The Ballad Of Alexei Navalny And The Russian Protests
In mid-January, massive anti-Putin protests broke out, all over Russia. The number of protesters ranges from 3,000 to 20,000. Russian authorities arrested more than 1,400 people at various rallies across the country. In Moscow alone, police detained over 1,000 protesters, while in St. Petersburg there were 248 arrests.
The scope of these protests is not the first time in Russia. Similar protests broke out in 2011 and 2013. However, the arrests and fines were much higher in the 2021 protests. The kremlin was oddly on toes about the citizen uprising against Putin’s Russia this time.
Creator: ANTON VAGANOV | Credit: REUTERS
Why are there 20,000 people on the streets every week in Russia? Considering that it wields nearly all the formal power, why is the Kremlin remarkably reactive this time? Why were 100 million people watching a parole hearing of a Russian politician? What is the root cause of this cataclysm? And why is this happening now?
First, we need some background:
In his 22 year leadership, Putin hasn’t been an ideal leader, so to say. Cases of corruption, spying conspiracy and even murder run high. There is a famous joke about Putin where Stalin appears to Putin in his dream and says: “I have two bits of advice for you: kill off all your opponents and paint the Kremlin blue.” Putin asks, “Why blue?” and Stalin says “I knew you would not object to the first one.”
The bureaucratic system in Russia is not democratic from any scale. Year after Year elections happen, but the result is premeditated. This has led to large scale corruption and bribery. According to some top officials, the “average size of the bribes increased 10 times since Putin first got elected” which is evident in the statistics.
In 2004, at the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s second term as president, Russia moved from 90th place to 126th in the Corruption Perceptions Index-a drop of 36 places.
According to the Russian Interior Ministry’s Department for Combating Economic Crimes, the average bribe amounted to 9,000 Rubbles in 2008 in 2011. It was 236,000 rubbles -making the average bribe in 2011 26 times greater than the average bribe in 2008, often the inflation rate for the same period.
So we have established that Russia has a corruption problem. And there hasn’t been much progress to solve it.
This sets up the entry Alexei Navalny. A lawyer turned politician. In the early 2000s, he started writing online blogs detailing corruption by government officials which became viral. He gained 6 million followers on YouTube and 2 million on Twitter. In his career, the turning point came when he was arrested during an anti-government protest in 2011 and was sentenced to 15 days in jail with some other known activist. This incident transformed him in the words of a Mosco radio host at the time “into an offline activist from an online one.”
This was the start of a body of work from Navalny detailing and investigating government corruption and organising protests and mobilizing people. His audience grew with time, and he got a position in the opposition party. He ran for the mayor election against a Putin appointee in 2013 but not surprisingly he got charged with 2 embezzlement cases. He was sentenced to 3 years in jail .the sentence; however, the case was suspended after the appeal. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) later ruled that the cases violated Navalny’s right to a fair trial, but they were never overturned. In total, Navalny won six complaints against the Russian authorities in the ECHR for €225,000. He still ran for the position but lost.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny addresses supporters
In 2018 he launched a presidential campaign against Putin, but this time he was prevented from running because of the embezzlement case.
Even though he was not allowed to run, Navalny established himself as a direct opposition to the government. He was Putin’s harshest critic. He continued to publish documentaries and articles and also spearhead several anti-corruption movements.
This was a routine anti-government movement until he was poisoned in the August of 2020 with a Novichok nerve agent during a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. He was medically evacuated to Berlin and discharged on 22 September.
Even though Kremlin denied any involvement, Navalny accused President Vladimir Putin of being responsible for his poisoning. An investigation by Belling cat and The Insider implicated agents from the Federal Security Service in Navalny’s poisoning. This was an indication of discomfort from the kremlin. US, UK and other European countries immediately passed sanctions against some Russian officials. Once again, Alexei Navalny went viral.
Navalny returned to Russia in January and was immediately detained on a parole violation charges when he was in a coma. The poisoning and detention of the best-known critic of Putin on clearly arbitrary charges by the government made the population angry. He also released a documentary called “Putin’s palace. History of world’s largest bribe “while being detained, which agitated the population even more and became the start of these massive protests.
On Thursday in his court hearing. Navalny launched into a stark monologue which he directed not at the court but Putin. An excerpt from his statement said
“I mortally offended him by surviving. I survived thanks to good people, thanks to pilots and doctors. And then I committed an even more serious offence: I didn’t run and hide. Then something truly terrifying happened: I participated in the investigation of my own poisoning, and we proved, in fact, that Putin, using Russia’s Federal Security Service, was responsible for this attempted murder. And that’s driving this thieving little man in his bunker out of his mind. He’s simply going insane as a result.”
Navalny was then sentenced to 2 years and 8 months of prison for a suspended sentence for a crime he did not commit. This speech was widely circulated in the Russian internet and highlighted this injustice system in front of the world. Navalny, as described in the New Yorker on Friday “surely knew he was not walking out of that courtroom a free man but was speaking for history”.
Navalny represents the sentiment and an ideal for the whole Russian population; a fearless man who unmasked his own attempted killer and confronted him. He did not hide away in a bunker.
On Friday, Russia announced the expulsion of diplomats from Sweden, Germany and Poland, accusing them of taking part in the protests.
There is not much to be optimistic about a change in systems. Putin wields enormous power in Russia. The massive protests despite the government pressure indicate that the Russian population seems to be fed up by the intimidation and the blatant misuse of their power. But even though there is not much to be optimistic about for the future the sheer audacity of a man standing in front of a court and calling the most powerful person in his country a scared mad man will inspire millions of the same “powerless” citizens to bring about a revolution. It just seems like the path for least resistance is not an option anymore.
The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors.
Originally published at https://www.millennialnewstank.com on February 6, 2021.
