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

Alesksey Navalny has become the face of Russia's opposition--and now he's being threatened with prison.

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Firstly, other ‘Yabloko’ leaders found Navalny’s new ideological initiative unacceptable, and in December 2007 he was expelled from the party. Secondly, his episodic involvement with NAROD had given him quite a reputation in Russian nationalist circles. He subsequently kept in touch with the nationalists, taking regular part in their annual events — the so-called ‘Russian marches‘ — as one of the organisers. But Navalny’s ‘ nationalism’, which was later used against him by his opponents, was always fairly dubious and was not much more than a stance on individual issues, such as illegal migration and inter-budgetary relations, which found a response in the public. His public addresses contain little that could be described as a nationalist agenda and his activities during the period 2007-11 had nothing to do with nationalism.

Doing battle with ‘crooks and thieves’

After being expelled from ‘Yabloko’, Navalny turned his attention to the protection of people’s rights in the economic sphere. In 2008 he set up the NGO ‘ Union of Minority Shareholders’, which concerned itself with defending the interests of private investors. But his greatest claim to fame was the project ‘ RosPil’ [a play on words: raspil is a Russian word for a carve-up], set up in December 2010 and aimed at fighting abuses in public procurement. On 2 May 2011 ‘RosPil’, had exposed and classified a multiplicity of fraudulent tenders amounting to 1.6 billion roubles’ worth of contracts.

Navalny set up a blog on LiveJournal to publicise the activities of RosPil, and in a short time this blog had become fantastically popular. It was because of the blog that Navalny became so well-known and started being regarded as an influential figure among politicised circles of internet users. The media then started publicising the blog.

Then, in February 2011 Navalny took to the waves of ‘Finam FM’ radio station to dismiss the bedrock of Putin’s political support, the ‘United Russia’ party, as a ‘party of crooks and thieves’. Met with an indignant response from a ‘United Russia’ supporter, Navalny kept up the pressure by asking readers of his blog: ‘Is United Russia a party of crooks and thieves?’. During the course of the survey and the accompanying debate, the phrase ‘ party of crooks and thieves’ became an internet-meme and a regular entry in Google and Yandex search engines. To a large extent because of this, by 2011 Navalny had become considerably better known, though even then his popularity remained within the confines of politically literate online Russia.

2011 elections and the protest movement

The Russian opposition went into the 2011 parliamentary election with fairly low expectations. It was clear in advance that the repressive legislation on parties and elections, combined with the authorities’ complete monopoly of TV and print media, would result in a ‘United Russia’ victory. Most of the opposition called on democratically-minded voters to boycott the election.

Navalny managed to put forward an alternative strategy, which looked fresh and optimistic in the context of the general pessimism. He suggested turning out and voting for any party except the party of ‘crooks and thieves’. This took him out of the narrow circle of internet users and made him fairly widely known. The success of his strategy only increased his popularity: despite all the expectations, ‘United Russia’ received less than 50% of the vote and many observers considered it had lost the election.

The 2011 election also gave rise to a movement protesting against vote rigging, born to all intents and purposes on 5 December at the Moscow post-election demonstration. Navalny addressed the rally and was arrested, then held for 15 days, which made him even better-known. At the biggest demonstration on 24 December, Navalny appeared as the recognised leader of the protest movement. When the protest movement was on its way up, he found his earlier connection with the nationalists very useful, because they formed a vociferous, if not very numerous, part of the movement. Their involvement was Navalny’s doing and they provided him with a stable and relatively disciplined support group at a time when he had no organisational base of his own.