The Daily - Aleksei Navalny and the Future of Russia

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

The Russian activist Aleksei Navalny has spent years agitating against corruption, and against President Vladimir Putin. Last summer he was poisoned with a rare nerve agent linked to the Russian state. Last week, after recovering in Germany, he returned to Moscow. He was arrested at the airport, but he managed to put out a call for protest, which was answered in the streets of more than a hundred Russian cities.Today, we look at the improbable story of Aleksei Navalny.Guest: Anton Troianovski, who has been a Moscow correspondent for The New York Times since 2019. For an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. You can read the latest edition here.Background reading: Pro-Navalny protests moved across time zones and more than 3,000 people were arrested in at least 109 cities, signaling widespread fatigue with the corruption-plagued political order presided over by President Vladimir Putin.The protests presented the Russian government with its biggest wave of dissent in years.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Over the weekend, a standoff between President Vladimir Putin and his loudest critic turned into a showdown in the streets of Russia. Today, my colleague Anton Choyanovsky with the improbable story of Alexei Navalny. It's Monday, January 25th. Anton, tell me about Alexei Navalny. So he's a real estate lawyer. He's 44 years old. He got his start around 2007

as a shareholder rights activist. He would buy small numbers of shares in various Russian state owned companies and then sue them for information that he would then put on a blog that quickly became widely read among people in the finance industry in Moscow. So more and more, he made a name for himself as an anti-corruption activist, kind of investigating the hidden wealth of the Russian elite, the questionable financial transactions made by Russian officials and people close to them. And he increasingly started dabbling in politics. And his breakout moment as a politician came in 2011. That was back when Putin announces that he's going to run for president again,

which was a big shock to a lot of people in Russia who had hoped that the country would see a more liberal turn. And you have this big explosion of protests that Navalny ends up leading. He becomes someone who can get thousands of people out into the streets, you know, with his Twitter posts, with his blog posts. He gets thrown in jail for a few weeks, but that doesn't stop the protests from continuing. So he really builds a platform that way as a politician.

He is not universally appreciated, even by Putin's critics. A lot of liberals in Moscow had a problem with his nationalist views. He was also known for some pretty xenophobic things he would say about immigrants from Central Asia or people from the North Caucasus. So he's quite a controversial figure, but he's really someone who, unlike most Putin opponents, unlike most Russian liberals, he's really someone who can speak to a broad cross-section of people. It sounds like he's a very successful agitator. Absolutely, absolutely. And we saw that in 2013, he runs for mayor of Moscow. And even though,

you know, he's largely barred from the airwaves, he's running against Putin's former chief of staff. He still gets 27% of the vote. And that's a lot in Russia for an opposition figure. So he has very much arrived on the national stage in Russia. Well, not quite yet, because in 2013, you know, he was still mostly known in Moscow and the big cities because his only platform really was the internet. It was Twitter and it was his blog. And what happens after 2013 is you see the internet access expand across Russia. And Navalny takes advantage of that using YouTube.

YouTube. And the most striking moment came in 2017, when Navalny puts out a video on what he describes as the hidden wealth of Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian prime minister at the time. You know, he goes into his yachts, his property in Italy, his hidden connections to Russian business tycoons. You know, he claims that Medvedev essentially embezzled a billion dollars in change out of the Russian budget. And, you know, this is the kind of stuff that many Russians suspect happens. But what's so different about Navalny's approach is that he puts it out there on YouTube in this really fast-paced, gripping style. We are tired of corruption and we don't want to deal with it anymore. And it's a huge hit, this video gets millions of views within days. And then what Navalny does is he calls for protests across the country saying, we have to show the government that we will not accept this. And kind of a guiding through line

of Navalny's politics has been elections are well and good, but that at the end of the day, this is an authoritarian system. and the only real way to make our voice heard is to go out on the street. And thousands of people come out all across the country in dozens of cities. And so that really shows his potential to use the internet to mobilize people. So what exactly is his goal? He's calling for protests. He's clearly trying to weed out corruption from the government. But at the same time, he has been seeking public office. So how are you making sense of all this? Well, his goal, he's said it for years, is to take down Putin. Wow.

To change the political system in Russia. So he's explicit about it. Yes, yes. His marquee line starting in 2011 was, Putin's party is a party of crooks and thieves. Anton, I don't think of Vladimir Putin's Russia as a place that tolerates public criticism of its leadership. has gone to extraordinary lengths to silence his enemies, dispatching operatives across the world to punish those who criticize him. So how is Navalny getting away with this? It's a bit more complicated than that because for a long time, Putin's Kremlin has tried to create something they call managed democracy in Russia. So there's a big middle class here. There's a lot of exchange with the West. They really recognize that people here don't want

this country to turn into North Korea or even China. People have become used to some degree of personal freedom of expression, to the internet being free. So basically, the Kremlin has for a long time tried to give people the feeling, some would say the illusion of some degree of democracy. And, you know, many analysts make the argument that allowing opposition figures like Navalny to exist has allowed the Kremlin to give people in this country the feeling that they can make dissent heard without it ever actually threatening the Kremlin. And also, there was clearly the decision made that Navalny was more of a danger to the Kremlin in jail than free. Because going all the way in terms of putting him in prison would have run the risk of turning him into this totemic figure with the potential to unite the opposition. So to summarize, Navalny is not seen as threat enough to actually punish or threaten directly. And putting him in jail or

worse might actually endanger this idea of managed democracy. So more or less, they're going to leave him alone. Yeah, absolutely. Because also, let's remember, this was after Putin annexed Crimea and after the blow up of tensions with the West. So that was all something that gave Putin this huge patriotic wave that he was riding on for several years. You know, from 2014 to into 2018, Putin's approval rating in independent polls was around 80%. But that starts to change in 2018. First of all, that patriotic fervor around the annexation of Crimea has really gone away. And then that summer, the government does something

that really sends these shockwaves throughout the Russian public, which is they raise the pension age drastically by five years for men, by eight years for women. So that summer of 2018 was really a watershed moment where Putin's really strong public approval started to dissipate quickly. And then Navalny, at the same time, has been putting himself in position to take advantage of that. So he tried to get on the ballot for the presidential election in 2018 when Putin was elected to his fourth term. The government, not very surprisingly, didn't let him get on the ballot.

But what Navalny did nevertheless was build this physical infrastructure of campaign-style offices all across the country in dozens of Russian cities. You know, really something that basically no other opposition figure has been able to do. So what that means is just as Putin's popularity is fading, Navalny's ability to influence events across Russia has never been stronger. And we see more and more pressure from the government on Navalny's organization.

We see very frequent raids against his offices, detention of supporters, and it's really starting to feel like we're headed for a collision between Putin and Navalny. We'll be right back. Anton, when does this collision come? So in August of last year, Navalny is in Siberia meeting with supporters ahead of local elections there. Then he flies home to Moscow.

And on that plane, soon after takeoff, he starts to feel sick. He screams in pain. He vomits. He collapses. Wow. He falls into a coma. The pilot makes an emergency landing in the city of Omsk, and Navalny is met at the tarmac by an ambulance crew. They determine he's been poisoned. They give him emergency treatment.

He's taken to the hospital. He's put on a ventilator. And then a standoff begins because his supporters are saying, the guy's been poisoned. He needs help. He needs to be airlifted somewhere out of the country for treatment. But initially, the doctors don't let him leave.

Angela Merkel, the German government, puts pressure on Russia to evacuate him to Berlin to let him go. And eventually he is let go. He's flown directly to Berlin to the Charité Clinic where doctors treat him, and within days a special lab of the German military comes back with this really stunning finding that he was poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent called

Novichok. And this, of course, is the exact same military-grade poison that we know was used to attempt to assassinate different Putin enemies, including one in the United Kingdom. So the assumption has to be that Putin's government is behind this poisoning, right? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, for the longest time, people assumed that this would not be something that the Russian government would want to do. But when people heard it was Novichok, it was like, wow, this strongly points to the Russian state at the highest levels being involved. So as this is playing out, Navalny actually, almost miraculously, starts to get better. And he comes out of a coma later on in September.

And one of the first things he says is he's going to come back to Russia. Wow. That is a very unexpected instinct for someone who has been poisoned by Russia. Indeed. And also, we didn't even know at this point whether or not he'd be able to make a full recovery. He was in a coma for weeks. And then he raises the stakes even further in December by marshalling evidence and publicly accusing Putin of having tried to kill him. Well, what kind of evidence? Well, so he works with Bellingcat, this investigative journalism outlet that uses a lot of open source evidence.

And they, together with a Russian outlet, The Insider, they basically get all these leaked telecommunications records out of Russia. And they piece those together along with flight records. along with flight records. And they're able to show that a team of officers from Russia's domestic intelligence agency apparently followed Navalny around for years and were near him when he was presumably exposed to Novichok in Siberia right before he took that flight. And then sticking the knife in even further, Navalny releases a video a week later

where he's actually calling, he's on the phone with a member of this Russian team that was allegedly part of this assassination attempt. Hello, Konstantin Borisovich. Hello, my name is Ustinov Maxim Sergeyevich. Navalny pretends to be a senior Russian official requesting a briefing from this officer and apparently successfully tricks him into essentially confessing the whole plot.

That's extraordinary. Yeah, yeah. I mean, even down to the point that they apparently applied the poison to the inside seam of his underwear. Oh my gosh. So Navalny is more or less fully recovered. He has made these videos embarrassing Putin's government.

But is he really going to follow through and return to Moscow? That's the question. Because also the Russian government was increasingly making it absolutely clear that if Navalny comes back, he gets arrested. And then a couple of weeks ago, one morning, Navalny posts on Instagram and says, I'm coming back this Sunday. I've bought a ticket. Come meet me at the airport. Wow. I will return to Moscow by the flight of victory.

Meet me. Wow. So a week ago, he boards a flight in Berlin to Moscow. Mr. Valdi, from Israeli television, aren't you afraid? Mr. Valdi, from Israel. You know, this is such an extraordinary event. It's being live-streamed in multiple places online. It's being watched by millions of people because everyone's like,

so what's going to happen when he lands? Will the Russians actually arrest him and risk setting off even more protests? So hundreds of his supporters go out to Vnukovo airport, the airport where he's supposed to land. They're chanting. The police try to keep them away. They're starting to arrest some of his supporters who were there.

And minutes before it's supposed to land, you see the plane make a turn away from Moscow. And then it turns out it's been diverted to a different airport, allegedly, you know, according to the official version, because there was a stuck snowplow on the runway at the airport where he was supposed to land. Obviously, no one believes that. But so everyone, all the journalists and supporters of his who were at Vnukovo Airport rushed to try to get to Sheremetyevo Airport.

So he ends up landing there and he's allowed off the plane. He gets onto the tarmac bus with all the other passengers. Before going into passport control, he very cinematically stops in front of a billboard that has a big picture of the Kremlin on it and gives a statement to journalists. You know, he's saying, I'm not afraid, I'm so happy to be home. Then he heads to passport control, where he's met by a group of police officers who tell him he is being detained.

And what is he being detained for exactly? I mean, the government, it seems, has just poisoned him. What has he allegedly done wrong? Right. They are saying he has violated the terms of his parole from a suspended prison sentence he received six years ago by being in Germany and not properly notifying prison authorities about his whereabouts. So he was taken to a police station near the airport. Then the next day, he's sentenced to 30 days in jail.

And before being taken to jail, he manages to record a video where he tells his supporters, you need to go out into the streets, you need to protest. It's not just about me, it's about your future. You know, his message is, this is the moment. They're trying to shut me down. They're trying to shut our movement down. And they're trying to show that this kind of authoritarian rule is possible in this country. And he's again telling his supporters, the only way to really affect change in Russia is by protest in the streets. Then his associates say these protests are going to happen on January 23rd.

They start organizing these protests in dozens of cities across the country. But then the question becomes, okay, all these people are watching Navalny. They know who he is. They're even willing to support him maybe on social media, but are they willing to physically go out into the streets and risk their own well-being on his behalf? And so the risk for Navalny out of all that is, what if all these people don't show up? And this really becomes a key test for his movement. And this really becomes a key test for his movement.

So what ends up happening on Saturday? So Navalny's supporters had said, go out into the streets at 2 p.m. local time. Russia has 11 time zones. So that meant it was still the middle of the night here in Moscow when protesters started emerging on Russia's Pacific coast. As the day progressed, you know, that coldest city in the world, where it was negative 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Wow. And over and over again, we saw hundreds, sometimes thousands of people protesting in the streets. You know, I was in Pushkin Square here in central Moscow on a Saturday afternoon, and people were totally packing that square, chanting, Putin is a thief.

The police, for the most part, let people gather, but then they still used rather violent methods to get the crowd to disperse. We repeatedly saw riot police in camouflage, in shiny black helmets, in body armor, charging at the protesters, swinging their batons, trying to clear the square. There was this awful video out of St. Petersburg, which has been really ricocheting through social media in Russia,

where a woman walks up to a riot police officer who's detaining someone else, and that police officer just goes up to her and kicks her incredibly hard in the stomach, so hard she's gone to the hospital. So we have these really intense scenes here. But people surprisingly stood their ground often, even fighting back against the riot police, which is one way in which these protests were really different from a lot of what we saw in the past.

There was one moment, really striking, where a black government car drove by with one of those blue official lights on top, and people first started throwing snowballs at it, then they rushed at it and started jumping on it and kicking it, actually injuring the driver. You know, this was a degree of brazenness on the part of protesters we really pretty much haven't seen before. So very clearly, Russians answered Navalny's call by showing up and expressing their disgust with the Putin government. They did. They answered his call. These weren't numbers that we can expect to force the Kremlin to change course within days. But they made it clear that Navalny has become a symbol of the opposition. You know, there were lots of people we spoke to who attended rallies all over the country yesterday

who said, I don't even really support Navalny. I don't agree with all his ideas. But right now, this is a moment where we're seeing such unfairness, such injustice on the part of those in power that we need to respond. So this has become kind of this moment that really crystallizes all this pent-up frustration that people have with the economic situation, with the judicial situation, with corruption, people have really come together around the symbol of Navalny in jail. And in terms of the breadth of the movement that's going on here,

what's absolutely key too is that these protests didn't just happen in Moscow and St. Petersburg. They didn't just happen in major cities across the country. According to one count, they took place in 109 cities across Russia on Saturday. Think about that. 109 cities saw coordinated protests in favor of Alexei Navalny. So is it fair to say that this strategy has backfired for Putin, that he has turned Alexei Navalny into an even more powerful force and an even bigger threat to Putin's

government? Yes, no question. I think that's become very clear that the hard line that the government has pursued against Navalny over the last six months and certainly over the last couple of weeks has really turned him into a figure of really large national stature. So what happens now? He's still in jail. Yeah, he's still in jail. His supporters have already called for more protests.

We expect those to take place next weekend already. Now it's becoming a real standoff, a real showdown, I would say, between some back in 2011 and 2012 that in Moscow saw far greater numbers of people in the streets than what we saw this past Saturday. playing out on the internet now, which is a communications medium that's completely outside of the Kremlin's control, we do have to ask, will this be a turning point for Putin? Will this be a turning point for the Russian political system as we look to the coming months and years? Anton, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Michael. Over the weekend, the Biden administration called for the, quote, unconditional and immediate release of Alexei Navalny,

demanded that Russia cooperate in the investigation of his poisoning, and condemned Putin's crackdown on protesters. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. I've been speaking to the Republican leader about the timing and duration of the trial. But make no mistake, a trial will be held in the United States Senate, and there will be a vote on whether to convict the president. Senate leaders have reached a deal to delay the impeachment trial of former President Trump by two weeks,

giving President Biden time to install a cabinet and pass legislation. As part of the deal, the House of Representatives will transmit the article of impeachment, which charged Trump with inciting a violent mob at the Capitol, over to the Senate at 7 p.m. tonight. at the Capitol, over to the Senate at 7 p.m. tonight. And over the past few days, new coronavirus infections have steadily fallen by a significant amount in what health experts say may be a temporary phenomenon following surges during the holiday season. New cases have dropped by about 30 percent over the past two weeks, but new variants of the coronavirus

could quickly erase those declines. Today's episode was produced by Luke Vanderplug, Rochelle Banja, Alexander Lee Young, Lindsay Garrison, and Rachel Quester. It was edited by Dave Shaw and engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.

See you tomorrow.