Pictured above: Aleksei Navalny, Putin criticizer. Image courtesy of WikiMedia Commons.
By Amelia Luo ’23
Global Editor & Photographer
Tens of thousands of Russians have rallied to demand the release of jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny.
Protests initially broke out on Jan. 23 from civilians voicing widespread disappointment with the current government, which Russian President Vladimir Putin has presided over for almost two decades. The rallies continued to grow throughout the following week and spread across the nation despite a large police presence and state threats of jailing, according to The New York Times.
Navalny is a 44-year-old Putin criticizer who became widely known as a blogger in 2008. Early in his career, he wrote about corruption at state-owned companies. In 2013, Navalny ran for the mayorship of Moscow, which, if won, would normally place the mayor into the Russian government’s inner circle with the promising hope of promotion within the Kremlin. Though Navalny did not win the mayoral election, he finished second with 27 percent of the vote behind Sergei Sobyanin, a Putin ally. In the same year, Navalny started to post videos on his YouTube channel, which gave him a stronger voice and a greater influence on the Russian people. Today, his channel has about 6.25 million subscribers.
As a blogger and active anti-corruption campaigner, Navalny has millions of Russian followers on social media. Using his platform, Navalny has accused Putin of “sucking the blood out of Russia”' through a “feudal state” by concentrating powers. Further attacking Putin, Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation published a video on YouTube — that has gone viral in Russia — on Jan 19, which states that Putin is the owner of a vast palace on the Black Sea. The video has been watched over 100 million times. Putin has denied this allegation.
Navalny’s political view is different from most liberal Putin critics, who mainly voice concerns regarding open elections. He has called for a restriction on Russia’s immigration policies, which would keep Muslims out from the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College Constantine Pleshakov said, “Navalny himself is a controversial figure: No doubt he is ready to die for the cause, but no one really knows what his ‘cause’ is, apart from ‘get rid of Putin.’ Frankly, if one looks at Navalny’s earlier political involvement, one could call him a hardcore nationalist, perhaps even a white supremacist.”
On Aug. 20, 2020, Navalny collapsed into a coma during a flight to Moscow. Local medical workers claimed that they found “no signs of severe poisoning.” Two days later, in a German hospital, Navalny was diagnosed with severe poisoning. He spent months there recovering.
The poison belonged to the Novichok group but was a previously unknown type. Both Navalny and Bellingcat, an independent collective of investigators and journalists, claimed that he was poisoned by nerve agents from Russia’s Federal Security Service, which was ordered to assassinate him under Putin’s order. This accusation was met with denial from the Kremlin.
On Jan. 17, 2021, Navalny was jailed upon returning to Moscow from Germany. According to Russian authorities, Navalny should have regularly reported to the Russian police since he was under a suspended sentence for embezzlement. However, Navalny’s lawyers responded, suggesting that the Russian authorities had allowed him to travel to Berlin for treatment.
Navalny was subsequently sentenced to jail for over two years on Feb. 2. The ruling court was in favor of the accusation that Navalny had violated his parole on a three-and-a-half-year suspended prison sentence he received in 2014. Six days after this arrest, protesters took to the streets.
In Putin’s home city of St. Petersburg, a crowd gathered in a central square and chanted “Down with the Tsar,” according to the BBC. Rallies have also spread to eastern Russia. In Novosibirsk, a Siberian city, at least 2,000 people marched through the streets in support of Navalny’s liberation.
Along with demonstrators, sympathizers and Navalny’s close associates, Navalny’s brother and Sergei Smirnov, the chief editor of a Russian human rights website, were also arrested.
Mount Holyoke Professor of Russian Studies Stephen Jones said, “Putin does not know what to do with Navalny. He represents a danger — protests could escalate, demonstrators could get killed, international ramifications for Putin could intensify [further sanctions and isolation]. We have seen this scenario before of demonstrations growing from [a] small to a mass scale.”
Jones continued, “Having said that, Navalny’s support is limited largely to youth and intellectuals — most Russians do not consider him relevant. He is much bigger in the West than he is at home. And post-Soviet regimes have also learned how to deal with these challenges — see, for example, Belarus.”
The police force has attempted to control the growing protests, detaining more than 3,000 people from at least 109 cities across the country, including 1,360 in Moscow and 523 in St. Petersburg, according to OVD-Info, an activist monitoring group. Protesters have also attempted to reach the Matrosskaya Tishina prison, where Navalny is being held.
Putin has said that these protests are illegal while authorities warn that they could lead to another wave of COVID-19. In Moscow, public transportation has been closed, and the city center was blocked. There have been reports that police have been struggling to find space in jail for detained protesters.
On Jan. 31, 2021, BBC News reported that protesters in Moscow began to “play cat-and-mouse” with police, getting close to the police force before retreating to safety. Police squads pulled some protesters through the line of riot shields and put them on buses that could transfer them to detention centers.
Pleshakov commented on the potential impact of this dissent. “We just don’t know whether the protests will have a lasting impact. What is important about these protests [is that] they are happening not just in Moscow and St. [Petersburg] — which was the traditional pattern — but in all major Russian cities. That is a bad sign for the regime,” Pleshakov said. “Putin seems to be still quite popular among the majority of Russians — this possibly means that though the protests are very visible and widespread, they are not necessarily supported outside big cities.”
The EU has also remained active throughout this conflict between the Russian state and Navalny. In October 2020, after Navalny’s poisoning, the EU imposed sanctions on six senior Russian officials and a chemical research center. According to Jones, these sanctions “have had an impact on the Russian economy, but not decisively — oil prices have had a much more negative impact. And Western governments, like Merkel’s in Germany, continue to push for trade with Russia.” Jones continued, “Sanctions also may increase support for Putin. If the West really wanted to hurt Russia, they could — by restricting its international banking transactions on a far deeper scale than it is now. Russia is a malign state, [and] the question is how far the Western states are prepared to go to [damage] its economy.”
In return to growing sympathizers in the EU, on Feb. 5, 2021, Russia expelled three diplomats from Germany, Sweden and Poland for joining the Navalny protests in Russia. Both Germany and Poland have summoned their Russian ambassadors to express their concerns. This action could trigger a tit-for-tat and lead to more diplomats being sent home, according to BBC News.