Recent events have not painted a pretty picture of Russian democracy. Rights abuses have become prevalent to the point of cliché, and high profile abuses such as the conviction of feminist punk band Pussy Riot for an anti-Putin demonstration in a church and the bigoted legislation outlawing “homosexual propaganda” have become international affairs. At the same time, elections have been an increasing point of contention in public life, with Putin’s success in attaining a third term as president following suspect Duma elections in 2011. The current climax of this authoritarian trend is the arrest, conviction, and surprising temporary release of Alexei Navalny, a key voice of resistance to the regime, on charges of fraud and embezzlement.
It is not hard to see why Navalny stands out as the voice of liberal opposition in Russia, and increasingly as the most prominent source of protest against Vladimir Putin’s increasingly oppressive and repressive regime. Navalny is young, liberal, and tech savvy. He ascended to his current position through blogging and whistleblowing, particularly by exposing pervasive corruption to the tune of $4 billion siphoned off by company executives in Transneft, a state-owned pipeline company. Having also spent time at Yale as a World Fellow, Navalny represents the opposite side of the Kremlin’s political thinking. He’s modern, Western, and all about transparency.
Navalny has been unabashed in his criticism of the present regime, going so far as to call the dominant party, United Russia, the “party of thieves and crooks” and leading protests amounting to as many as 50,000 strong. In short, he leads towards a new kind of Russia, and one that could be a key ally instead of a complicated frenemy.
In contrast to Navalny, Putin is more than two decades older, conservative, and an ex-KGB hard man who spent 17 years with the notorious security agency before moving into state government following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Unlike Navalny, who rose to relevance from outside the system, Putin took an altogether more opaque path. This is to say that he ascended from the inside, as a result not of the public eye but the private power broker. He served as a fixer for St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak before being fast-tracked to the top through a directorship at the Federal Security Service, the KGB’s spiritual successor, after which he was handpicked as Boris Yeltsin’s Presidential successor. Since then he has held a more or less unflinching grasp on power, circumventing the constitutional consecutive terms limit by setting up a so-called “tandemocracy” in which Dmitry Medvedev served one presidential term, allowing Putin to utilize a loophole in the constitution which permits him to run again. He has hinted at possibly another twelve years of Putin on the horizon, and he seems to fancy himself a contemporary Czar.
Consequently it was unsurprising, given the endemic nature of Russia’s corruption, when the charges of fraud and embezzlement so associated with political hack jobs as to practically be formulaic were announced against Navalny. At this point, conviction and imprisonment seemed like the inevitable result, and even the man himself described his chances of acquittal as impossible. This premonition proved sadly prophetic with the handing down of Navalny’s sentence. After a yearlong legal process following his being charged with conspiracy to steal timber and defrauding a political party through his advertising company, he was found guilty.
Therefore, the significance of the symbolism behind Navalny’s release cannot be underestimated. While he seemed to be going the way of most political dissidents – being silenced through corrupt courts or more lethal means – in countries that teeter on the brink of totalitarianism, Navalny’s subsequent release, whether a result of international or domestic pressure, elevates Navalny to a position of invincibility, for the time being. He has defied the regime and effectively gotten away with it. Ongoing legal wrangles will only increase Navalny’s profile and therefore heighten his relevance, at home and abroad.
It is fair and quite reasonable to suggest that the sudden reversal of the court, clearly driven by Putin administration forces, demonstrates more than ever the power and reach of that government, as well as a discouraging breakdown of the separation of powers. If we accept this assumption, however, it shifts more attention and emphasis from the judicial system and quirks of Russian law to the role of the Putin administration in relenting on the conviction. While it is plausible that there is a tactical reason for this – for example, to maintain some semblance of political adversarialism – it doesn’t make sense that the administration would go through with the whole prosecution and conviction process if there were a diabolical grander plan at work. This implies that the change in policy stemmed from extenuating circumstances: that is, pressure, both within Russia and without. Furthermore, while the lack of judicial freedom does not currently bode well for the state of civil rights in Russia, the presence of people like Navalny – activists and dissidents – in the public eye can only have good consequences for the future of Russian civil rights.
If, however, his conviction is upheld by higher courts and Navalny is indeed sent away to prison camp, it will serve as an evocative sign of Putin’s hardening resistance to oppositional elements, and sound the alarm to similarly inclined figures in Russia’s civil society. Such an outcome, combined with other recent events, would be a heavy blow to the current prospects of Russia’s already trembling democracy. It would also be proof positive that Russia is a wonderful place for whistleblowers and rights activists, so long as they aren’t Russian (Ed Snowden, take a bow).
In the meantime, Navalny’s release represents a respite from the recent slide towards authoritarianism a Russian dream of the past. However temporary this is, it should be taken as cause for guarded optimism. The dissident-in-chief’s support is overwhelmingly a youthful one, an aspirational middle class composed of young professionals with fading memories of Soviet Russia, and as such is only bound to grow, however slowly. Navalny’s reputation, and subsequently his power as a leader of the opposition, will be harder to tar with the brush of corruption than Khodorkovsky or Berezovsky, those other eminent anti-Putin figures.
As for Putin himself, it is a past famous Russian with the most to say. Anton Chekhov, the legendary 19th century playwright wrote that, “If you hang a pistol on the wall in the first act, it must be fired by the third”. This is a lesson in drama that Vladimir Putin might have kept in mind when gambling on the patience of a Russian public and international audience vocally tired of corruption and repression in his failure to follow through on Navalny’s case. If the crack in the facade opened by Navalny’s release turns into a canyon, Putin may very well reflect on Chekhov’s Gun: a rule as much for aspiring despots as aspiring dramatists.