The Moscow mayoral race confirmed an already developing tendency: Navalnyi had become the focal point of the opposition to Putin. How did he acquire this status, and what did his prominence mean for the movement as a whole? Navalnyi had become a figure of some renown in Russia long before the 2011–12 protests, thanks to his acidly ironic internet presence and his anti-corruption crusade against some of the country’s most powerful companies. His best-known campaigns of that time involved buying shares in a well-connected company, and then demanding, as a minority shareholder, to see the accounts: where had the $300 million the oil company Transneft supposedly donated to charity in 2007 actually gone? Why were the oil-drilling rigs purchased by VTB Bank at a vastly inflated price simply dumped in the snowy wastelands of the Yamal Peninsula? In 2010–11, Navalnyi also set up two sites to crowdsource damning materiaclass="underline" RosPil – from the Russian verb pilit’, ‘to saw off’ – encouraged users to scrutinize government tenders, while RosYama allowed them to report excessively large potholes.[11]
Since then, Navalnyi has continued to hammer away at the same theme, setting up an Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) in 2011, which has carried out several investigations into the thievery of key members of the elite. In 2014, it published a report on the unbelievably inflated costs of the Sochi Olympics – many of the funds coming straight out of the state budget – and the following year produced a film centred on General Prosecutor Yuri Chaika and the business empire built by his sons. In March 2017, it released a documentary targeting Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, listing his collection of yachts and his formidable real estate holdings, which include palatial apartments, holiday homes, and vineyards in Russia and Italy.{14}
It was this report – titled ‘Don’t Call Him Dimon’, after the diminutive nickname many Russians applied to the former president – that prompted a string of anti-corruption protests in dozens of cities in March and June 2017. The second round was larger than the first, bringing at least 50,000 people onto the streets in 150 places, according to one report. As with previous protests, many of the individual gatherings were small, but the geographical spread was impressive: several thousand turned out in cities deep in the interior – Ivanovo, Omsk, Chelyabinsk – as well as in the larger metropolitan centres. On both occasions, more than 1,500 people were arrested in total.{15} Strikingly, many of them were teenagers – too young to have participated in the 2011–12 protests themselves, but raised in the more embattled atmosphere of Putin’s third term, in which the idea of contesting the system was not only regularly aired by the system’s opponents, but had also come to trouble the imaginations of those in power.
Many of the strategies the Kremlin and its allies adopted to counter Navalnyi backfired. If anything, they heightened his importance, validating the tendency of Western media outlets to centre their coverage of the opposition around him. It’s not hard to see why Navalnyi acquired such visibility. Charismatic, relatively young, he has a combination of no-nonsense directness and mischievous humour that has served him well in conveying his ideas, especially on social media. But his ascent quickly raised concerns within the opposition, both about Navalnyi himself and about the strategic implications of his personal prestige. In promoting this one man as its paramount leader, did the opposition risk creating its own mirror-image Putin – or worse?
Many of these anxieties stemmed from another dimension of Navalnyi’s public persona: a Russian nationalism that often spilled out in chauvinistic outbursts. Having joined the liberal Yabloko party in 2000, Navalnyi was expelled from it in 2007 for helping to organize the ‘Russian March’, a gathering of far-right nationalists whose best-known slogan is ‘Russia for the ethnic Russians!’[12] He was dismissive of liberal squeamishness about the connection, telling one interviewer in 2012 that ‘what is discussed at the Russian March, if we abstract from the people shouting “Sieg Heil”, reflects a real agenda that concerns a great many people’.{16}
That agenda notably included hostility toward migrants from Central Asia and Russian citizens from the North Caucasus. Central Asian migrant workers came to Russia in increasing numbers during the boom years after 2000; whether they came through official or unofficial channels, they remained vulnerable to extortion at the hands of the police and violence at the hands of the far right. The North Caucasus, meanwhile, had become an object of particular venom among Russian nationalists in the wake of the Chechen wars – fought, it should be recalled, to keep the region as part of the Russian Federation. All the republics of Russia’s mountainous south depend heavily on federal subventions, and after the economic downturn of 2009, ‘Stop Feeding the Caucasus’ became a frequent slogan of far-right marches – directed not only at the lavish lifestyles of the Kremlin’s placemen in the region, but also against the idea that federal revenues should go to non-Russian areas in the first place.
Navalnyi has at different times endorsed expressions of chauvinism against both these groups, and against others too. During the 2008 war with Georgia, for example, he called for cruise missiles to be rained down on that country and referred to its nationals as ‘rodents’ (gryzuny) – a pun on the Russian demonym for Georgians (gruziny). He has, on more than one occasion, voiced objections to migrant workers’ physical presence, complaining to one interviewer about their posture: ‘They should stop sitting on their haunches! It drives me crazy.’ ‘I’m not against people coming here,’ he added, ‘but they need to behave in accordance with the generally agreed norms.’{17}
Shortly after his 2007 exit from Yabloko, he appeared in a video put out by a nationalist organization he co-founded called ‘Narod’ (‘The People’). Breezily discussing how to deal with cockroaches and flies, he asks: what do you do if the cockroach is too big, or the fly too aggressive? At this point, an image of Shamil Basaev, the Chechen Islamist warlord, appears alongside him on the screen, and then a shadowy, bearded figure emerges from behind the camera and attacks Navalnyi with a knife; he shoots the figure with a pistol, and when the smoke clears, the message of the video appears: carrying firearms should be legalized. Of course, the video is not actually saying we should shoot Chechens; but it is implying they are insects. The combination of macho humour and dehumanizing rhetoric is all too familiar: it reminds you of no one so much as Vladimir Putin, with his vow to ‘wipe out the terrorists in the outhouse’.
These ugly sentiments rightly caused a great deal of unease, even among some of Navalnyi’s supporters in Russia and his boosters in the West – prompting Navalnyi himself to murmur belated apologies for some of them. Critics of Navalnyi, meanwhile, seized on such statements to denounce him from a range of ideological perspectives: Russian officialdom labelled him a fascist demagogue, some liberals condemned him as yet another charismatic leader figure in a sombre tradition, while some on the left identified him as ‘Russia’s Trump’.{18}
11
These are a historic bane of Russian life. Gogol is popularly credited with a phrase that people still regularly trot out: the country’s two main problems are
12
In Russian, the adjective