*
Navalny, flanked by his wife, Yulia, and the towering man-mountain of a bodyguard who had accompanied him almost everywhere since the onset of the protests, jumped off the train onto the platform in Kirov, the small town in central Russia where he was alleged to have embezzled half a million dollars. It was 17 April 2013, the first day in a trial that would determine exactly how far the Kremlin was willing to go in its crackdown against the protest movement. Few failed to note that the trial was to take place in a city named after Sergei Kirov, the Bolshevik whose 1934 assassination was used by Stalin as a pretext for the start of his Great Terror.
‘I feel great!’ an assured Navalny told the scrum of waiting journalists, many of whom, like myself, had travelled from Moscow on the same overnight train. He then strode off, journalists and film crews in tow, for the nearby courthouse, newly painted that week for the high-profile trial. Navalny might have exuded confidence, but his wife looked tense, lost in her thoughts. ‘He’s doing all this for us, for me and my children,’ she had declared before the journey to Kirov, smiling weakly. ‘I’ve never once asked him to stop.’1
Navalny had worked in Kirov for a number of months in 2009, having been invited to the city by the governor Nikita Belykh, a young liberal politician installed by Medvedev. According to investigators, Navalny had abused his position as Belykh’s unpaid aide to pressure officials at a state-run timber company, Kirovles, to sell timber at knockdown prices to a company owned by a business associate named Pyotr Ofitserov, who was also set to stand trial. It was a complex case, made even more so by its apparent lack of logic. As both Navalny and a host of independent legal experts pointed out, Ofitserov’s company had bought 14.5 million roubles worth of timber and sold it for 16 million. How then could anyone have embezzled 16 million roubles? Investigators had offered no explanation in the indictment as to how they had come up with the figure. ‘They just plucked it from thin air,’ Navalny said to journalists in Kirov after the opening court session. He also joked that he would give some free timber to anyone who could make head or tail of the prosecution’s case.
One of his lawyers, Vadim Kobzev, was even more bemused, when I spoke to him before the trial. ‘What does it mean he pressured Kirovles to sell the timber for an unfavourable price? Aren’t negotiations over prices what capitalism is all about?’ Just like at the Pussy Riot trial, it was Alice in Wonderland logic again.2
Navalny had been offered one last chance to co-operate with the Kremlin, when an offer was made via intermediaries in late 2012 to drop the charges in return for a pledge to stay away from street protests. But he refused to enter into negotiations and made a point of attending the unsanctioned rally outside the FSB headquarters in December 2012.3 ‘Am I going tomorrow?’ he had asked ahead of the rally in a defiant blog post. ‘Why, of course I am.’4
Putin denied that the charges were politically motivated. ‘Those who fight corruption must be crystal clean themselves,’ he declared.5 He did not, however, mention Navalny by name. In fact, the president had not yet once uttered the protest leader’s surname. Was he being superstitious? Or was he simply worried about lending him an air of legitimacy?
Navalny’s supporters had travelled to Kirov in the days before the trial, and set up a makeshift headquarters on a street opposite – appropriately enough – a Stalin-era anti-corruption HQ. By the time the protest leader arrived in town, they were already gathered for a noisy rally outside the courtroom, shocking bleary-eyed locals with their cries of ‘Putin is a thief’ and ‘Russia without Putin!’
Nikolai Lyaskin, a long-time activist involved with the Khimki forest campaign, urged the people of Kirov to ‘show some courage’. ‘This is your city!’ he yelled into a megaphone. But Kirov was largely indifferent to Navalny’s plight; despite the posters and stickers that activists had plastered across town, on bus stops, lamp posts and benches, few people knew – or cared – much about what was going on. Nowhere was the gulf between the protest movement and the majority of provincial Russians greater or more obvious than on that sunny April morning. ‘I kind of hoped more people would turn up,’ Lyaskin said, shrugging despondently, after police had ordered him to turn off his megaphone.
The crowd outside the court was not only made up of journalists and Navalny supporters. There were also some two dozen members of a pro-Kremlin youth group, many chanting ‘a thief belongs in jail!’ the phrase Putin had used to justify the imprisonment of the oil tycoon Khodorkovsky, who by 2013 had spent a decade in prison.
It was, as the Russians say, ‘only the lazy’ who had failed to note the similarities between the two men’s cases. Both had threatened to loosen the Kremlin’s stranglehold on power, and both had been hit with trumped-up fraud charges. But even Khodorkovsky, who had reportedly incensed Putin with his funding of political parties, had not offered such a direct challenge to the authorities as Navalny. And, while the oligarch had transformed himself into an anti-regime martyr while behind bars, his 2003 arrest was generally popular, even among future members of the protest movement. Navalny’s prosecution had far more potential to damage the authorities, with deep splits reported among the political elite as to the wisdom of any custodial sentence.
A handful of elderly women had also been drawn to the commotion outside the court. ‘They can’t say things like that about the president,’ one of them, a grey haired pensioner called Vera, told me, shaking her head. ‘They should be ashamed of themselves.’
I wandered over to the increasingly noisy pro-Putin activists, many of whom were, despite their frenzied chanting, covering their faces with placards and refusing to speak to the media. ‘They’ve all been paid to come out here and shout their vileness,’ a Navalny supporter laughed. ‘Of course they are embarrassed.’
One of those who agreed to chat, a young, dark-haired student who gave his name as Yevgeny, told me he wanted to see Navalny go to prison because the money he was suspected of stealing could have been used to ‘do up’ the city’s notoriously bad roads. ‘I’m not interested in Navalny’s claims that Putin and his associates are corrupt,’ he sneered, apparently sincere. ‘I realize Russia sells a lot of oil and gas, but I don’t care what happens to that money. It’s not my business.’
I later repeated Yevgeny’s complaint to a middle-aged taxi driver. ‘Of course,’ he laughed, as we juddered into and out of a pothole. ‘Navalny is totally to blame for these fucking roads. You know, I don’t think there have been any repairs to the roads here since before World War II. When was that Navalny born?’
*
Navalny may have tried to project confidence as he stepped off the train in Kirov, but, in truth, he sensed the dragnet closing around him. Many of his financial backers had withdrawn their support in the face of Kremlin pressure, while others, like Alexander Lebedev, the London-based tycoon and joint owner of the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, were facing politically motivated criminal charges of their own.
‘Man is weak. People are afraid. I can’t expect each of them to be some kind of heroic person,’ Navalny said in an interview ahead of his trial, sitting in the Moscow office where his staff had recently discovered a snooping device. 6
Other supporters had been forced to flee Russia by a campaign of intimidation. The most high-profile, Sergei Guriev, a highly regarded, US-educated economist who had advised Medvedev’s administration, abruptly left Russia for France in May 2013 after investigators had questioned him over a report he had written for the Kremlin’s human-rights council on the Khodorkovsky case. Guriev, whose report concluded that the second set of charges against the tycoon should be dropped, denied allegations he had received money from Khodorkovsky or anyone connected to him. But his real crime, he and many others believed, was making a symbolic donation of some $300 to Navalny’s anti-corruption fund. Fearing imminent arrest, the middle-aged, bespectacled economist jumped on the next available flight to Paris, where his wife and children had been living for the past three years.
Guriev was no rabble-rousing protest leader, no radical activist calling for Putin’s overthrow. He was a well-respected professor who had earned international recognition for his work as rector of Moscow’s New Economic School. He was, in short, the kind of person Russia badly needed. His sudden departure, one blogger wrote, triggered ‘a sense of imminent catastrophe’.7
‘An informed person told me there is a list of friends of Navalny and there is a special operation against those people – and I am on the list,’ Guriev told me by telephone once he was safe in France. ‘Some of my high-ranking friends told me that as long as there is a special operation – a very important term in modern Russia – they will not be able to find out anything about this and they will not be able to help me. I have done nothing wrong and I do not want to live in fear.’
Guriev laughed dryly when I asked him if he saw his persecution as symbolic of the darkening political mood in Russia. ‘Medvedev asked me to speak publicly on the Khodorkovsky case,’ he said. ‘When Putin came back to power, I am being interrogated about this. It’s pretty clear.’8
Ahead of the trial, Navalny issued his biggest challenge yet to Putin. ‘I want to become president,’ he said in an interview with TV Dozhd. ‘I want to change life in the country. I want to change the way it is ruled. I want to do things so that the 140 million people who live in this country, who have oil and gas coming out of the ground, do not live in poverty or dark squalor and live normally like in a European country.’9
The announcement immediately upped the stakes. It was one thing to jail an anti-corruption blogger who belonged to no political party; locking up a potential presidential candidate was another matter altogether. A few weeks later, Navalny also declared he would stand in mayoral elections in Moscow in September 2013; that is, of course, if he could get on the ballot.
There was little doubt that Navalny would be found guilty of the charges against him: the man set to preside over the trial, Sergei Blinov, a softly spoken, baby-faced regional judge, had handled 130 cases in his career, with exactly zero acquittals. The head of the Kirov court, Konstantin Zaytsev, was upfront about the likelihood of a guilty verdict, explaining that Russia’s judicial system was so ‘effective’ that only watertight cases came to court. Why, he recalled, he himself, in a career that stretched back decades, had only once acquitted a suspect. And even that ruling was later overturned.10 It made one wonder, really, why they were bothering with the trial in the first place.
The only uncertainty was this: would the authorities imprison Navalny or hand him a suspended sentence? ‘It’s either the Belarus model, where they simply lock everyone up,’ said Yashin, the activist and long-time Navalny ally, when I met him ahead of the trial. ‘Or the Chinese model, where they put people under house arrest or slap them with suspended sentences.’11
Under Russian law, a criminal conviction of any kind would bar Navalny from ever running for public office. The ‘Chinese model’ would also be likely to soften international criticism of his prosecution, and prevent him becoming a martyr for the protest movement. ‘If they jail Navalny, he will become a Russian Nelson Mandela,’ opposition figure Boris Nemtsov told me. ‘It’s that simple.’12
Navalny’s trial would, however, fail to spark the same international media frenzy as the prosecution of the anti-Kremlin punk group Pussy Riot. ‘It’s clear why – Pussy Riot was a much more understandable issue for the West,’ said Mark Feigin, one of the lawyers who represented the group in court. ‘It’s unfortunate, because he is a much more significant figure. He offers a real alternative to Putin’s system.’13
The authorities had not even attempted to hide the political nature of the charges. ‘If a person tries with all his might to draw attention to himself, even, you might say, tries to taunt the authorities – says, “Look at me, you’re all covered in dirt and I’m so clean” – well, then the interest in his past increases, and the process of exposing him naturally accelerates,’ said the Investigative Committee’s increasingly influential spokesperson, Markin, who was widely believed to be voicing Putin’s opinions. He also suggested Navalny would be able to continue his fight against corruption from ‘a penal colony’ and mocked the Western forces he said had ‘prepared’ the activist to take over in Russia. ‘They mixed Russia up with Georgia or some other Third World country,’ Markin seethed. ‘But Russia is a world power.’14
The verdict was just part of the story: by charging Navalny with corruption, the authorities had thrown the dirt he had dug up back in his face, associating him in the minds of the public with the corrupt officials he had sought to expose. A much-vaunted Kremlin campaign against corruption had also co-opted Navalny’s raison d’être; state-controlled TV had taken to airing hysterical exposés of officials accused of demanding bribes and kickbacks. Opposition activists dismissed the campaign as a sham: indeed, its most high-profile victim, Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, may have been fired over allegations of massive corruption at the ministry, but he was charged merely with ‘negligence’, an offence punishable by a maximum of three months behind bars.15 Few believed the ex-minister would do time. Shortly after his dismissal, Serdyukov took up a new, highly-paid post at Rostekhnologii, the state hi-tech corporation.
‘It’s very important for them that they can mention me and corruption in the same sentence every night on the news,’ Navalny said to journalists in Kirov, clearly affronted by the Kremlin’s tactics.
And Putin’s plan was working. ‘Navalny? Isn’t he some official who stole a load of money from the budget? Like they all do?’ said a giggly twenty-something woman called Svetlana when I carried out a random survey of passers-by on the first day of the trial in Kirov.
‘He was in the governor’s team, right?’ opined Kirill, a middle-aged man with a bald patch just like Lenin’s. ‘That means he’s corrupt.’
Others had no opinion whatsoever. ‘I’ve got enough worries getting money for my medicine and what have you every month,’ said an elderly woman in a purple hat. ‘And you want me to worry about some Navalny?’
The trial dragged on through the summer, the incessant message ‘Navalny – corruption’ drummed into the heads of state TV’s massive audience by one-sided news reports. The authorities had refused to have court proceedings moved to Moscow, Navalny’s stronghold, and – predictably – both his supporters and journalists began to turn up at court less and less often. Even by day five, where once it had been necessary to queue overnight to stand a chance of claiming a place at the ‘trial of the year’, now it was possible to drift in a few minutes before the start of proceedings. Much of the trial was taken up with the tedious study of case-related documents and the cross-examination of the prosecution’s witnesses, not all of whom were able to get their stories entirely straight. A key witness for the prosecution, former Kirovles official Vyacheslav Opalev, who had previously been handed a four-year suspended sentence after he had pleaded guilty to conspiring with Navalny, mixed things up entirely, telling the court that the anti-Putin activist had forced him to sell the timber, rather than colluding with him. When his error was pointed out to him, he covered his face with his hands. ‘You are driving me crazy!’ he yelled, under cross-examination, triggering laughter from the courtroom.
The prosecution would call almost three dozen witnesses, the majority of whose testimonies appeared to prove that Navalny had done nothing illegal. The cross-examination of the prosecution’s witnesses over, Navalny’s defence team prepared to call its own. But Judge Blinov was having none of it, and ruled that the court would not be hearing any witnesses for the defence, as it was not clear ‘what they could say in the courtroom’.
‘I’m in shock,’ Navalny responded. ‘It was clear they wouldn’t allow some. But all of them? How is the defence supposed to operate, if not a single witness is allowed into court?’16
A few days later, after the judge had grudgingly allowed a handful of defence witnesses to speak, Navalny ‘congratulated’ the court on the occasion of what would have been the 130th birthday of Franz Kafka, author of The Trial. ‘He predicted almost precisely what’s going on in this court,’ an unsmiling Navalny said.
The very next day, as an activist sat in court reading a newly purchased copy of Kafka’s classic novel of unthinking, totalitarian terror, prosecutors requested a six-year jail sentence for Navalny and five years for his co-defendant Pyotr Ofitserov.
Navalny, for once, seemed at a loss for words. ‘Everything will be OK,’ he said as he stepped outside the courtroom during a break in proceedings, smiling nervously and hugging his wife. But he looked shocked. He had always insisted he was fully aware of the dangers of his uncompromising battle against Putin, but now the abstract threat that had shadowed him through his years of opposition, the heated debates in smoky Moscow clubs, the sensational exposés of multimillion-dollar corruption schemes and the heady street protests was close enough to reach out and seize him. And with many more criminal cases in the pipeline, once he found himself in the brutal, disease-ridden world of the Russian penal system, six years was unlikely to be the limit of his incarceration.
By the time Judge Blinov returned, Navalny had still not regained his usual composure. Standing to address the court, he apologized first to his co-defendant, Ofitserov, and his family. ‘Stop torturing this man and his family,’ he urged the judge and prosecutors, pausing to collect himself. ‘Everybody realizes that Ofitserov is here entirely accidentally… To put a person in prison for an economic crime, a businessman was needed, and Pyotr Ofitserov turned out to be this businessman.’17
These were Navalny’s ‘last words’ before sentencing; he had a long tradition of final statements to live up to, from the dissident poet Joseph Brodsky’s insistence that God had gifted him his literary abilities and there was nothing the atheist Soviet state could do about it to the defiance of Pussy Riot as they were shipped off to penal colonies.
‘If anyone thinks that I or my colleagues will cease our activity because of this trial or the Bolotnaya trials or the many other trials going on all around the country, they are gravely mistaken,’ Navalny continued, calmer now, as if soothed by his own rage.
‘Some may think that this is not the best place for me to put forward conditions, to make threats or plans for the future – I don’t agree. I think this is the best place. And I declare now that I and my colleagues will do everything possible to destroy this feudal regime – to destroy the system of power under which 83% of national wealth belongs to 0.5% of the population.’18
It was an uncompromising message, but it was nothing he had not said before. But what, really, was there new to say? Lines had been drawn long ago and both sides were entrenched. There were no converts to be made, no enemies to be turned.
After Navalny had spoken, Ofitserov, who had sat quietly through most of the trial, a pained look on his face, stood to address the court. A chubby father of five facing mounting financial problems, he recalled how he had been offered a deal by investigators. How the authorities had proposed he testify against Navalny in exchange for a suspended sentence, to ‘make things easier on himself’. Although, like all normal people, he said, he had no desire to go to jail, he had turned down their offer and the chance of freedom that went with it.
‘I don’t regret my decision,’ Ofitserov went on. ‘I believe men should take responsibility for their actions. I mean, one day my children will grow up and ask me about all this. How would I have explained myself to them?’19 He shrugged sadly and sat down. He had nothing else to say. Judge Blinov, I was not the only one to note, was unable to meet his gaze.
*
Navalny had jokingly compared the trial in Kirov to a television drama; like all the best examples of the genre, the next episode threw up an unexpected twist. Initially, however, as the court convened again on 18 July 2013, everything seemed to be following the usual scenario. Judge Blinov declared both defendants guilty as charged and jailed Navalny for five years and Ofitserov for four.
‘Whatever. Don’t get bored without me. And most importantly – don’t stay idle,’ Navalny tweeted. ‘The toad won’t chuck himself off the oil pipeline,’ he added, using his usual nickname for Putin.
Within minutes of the sentence being handed down, both men were being led away in handcuffs. Navalny looked back at his wife and parents and offered a weak smile. Ofitserov’s despairing wife had to be pried away from him by court security.
Reaction in Moscow was swift. Activists had previously made plans for a ‘public discussion’ of the verdict in Manezhnaya Square, adjacent to the Kremlin. As the news flashed that Navalny and Ofitserov had been sent down, thousands of protesters poured into central Moscow. Police were ready for them, and had blocked off the area. Not to be deterred, demonstrators swarmed over the road and stood in lines many deep outside the State Duma, Russia’s parliament. ‘Freedom!’ they chanted, as passing vehicles hooted their support, and scores of young protesters clambered up on to the windowsills of the State Duma to scrawl anti-Putin graffiti on its walls. The crowd soon swelled to at least 10,000, easily the biggest ever unapproved, spontaneous political demonstration in modern Russian history. ‘We want to live in a country that lives by the rule of law, not by the rule of dictatorship,’ a young woman said, her dark hair tied back, a ‘Navalny’ sticker on her T-shirt. Riot police initially seemed unsure of how to react, but, when protesters chanting ‘Revolution!’ attempted to block a nearby central road to traffic, they moved in to make arrests.
The protest in Moscow that afternoon was a stunning indication of Navalny’s popularity among the capital’s middle class and younger generations. Many of the protesters were still in their teens, others in their early twenties. No other political figure in Russia had the ability to inspire such a turnout without resorting to the ‘rent-a-crowd’ tactics employed by Putin in his presidential campaign.
However, not everyone outside the State Duma that afternoon was a Navalny supporter. Many protesters freely admitted that they found his right-wing views off-putting, but had gone to rally against a blatant case of political repression. A five-year jail sentence for a protest leader was a dangerous precedent. ‘I went because I’m against locking people up for their political beliefs,’ said Isabelle Magkoeva, the leftist activist and bitter Navalny critic who helped set up Moscow’s short-lived Occupy camp.
‘Like many other people I went to protest against Navalny’s jailing because it was a clear example of injustice,’ Maria Kuchma, a young graduate student, told me. ‘But as a political leader I find Navalny very worrying.’
Elsewhere, things were moving fast. Just hours after Navalny and Ofitserov had been jailed, as demonstrators began to make their way into central Moscow, the prosecutor requested the two men be released on bail pending their appeal. It was an unprecedented move. Things like this simply didn’t happen in Russia. Why had the prosecutor originally asked the judge to jail Navalny and Ofitserov without waiting for the result of their appeal if this was, as he now claimed, an infringement of their rights? And anyway, since when had anyone in Russia, least of all the state prosecutor, cared about the law? Well-known lawyer Vadim Klyuvgant even suggested the prosecutor had no legal right to challenge the decision, as he himself had requested it.20 The prosecutor’s about-face was a blatant example of the judiciary’s lack of independence. Analysts and legal experts were almost unanimous – someone higher up had called the prosecutor and told him to get Navalny out of jail.
Less than twenty-four hours after they had begun serving their sentences, Navalny and Ofitserov were released on bail. The protest leader couldn’t resist a joke, and asked the judge to check if the prosecutor had not perhaps fallen victim to body snatchers. There was, he reasoned, simply no other way to explain the prosecutor’s dramatic U-turn.
As the train that brought Navalny back to the capital pulled into north Moscow’s Yaroslavl station early on 20 July, the hundreds of supporters who had gathered to meet the opposition leader began to cheer. It might not have been as earthshaking an event as Lenin’s arrival by steam train in St Petersburg in 1917, after years in exile, but as Navalny addressed the swelling crowd, it was hard to shake off the sense that a tiny piece of history was being made. ‘If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t be standing here,’ Navalny said through a megaphone, as wary police looked on. ‘We are a massive, powerful force and I’m so glad that we are starting to realize this!’21 Standing next to him, Ofitserov raised his clenched fist.
Navalny was portraying his release as a triumph for people power. But had Putin really buckled under pressure? Or was there another explanation for the protest leader’s unexpected freedom?
The day before he was sentenced to five years behind bars, Navalny had managed to get on the ballot for the September 2013 mayoral elections. His release on bail meant he would now be free to participate in his first ever election campaign. Speculation quickly arose that the unprecedented decision to set Navalny free had been taken solely to allow him to run in the polls – and lose. The incumbent mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, a Kremlin-appointed Putin ally from the oil-rich Siberian region of Tyumen, was seeking to legitimize his rule at the ballot box after the return of direct elections for the post (one of the concessions forced by the protest movement). Navalny, he was sure, would make the perfect opponent. After all, with state media and the Moscow city budget at his command, Sobyanin’s victory was all but assured. The white-haired mayor was even genuinely popular with large sections of the city’s voters for his efforts at transforming Moscow into a comfortable urban environment, including the revamping of city parks. So why not boost his own status with a resounding election win over the biggest thorn in the Kremlin’s side? A humiliating defeat for the protest movement’s brightest star would also deal a damaging blow to its claims to represent the Russian people. Indeed, Sobyanin was so keen to have Navalny run that he instructed district councillors to approve the protest leader’s participation – thereby ensuring he overcame the so-called Kremlin filter designed to keep inconvenient candidates away from elections.
Navalny flatly rejected, however, suggestions that his freedom was part of a wider political intrigue. The spontaneous demonstration at the State Duma, he insisted, had left Putin with no choice but to retreat, at least temporarily.
‘Putin changed his decision because he knew that thousands of people were getting ready to take to the streets,’ he told Ksenia Sobchak, the socialite TV-show host turned protest figure, in a widely watched online interview after his arrival back in Moscow.
Sobchak, echoing the opinion of most analysts, was sceptical. After all, 10,000 or so protesters was nothing compared to the tens of thousands that had flooded the streets of Moscow in the winter of 2011–12, albeit at approved demonstrations.
‘Look,’ Navalny went on, ‘those twelve thousand people were angry, they were mainly young men under the age of thirty-five – yeah, they might have simply gone home later, but then again they might have burned down the State Duma. This is Putin’s traditional aikido style. Take a step back, and then, when they turn around, whack them on the back of the head with a hammer.”22
There were more outlandish explanations for Navalny’s freedom.
‘Obama called and ordered that Navalny be set free,’ declared Yevgeny Fyodorov, the United Russia lawmaker who had called for a campaign to ‘root out’ the ‘traitors’ in the Russian government. ‘As a US agent,’ he said, eyes flashing wildly, ‘Navalny is untouchable. He could walk around the streets of Moscow hitting people if he wanted, and nothing would happen to him.’
Others, like Eduard Limonov, the writer and ex-NatsBol leader, who was by now penning a column for the pro-government Izvestia newspaper, wondered aloud if Navalny had made a deal with the authorities to get out of jail. ‘This whole Navalny story is beginning to smell really bad,’ he wrote.23
*
If Navalny was being set up as a fall guy by Sobyanin, then the plan backfired. The opposition figurehead and his team quickly put together a slick, Western-style election campaign, the likes of which had never been witnessed in Russia. His years of online campaigning meant Navalny had already got his message across to the middle and creative classes. Now he would have to reach out to those Muscovites who got their information almost solely from state media, and who, if they used the internet at all, it was for online chat, sports or pornography, but not political debate.
Sobyanin, taking his cue from Putin’s election campaign style, declined to take part in debates with opponents. Or even to meet voters. Instead, he relied on loyal state media to reach out to Moscow’s millions of residents for him. As a result, Navalny claimed the city’s streets, squares and parks, frequently giving up to three stump speeches a day. Blacklisted from national TV, Navalny and his supporters set up so-called ‘cubes’, colourful candidate information stands manned by enthusiastic campaign volunteers that popped up like mushrooms across the rainy city. ‘Change Russia, starting with Moscow!’ was the Navalny campaign slogan, and stickers bearing the phrase were soon plastered everywhere. Navalny had once been a little-known blogger preaching to the converted. Now his face – and message – was on almost every corner.
Navalny’s campaigning style, he revealed, had been picked up from watching election scenes in US TV dramas like The Wire.24 The hardest-working candidate the city had ever seen, he even descended into the metro to hand out copies of his campaign newspaper. City authorities were unsure how to react to this flurry of activity, sending workers to cut down, often aggressively, pro-Navalny banners from the balconies of private apartments, and even briefly detaining the protest figurehead at a well-attended election rally in an east Moscow park. Police also raided an apartment where a group of activists known as the ‘Brothers of Navalny’ were turning out ‘illegal’ election campaign material. Two young supporters, one of them Oleg Kozlovsky from the now defunct Orange Revolution-inspired Oborona movement, were detained for ten days, but no one explained what was illegal about the material. On top of all this, state-run television compared Navalny to Hitler.25
Navalny was fighting not only for the mayor’s office, but also for his freedom. A good showing at the polls would make it that much more difficult for the authorities to send him back to prison. And his relentless campaigning was slowly winning over voters. His ratings, at just 3% before the start of the campaign, began to rise steadily. Equally importantly, Navalny’s nationwide recognition ratings passed the 50% mark for the first time.26 The election campaign was transforming him from a protest leader into a national politician. ‘I wasn’t too sure about him before, but he makes a lot of sense,’ a young office worker on his lunch break told me, when I watched Navalny speak in north Moscow. ‘He’s not afraid to speak the truth.’
Navalny’s liberal supporters had urged the opposition leader to tone down his nationalist rhetoric during the mass anti-Putin protests, and the anti-corruption crusader had listened. But now he returned to the theme, blaming migrants for rising crime and publicly backing rioters who that summer had called for the expulsion of Chechens from a southern Russian town.27 He also pledged to hire a private security firm to deal with urban problems, including that of illegal immigration. And his message was popular. When Navalny spoke of the ‘crooks and thieves’ he said had bled Russia dry, people applauded; when he turned his anger on migrants and the authorities who had allowed them to flood into Moscow, they shouted their approval. ‘Much of his nationalism is based on pure ignorance,’ an exasperated high-profile liberal backer told me, insisting on anonymity. But, for the large part, liberals were happy to close their eyes to Navalny’s nationalism.
There was a pattern emerging here: Russia’s liberals had supported Yeltsin’s deadly attack on the rebellious leftist and nationalist forces that had holed up in parliament in the autumn of 1993 because they were terrified of a return to Communist rule. Their modern-day counterparts backed Navalny because they were scared Putin would reign forever. It was a choice fraught with risk. The shelling of parliament-concentrated power in the hands of the president: Putin merely had to apply the final touches to make his powers dictatorial in scope. What would liberal support for Navalny lead to? The dangers were obvious enough. In the weeks after the mayoral election, a south Moscow region erupted into nationalist violence following the murder of a young ethnic Russian, allegedly by an Azerbaijani national. ‘White power!’ rioters shouted, as they attacked a market where scores of migrants were employed. The authorities responded by rounding up over a thousand migrants. Writing on his blog, Navalny said the rioters had been forced into ‘primitive and desperate measures’.
There were other causes for concern. Navalny’s volunteer campaigners, who numbered around 10,000, many of them in their early to mid-twenties, were gaining a reputation for fanaticism that rivalled that of the pro-Putin youth group Nashi. Fellow protest leaders, TV presenters, bloggers and anyone else who dared to question Navalny’s actions quickly found themselves facing a barrage of abuse and personal attacks. One person who became a target was eco-activist Yevgenia Chirikova, who announced she would not vote for Navalny at the mayoral polls unless he included a green element to his programme.
‘I was accused of being a traitor… programmed by the KGB, a drunkard,’ Chirikova recalled. ‘They told me that God sees everything and would punish me. If this is how they act when Navalny is fighting for power, what are they going to be like when he takes power? What makes them any different from Nashi members?’28
And Navalny saw nothing wrong with all this. ‘I would like to call on my supporters to be themselves: that is, tough and uncompromising,’ he said, defiantly, when handed the opportunity to make an on-air plea for his followers to be tolerant of opposing views. ‘I want them to tell it like it is. I need people who are like me.’29
Navalny’s supporters were so willing to attack his detractors because they had ceased to see their idol as a mere politician or protest leader. For the young men and women who laboured that summer at his campaign HQ, or walked the streets to convert the unbelievers, Navalny was the saviour, the Moscow messiah come to lead Russia to the promised land of transparent government and free wi-fi on every corner. Stanislav Belkovsky, a veteran political analyst who had known Navalny for years, mockingly dubbed the protest leader’s saucer-eyed followers ‘Navalny’s Witnesses’.30
This willingness to seek a saviour figure that will rescue Russia from itself has roots in the country’s turbulent history. The leaders of the four great rebellions that shook Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were all hailed by the lower classes as the saviour come to punish the evil-doers and eradicate sin and suffering. The Bolsheviks who swept the tsar from power in 1917 famously pledged to establish a workers’ paradise on earth, and the cult of personality that emerged around Stalin has few parallels in modern history. Later, both Yeltsin and Putin were greeted as saviours who would magically put right all wrongs and drag Russia into a bright and shining future. And now it was Navalny’s turn to be hailed as the hero of the hour who would wipe away the mistakes of the previous ‘false’ messiahs. This pattern of a Russian Leader/Saviour who is then discredited and disgraced seems set to repeat forever. ‘To change Russia, we need to start not so much with Moscow, but ourselves,’ noted Belkovsky, the analyst.
No one, with the exception of ‘Navalny’s Witnesses’, had seriously believed that Navalny could defeat Sobyanin at the elections, or even force him into a run-off. Opinion polls in the days before the vote gave the protest leader just under 20%. Sobyanin was on almost 60%, far more than the half of the votes he would need to avoid an embarrassing second round.
The authorities, wary of triggering streets protests and confident of a Sobyanin victory, were reported to have ordered ‘clean’ elections. But, as voting day progressed, exit polls indicated that a major shock could be on the cards. An unexpectedly strong showing by Navalny meant the authorities had a decision to make. Stay honest, or resort to vote fraud to ensure the ‘right’ result? As midnight approached, reports came in that an urgent meeting was being held at Moscow City Hall, with the involvement of presidential administration staff.31 ‘It looks like there is going to be a second round,’ Navalny told cheering supporters in the courtyard of his election campaign’s HQ.
And then the official results were announced. Sobyanin had just scraped victory in the first round, election officials declared, taking 51%, while Navalny had garnered 27%. Navalny called foul and pledged a campaign of civil disobedience, if a second round of voting was not held. But his anger could not disguise his satisfaction. Even the disputed ‘official’ results were a massive victory for the protest leader, and a boost to his chances of staying out of jail. Turnout had been low, with just a third of Moscow’s registered voters casting a ballot, but the results still meant that over 600,000 people in the capital had put their trust in Navalny. For a candidate barred from mainstream TV networks, it was a stunning result and no less than a reshaping of the political landscape. Navalny had received more votes than the candidates from the four traditional opposition parties combined. Enthused by their hero’s breakthrough, Russian opposition journalists began writing articles with headlines such as: ‘When Navalny Becomes President’.32
The next evening, some 25,000 Navalny supporters gathered on Bolotnaya Square, the scene of the violence on the eve of Putin’s inauguration. There was a heavy security presence, and tensions were high as a police helicopter hovered overhead. ‘Recount! Recount!’ chanted the crowd, the majority holding up blue ‘Navalny’ placards. The mood was defiant.
‘The authorities stole the second round from us!’ a balding, middle-aged man named Stanislav Kuzmin told me. ‘We’re going to force a recount. Whatever it takes!’ His wife, a pale blonde, nodded enthusiastically.
Navalny, however, had other ideas. There would be no promised campaign of civil disobedience. Better this show of force before his trial, he had reasoned, than an unnecessary confrontation.
‘When the time comes, and it may well come, when I will ask you to take part in unsanctioned demonstrations, to overturn vehicles and light flares, I will tell you straight out,’ Navalny said, after high-fiving members of his campaign staff as he clambered on to the stage.
Like Putin, Navalny was learning how to bide his time. Besides, the Kremlin had got the message. Navalny was no longer an upstart protester, or ‘some blogger’, but a national politician with a growing following. A few weeks after the elections, in tacit admission that his foe had reached a new level, Putin would utter Navalny’s name for the first time.33
*
Navalny was being increasingly compared with Yeltsin. Not, of course, with the President Yeltsin whose drunken antics had so embarrassed Russians in the 1990s, but with the younger, healthier Yeltsin, who had inspired millions in the final years of the Soviet Union. Both men were tall, fiery speakers with the common touch: like Navalny, Yeltsin had also battled against high-level corruption. ‘Vova, I’m back’, read the caption under a composite digital image of the two men’s faces that made the rounds online that autumn.34 Yeltsin had famously outmanoeuvred Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to sideline him politically: would Navalny do the same to Putin?
The first test of Navalny’s newfound political weight came on 16 October 2013, as a court in Kirov heard the appeal against his five-year jail sentence. Unable or unwilling to hold off with his relentless attacks on Putin and his allies, just a week ahead of the appeal, Navalny published a report on the foreign-based children and grandchildren of Vladimir Yakunin, the ultra-patriotic, ultra-Orthodox head of the Russian Railways company. ‘He’s set his family up comfortably in Switzerland and England, but has the cheek to teach us about patriotism,’ Navalny fumed. ‘And to tell us that anyone who is against him and Putin is an enemy of our country.’35 Navalny was still raging about Yakunin as he set off on the train to Kirov.
Back in Moscow, Navalny’s supporters prepared to take to the streets again in the event of his jail sentence being upheld. But there was no need. The appeals court ruled to soften Navalny’s sentence to five years suspended. Ofitserov also got four years suspended. Both men were barred from leaving Moscow without police permission for the duration of their punishment. ‘And we’d got the tents and the snacks ready,’ an activist tweeted, as preparations for another invasion of central Moscow were called off.
‘They’ll come in handy, another time,’ Navalny replied.
Navalny’s supporters celebrated. But it was a hollow kind of victory. Of course, as Navalny admitted, freedom was far better than the prospect of ‘battling mosquitoes in a prison cell’. Politically, however, Navalny had been isolated. Under Russian law, he would be banned from running for public office until at least mid-2018, after both the next parliamentary and presidential polls. The probationary nature of his sentence also meant he could be sent back to jail at any time, should he be detained for even a minor offence. He was also facing a number of other criminal charges, any one of which could see him jailed for up to ten years.
‘We are simply so used to the lack of justice that, when the authorities give an innocent person five years suspended, we are happy and congratulate one another,’ Navalny commented. ‘If anyone thinks I am going to get scared and stay away from demonstrations in case they jail me again, then they are wrong,’ he added. ‘I did what I believed to be right, and I will keep on doing what I believe to be right and necessary.’36
Navalny’s freedom sparked speculation that the Kremlin had decided to back off, at least temporarily, from its hard line against dissent. With Russia set to host the 2014 Winter Olympics in its Black Sea resort of Sochi, Putin could do without the headache of another high-profile political prisoner. And, of course, by not jailing Navalny, the authorities had prevented him turning into an anti-regime martyr that the beleaguered protest movement could rally around.
A mooted amnesty for prisoners convicted of non-violent crimes set to come into effect just before the Games also opened up the possibility of an early release from jail for Pussy Riot’s Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova. One other concession has been granted: speaking at an off-the-record meeting with protest-movement figures after the Moscow mayoral polls, Vyacheslav Volodin, the replacement for the grey cardinal Surkov as deputy head of the presidential administration, said genuine opposition politicians would now be allowed to run in low-level elections.37 It seemed a poor return for two years of bitter, often costly political struggle.
On the ground, little has changed. Putin remains in the Kremlin. United Russia, though damaged, is still the largest party in the State Duma. Judges and the courts continue to operate to a system of telephone justice. State media’s coverage of political life is as one-sided and vicious as ever. Udaltsov and his fellow Left Front activist Razvozzhayev are still behind bars, facing ten years on coup charges based on footage aired by state TV. And, ominously, in the autumn of 2013, the authorities made a return to the Soviet-era abuse of psychiatry for political ends when Mikhail Kosenko, a suspect detained after the unrest ahead of Putin’s return to the presidency, was ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment for an undefined period.
In October 2013, protesters marched through central Moscow to call for the release of political prisoners. The turnout that afternoon was around 5,000, far fewer than the tens of thousands who had filled the squares of the Russian capital at the height of the anti-Putin protests. Marching past the watchful eye of riot police, the crowd broke into the familiar chant of ‘Russia without Putin!’ But there was a weariness about the rallying cry. The belief that had sustained the protest movement, I realized, had gone. People had come out on to the streets time after time, been jailed and beaten for their beliefs, and nothing had changed. If anything, things had got worse. It was a brutal truth. Navalny, walking with his wife, Yulia, in the centre of the crowd, sighed. ‘The opposition’s fight is endless,’ he said. ‘And rather exhausting.’
Three days later, investigators charged Navalny and his younger brother, Oleg, with another case of embezzlement. The Kremlin might not plan to jail its number-one foe just yet, but it is keeping Navalny on the shortest leash it can find.