Riot police are in front of protesters during a rally in support of Navalny in central Moscow on January 23.
Photographer: Natalia Kolesnikova / AFP / Getty Images
Photographer: Natalia Kolesnikova / AFP / Getty Images
Lyudmila Shtein, a 24-year-old Muscovite and city deputy, is under house arrest until May and faces a two-year prison sentence for encouraging people to join a protest last month. He is among more than 11,000 people gathered in the past two weeks after the biggest show of defiance of President Vladimir Putin in recent years.
When social media was flooded with stories of police brutality, including beatings, a The repression of the Kremlin has so far managed to stop the unrest caused by the imprisonment of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. No more demonstrations are planned until the spring, but after more than two decades in power, Putin has not extinguished the threat of his government.
“If we continue to protest every weekend, there will only be thousands of detainees and hundreds beaten, and the work of our field offices will be paralyzed and we will not be able to prepare for the elections” in Parliament in September, said one top Navalny, ally, Leonid Volkov, who is out of the country and wanted by the Russian authorities. “That’s not what we want and it’s not what Alexey has asked of us,” he told TV Rain.
Putin, 68, is digging as Navalny tries to galvanize the discontent fueled by years of deteriorating living standards and the recession caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Navalny, an anti-corruption activist, has produced a a series of exhibitions aimed at Putin and his inner circle and built a follow-up of millions in the process.
Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in dozens of cities across Russia for two consecutive weekends causing alarm and provoking a violent response from the authorities, who accuse Navalny of working with foreign governments to try to destabilize the regime.
Navalny has garnered the full support of any opposition politician in Russia, “although his constituency for the time being remains quite narrow,” said Mikhail Dmitriev, an economist who correctly predicted the largest protests against Putin since a decade.
For now, most Russians are worried about the need to survive, but as the economic situation stabilizes, “the demand for political and rule of law rights and freedoms will grow” and there will be more people willing to confront the authorities, said.
Navalny, 44, was arrested as he arrived in mid-January from Germany, where he recovered from a nervous breakdown that he said was an attempt by Putin to kill him. The Kremlin denies any role in the poisoning. Navalny is now the most famous prisoner in Russia. A Moscow court on February 2 sentenced him to two years and eight months for violating the probation conditions of a suspended fraud sentence from 2014, including when he was recovering in Berlin after a coma.
Russian investigators are also prosecuting many of Navalny’s aides and have warned they could charge him with crimes related to other allegations of fraud that could add a further ten years in prison.
International criticism
Backtracking on international criticism, Russia has rejected calls from the US and Europe to release Navalny despite the risk of further sanctions and Friday expelled three diplomats from Germany, Poland and Sweden to attend the rallies.
While waves of past protests have also sparked mass arrests and trials, authorities have been more ruthless this time around.
Putin, the poison and importance of Alexey Navalny: QuickTake
Lawyers say they have no access to detainees, protesters have spent hours in police vans, deprived of food, water and even heat, and photos posted on social media show people crammed into cells with open latrines and beds with metal frames and no mattresses.
Aliona Kitaeva, a volunteer who worked for a Navalny aide, said police put a plastic bag over her head, pushed her in and threatened electric shocks to force her to give her mobile phone password. He told four officers in the cell that they did not have a surveillance camera.
Navalny is escorted out of a police station in Khimki, Russia, on January 18th.
Photographer: Alexander Nemenov / AFP / Getty Images
“I was subjected to physical and psychological abuse: it involved torture,” she told Current Time TV just before she was sentenced to 12 days for participating in an unapproved protest.
Putin’s tactics may intimidate the opposition in the near future, but Navalny in prison will become a powerful symbol of resistance, said Gleb Pavlovsky, a political consultant who worked for the Kremlin until 2011.
Risks for Putin
“In the short term, the risks to the Kremlin are not great, but they can be very significant if Navalny becomes a constant trigger of protests against Putin,” Pavlovsky said. “It will not disappear completely and will continue to play an important role.”
With his return from Germany despite the threat of arrest, it is possible that Navalny also altered Putin’s plans for his eventual exit from the presidency because it would now be too risky, according to Pavlovsky.
Opposition demonstrations alone will not threaten Putin, whose main challenge is to stay true to his environment, according to Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist at the State University of Management who has studied Russia’s elite for the past three decades.
“The two sides are so unequal that the only thing that can lead to change is an internal coup,” he said.
– With the assistance of Evgenia Pismennaya