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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Navalny’s candidature fitted well with this concept of an election. He was put forward by one of the liberal parties, the ‘Republican Party of Russia – Party of National Freedom.’ This party has few organisational resources and Navalny still has no structure of his own. One of the conditions for taking part in elections of this kind in Russia is the collection of signatures of municipal deputies. They support ‘United Russia’ en masse, which could have presented an insurmountable barrier to Navalny’s participation in the election. But Sobyanin moved to enable Navalny to collect the essential number of signatures, and he was registered as a candidate. This happened just before the Kirovles sentence was handed down.

The authorities’ reasoning in this can only be guessed at, but I think that from the beginning Sobyanin did not really intend Navalny to stand in the election. The fact that he would be found guilty was never in doubt, and under Russian law Navalny’s candidature will be annulled immediately after his appeal has been considered in the Kirov court. There’s no question but that the appeal will be turned down. The authorities only intended to neutralise accusations levelled at Sobyanin that he went into the election with no real opponents. One of the rhetorical tricks of the Russian authorities, as we saw in the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is that they are not responsible for the decisions of the courts they control, even if the political reasons for these decisions are abundantly clear.

Now what?

Having sentenced Navalny to five years in prison, the district court at the same time instructed that he be held in custody until the sentence comes into effect i.e. until the appeal has been heard. This decision actually made Navalny ineligible to stand in the election, although formally he was still a mayoral candidate. This was probably the authorities’ main idea, relying on the fact that Navalny has already played his last card and it’s time to get back to business as usual. But, despite it being the ‘dead season’, the court decision provoked furious reactions in the public. There were fairly large protests in Moscow and Petersburg but, more importantly, some of the independent media universally described the effective removal of Navalny (his office, naturally, announced that he would not take further part in the election) as making a farce of the electoral campaign. Not at all what the authorities planned.

As a result, the court decision to hold Navalny in custody was protested by the prosecution and the next day, 19 July, was overturned by the regional court. We must stress that this small change to government strategy will on the whole work in its favour. Sobyanin will be able to run his campaign against an opponent, who actually still can’t take part in the election. It is highly probable that the sentence will be upheld a few days before the election, which disorientates the opposition and leaves no time to develop an alternative strategy. Meaning that Sobyanin will win the election and Navalny will find himself in prison.

The only ways of dealing with this turn of events, which is by far the most natural for current Russian reality, would be if Navalny’s campaign was so energetic that without him the election risks being wrecked. I am not sure that Navalny has enough organisational or other resources to run such a campaign, but it is clear that wide-ranging energetic public support will be of critical importance, as will be appropriate behaviour on the part of the various parts of the Russian opposition.