Murmansk and Boston, united for centuries by bitter arctic weather, alcoholism and vitamin D deficiency, grew even closer this week when my beloved hometown, once familiar mainly to Tom Clancy readers and WWII afficionados (nuclear icebreaker base, allied convoys), hosted a major political insurrection.

It all started when Sergei Subbotin, the deputy governor, stood for election against the incumbent mayor Mikhail Savchenko. So far, so normal. Except that this time Subbotin was not a member of United Russia, the party of power headed by prime minister Putin.

This sort of embarrassment was exactly what Putin had hoped to stamp out when he replaced gubernatorial elections with presidential appointments: while mayors would still be popularly elected,  it was understood that only party members would be elected.

Unfortunately for himself, governor Yevdokimov (himself a UR member) seemed only to have got that memo yesterday; before then, he had forcefully tested political ‘etiquette’ by firmly backing his non-party deputy against his fellow party member Savchenko.

None of this would have mattered had Subbotin not shown so much early promise in the first round of voting, which triggered a run-off. This spooked Moscow so much that in the days to follow, a troupe of national (United Russia supporting) celebrities began to hecticly flood Murmansk from the capital. But even the legendary ice hockey goalie Tretyak, who was trotted out to stump for Savchenko, could not stop Subbotin’s 60%-35% thrashing of Moscow’s candidate in the second round.

There are rumours that Yevdokimov broke with Savchenko after a clan war within United Russia. If that were the case, asks Radio Liberty’s Robert Coalson, “why didn’t the purportedly all-powerful Vladimir Putin, supreme leader of Unified Russia and presumably of Russia as well, not pick up the phone to one clan or the other and settle the matter?…Where was Putin?”.

The answer is that Putin and United Russia were themselves central components of Savchenko’s downfall. Alas, the wave of United Russia support gave the poor mayor as much help as a campaign endorsement from George Bush.

No amount of support from Yevdokimov could have delivered Subbotin a landslide; and, corrupt though he was, Savchenko himself was not hated enough to be kicked out in such spectacular fashion. Contacts in Murmansk attest that the way the votes gap grew as United Russia threw its weight behind him clearly indicates a protest vote against the ruling party in Moscow, rather than the mayor himself.

Of course, other factors may have played a role, including “the possibility that forces within Unified Russia are playing up the conflict (or even created it in the first place) precisely to secure [Yevdokimov’s] removal as governor. The governor of Murmansk Oblast plays a key role in the development of the massive Shtokman gas field a multibillion-dollar project connected to the Nord Stream gas pipeline to Europe”.

According to a political observer quoted in today’s Kommersant, a liberal daily critical of the government, the very public removal of the governor just days after he ‘permitted’ the defeat of a United Russia candidate was intended to serve as an example to others to “deliver the necessary votes” in future.

Moreover, the Kremlin is greenlighting a law that would give “extra powers to dismiss mayors, who are still directly elected by constituents”.

Another interesting development is the tightening of the United Russia party’s grip not just over the regions, but also the presidency itself: the Duma is to vote on “a bill that would give the party that holds the most seats in a regional legislature the right to propose gubernatorial candidates…Under the existing procedure, this right belongs to the presidential envoys to the federal districts”.

Indeed, the political dailies in Russia mostly saw the election as a struggle between two ‘power verticals’, the federal and the regional. Kommersant reporter Maria-Luisa Tirmaste dubbed it a battle between two ‘administrative resources’, using the euphemism for political strong-arming by incumbents using all resources at their disposal.

Yet such a discussion completely leaves out the views of the ordinary people who cast the votes. How many Murmansk residents (called Murmanchani) actually cared passionately enough about the Byzantine tribal warfare between the governor and the mayor to come out to the polls (in knee deep snow after a massive blizzard last week)?

I’m under no illusions that democracy figured in the motivations of either party in this dirty political dispute. Yet, like the Romanian ‘revolution’ of 1989, it provided an (flawed) outlet for people onto which to project their desires of protest; their willingness to cast the no confidence vote was a more important event than the backroom politics of the scandal itself.