Kremlin leaders cannot afford to overlook the inherent dangers of the semi-freedom permitted to the country’s citizens. The administration has, therefore, maintained a preventive strategy of pulverizing the serious organized opposition. Zyuganov’s Communist Party and Zhirinovski’s Liberal-Democratic Party are allowed to survive as minorities in the Duma because they lend the appearance of pluralism while no longer offering a serious threat. But Putin has always treated political liberals with severity precisely because he is nervous about the potential menace they pose. Since they had already lost their appeal in the 1990s, when they came to be regarded as advocates of a capitalist economy that pitched millions of Russians into destitution, this was something of an overreaction. In the Duma of 1999–2003, the liberals were poorly represented, with only twenty-nine seats for Union of Right Forces and twenty for Yabloko, and in subsequent parliamentary elections they secured none at all. Even if the administration had employed no dirty tricks against them, they were never popular enough to challenge seriously for the presidency.
In the early 2000s political liberalism underwent many organizational splits and mergers, while the same leaders of the movement remained in place, notably Grigori Yavlinski, Mikhail Kasyanov, Boris Nemtsov and Irina Khakamada. But Yavlinski was no longer as vigorous as when he had pushed for Gorbachëv and then Yeltsin to choose a liberal path in politics and economics. Kasyanov and Nemtsov had their disagreements but tended to concur on the basic questions. They criticized the constitutional and legal manipulations that secured power for the Putin group. They denounced the control exerted by the FSB. They castigated fraud, corruption and cronyism. While approving the official measures to tame the ‘oligarchs’, they lamented that Putin’s favourites in big business continued to receive privileged contracts from ministers.1 Liberal politicians called for an end to the system of cosy deals between super-wealthy entrepreneurs and the government. They consistently lamented the absence of the rule of law in Russia. They drew attention to the flight of capital and bright young people from Russia and the inadequate level of industrial investment.2
These problems, they argued, were why the Russian experience of the global recession of 2007–8 was worse than elsewhere. The costs of the 2008 Georgian military invasion – both financial and in terms of relations with the West – were also underlined. In the eyes of liberals, it was disastrous for the Kremlin leadership to turn away from the opportunities for conciliation with the West. The 2014 Crimean annexation compounded their disappointment about the road not taken. They saw themselves as the true patriots who had the country’s best interests at heart and offered a realistic alternative to the impasse that Putin created.3
Nemtsov had trained in theoretical physics and entered political activity in the perestroika years in his native Gorki (now Nizhni Novgorod as in the tsarist era). Like Kasyanov, he was good looking and dynamic. Unlike him, he quickly decided that Yeltsin had made an awful blunder in choosing Putin as his presidential successor.4 Yeltsin had brought Nemtsov to Moscow after being impressed by his five years as elected governor of Nizhni Novgorod province, and Nemtsov became first deputy prime minister despite having a record of opposing Yeltsin’s war in Chechnya in 1994 and blaming it for the rise in terrorist incidents.5 Yeltsin liked his practical efficiency and independence of judgement. But for the political difficulties that beset Yeltsin in 1998–9, he might easily have chosen him as his successor. From 2000, after Yeltsin stepped down from office, Nemtsov ran the Union of Right Forces, a coalition of parties and groups that promoted the values of political and economic liberalism. In the periods between parliamentary elections he produced pamphlets and websites denouncing the trends in ruling policy.
Nemtsov travelled abroad to make his case against Putin. In June 2013 he returned to Washington and pressed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to broaden the punitive range of the Magnitsky Act that had passed into American law the previous year.6 This was bound to infuriate the Russian government. Nemtsov had already complained of a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack in April 2011, when his organization’s email system was overwhelmed by a deluge of malicious traffic.7 As the book trade grew nervous of appearing to be friendly towards him as an enemy of the Kremlin, Nemtsov and his associates were compelled to publish his writings themselves.
Nemtsov and his friends knew the risks he was taking when denouncing the military operations in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. In April 2014 he travelled to Kyiv for a forum called Ukraine–Russia Dialogue and allowed a young person to video him laughing and saying, ‘Vladimir Putin would have voted for Yanukovych. He’s a fucked-up person, Vladimir Putin, that’s what you have to understand.’8 It was one thing to oppose a policy, but another to use the language of the street against one’s elected president in front of a camera, and Putin was unlikely to forgive him. In May the same year, in his capacity as a Yaroslavl regional assembly deputy, Nemtsov filed a question for FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov about reports that Kadyrov’s Chechen troops were fighting in eastern Ukraine. Receiving no answer, he became intent on making trouble in all matters Ukrainian, his blogs calling out Kadyrov for the wild rallies he addressed in which he invoked Allah and praised Putin.9 Nemtsov was no longer the cautious challenger he had once been.
At a time when emotions ran high among all Russians, Nemtsov divided national opinion. Many regarded his ideas as unpatriotic, even traitorous. As a politician, he did poorly in opinion polls on public trust, whereas after the Crimean annexation Putin’s ratings flew sky high. But Nemtsov remained a critic who got himself heard in Russia, and made trouble for the Kremlin’s management of international relations. On a few occasions he alluded in private to the possibility of assassination, but nothing daunted him. He had witnessed how Yeltsin had confronted the communist leadership in the USSR and won his struggle against terrible odds.
Some of his enemies, however, were out to get him. On 27 February 2015 he and his friend Anna Duritskaya were walking across the Bolshoi Moskvoretski bridge near the Kremlin – on the spur of the moment they had changed their plan to drive home. They were not to know that a gang had intended to shoot him in a nearby underpass not long before, and had failed only because they could not get a clear enough sight of him.10 As Nemtsov and Duritskaya approached the middle of the bridge, an armed man sprang from behind them and shot Nemtsov before speeding off in a getaway car. When the police arrived, Nemtsov was already dead. Around the world there was an outpouring of sadness that a figure of such courage and outspokenness had been struck down. In Moscow, there were angry demonstrations on the bridge against what many regarded as a state-sponsored murder. It was remarked that the area round the Kremlin was under the heaviest surveillance anywhere in the entire country, and that the gang of assassins would have needed inside information and assistance to carry out the deed.11
Alexei Navalny, who was under house arrest at the time of the murder, accused Putin and unnamed security force leaders. Though he had no proof, he speculated that Putin had expressed a general desire for Nemtsov to be eliminated and that the FSB – or possibly Chechen president Kadyrov – had interpreted this as encouragement to kill him.12
The widespread sorrow and anger at Nemtsov’s liquidation persuaded Putin to avoid the indifference he had flaunted in 2006 when Anna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko were murdered. That year his ploy had been to say that he wanted the police investigations and judicial proceedings to take place independently of political pressures, including his own. This would not have gone down well after Nemtsov was killed, and so Putin, talking to liberal veteran Irina Khakamada, commented:
You were friends with him, maintained contact. He was a harsh critic of the government in general and me personally. That said, our relations were quite good at the time when we talked to each other. I have already made a statement regarding this issue. I believe a killing of this kind is a shame and a tragedy.13
That he was willing to engage with Khakamada on live television showed the gravity of the situation. But he refrained from saying anything positive about Nemtsov’s important contribution to Russian public life.
Gleb Pavlovski, Putin’s former political consultant, gave his personal complicity the benefit of the doubt. Much likelier, in Pavlovski’s view, was a complex scenario:
Last year’s assassination of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, however, clearly went beyond Putin’s limits. Could Putin have said something about Nemtsov that someone could have taken as a go-ahead to kill him? That seems impossible to me. I have never heard anything like that from Putin, even with regard to people he hates. Putin sometimes mocked Nemtsov a bit, but he tolerated him. After the assassination, Putin disappeared for a few days – apparently, what had happened was too unexpected. It soon emerged that the alleged perpetrators were linked to Kadyrov, the Chechen leader who is zealously loyal to Putin (and whom Putin, in return, has allowed to build a private fiefdom in Chechnya).14
Responsibility for the killing was eventually attributed to a gang of Chechens, who were tried and sentenced at the Moscow District Military Court. The five defendants belonged to the Russian Guard. They included the gunman who allegedly fired the fatal shots, Zaur Dadaev. The proceedings frustrated the efforts of Nemtsov’s lawyers to compel testimony from their commanding officer. No attempt was made to ascertain who gave the order for the murder, even though it was widely assumed to have been a contract killing. The court case started and finished with the five Chechens accused of the crime.15
The convicted men went to prison without revealing any wider details. No doubt they worried about retaliation against their families in Chechnya if they said anything to compromise the reputation of public figures. In the vacuum this left, rumours spread like wildfire. The Chechen president Kadyrov added to them by declaring that he laughed off the murder, calling Dadaev ‘a true patriot of Russia’. Even before his tasteless comments there were suspicions that he had masterminded the killing. Navalny put forward the hypothesis that Kadyrov might have thought Putin, by criticizing the trouble that Nemtsov was causing, had given the green light for a hit. Navalny also suggested that individual members of Putin’s Moscow entourage wanted to darken the political weather, and saw the murder as a way of tugging Putin along with them.16
Flowers were placed daily at the spot on the bridge where Nemtsov was slain. The authorities ensured that cleaners removed them every night, only to find more flowers appearing the next day.17 Official sensitivities are never openly admitted, but the project to name a Moscow street in Nemtsov’s memory was quietly shelved while no problem was found with adding a Hugo Chavez Street and even an Akhmat Kadyrov Street to the map.18 Presidential spokesman Peskov stated baldly that Nemtsov was ‘little more than a statistically average citizen’ who ‘at the political level had not constituted any threat’ to Putin.19
The Nemtsov family pressed for a proper investigation, and Nemtsov’s lawyer Vadim Prokhorov tirelessly gathered information from interviews and written records. His findings were shocking.
The convicted killers had been living in Moscow’s Veernaya Ulitsa at the time of the crime – the mother of Kadyrov had an apartment on the same street – and served in the Sever (‘North’) Regiment of Kadyrov’s militia, which was merged into the new National Guard in 2016. They were under the command of Ruslan Geremeev and were said to live in fear of him. Prokhorov wondered whether the killing squad would have dared to go after Nemtsov unless Geremeev was at least aware of the order. When the official investigation of the assassination started Geremeev found sanctuary in Chechnya. Geremeev did not respond to the accusations, nor was he treated as a suspect in the investigation. Acknowledging that there are gaps in the evidence, Prokhorov speculated that a trail of suspicion led back towards the Chechen president, but he added that only a full and open inquiry could ever establish the truth. He had nevertheless discovered enough to convince him that the gang had received orders through a chain of command that was headed by one or more individuals in political authority.20
The ruling group resolved to see off the menace posed by other liberal leaders. Nemtsov’s colleague Kasyanov was next. In April 2016 a video was circulated among the media showing Kasyanov in a compromising sexual liaison with his assistant, British-based Natalya Pelevina. Kasyanov had recently been less industrious than Nemtsov in pursuing his political cause, but those in authority evidently felt the urge to remove any chance for him to raise his profile.
This left Navalny as the Opposition’s leading public figure. For some years Navalny had thought that the Yavlinskis, Kasyanovs and Nemtsovs had made the mistake of trying to beat Putin mainly through old-fashioned methods of party organization, pamphlets and the occasional public meeting. The Opposition had rethought how to organize street demonstrations, and put an emphasis on forming mobile activist groups and publicizing local abuses of power.21 But Putin was still able to counter them with a traditional use of police and courts. He also denied them fair electoral contests and television appearances. Navalny therefore chose a different path, using social media and his own online videos to get his message across. With his clear blue eyes and direct manner, he is a natural performer, introducing the videos with the words: ‘Greetings. This is Navalny!’ His exposures of corruption attract a vast number of viewers – for example, his attack on Deputy Prime Minister Prikhodko as an alleged serial taker of bribes earned over seven million YouTube hits in the first couple of months after its appearance.22
Navalny, born in 1976, is from a family that experienced many of the twentieth century’s horrors. His grandmother had been on the Western Front at the end of the Second World War – she recalled scrawling her name on the Reichstag after the fall of Berlin – but her sister was sentenced to the notorious labour camp at Vorkuta in eastern Siberia.23 Navalny was brought up in Moscow province, and as a young man in the early 1990s was a passionate supporter of Yeltsin, believing that Gorbachëv had failed for want of audacity, whereas Yeltsin had hastened to introduce a market economy and remove the constitutional obstacles left behind by the USSR. Only gradually did Navalny grow alarmed about the rampant corruption under Yeltsin, as well as about the violence he used to crush the Supreme Soviet in 1993.24
He had to build a life for himself. Calling himself a fundamentalist on the need for a new Russian capitalism, he went into business. At the same time he tried to fill the gaps in his education. Having failed to obtain a place in the law faculty at Moscow State University, he settled for a degree at the Patrice Lumumba Friendship of Peoples University. After receiving his diploma, he got a job as a lawyer at the State Property Committee, where he daily witnessed a stinking swamp of malfeasance.25
He joined Yabloko because the party reflected the liberal kind of politics he espoused. After leaving the State Property Committee, he resumed his business activity and experienced the difficulties that start-up entrepreneurs faced in Russia. The timber industry in Kirov province offered tempting opportunities, and in 2008 he and his brother Oleg founded their Alortag company, which, like many other Russian start-ups, they based in Cyprus – presumably for the fiscal benefits. But it was politics that consumed his imagination. From 2007 onwards he energetically wrote critical blogs about the Kremlin,26 and quickly turned into a national sensation, especially among students and intellectuals, even beginning to acquire an international profile. In 2010 he received a grant to spend six months in America as a Yale World Fellow.27 By 2011 such were his fame and impact that Nemtsov announced that he would challenge Putin in the forthcoming presidential election on behalf of the entire liberal opposition.28
Though this failed to happen, Navalny’s public prominence continued to increase. In September 2013 he stood against Sergei Sobyanin, Putin’s favoured candidate in the Moscow mayoralty election, and shocked the Kremlin by winning 27 per cent of the vote. Navalny and his supporters had put up posters that said, ‘We’re fed up with scoundrels and thieves.’ They organized a ‘march of the millions for honest government [vlast’]’.29 Sobyanin easily won, albeit through methods oppositionist groups denounced as fraudulent, but Navalny had given an account of himself that riled the authorities.30 In April they had tried to destabilize his campaign by trying him and Oleg for embezzlement. The outcome in July was inevitable since the judge, Sergei Blinov, had tried 130 cases in his career, and found 130 defendants guilty. The only question was how severe the punishment would be. No doubt on orders from the Kremlin, Blinov sentenced Navalny to five years’ imprisonment. Public protests led to the verdict being changed to a suspended sentence. Before his appeal was heard, he was allowed to fight the mayoral election even while his new Party of Progress was refused official registration.31
In December 2014 Navalny’s suspended sentence was confirmed whereas his brother Oleg was sent to prison for three and a half years, not least as a way of exerting psychological pressure on Navalny to withdraw from public affairs. In any case, the fact that Navalny had a criminal record secured the Kremlin’s main aim of disrupting his political progress, because as a convicted criminal he was now permanently barred from standing.32
Thereafter, apart from brief detentions after street protests, Navalny stayed out of prison. Though the police handled him roughly, he survived unharmed till May 2017, when an unidentified thug tossed a green antiseptic dye in his face.33 Navalny called for a boycott of the forthcoming presidential election if his own name was banned from the ballot papers. The electoral commission cited his embezzlement conviction in turning down his right to stand as a candidate. Navalny argued that the case had been brought against him on spurious grounds, and the European Court of Human Rights supported his claim, but the Russian judicial system ignored the verdict.
While saying little about his general lines of policy, Navalny marked himself out as a thoughtful politician. In March 2014 he wrote in the New York Times condemning the Crimean annexation, describing it as an imperialist blunder or worse, and blaming Putin for having ‘artificially’ created an anxiety about the peninsula.34 Putin, Navalny suggested, had ordered it for purely domestic political reasons, and with the Crimean referendum had unwittingly set a precedent that might come back to trouble him: there were ethnic republics elsewhere in the Russian Federation that were restless under Russian rule. Navalny endorsed America’s economic sanctions, pleading only that the measures should not harm the Russian people. He urged the targeting of Putin’s entourage, especially his rich friends in business – he named Timchenko, the Rotenberg brothers and Abramovich as among about a thousand individuals he characterized as forming ‘the war party’ and promoting the ‘hysteria’ that underpinned Putin’s militarism.35 This was also Navalny’s way of trying to get at the media pundits and presenters who followed the Kremlin line.36
But by October 2014 Navalny spoke against handing back the peninsula: ‘I think that despite the fact that Crimea was seized by a dreadful breach of international norms, nevertheless the reality is that Crimea is now a part of the Russian Federation. And let’s not deceive ourselves. And I strongly recommend the Ukrainians also not to deceive themselves.’37
These sentiments, voiced in an Ekho Moskvy radio interview, annoyed many liberals. Since then he has more cautiously endorsed the idea of a referendum under ‘international control’ among Crimean residents,38 and argued for the right of every country to determine its own future, including the freedom for east Europeans to join NATO.39 For Navalny it was no business of Russia’s to complain, far less to intervene in any direct fashion, if the Baltic States chose this way to ensure their security. But he does think it was a mistake for the Americans to install an anti-missile defence system in Poland. On that point at least, he agrees with Putin. Liberals will never win power in Russia, Navalny declares, unless they accept this.40
But he aims for a change in foreign policy that will mean Russia no longer fears NATO, and wants to ensure civic protection for the individual in Russian society by adherence to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights.41 Russia, he insists, belongs in Europe, and should choose a ‘European path’ for its destination.42 He laments Putin’s success in turning the Russian people away from this objective by identifying Europe with phenomena such as gay parades and same-sex marriage.43
Navalny’s own ideas – he dislikes being linked to any ‘ideology’ – are hard to categorize. While obviously not being a socialist, he has shunned most of the other available labels. His statement marks him out as both an anti-liberal liberal and an anti-conservative conservative. Ultimately, his thinking is a jumble, and all attempts to make coherent sense of it have failed. This does not bother him. Quite the contrary: he revels in his reputation as a maverick in Russian public life, and takes pleasure in the fact that the liberals call him a nationalist while the nationalists reject him as a liberal.44 Even his sympathizers find this a baffling state of affairs, and have asked him to clarify his position, but Navalny defends his right to be elusive. The nearest he came to defining his philosophy was when he spoke up for ‘civic nationalism’.45
This conception of national belonging excludes any racial or ethnic qualification, but in the light of Navalny’s frequent disparagement of Muslims and others of Islamic heritage he can hardly be said to include them in his idea of nationhood. In 2011 he controversially exclaimed: ‘Stop feeding the Caucasus.’46 He censured the vast subsidies central government poured into Chechnya and Dagestan.47 He later scoffed at Putin for effectively permitting sharia law in practice in some of Russia’s regions while ranting about the danger of a spread of Islamism and cosying up to anti-Islamist foreign politicians like Marine Le Pen, which Navalny has joked is ‘the apex of post-modernism’.48 In contrast with Putin, he calls for a new visa regime to control the influx of migrant workers from central Asia.49 Every November, Navalny has attended the annual Russian March of nationalist organizations, and defended the gathering as a positive venture.50 Many oppositionists have indeed wondered aloud whether he was an appropriate choice to lead them at all.
Only occasionally does Navalny focus on specific policies for the Russian people. He seeks a separation of the Orthodox Church from the state, declaring himself a believer, and admitting that some of his followers criticize him for failing to censure the ecclesiastical hierarchy.51 He aims the thrust of his appeals at Russians, and undoubtedly worried the authorities with his capacity to reach out to young educated voters, even though they are prevented from voting for him. Navalny is an optimist: when people cautioned that Russians are naturally conservative, he replied why, if that were so, does Russia lead the world in the number of abortions per head of the population, adding that independent ways of thinking are limited to ‘the modernized part of a traditional society’.52 Navalny endorses progressive social policies, accusing Putin of deliberately exploiting topics such as gay parades and same-sex marriage as a way of increasing prejudice and deflecting people’s attention from his oppressive methods.53
The Party of Progress has only the rudiments of an economic programme. Navalny has had help in policy-making from the dissenting economist Sergei Guriev, and the main idea is to reduce the role of the state in the Russian economy through a further schedule of privatizations, and use the proceeds to boost people’s pensions. Navalny also calls for free health care and free education.54 But since Guriev’s emigration, economics have tended to feature less in the party’s official statements.
At any rate, Navalny sees his objectives in different terms. For him, the priority has always been to institute the rule of law. He wants Russia to follow a ‘European path’ of development, and rejects all talk of copying the Chinese example. His ambition is to foster the kind of politics in which the president and cabinet can be replaced through a fair electoral contest: to him Putin’s extended supremacy is anti-democratic. He has revised his belief that it would have been a national disaster if Yeltsin had lost the 1996 presidential election to Zyuganov: so long as an open political system had been preserved, Navalny maintains, things would have been righted in the longer term – and if Zyuganov had behaved properly, Russian democracy would have survived and improved.55 His main slogans and those of his party are to do with legality, justice and fairness in public life. Navalny calls for an independent judiciary and an end to lucrative business contracts for cronies, demands a clean electoral process, and calls for officials who have broken the law by corruptly awarding contracts or throwing innocent people into prison to go on trial.56
Of the surviving oppositionists Navalny is unquestionably the principal: Nemtsov is dead and Kasyanov a spent force. Putin, Navalny believes, is actually frightened of him, as the potential leader of an anarchic ‘Russian revolt [bunt]’,57 as a result of his willingness to challenge and confront, even at the risk of being manhandled by police at prohibited demonstrations. He is a rebel with an abundance of physical and moral courage.
But Navalny’s prospects are not promising. He has never headed a cabinet as Kasyanov did or been a first deputy premier like Nemtsov. Kasyanov and Nemtsov also led substantial political parties, and acquired deep experience of the workings of the state order across the entire range of policy. They were once on friendly terms with ministers. Both men had been cherished by Yeltsin, about whom they retained fond memories: Yeltsin at various times had evidently marked them out for further promotion. Though the economy had been the focus while in government, they knew every sector of public life intimately. They were privy to how governmental contracts were awarded. Nemtsov under Yeltsin and Kasyanov under Putin were witness to the pressures that ministers, officials and businessmen were able to exert on a president. They understood those sectors in public life that could cause trouble if they failed to receive privileged treatment. As a gifted but inexperienced outsider Navalny could only guess at all this. Not without justification, some thought Nemtsov’s murder had beheaded the Opposition.
As the most famous living oppositionist Navalny draws the Western media’s attention. He talks well, organizes as proficiently and flexibly as conditions allow, and is brave, determined and agile. But his rating in the opinion polls in spring 2017 was scarcely encouraging: according to the Levada Centre, only 2 per cent of potential voters responded that they would definitely support him. A further 7 per cent answered ‘perhaps’.58 In a further survey in August 2018, less than 1 per cent expressed trust in Navalny.59 Navalny has tried to spread the Opposition’s message to the regions, campaigning for a devolution of power not just to each province but right down to city level.60 Government, he declares, is overcentralized. But his own party’s organizational network grows weaker in proportion to the distance from the capital. Navalny remains predominantly a Moscow politician, and Russia is a huge country.61
Putin contains him with the help of obedient police, judges and media – and until recently by a dosage of pensions and welfare policies as well as an assertive foreign policy. Stooped double by persecution, the Opposition refuses to give up, and in Navalny it has a leader of spirit. If and when public opinion becomes inflamed, he could emerge as a champion of a new, different Russia. The persecution he has endured might increase his appeal as a victim with whom many Russians would identify. He is a complicated political figure, rightly praised for his courage and dynamism but handicapped by a way of thinking that would restrict the scope of liberal politics if he ever came to power. It is also unclear how he would cope with a powerful business lobby and the security forces, whose interests lie in maintaining the status quo.