Well past midnight on Wednesday, Dec. 21, a few dozen Russian activists gathered outside a jail in the south of Moscow to await the release of Alexei Navalny, the blogger at the forefront of Russia's opposition movement. A snowstorm had begun that night, so only his hardcore supporters showed up at the jailhouse gate, passing around thermoses of tea and flasks of whiskey to keep warm. It was an odd mix of people, about as eclectic as Navalny's own political views, and ranged from tree-hugging liberals to hate-spouting nationalists and everything in between. Seen from a distance, they would have looked like a crew of hipsters who were, for some reason, really excited to be caught in a blizzard. But insofar as the ongoing wave of protests against the government can be said to have a vanguard, this was it. And they were waiting for the only man who has so far been able to unite them.
Navalny, 35, a lawyer by training, had been arrested during the demonstrations in Moscow on Dec. 5, when a crowd of about 7,000 people came out to protest the parliamentary elections held the previous day. The ruling United Russia party, led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, 59, had won a majority in parliament during the vote, but claims of fraud -- a regular trope during Russian elections -- finally seemed to hit a nerve among the urban middle-class. For the first time since Putin rose to power 12 years ago, they came out by the thousands to protest in the streets, chanting Navalny's viral nickname for United Russia, "the party of crooks and thieves." From the stage, Navalny told them them that, "After these elections, the Kremlin crooks have no right to say they are in power. They are nobody!" Riot police grabbed him afterward, when he tried to lead a column of protesters in the direction of the Kremlin. He was sentenced to 15 days for disobeying orders to desist. (See "Russia's Crisis: This Winter the Bears Will Not Hibernate.")
Two days later, an official from the youth wing of United Russia called me to ask about Navalny. He seemed surprised to hear about his popularity. "I thought he was just some blogger," the official said. This might have been a fair assessment a couple of years ago, when Navalny was known only to a fairly small online community. But his status as a kind of Internet folk hero had already been cemented by November 2010, when he blew the whistle on a $4 billion embezzlement scheme at a state corporation.
The leaked documents he presented as evidence, which he posted on his blog, caused a sensation in the Russian and international press, and Navalny soon became known as Russia's top crusader against corruption. He followed that by setting up a series of websites that the changed the face of online activism. The most famous one, RosPil, allowed readers to dissect government tenders -- such as orders for a fleet of cars for a local police force or a new website for a dance company -- for signs of corruption or embezzlement. Since its founding last December, the site's volunteers have been able to find irregularities in state contracts worth a total of around $1.3 billion, according to RosPil's own tally. Many of those tenders have since been annulled.
Like most of Navalny's campaigns, RosPil stood out for its pragmatism. Instead of the polemics and pamphleteering that occupy most of Russia's old-school opposition groups, Navalny focuses on specific issues, like corruption or potholes, and invites his fans to help redress them with the crowd-sourcing power of the Internet. This has allowed him to tap a huge and unrepresented demographic, the young, tech-savvy and educated middle-class, who are not only fed up with Putin but also mistrustful of Russia's regular soapbox dissidents. "It's hard to call him a leader in the traditional sense, because the Internet society runs on a culture of networks," says Evgeniya Albats, the editor ofThe New Times, a liberal Russian weekly. "But he has an ability to unite various networks of people around concrete ideas and actions." By the beginning of this year, his blog had a daily readership in the hundreds of thousands. (See "As Russia Braces for New Protests, Anger at Suspect Election Results Persists.")
But as his celebrity grew, government scrutiny followed, especially after his anti-corruption work targeted major state interests. Police in the Kirov region, where Navalny worked as a policy adviser to the governor in 2009, opened an investigation against him last December for giving the governor bad advice on a timber deal. Investigators claimed the deal had cost the regional budget $40,000, but later declined to pursue charges, citing a lack of evidence. Another attack came in July, when a news website with links to the security services published an expose about Navalny's family. The site's reporters went to a liquor store owned by his parents in a suburb of Moscow and purchased a bottle of "Putinka" vodka after 11:00 p.m., when stores are forbidden from selling hard alcohol.
Pro-Kremlin bloggers hailed the report as proof that Navalny was himself corrupt. "This tells you something about how deep they're digging," says Konstantin Voronkov, a friend of Navalny's and the author of his official biography, The Scourge of Crooks and Thieves, which was published this year. "With all their resources, they ended up having to record some poor salesgirl in his dad's shop with a hidden camera. This is the only thing they could find on him." Even Navalny's email correspondence with family and colleagues, which was stolen and posted online in October by a hacker known as Hell, revealed nothing at all incriminating.
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His main vulnerability, at least in the eyes of his detractors, is his fervent nationalism, which has alienated many in the liberal opposition. In 2007, he co-founded the National Russian Liberation Movement, known as NAROD, and published its manifesto on his blog. It calls for all law-abiding citizens to have the right to bear arms (Navalny owns several) and sets immigration policy as a priority. "Those who come into our home but do not want to respect our law and traditions must be kicked out," the manifesto says. That year he also began attending the Russian March, an annual nationalist rally that attracts thousands of right-wingers and some skinhead and neo-Nazi groups. "The only way to make the Russian March look better is to go there yourself. So I go," he wrote after helping organize the march in November.
His involvement in the nationalist movement got him expelled in 2007 from the the left-wing Yabloko party. When the party was choosing its candidate this month for the March presidential elections, one of its board members nominated Navalny, who was in jail at the time. The idea was quickly rejected. "When he renounces his nationalist views, maybe we can consider it," Sergei Mitrokhin, the leader of the party, told me. (See "The Crisis in Russia: A Billionaire to the Rescue ... of Whom?")
But Navalny has done the opposite. He has used nationalism to tap another huge base of support in the right wing, which he has brought into a shaky alliance with the liberals.
Even when Navalny was incarcerated after the Dec. 5 protest, the two political flanks managed to work together. On Dec. 10, they organized the biggest rally ever against Putin's government, bringing about 50,000 demonstrators onto Moscow's Bolotnaya Ploshchad (Swamp Square). Oleg Kashin, a journalist, read out a message from "our leader Alexei Navalny" to the crowd. It lacked nothing in pomp. "The time has come to throw off our chains," the message read. "We are not animals or slaves." It urged the protestors to keep attending rallies in defense of their "personal dignity," with the next big demonstration scheduled for Dec. 24.
The goal of the opposition was simply to hold on to their momentum until then. But with Navalny still in jail, it quickly began to slip. Sessions of the so-called OrgKomitet (Organizing Committee) of the opposition were tiresome and frustrating affairs. "For once in your life, put your egos away!" one woman burst out -- to wild applause -- during a session on Dec. 13, when the committee spent more than an hour debating what to call itself. The problem was obvious. Career politicians were seated around the table with Soviet dissidents, tech geeks and graffiti artists. Hardcore nationalists would often show up in packs and overwhelm the meetings. Every 10 minutes or so a shouting match ensued. "Don't worry, it won't be long," Bozhena Rynska, a celebrity gossip columnist who took part in the Organizing Committee meetings, reassured me after a particularly hectic one. "Soon Navalny will be released and straighten everything out."
He did not disappoint. Outside the jail in the early hours of Dec. 21, he told the crowd of activists and reporters, who were frozen almost stiff by the time he was released, that he would consider running for president when he could be sure of an honest vote. Until then, his goal would be to attack and discredit Putin. "We have to push them until they give us what they stole, meaning politics, meaning the economy, meaning everything," Navalny said. He seemed to concede that with no viable competitors, Putin would likely win a third term as president during the March elections. "But this will not be a legal presidency," he said. (See "Putin: Four More Years.")
The next day, Navalny took over the chairmanship of the Organizing Committee and much of the bickering stopped. "Our priority is to leave here radiating the impression that we are united," he said. To Navalny's left sat the ultra-nationalist Vladimir Tor, who helped lead the Movement Against Illegal Immigration until the group was banned this year for extremism and hate speech. To his right sat the human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov and a gaggle of other liberals. Just about the only thing they had in common was a basic trust in Navalny and a desire to break Putin's hold on power. So far this seems to be enough.
On Dec. 24, the ragtag committee pulled off the biggest demonstration in Moscow since the fall of the Soviet Union. As many as 120,000 people gathered on Sakharov Avenue to call for democracy and political reform. Putin was their favorite laughing stock. Navalny was one of the heroes. "I see enough people here today to take the Kremlin," he told the crowd. "But we are a peaceful force. We won't do that just yet." Three days later, during a live interview on Echo Moskvy radio, he announced plans to create his own political party, saying he was "ready to fight for leadership positions," including the post of president.
The only question now is whether the Kremlin is ready to allow that. The chances look slim. From the start of his career as an activist, Navalny has pledged to put Putin and his circle on trial if they are ever removed from power. "He can't go back on that now," says Voronkov, his biographer. "He couldn't just give them a one-way ticket to Venezuela and call it a day. His credibility would be shattered." But Putin and his party have missed their chance to sideline Navalny while he was still just another blogger. He is now a political force, and even if he is again arrested, or worse, there is no guarantee that his influence will be diminished. "You can knock the head off of something a hundred times," says the novelist Boris Akunin, another member of the Organizing Committee. "But you can't destroy a wave that rises from the bottom. It can only rise and crest. You can't stop it." However, they can certainly try.
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