Well, they’ve finally done it. Last night, after some six thousand people came out in central Moscow to protest suspected fraud in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, authorities rounded up three hundred people. Among them was Alexey Navalny, a popular anti-corruption activist and blogger. (I profiled Navalny for The New Yorker in April, and wrote about the alleged election fraud on Monday.).
The problem for Putin’s government is that, unlike the other two hundred and ninety-nine or so people arrested, Navalny is as close to a real celebrity as the Russian opposition has. He is also the one coherent, galvanizing, and viable figure among them. Despite his flirtations with nationalists, he is a brilliant political tactician and ad man: within three months of his coining the meme “party of crooks and thieves” to describe the ruling United Russia, one third of Russians polled said they identified United Russia as crooks and, yes, thieves.
No one among the opposition has been able to pull off the kinds of carefully calibrated victories Navalny can, and he has never been shy about his desire for power, which is why the Kremlin has been warily dismissive of him. Last week, when I asked Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, about Navalny as a possible pretender to the presidential throne, Peskov took the standard, vaguely neo-Soviet line: invoking spies and illicit cash. “I have a strong suspicion that he is earning money,” Peskov said. “It’s not about politics, it’s about money. I know for sure that a group of very talented lawyers are working behind him”—last winter, Navalny took up a collection to hire young lawyers to help him challenge corrupt state companies in court—“and supplying him with information and instruction. I know for sure that these specialists are working not only in this country but in some other countries, also. So, he has nothing to do with politics. It’s business. It’s like advertising on the Internet: another way of doing business.”
But if the Kremlin’s goal was to discredit Navalny and hobble his meteoric rise, they’ve done the opposite. Last night, hundreds of people protested through the night in front of one of the police precincts where, it was rumored, he was being held—trying to force the police to let his lawyer in to see him. At four A.M., nearly four thousand people were watching a live-stream video from the protest, which a supporter was beaming from the police station. In the meantime, Navalny tweeted cheery pictures from the police van and the holding pen, at least until his phone died or the police took it away. A (http://www.lifenews.ru/news/76363) appeared of him in his cell, penning an official complaint—his favorite tactic.
All day Tuesday, when his tweets went silent, Russian Twitter was filled with conversations about Navalny’s whereabouts: Where was he being held? Where was his court hearing? No one, not even Navalny’s lawyer, seemed to know. Others wondered if he had been harmed, or worse. When he finally appeared in court, a picture was tweeted out with the message, “he’s alive!” This only fueled the euphoric panic that has filled the city in the last few days, and added to the (very accurate) sense that the state was cracking down and reverting to its old ways when faced with something new. Tuesday morning, armored vehicles rolled into Moscow, and the Interior Ministry confirmed that it had dispatched fifty thousand additional cops and eleven thousand five hundred Interior Ministry troops to provide “additional security” until the ballot count was completed.
Tonight, United Russia and the opposition are staging competing protests (the site of the latter has already been equipped with water cannons), and Russians (and Twitter) wait for Navalny’s verdict at the hands of a judge famous for jailing other opposition figures. Navalny’s cellmate, another young opposition politician named Ilya Yashin, was given fifteen days in prison, and Navalny could stand to get the same.
But even if the judge avoids adding fuel to the fire and delivers the verdict after Tuesday night’s protests have ended—or even if she lets him go—the damage has already been done. As Alexei Venediktov, the head of the Echo Moskvy radio station put it, arresting Navalny was “a political mistake: jailing Navalny transforms him from an online leader into an offline one.” Serving time in jail and publicly suffering at the hands of an unpopular state is any opposition leader’s dream, Venediktov wrote. “Historically, such political mistakes prove costly to those who commit them. Not right away, but inevitably. Alas.”
UPDATE: At around 7 P.M., Navalny was given the maximum sentence: fifteen days for defying a government official. He plans to appeal the verdict.
Photograph of Navalny by Petr Shkumatov.