How to solve a problem like Navalny

Russian opposition activist and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny has been moved to a penal colony 60 miles east of Moscow. There, he will serve his two-and-a-half year sentence for parole violations regarded by many as politically motivated.

After disappearing last week from a detention centre just outside the capital, Mr Navalny’s new location was confirmed in a post to his Instagram account on Monday where he describes the prison as a “friendly concentration camp”. Known as IK-2, the barracked camp in the Vladimir region has a reputation for strict rules, psychological isolation and high levels of surveillance.

It has been an eventful few months for the activist and campaigner. After returning in January to Russia from Germany — where he spent months recovering from a poisoning widely blamed on the Russian government — his arrest brought hundreds of thousands out onto the streets in what were some of the largest protests the country has seen in years.

With Mr Navalny’s fate, for now, sealed at IK-2, what next for him and his supporters?

In the West much of our understanding of the Navalny movement has come from protests like those in January, which, after more than 10,000 detentions, were paused until at least the spring. Their return may not be so far away. When they do, their focus will likely be on making sure Mr Navalny’s plight is not forgotten. They may also set the stage for opposition attempts to frustrate September’s parliamentary elections.

But while protests can embarrass those in power at home and raise a media storm abroad, they also have limits. The Kremlin under President Vladimir Putin has become adept at applying short, sharp instances of police violence and intimidation before simply waiting them out. We have been here before.

Indeed, should the Navalny team want to have lasting political impact they will need to build a story that appeals beyond the streets, and find creative ways to take advantage of the now imprisoned campaigner’s position in politics.

That position is an unusual one. While Moscow has denied Mr Navalny the opportunity to accumulate traditional political legitimacy — making polling on his popularity skewed — , numbers from the independent Levada Centre nevertheless show him to have low approval and trust ratings, with many Russians being indifferent toward him.

This was reflected in January’s protests. Many of those who took to the streets did so not in support of Mr Navalny as an individual politician but rather as a symbol for various systemic abuses of power by state authorities. The anti-corruption campaigner has become a sort-of lightning rod, galvanising disparate sources of disaffection.

This disaffection has grown over the years, resulting in a rise in protests and other civic action. The triggers have often been specific, sometimes local issues — a governor’s arrest, a toxic waste dump, corruption, pension reform — , but the overarching themes have been institutions and accountability. The targets have been elites, but the anger has also been a-political. Protests have taken place in both urban and rural centres, and across all demographics. They are far from representing an organised opposition.

The task for Mr Navalny’s team will be to not just mobilise these disparate groups and pull them together, but also convince them that another vision for Russia is possible. That won’t be easy, and not just because the authorities will seek to break up the activist’s growing grassroots network around the country.

Politics has long been a place of theatre under Mr Putin. Years of state-managed elections with no genuine competition and hollowed out institutions have bred amongst many Russians an ambivalence towards the idea of positive change through politics. This apathy has been the foundation of the Kremlin’s soft authoritarianism, and key to the narrative of there being no alternative to President Putin’s rule.

But it is also an apathy that has relied on telling stories, particularly of a successful economy. In his first two terms, buoyed by a very real economic boom, Mr Putin built his legitimacy around a social contract that reversed the turmoil, chaos and uncertainty of the 1990s.

This narrative — so important to Moscow’s rejection of change — has been stubbornly successful. But it is also fading. The Kremlin’s sacrifice of economic growth for stability in its efforts to shield the broader economy from global shocks has resulted in around a decade of stagnation and austerity. Covid-19 has exacerbated what was already a grim set of trends for ordinary Russians; years of falling real disposable incomes, worries about low wages and high prices, and a decline in living standards which leaves them worse off now than they were when Mr Putin resumed office in 2012.

There are conditions, then, for further protest to be organised around, especially as the Kremlin remains unwilling to make the fundamental structural reforms the country needs. Two recent polls in particular from the Levada Centre will raise government eyebrows; almost half of those aged 18 to 24 disapprove of Mr Putin’s performance, while 57 per cent do not want him as leader after 2024 (he can technically stay in power until 2036). Moscow’s fear will be how quickly apathy can turn to anger.

But when the cycles of protests, detentions and violence do return it will be important to remember there is little danger of Mr Putin losing his grip on power. The same can be said for the system under-pinning his rule. Any opposition remains a fragmented, often spontaneous coalition of voices.

With Mr Navalny isolated from the outside world, his team targeted, and more repression likely, moving beyond the streets won’t be easy. Mr Navalny and his team will know this. They are playing a long, slow, uncertain game.

March 2021