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."
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