How a Russian Dissident Became a Thorn in Vladimir Putin's Side

Russian opposition activist Alesksey Navalny
Photo Credit: MItya Aleshkovskiy/Wikimedia Commons

On 18 July, the Lenin District Court in the city of Kirov sentenced opposition activist Aleksey Navalny to five years in a prison camp for alleged embezzlement of funds at the Kirovles Timber Enterprise. I will not go into the details of the case against him and co-defendant Petr Ofitserov. Suffice to say that in the  opinion of the former Finance Minister Aleksey Kudrin, whose competence in the legal regulation of economic activity in Russia should not in doubt, ‘Navalny’s sentence shows up our selective system of justice: any official involved in the management of a company could be given the same sentence.’  In Kudrin’s view, his sentence is a way of ‘isolating a politician from public life and the electoral process’, and the majority of Russia’s legal experts agree with him.

So the question ‘why is Navalny going to prison?’ has very little to do with Kirovles, and a great deal more with Russian politics. And to answer the question, one has to understand how it is that Navalny has managed to become so well-known and popular in such a short time, and an opposition politician who is so dangerous for the authorities. 

For this is why is being sent to prison.

Navalny the politician: the beginning

The Western press sometimes expresses the  opinion that Navalny is a civil activist fighting corruption, with no political aims, and that he is very inconvenient for the authorities because of the information he has revealed. This is largely incorrect. Politics have long since become Navalny’s profession. He was born into the new middle class (his parents own a small firm in the Moscow region), and he received a good legal and financial education. When he was 24 he had a go at business, but not very successfully. In his own words, this meant he lost the little money he actually had.

In 2000, at the age of 24, Navalny joined the ‘Yabloko’ party, which is Russia’s oldest liberal party, and advocates liberal democracy and a market economy. The ‘Yabloko’ position was somewhat more left-wing than the other liberal party of the time, ‘Union of Right Forces’. It is, however, very likely that Navalny’s choice was dictated by the rather more open structure of ‘Yabloko’ and the opportunities it offered, than by ideology. In one way or another, Navalny rose rapidly through the ranks of the party: by 2002 he had already joined the leadership of its biggest Moscow branch and in 2003 he managed the Moscow electoral campaign in the nationwide parliamentary election; by 2006-7 he was a member of the highest party body, the Federal Council.

‘Yabloko’s’ political position was weaker after the 2003 election.  It was no longer a parliamentary party, which to a large extent wrecked its organisational opportunities. The regional structure started to collapse and these changes led Navalny to look for opportunities elsewhere. In 2004 he founded, and was one of the leaders of, the ‘Committee for the defence of Muscovites’, a city movement against corruption and human rights violations in construction in the city.  In 2005 he was one of the founders of the youth organisation ‘Democratic Alternative.’ During this time he was still one of the leaders at ‘Yabloko’; his final break with the party came in 2007, though not of his own volition.

After the 2007 parliamentary election, which ended in a total rout of the democratic forces, there was an idea current in liberal circles that supporters of democracy would be able to regain their popularity if they added a dash of nationalism to their political mix. The first attempt in this direction was a pressure group called the ‘ Nationalist Russian Liberation Movement’ whose Russian acronym (NAROD) spelt the word ‘People’. Navalny was one of the founders and signed the manifesto, which was in effect all the movement ever amounted to.  But for him this project had significant consequences, both short- and long-term.