The Nation, Jan. 28, 2021
Alexei Navalny Grows More Powerful Every Time Putin Talks About Him
It is possible that we will one day look back on January 2021 as the
beginning of the end of Putin’s reign.
By Vadim Nikitin
Тhe parallels were simply too much for Vladimir Putin. The last time a
major opposition leader was allowed to return home from Germany
unimpeded, it did not end well for Russia’s ruling elite. On January 17,
the Kremlin was not about to let Alexey Navalny copy the man whose
arrival by sealed train from Berlin in 1917 after years in Swiss exile
sparked the October Revolution.
Moments after touching down in Moscow, Navalny was whisked away to a
makeshift court hastily convened at a local police station and jailed
for 30 days. Just then, his team released the secret weapon. The video
titled Putin’s Palace has now been watched 97.5 million times and
spawned anti-government rallies in over 120 cities across Russia.
For all the furor caused by the video, it’s remarkable how little new
information it contained. The allegations behind Putin’s Palace—that the
Russian president is the hidden beneficiary of a sprawling property on
the Black Sea built with taxpayer money embezzled by his friends and
family members—were first revealed back in 2010. Nor was there anything
particularly unusual about Navalny’s arrest: He has spent significant
portions of the past decade behind bars.
Yet there is a hard-to-shake feeling among many observers of Russian
politics that the Rubicon has been crossed. For one thing, Navalny’s
decision to come back to Russia and risk certain jail, or even another
attempt on his life, was an act of such singular courage that it seemed
to send a jolt of electricity through the nation’s jaded conscience. The
video, which distilled all the charges Navalny has leveled at the regime
for years into a heady Molotov cocktail of dark humor and righteous
anger, did the rest.
For Princeton professor Ekaterina Pravilova, a specialist in tsarist-era
law, economy, and governance, the video’s greatest achievement was the
“desacralization of power.” By using humor and irony to ridicule Putin’s
venality and bad taste, Navalny turned a formerly revered leader into a
punch line. Revelations that the palace contained something called an
aqua-disco and that its bathrooms were fitted with €700 toilet brushes
birthed instant memes. For the Kremlin, the sight of toilet
brush–wielding protesters chanting “Aqua-disco!” at police, as one of my
friends witnessed while attending last Saturday’s march in St
Petersburg, is no laughing matter: “When power loses the aura of
sainthood, the legitimacy of a monarch crumbles,” said Pravilova.
According to Sergei Guriev, a leading economist who fled Russia in 2013
and teaches at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, the nationwide
protests of January 23 were “unprecedented in their scale and breadth,”
spreading far beyond the usual metropolitan flashpoints of Moscow and St
Petersburg. “They do not imply the end of the regime,” said Guriev by
e-mail, “yet they are a challenge the Kremlin has not seen before.”
The biggest acknowledgment of a paradigm shift in the opposition’s
relations with the state came from Putin himself. Never before has the
president addressed any allegations aired by Navalny. But on January 25,
during a live Q&A with university students, he allowed himself to be
asked about the film directly. Putin replied that he had not seen it
apart from selected clips shown to him by staff, but that “none of what
was made out to be my property belongs to me or my close relatives, and
never did. Never.”
The tightly controlled nature of Putin’s public appearances leaves
little doubt that the question was planted or at least pre-vetted. The
fact alone that the Kremlin felt it necessary to respond to the video
suggests a qualitative leap in Navalny’s political capital. Where he
could once be derided as a nuisance activist, Navalny has now been
anointed аs Putin’s official rival.
The change became immediately apparent on state television. Having up to
now mainly ignored Navalny, Channel 1’s flagship 9 PM news bulletin was
saturated with coverage of the rallies. Four main arguments were made:
The turnout was poor; most of the attendees were uninformed children
brainwashed on TikTok and placed in danger by Navalny; marchers used
violence against police; Navalny is a Western agent.
“Many experts are convinced that [Navalny] has close links to foreign
security services, from as far back as his time as an intern at Yale,”
said the narrator of one segment. Later, American conspiracy blogger and
regular RT contributor Caleb Maupin announces: “Alexey Navalny is an
asset of Western intelligence.”
The point was hammered home by Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria
Zakharova, who singled out an alert posted on the US Embassy website
noting the start times and routes likely to be taken by the marchers.
“What was that?” she said, looking ominously into the camera. “A call,
an instruction, a motivation? It’s interesting to see how the US
authorities would have behaved had the Russian embassy done something
similar in Washington.” It took me a few minutes of googling to confirm
that US embassies all over the world issue nearly identical alerts—for
the safety of their own nationals in-country—anytime a big demonstration
is expected.
Despite the clear attempts to make the protests synonymous with Navalny
the person, who could then be smeared as a Western spy, many people I
spoke to marched for various reasons. In the words of Anna Yalovkina, a
communications professional from St. Petersburg who attended her
second-ever demonstration, “it’s easier for the government to discredit
Navalny than to justify their own sins.” She added: “I didn’t march to
stand up for Navalny. I went to stand up for myself, my own future.”
Perhaps the most absurd aspect of the coverage involved reporters and
interviewees expressing concern for minors being put at risk by Navalny,
while simultaneously disparaging their judgment and intelligence.
“The big danger is for children in crowds. Small children in crowds can
get trampled on,” said Anna Kuznetsova, the Russian children’s rights
commissioner. “To think that adults are putting out these treasonous
calls for children to go” to the rallies. Moments later, a disappointed
“Kristina from Krasnoyarsk” laments, “They said it would be a cool
party. I heard about it on TikTok and Instagram and decided to go and
see. They promised a party but this is the pits.” Numerous versions of
Kristina, including “Sergey from Butovo” and “Sveta from Bibirevo,” have
been quoted across state-owned media spouting similar ignorant views.
Such public denigration of a generation of future voters was an oddly
self-defeating step for a government already concerned about its
medium-term electoral prospects. It appeared to show a regime
desperately scrambling to respond to events. And with good reason. Where
opposition rallies were once confined mainly to Moscow and St
Petersburg, this time demonstrations took place in over 120 cities from
Murmansk to Irkutsk.
In a sign of how seriously such success was taken by the authorities,
3,960 people have so far been arrested in connection with the protests,
according to the civil rights organization OVD Info. Among them were
Navalny’s press secretary Kira Yarmysh and Georgy Alburov, who fronted
the Putin’s Palace video, as well as dozens of other members and
volunteers of Navalny’s Moscow and regional headquarters. On January 27,
police searched Navalny’s apartment under the pretext of investigating
suspected breaches of Covid rules. Even lawyers attempting to defend
detainees have not been spared. In a particularly egregious example,
Mansur Gilmanov, a lawyer from the civil rights NGO Apologia Protesta,
which provides free legal aid to political prisoners, was wrestled to
the ground by police while visiting his client and detained for five days.
The blossoming of organizations like OVD Info and Apologia Protesta
suggests a significant revitalization of civil society. In the same way,
Navalny’s concept of Smart Voting, where citizens vote strategically for
the single strongest non–United Russia candidate in each district, has
empowered a cohort of young people to enter politics without pledging
fealty to Moscow. However, important questions remain about Navalny’s
ability to channel his street popularity, media savvy, and undeniable
moral authority into a coherent program for government.
“Navalny is an incredibly compelling moral figure,” said Sean Guillory
of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the
University of Pittsburgh. “But he is also a cipher, a proxy for all the
grievances and dissatisfaction of a growing number of people.”
Guillory is skeptical of Navalny’s charismatic approach to politics.
“Russia doesn’t need another guy on a white horse. It needs democracy
from below,” he told me. He also criticizes Navalny for appearing to
reduce corruption to a set of crimes committed by individual bad actors,
when it is in fact a structural problem unlikely to be fixed by
protests, free elections, or the rule of law alone.
Nowhere is Navalny more inscrutable than on economic policy. Formerly a
classic free-market liberal, in recent years Navalny has begun to lean
left by attacking inequality and corporate greed. But he has so far
failed to express a coherent vision for an alternative economic
settlement. “Navalny is a black box when it comes to the economy,” said
Stanislav Markus, associate professor of international business at the
University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business. “Nobody
knows much about his position.”
According to Markus, removing Putin without a concrete economic plan
would be either impossible or meaningless so long as most natural
resources and heavy industries remain controlled by his allies. “For
these people, the arrival of the rule of law would mean losing their
wealth, and even their freedom,” he said. As a result, they are unlikely
to switch their allegiance to Navalny without a fight. And while more
marginal oligarchs may initially welcome attempts to level the playing
field, any potential gains are likely to be outweighed in their minds by
the risk that Navalny—were he to heed the swelling popular demand for
economic justice—might resort to redistributive policies that would hurt
their business interests.
Such critiques of Navalny reflect an enduring and bitter divide between
an old guard of pro-Western liberals leftover from the 1990s and a more
critically minded generation, many forged by the 2008 financial crisis,
who doubt the ability of boilerplate free-market capitalism to right
society’s wrongs.
I asked veteran broadcaster, scholar, and activist Yevgenia Albats—a
grande dame of the first group—whether Navalny can succeed without
addressing the deep failings of the liberal democratic system with which
he would presumably like to replace Putinism. “You evidently haven’t
spent much time in Russia lately,” she e-mailed back. “Our problems are
quite far removed from ‘failings of the liberal democratic system.’ We
are concerned with survival, with basic rights, with the absence of
legal institutions etc.”
Albats may have a point, but breezily dismissing the deep crises of
legitimacy facing Western institutions, brought to the surface by Trump
and Brexit, is not only shortsighted but also dangerous. The grievances
that led so many Americans to vote for Trump echo those that helped
sustain Putin’s rise: the feeling of being forgotten or ridiculed by
arrogant and entitled elites, the sense that despite formal freedoms
society is a rigged game, that the country and its rulers simply have no
need for ordinary people like them. Certainly, ignorance and prejudice
also play their part. But ignoring such parallels only bolsters Putin’s
last remaining argument for clinging to power: that the opposition’s
version of democracy would simply return Russia to the chaos and
iniquity of the 1990s.
It is possible that we will one day look back on January 2021 as the
beginning of the end of Putin’s reign. But for all the heroism of
Navalny’s convictions and the energy on the streets, the movement still
has a long way to go before it becomes a government in waiting. That
won’t happen until Navalny and his supporters find their economic and
ideological bearings and act on them. “We all want this to be the
tipping point, but just because you want it doesn’t bring it closer,”
Markus said. “Such concentrations of money and power don’t just
disappear into thin air.”
Vadim Nikitin is a Murmansk-born, London-based Russia analyst and
financial-crime specialist. His commentary and book reviews have
appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, and Dissent.
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