The strangest thing about Alexey Navalny is that he is walking around Moscow, still. Here is what has happened to the other men who headlined the Russian protests in 2011 and 2012: Boris Nemtsov, the liberal, is dead, shot in view of the Kremlin in February of last year; Sergei Udaltsov, the radical leftist, is in jail, serving a four-and-a-half-year sentence for allegedly plotting to overthrow the Russian government; Garry Kasparov, the chess champion who became a politician, is in exile, as are many others. Meanwhile, Navalny is living in Moscow and openly running several political projects, the largest of which, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, has just released its biggest and most revealing investigation yet.
To be sure, the Russian state has tried to stop Navalny from walking around, only to move him ever closer to being, in the deepest sense of the word, a free man. Two and a half years ago, Navalny faced trial on bizarre embezzlement charges: he was accused of having used his position as an unpaid consultant to the liberal governor of the Kirov Region to arrange to steal huge quantities of timber from the region’s state-run forestry company, causing half a million dollars in losses. If this sounds confusing, that is because the case itself was: like the former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was once convicted of stealing crude oil from his own company, Navalny was accused of doing something that was both impossible and absurd. The state failed even to show that money ever went missing, let alone that Navalny was guilty. He was convicted in July, 2013, and sentenced to five years in prison. Within a couple of hours of the sentencing, as many as ten thousand people gathered in protest in the center of Moscow. For hours, they refused to leave. The protest was unsanctioned, which meant that every one of the participants was risking arrest followed by a backbreaking fine or a jail sentence. Not since 1991 has Russia seen so many people willing to take such a risk: unsanctioned protests usually draw a couple of hundred people at most. The following morning, Navalny was released.
The maneuver was legally impossible: Navalny's lawyers had not yet filed an appeal. Following no known procedure, it was the prosecutor who had requested the change in Navalny’s sentence. This suggests that Moscow brass must have made the prosecutor and then the court change their minds. After his release, Navalny took the overnight train to Moscow, where he was greeted by hundreds of supporters at the railroad station.
Since Navalny's prison sentence was aborted, he has continued to occupy a unique space in Russian society: he is a man so strong, or so dangerous, or so free—or all of those things—that the usual Kremlin tools cannot work against him. The regime has invented a series of new, custom-made anti-Navalny measures, ranging from the ridiculous to the sinister. None of them have so far succeeded in silencing Navalny.
His Anti-Corruption Foundation rents space on the top floor of a large mixed-use complex in not-quite-central Moscow. The ground floor houses dozens of cafés and shops; four more stories contain corridors lined with travel agencies, small production companies, and assorted startups. Navalny occupies a corner office with two glass walls that provide spectacular views of apartment blocks representing every decade of Soviet architecture. The other two walls have a blackboard and a whiteboard on them. The whiteboard has a list of officials that the foundation is investigating; the blackboard, a list of projects under way or in the planning stages.
In early December, Navalny's group released its latest investigation, as both an article and a forty-three-minute film. The story begins with the opening of a super-luxury hotel in Greece, attended by a large number of extremely wealthy Russians, and follows the ownership trail. In the end it appears to show that the hotel, along with billions of dollars' worth of other assets in Switzerland, Russia, and other countries, is owned by the son of Yuri Chaika, the Russian prosecutor general, often in collaboration with the prosecutor's other family members, his colleagues, and their family members, and that all of these people have long been in business with one of Russia's most notorious and most violent organized-crime families.
The investigation, based entirely on information mined from open sources, went live on December 1st. A deafening silence followed as the film was watched on YouTube by more than a million people in two days. (During the following month, the number of views exceeded four million.) On December 3rd, Vladimir Putin gave his annual address to parliament. When he talked about rooting out corruption, the state channels' cameras lingered on Chaika’s face, showing that even the professional propagandists could not get Navalny's revelations out of their heads. It took more than a week for the people mentioned in the film to start reacting. One said she was filing a defamation suit against Navalny, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, and others, including Google. Navalny's staff and allies got a full day's worth of social-network jokes out of the claim. Then, on December 14th, the prosecutor general finally made a statement on the investigation. He said that the film was a plot against him and Russia itself, backed by an American businessman.
“What an answer from Chaika!” Navalny tweeted. “I'm very pleased. The dude has simply admitted everything.”
The following day, Navalny said a car carrying several members of his team was stopped on the outskirts of Moscow. The traffic cops, he said, asked what they were doing there. Schooled by Navalny, they were only too happy to answer the question: they had been taking pictures of a house that they believe belongs to one of Chaika's associates. Then, as has been Navalny's way and has become his team's habit, they suggested that the police book them—and, when the police admitted that they had no basis for booking, drove off. Then Navalny posted another long explication of the latest investigation online, framing it as a written response to the traffic police.
Navalny, who is thirty-nine, gained clout about five years ago. As a young lawyer, he had been active on the fringes of a liberal political party, back in the early aughts, when Russia had real political parties. Except for a couple of controversies—when his party colleagues condemned his nationalist views and when he briefly became an advocate for the right to bear arms—Navalny wasn’t involved in anything of resonance. That changed when he became a lone crusader. In 2008, he bought about ten thousand dollars' worth of stock, tiny shares in some of Russia's largest companies, and then began fighting for access to information about the companies to which the law entitled all shareholders. Then he published, on his blog, such an incisive critique of Sheremetyevo, Russia's largest airport, that he was engaged as a consultant on reforming it, and even served on the board of the Russian airline Aeroflot for a year. In 2010, the newspaper Kommersant, then the country's leading independent daily, conducted a poll on a hypothetical Moscow mayoral election; Navalny won handily, with forty-five per cent. Around the same time, he began the work that has made him the Kremlin's most formidable foe: studying publicly available information in order to document large-scale corruption. What began as one man's blog has now grown into a significant crowd-funded operation, with about thirty staff members and thousands of volunteer contributors. This work is also what has motivated both the persecution of Navalny and the protests that appear to have protected him.
It was probably the fear of further protests that compelled the authorities to allow Navalny to take part in the Moscow mayoral election in 2013, right after he was not sent to prison. Russia does not have a lot of elections: both houses of parliament are effectively appointed, as are most regional governors. Some mayoral offices and some city legislatures sometimes hold elections of sorts. The mayoral election in Moscow in 2013 was its first in a decade. Navalny had little access to media, and the sitting mayor, a Putin appointee, did not deign to debate him, but in the September vote he came in second in a field of six candidates, with twenty-seven per cent. Two months later, a Moscow court seized Navalny's assets in connection with a new case, in which Navalny and his brother, Oleg, were accused of defrauding several clients of a shipping company that Alexey Navalny had helped his brother start back in 2008. Alexey was placed under house arrest.
House arrest had shown itself to be an effective tool for silencing opposition activists. Udaltsov, the radical leftist, and several lower-profile anti-Putin activists had been under house arrest for months or years. The conditions of Russian house arrest usually dictate that the person cannot have any contact with the outside world; that means no visitors, no phone, and no Internet. In other words, it means silence. It also often means extreme hardship, because the arrested person cannot make a living. Still, Russians have not been generally known to protest anyone's placement under house arrest, because it is indisputably more humane than Russian prison. House arrest was not as effective at silencing Navalny as it had been in the case of other activists: his anti-corruption network continued to work, conducting open-source investigations, and someone continued to update Navalny's blog.
Navalny was under house arrest for a year while the court heard the shipping-company fraud case. None of the ostensible victims testified that they considered themselves to have been defrauded. Representatives of the shipping company's largest client, Yves Rocher, even testified that they had profited from doing business with the shipping company. (The prosecution was claiming that Yves Rocher lost twenty-six million rubles, then worth about a million dollars.) Still, the court found both brothers guilty.
The sentence was scheduled to be read in January, 2015, but was moved up hastily to December 30, 2014—a day when Moscow was nearly empty, on the eve of the New Year holidays, making protest and even media coverage extremely unlikely. The court sentenced Oleg Navalny to three and a half years in prison and Alexey Navalny to a suspended sentence of the same duration, as well as a continuation of his house arrest. The sentence was designed to silence Alexey more effectively, by taking his brother hostage, but also to continue to avoid protest. “Psychologically, they calculated well,” Alexey told me a year later. “I'd always thought I'd be the one jailed. And that there was also the probability that we would both go to prison. It had never occurred to me that Oleg would be the only one to go to jail. They did succeed in upsetting my inner equilibrium.”
Hostage-taking is a long-running Soviet tradition. Stalin's prisoners signed confessions when interrogators threatened harm to their families. One of Stalin's less-trusted allies, the foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, was forced to divorce his wife, then saw her arrested and deported to Kazakhstan. The great Russian sociologist Yuri Levada believed that the institution of what he called “collective hostage-taking” was a key element of the Soviet system. Any misdeed—making a careless remark, say, or signing a letter in support of a dissident—would result in repercussions not only for the transgressor but for his family, friends, and co-workers. This not only rendered many people passive and afraid but also turned most citizens into enforcers: they pressured their friends, relatives, and colleagues into conformity, for fear of being punished for others’ misdeeds.
Alexey Navalny, in other words, was being blackmailed. He also found himself, once again, in a legally impossible situation. Russian law does not contain the possibility of house arrest as a penalty: one can be held under house arrest pending trial, but one cannot be sentenced to house arrest. All the other activists who have been silenced by house arrest have been or are still awaiting trial, which usually ends up sending them to prison without much public notice, because they have not been heard from in a while. But Navalny, as a lawyer, knew that his sentence was illegal. So three hours after being driven home by prison-authority officers on the day of his sentencing a year ago, Navalny left his apartment to attend a protest against his own, and his brother's, sentencing. He was detained en route and driven home, where five policemen stood guard by his door. Navalny considered his options, and theirs, for a few days. On one hand, the officers had no conceivable legal right to detain him or force him to stay in the apartment. On the other, the worst that could happen was that they would take him to jail—an eventuality to which he had reconciled himself in the months leading up to the sentencing. He decided to act as if the rule of law existed in his country. He took a pair of wire cutters and removed the tracking bracelet from his ankle. Then he blogged about it.
Navalny started leaving the house. Prison-authority officers followed him to the grocery store and the office. They pleaded with him to go home. He went about his business. To make everyone more comfortable, he gave the officers a desk in a large open-plan room in his organization's office, and for a few weeks they sat there during the workday. Precisely one month after the sentencing, he told me, the officers appeared to give up. His theory is that they were simply unable to get any intelligible orders from on high. “It's obvious that Putin personally makes decisions about my fate,” he said. “As he does with many things—Putin personally makes a lot of the decisions in the country.” Putin is the hands-on, possibly sole manager of the wars in Syria and Ukraine, all the international sanctions and conflicts, all the planes going down and taking off. “So the number of people standing in line to get a decision from Putin is so large that the person in that line holding a folder with the name Navalny on it has to wait a very long time.”
In the year since he cut the surveillance bracelet off his ankle, Navalny has perfected the art of living as if Russia were a normal country. His team has followed suit, and its interaction with the traffic police earlier in December was a sterling example: his supporters treated the police as if they were cops following actual laws, and answered their question as if it were posed earnestly. The approach has reënergized Navalny’s work by supplying it with a sort of spiritual core: the investigations are conducted and presented as if the corruption they uncover were not hopelessly self-evident. Once these optics of naïve normalcy are applied to Russia, the possibilities seem boundless—which is why the list of projects on the blackboard in Navalny's office is very, very long.
Navalny asked me not to write about several of the projects, which he is keeping under wraps for the moment. But here is one that is not a secret. “Moscow real estate,” the line on the blackboard says.
“Look,” Navalny said, making a sweeping gesture toward the window. “See those decommissioned research institutes?” These were largely dilapidated steel-and-concrete towers from the seventies that were interspersed with the apartment blocks. Most were, technically, municipal property. “All of the space in them is rented out,” he continued. “The names of the renters and their rental contracts are a matter of public record. Let's compare the prices they are paying, and we will see differentials of a factor of a hundred. Then we trace the connections that allow some people to be paying seven dollars per square metre per year while the office next door is being rented for seven hundred a square metre.”
“Censorship,” another line on the blackboard says. “Censorship is illegal,” Navalny explained. “There is a law against it. Yet even journalists working for state television channels say that there are so-called blacklists that they have to consult.” These are lists of people who cannot appear on state television; many anti-Putin activists and journalists are on them. “So we want to get some of the better-known journalists to file lawsuits challenging this practice, because it's a crime. We are also going to demand that state television channels cover our Chaika investigation, because it says in the law that topics of public interest and public resonance have to be covered. If two million have watched the film on YouTube in the first three days, this is clearly a topic of public interest. So we are going to go to court.” They will act, in other words, as if the law meant something and the courts could do something about it.
There was a series of business-card-size pieces of paper stuck to the bottom right-hand corner of the whiteboard. They were copies of the identification card Oleg Navalny has to wear pinned to his prison robe; they contain his picture, his name, and the number of his camp unit. “I call this series ‘The Evolution of an Inmate,’ ” Alexey said. “Look how he has changed in a year.” Oleg, who is thirty-two, has lost weight but, it seems from the head shot, has gained some girth—he no longer looks like a boy, as he did in court. He has grown a mustache. He has also racked up an astounding seventeen violations, charges that have allowed the prison authorities to place him in solitary confinement and deprive him of the right to make phone calls or receive food parcels from the outside—a supplement that is generally considered essential to an inmate's survival. The latest news was that the colony had created a sort of super-solitary regime for Oleg by vacating the cells to either side of his, to remove any possibility of communication. The hostage, in other words, was being tortured.
Alexey Navalny's response is to reject the hostage paradigm altogether. “What am I going to do, stop my activities?” he asked when I visited him. “That's impossible.” He chooses to act as if everyone, including Oleg, had free will. “When Oleg was sentenced, he told me not to even think about stopping what I'm doing.” Nor would it be practical to try to stop: the foundation's investigations involve dozens of full-time and hundreds or even thousands of volunteer part-time researchers. Navalny's constant online presence is also a group effort. “ ‘Navalny’ has long since become a collective force,” he said. His approach seems to have stripped the news of what is being done to his brother of much of its emotional power. “I get it,” he said. “These are messages to me.”
The authorities' reaction has been clear, if not imaginative: they are taking more hostages. Every single person on the foundation's staff has been called in for interrogation. At least two of the organization's most prominent activists are living in exile because criminal charges are pending against them in Russia. A third, Navalny's mayoral-campaign manager, Leonid Volkov, spent a year and a half after the Moscow election living in Luxembourg, where he was an executive at a tech firm, and then decided to return to rejoin the fight. Now he is facing charges that carry a maximum penalty of six years behind bars: he is accused of trying to wrest a microphone out of a tabloid reporter's hands, thereby committing an act of “obstruction of the work of a journalist,” which is a crime in Russia, albeit one that is rarely, if ever, prosecuted.
I talked to Volkov the day after he returned from an interrogation in Novosibirsk, where the crime was ostensibly committed and where he will eventually stand trial. “The point of this case is not to make me Hostage No. 2,” he said. “The point is to force me to leave the country again. They don't like the fact that I came back.” Volkov was probably right: he has not been jailed pending trial, which is unusual on a charge like his, and he has even been allowed to keep his passport, which is nearly unheard of—it is a veritable invitation to leave the country. “I've tried that, and I wasn't happy,” Volkov said. He also noted that Russian courts almost never fail to convict, so a guilty verdict is virtually assured. “But I am an optimist, and I believe in what we are doing.”
Other than hostages, the Kremlin cannot take much away from Navalny. He lives in a three-room Soviet-era apartment with his wife, Yulia, and their two children. His brief tenure on the Aeroflot board, a few years back, was the only time in his life when he made a significant amount of money. The total was four and a half million rubles (about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars at the time, and less than half that amount now), and it was deposited in a bank account that has long since been frozen as part of the shipping-company case. Now courts have begun slapping Navalny with fines: over four million rubles in the shipping case, which he managed to pay off with great difficulty, and another sixteen million in the forestry case, soon to come due. Barring an extraordinary fund-raising effort, Navalny will be unable to pay the latest fine, and this means that court marshals will come to his apartment looking for non-essential items. “I guess they'll arrest the video-game console and I won't be able to finish playing a game,” Navalny theorized. Other options include chairs in excess of the number of people in the family and winter clothes beyond a single coat and hat. When that is done, Navalny will be very close indeed to having nothing left to lose.