This article discusses the role of the Russian Federal Assembly in legislating containment of the 2011/2012 domestic protests, the increased contentious politics that followed with the 2018 Navalny campaign, and the 2019 Golunov and Moscow City Council electoral demonstrations. It scrutinizes the evolution of restrictive legislation from 2012 to 2021 and finds that, after the protests of 2011/2012 the Federal Assembly has played an ever more important role in redesigning legislation that undercut the liberal framework of the 1993 Constitution. The study contributes to understanding the role of legislatures in post-Soviet patrimonial regimes; and it discusses how Russia’s patrimonial legislatures respond to popular protest and contentious politics by restructuring societal expectations and enhancing the regime’s coercive capacity, cementing it in personalized authoritarianism.

Given the recent trend toward the instrumentalization of memory of the Great Patriotic War (GPW) in Russian federal memory politics, this article examines regional features of this trend by assessing the transformations that occurred in the monumental GPW commemoration in the post-Soviet Murmansk region. The case study analyzes the process of creating war memorials dedicated to the Battle for Zapoliar’e, a Murmansk regional narrative of the Great Patriotic War, by observing new war memorials and activities of mnemonic actors initiating these memorials. The article sheds light on the vigorous commemorative activism pushed by a set of regional mnemonic actors who, although remaining loyal to the official patriotic state narrative of the Battle, tend to emphasize other aspects, particularly heroic or tragic, depending on their agendas. While veteran organizations and sometimes regional authorities promote the state-centric and triumphalist vision of the Battle, local poiskoviki activists, on the contrary, appeal to its tragic side, pointing out the importance of the personal remembrance of the fallen. The article concludes that, although the centralization and unification trends in Russian memory politics noticeably affect the regional domain, they are unlikely to fully explain the regional dynamics of developing the monumental media of war memory since such dynamics are set primarily by grassroots activists.