IF you set out to design a political nemesis who would give Vladimir Putin the shivers, you might well come up with Aleksei Navalny. That is why the trial of the popular Russian activist on Wednesday is the most important political trial in Russia in decades.
Navalny, a lawyer, anticorruption crusader and blogger, has been likened to every political insurgent from Julian Assange to Nelson Mandela. As a potential political leader he long ago surpassed Assange and hasn’t quite caught up to Mandela, but he keeps getting better. He is young (36), thoughtful, politically astute, crowd-pleasing and apparently unafraid. He has command of the Internet and the skills of an investigative reporter. (He buys stock in state-owned oil companies and banks and uses his status as a minority shareholder to air their dirty laundry on his LiveJournal blog.)
He is an ethnic Russian who has incorporated a mild dose of nationalist sloganeering into his patter. This has dismayed some of his liberal friends, but it is shrewd. It inoculates him somewhat against Putin’s favorite line of attack, that critics are Western stooges, and, more important, helps broaden his appeal beyond the young, social-media-savvy cubicle workers who are his base.
His platform combines free-market libertarianism, which appeals to Russia’s growing bourgeoisie, and a relentless campaign against corruption, which resonates widely in a nation where it seems every transaction entails a bribe. (Russia ranks a humiliating 133rd on the Transparency International index of countries where businesses can invest with confidence.) The Moscow Times in 2011 called Navalny “the only electable” opposition figure. That might be true, although the best rabble-rousers don’t always make the best presidents — a lesson Russia should have learned from Boris Yeltsin.
This is hardly the first time the Putin regime has used law enforcement and the criminal courts (acquittal rate: 0.4 percent) to cull antagonists. The hounding of the outspoken tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was an appalling and largely successful effort to warn Russia’s wealthiest not to kid themselves that money entitled them to free speech. The sham trial of Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian lawyer who dared take on tax fraud in high places and died in jail from mistreatment, sent a message not to meddle with the thievery of Putin’s cronies. And the trial of the sacrilegious punk trio Pussy Riot served notice that the president does not see the joke, not when it’s on him. None of these victims of Kremlin justice, though, could mobilize a serious political following. Navalny might, especially if he ever gets off a TV black list.
The main charge against Navalny is that, as an adviser to the regional government in Kirov, he embezzled money from a state-run timber company. A review of the case by a Chicago law firm for a client sympathetic to Navalny’s plight concluded that the charges were laughably bogus, and the state has offered nothing to rebut that. In fact, local authorities conducted what seems to have been a thorough investigation and concluded no crime was committed. But the federal Investigative Committee, a powerful agency that serves Putin, stepped in and — without adding any new evidence — charged Navalny with stealing timber worth more than $500,000.
It’s probably no coincidence that one of the targets of Navalny’s recent muckraking was the head of the very same Investigative Committee, Aleksandr Bastrykin. Navalny posted documents showing that Bastrykin secretly possessed a residence permit and real estate in the Czech Republic, raising questions about his faith in Russia’s future and, since the Czech Republic is a member of the NATO alliance, his vulnerability to blackmail.
The state’s obvious hope is that by convicting Navalny on charges of greed, it will diminish his credibility as a corruption-fighter and, not incidentally, head off his political ambitions. (Conviction of a serious crime is a disqualification for public office.)
I suspect the Russian public knows exactly what is going on. That, in fact, is the point. The trial is a show, and the moral of this drama is, if you stick your head up too high, you could lose it. In an interview in Izvestia that reads like a relic of Soviet-era cynicism, Vladimir Markin, the oleaginous spokesman for the Investigative Committee, left no doubt about Navalny’s real crime. Why, the paper asked, was the case propelled to the front of the court docket? The spokesman replied: “If a person tries with all his might to draw attention to himself, even, you might say, tries to taunt the authorities — says, ‘Look at me, you’re all covered in dirt and I’m so clean’ — well, then the interest in his past grows, and the process of exposing him naturally speeds up.”
Markin suggested that Navalny, who spent a semester at a Yale program for budding foreign leaders, is a kind of Ivy-League Manchurian candidate, set in motion by American mentors to provoke a conflict with the Kremlin that would end in his arrest and demonstrate that Russia persecutes truth-tellers.
The interviewer asked why, rather than threaten Navalny with jail, the state did not enlist his anticorruption expertise to help clean up the country. “No one is hindering his public activities,” Markin smirked. “Even in prison many convicts write letters and statements, struggle against the shortcomings of the system.”
Friends of Navalny — and, you would think, common sense — say this case is a loser for Putin. He will further discredit a politicized justice system. He risks making Navalny a martyr. He jeopardizes Russia’s respectful treatment at all those meetings of the G-8, the G-20 and the P5-plus-1, not to mention the Winter Olympics in Sochi next year. And at a time when Russia badly needs foreign capital, using economic laws for political repression spooks investors. “Putin doesn’t want Russia to become a pariah,” a close friend of Navalny told me, hopefully. “He doesn’t want to be treated like the president of Belarus.”
Let’s hope this is all true, but Putin — especially in the last few years of his seemingly endless rule — has not been a cleareyed calculator of Russian’s best interest, or a man in close touch with what the world thinks of him. He has become ever more weirdly narcissistic, a stuntman posing shirtless on horseback, hugging a tranquilized polar bear, piloting a motorized glider to lead a flock of migrating Siberian cranes. And he has become more petty and vindictive, signing a law ending the adoption of Russian orphans by Americans and obliging nonprofits to register as “foreign agents.” In the campaign to make an example of Navalny, the activist’s friends and supporters have been followed, searched, harassed and threatened. Authorities have filed charges against Navalny’s brother and leaked private e-mails that suggested tensions in Navalny’s marriage.
Navalny knows, as Putin does, that sometimes fear works. The blogger’s middle-class followers, unlike the threadbare Soviet throngs who backed Yeltsin against the Communists or the miserable armies of the Arab Spring, actually have something to lose.
“The majority of the elite or business elite,” Navalny told The Times’s Ellen Barry recently, “they are people with liberal views, but they are cowardly, they are simply afraid of everything, they are trembling all the time, so they will be quiet.”
“Man is weak,” he said. “I am not blaming anyone, but man is weak.”
For the United States, Navalny’s case calls for calibrated diplomacy. President Obama and Putin have a bilateral summit scheduled in September, and the administration is busily trying to salvage a relationship on the rocks. It would be wrong to let the case impede cooperation in combating terrorism (as the Boston-Chechnya connection reminds us) or the downsizing of nuclear arsenals or possible Russian cooperation in resolving the crises of Syria and Iran, not that much cooperation has been forthcoming so far. But it would be wrong, too, to pretend Navalny’s case didn’t matter.
I hope Obama pays attention to the Navalny show trial. He will learn something about the man across the table, and about the man who, you never know, might someday take his place.
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The Navalny affair
Reproduzido da The Economist [20/4/13]
Alexei Navalny’s conviction looks likely, but its effects are uncertain
KIROV, a town 900km (560 miles) east of Moscow, is not known for its attractions. It was the place of exile for a 19th-century revolutionary, Alexander Herzen. On April 17th an army of journalists descended on Kirov for the biggest political show trial of the season. In the starring role was Alexei Navalny, a popular anti-corruption blogger and opposition figure who has an almost cult-like following among Russia’s internet-using middle class.
In the past three years he has united different camps, forcing the Kremlin to respond to his anti-corruption campaigns and his rising popularity. The case against Mr Navalny is part of the response. He is accused of embezzling $500,000 from a state timber company during his time as an adviser to the governor of Kirov.
The case began two years ago but local prosecutors dismissed it. Then Alexander Bastrykin, Russia’s chief federal investigator, ordered it reopened. (Mr Navalny had ridiculed him as a “foreign agent” and publicised threats made by Mr Bastrykin to a Russian journalist.) That the company from which the timber was stolen was paid and that Mr Navalny had no proven role in the transaction seem to be details. “If a person tries to attract attention or teases the authorities—‘look at me, I am so good compared to everyone else’—well then interest in the process of exposing him naturally speeds up,” a spokesman for Mr Bastrykin told a Russian newspaper.
The case has been adjourned for a week, but Mr Navalny has few doubts that he will be convicted. The question is whether he gets a sentence of up to ten years, or a suspended one that could become real if he is politically active. Since Mr Navalny told an internet television channel that he wants to be president and would do anything in his power to have Mr Putin and his cronies jailed, the gloves have come off.
The Kremlin takes Mr Navalny more seriously than any other opposition figure except Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Mr Navalny is a new type of politician, who does not come from within the system or have Soviet baggage. He has circumvented the Kremlin television monopoly by using social networks. He is smooth, has no clear ideology and few convictions; but he does have political intuition. He has manoeuvred between nationalists and liberals, before lighting on the one issue that galvanises both: corruption.
Mr Navalny’s main appeal is not to the Russian intelligentsia but to the urban, mobile middle class, small-time entrepreneurs and managers in private firms who flourished in the 1990s. Many voted for Vladimir Putin in 2000 but have become disenchanted and angry as state bureaucrats have encroached on their territory.
Mr Navalny sees politics as a full-time profession. As a minority shareholder in several Russian state firms, he sued them for more information, publicised details of odious state tenders and corrupt deals, and exposed many linked to Mr Putin. He has done more damage to the ruling United Russia party than anybody else. His branding of United Russia as “the party of crooks and thieves” has spread virally. And his call for people to vote for any other party in 2011 was so effective that, when United Russia tried to boost its poor results through ballot-rigging, people came out with him in protest.
Over the past two years Mr Navalny’s name-recognition has grown from 6% to 37%, even though the share of people ready to vote for him has fallen. Yet critics say he has failed to convert this into a political structure or campaign. “He held the pause for too long,” says Gleb Pavlovsky, a former Kremlin adviser. This has given the Kremlin breathing space in which to intimidate Mr Navalny’s donors and arrest some protesters, dampening the mood for action.
Jailing Mr Navalny might play to his advantage, further eroding the Kremlin’s legitimacy. Boris Akunin, a writer and opposition figure, says, “if Navalny gets imprisoned, Russia will get onto a track that will take it to the last station: Revolution Square.” His conviction may be predictable, but its consequences are not.
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