying idea that could galvanize the masses.
That includes radical Islam. Growing discontent and the inability to channel it through formal institutions—let alone achieve any real change—will likely lead to further expansion of the Islamist underground, more recruits, and more attacks, influenced by global Islamist narratives. But don’t overstate the trend. On the contrary: Dagestan suffered through the 1999 invasion by Shamil Basayev and Khattab’s forces, which triggered the Second Chechen War. The society, by and large, remains secular, and terrorism or separatism have little popular support. If anything, Islamist violence would likely provoke a backlash and push both society and the government closer together in the face of a common threat.
The authorities will likely continue to tolerate some level of local protest—as long as it remains fragmented and focused on mundane issues. Larger demonstrations, especially those with any political overtones, will be suppressed. And if local forces can’t handle them, federal security services will be brought in to do the dirty work.
[1] Land conflicts between private individuals regularly escalate into shootings, mass brawls and even murders.
[2] Novolaksky District is adjacent to Chechnya, with ethnic Chechens making up more than a quarter of the population.
[3] Due to poverty, low levels of education and lack of career prospects, professional military service was one of the few social elevators available to Dagestanis in recent years, so a disproportionate number of Dagestanis served in the army. They were among the first to get to the front lines, where many of them perished quickly. Later, when Russia shifted to using mostly mercenaries in combat operations, including so-called volunteers rather than regular military personnel, this disproportion was smoothed out.
[4] Recently, it was reported that the Russian Federal Agency for Ethnic Affairs released an analytical report, supposedly following the terrorist attacks in Makhachkala and Derbent. In it, the agency claims that Dagestan is “on the brink of a social explosion.” The cited causes include utility failures, corruption, and Islamization—blamed by the agency on the republic’s muftiate, despite the fact that it is entirely and unequivocally loyal to the authorities and, moreover, actively participates in the persecution of Salafis. The agency has neither confirmed nor denied the document’s authenticity, while Dagestan’s Ministry for National Policy dismissed it as a fake.
PSCRP team