Alexei Navalny: The thorn in Vladimir Putin’s side

As he lies in an induced coma in a German hospital, the victim of an attempted assassination, Alexei Navalny has at least proved one thing: that Vladimir Putin, de facto dictator of Russia for life, fears as well as loathes this 44-year-old activist and effective leader of Russia’s fractured and persecuted opposition.

In its way, it is almost a compliment that Putin, or at least those working faithfully to what they perceive as his wishes, should have gone to the trouble of using novichok on him. It is, after all, a chemical weapon, banned under international treaty, the supplies of which are controlled by the Russian state, developed as it was in the days of the Soviet Union. If Putin was trying to thereby send a further signal that this is what happens when you try to resist his will, it worked. When Putin permitted Navalny to be moved to Germany for treatment, possibly saving his life, the president may have been embellishing the original message with the idea that he, Putin, was indifferent as to whether Navalny lived or died; he has had his punishment either way, and others will take the point.  

Yet the very fact of the assassination attempt does tell us much about Putin’s attitude towards his putative rival, who has spent most of the past two decades campaigning tirelessly against Putin’s accretion of power and destruction of Russia’s already weak democratic institutions. Navalny’s characterisation of Putin’s United Russia party as “a party of crooks and thieves” stung because it struck a chord with the public, and stuck. Ever since he emerged from a long spell in higher education (degrees in law and finance) at the age of 32, Navalny has been engaged in politics and, specifically, in resisting Putin, who began his rise to near-absolute power when he was first appointed prime minister in 1999. (The president is Navalny’s senior by 23 years.) Putin was Boris Yeltsin’s protege, and, in their different ways, Putin and Navalny “inherited” the consequences of the  chaos, Wild West capitalism and oligarchism that arrived after the fall of the USSR.  

Navalny decided to do something about it by buying small amounts of shares in newly private giants such as Rosneft, Gazprom and Lukoil, in order to ask awkward questions at shareholder meetings. Since then, through a dizzying array of vaguely progressive, anti-corruption parties and a multimillion-strong following on social media, Navalny has become a pain in Putin’s neck.

It is personal, too. Putin is said be unable to bring himself to utter Navalny’s name, and it is thought unwise to do so, at least publicly, throughout Kremlin circles. A Russian government spokesperson who sought to deny the rumour avoided the word “Navalny” in his remarks.  

Putin is said to be particularly upset that Navalny revealed the pseudonym used by Putin’s daughter to try to lead some sort of normal life. The private lives of the president and his children are virtually state secrets, and Navalny’s violation of them hardly endeared him to the establishment. Any secret service officer in the FSB, GRU or any semi-detached irregular looking to ingratiate themselves with the president would find Navalny an obvious target.  

Navalny, now more than ever, enjoys a relatively high profile in what amounts to a one-party state ruled by one man, and, if he survives his ordeal and is brave enough to return to his three-bedroom apartment in Moscow, will no doubt become even more of a popular hero, as well as one with an even bigger target on his back and those of his wife and two children. Navalny joins the Skripals, Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Nemtsov, Anna Politkovskaya, Sergei Magnitsky, Sergei Yushenkov, Boris Berezovsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, among many less prominent others, in the long list of enemies of the state who have been targeted, successfully or not, for disposal through extra-judicial means. The various murders are obviously the work of the Kremlin, especially the ones using WMD, albeit ultimately deniable in some theoretical sense.

However, Navalny has never been elected to anything, even a regional Duma or city council, though not for want of trying. His best, and indeed only, official showing was the 27 per cent of the vote he won as candidate for mayor of Moscow in 2013 against a Putin-approved appointee. Even on that occasion, Navalny’s campaign was almost wrecked by an alleged corruption case.

Navalny’s conviction in a total of three cases, all involving corruption, have prevented him standing for public election until at least 2022. Thus, he was unable to stand against Putin himself in the 2018 presidential election, even as an independent candidate of protest. Just to make sure, though, Navalny was beaten up (again) in 2017, and the authorities refused to recognise Navalny’s then political vehicle, the Progress Party. The worst beating meted out to Navalny, by the way, left him partly blind in one eye. It did not deter him.

The corruption scandals are intriguing because they are so random, so obviously at odds with his anti-corruption campaigning, and cannot quite be dismissed as complete fantasies invented by prosecutors. The first, in 2012, concerned the lumber business in the city of Kirov, where Navalny was working for the governor and allegedly embezzled funds (about the equivalent of half a million dollars).  

The second corruption scandal was at the Russian subsidiary of the French luxury cosmetics company Yves Rocher. Navalny and his brother, Oleg, supposedly conspired to drain about another half a million dollars, by diverting duties due to the authorities into Navalny family interests. These, bizarrely, included Navalny’s parents’ basket-weaving company, which they had been running in the Moscow region since 1994.  

The third scandal was an allegation that Navalny’s own advertising company, Allekt, defrauded a political party unconnected to Navalny.

The first two cases were referred to the European Court of Human Rights, which condemned them as flawed and abuses of the judicial system – but that is not the same as exonerating the Navalny family. In any case, Navalny had suspended sentences imposed, and the main effect of the convictions has been to harass him with compensation claims and to disqualify him from standing for office.  

Even so, far more than any other politician in Russia today, Navalny has the status of a genuine leader of the opposition. The last time Putin stood for election to the presidency, in 2018, he won 77 per cent of the vote (officially), and the second-placed candidate was nothing more than a stooge who attacked Putin for being too moderate – Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the “Liberal Democrats”, who is no Ed Davey.  

Yet it would be a mistake to try to fit Navalny into the stereotype of a western liberal. For example, as someone of part-Ukrainian heritage and who spent some of his childhood in the now-independent state, he might be thought hostile to the invasions of Crimea and Donbass; yet Navalny has been inconsistent and equivocal on the Ukraine issue. If anything, he seems to want Russia, Ukraine and Belarus to be linked together in a happy voluntary partnership, in turn linked to the EU and on better terms with the United States. Like virtually every Russian figure on any part of the spectrum, he is hostile to immigration and keen on stressing the rights of ethnic or “social” Russians now living as minorities in former Soviet lands such as Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.  

Putin’s use of assassination and show trials as instruments of oppression has a Stalinist, almost medieval feel, despite the hi-tech poisons. It recalls the purges of the 1930s and the grisly ends that Trotsky, Bukharin and Tukhachevsky met in that previous reign of terror. Perhaps Putin is self-consciously emulating Stalin, someone still revered in some Russian circles for rebuilding the Russian empire and smashing Nazi Germany. No doubt Putin, to borrow a phrase, is also determined to “make Russia great again”.  

With the last rigged alteration to the Russian constitution, Putin could legally stay in power until 2036, by which time he would be 84, older than Brezhnev when he died in office in 1982. At the moment, that seems plausible enough, and Putin looks quite immutable. Yet only a few years before it crumbled, so did the old Soviet Union seem permanent, and so, for that matter, did the rule of the Romanov dynasty before the 1917 revolution. Then, as now, appeals to patriotism and loyalty can go only so far when the economy is visibly collapsing, civic life is ruined by endemic corruption, and political murder and violence actually undermine the authority of a failing regime. If so, then the attack on Navalny could prove to be one of the sparks that sets alight a democratic revolution. Putin knows it, too.