After Navalny’s Arrest: Whither the Russian Opposition

The return to Russia and subsequent imprisonment of Alexei Navalny represents a possible turning point in Russian domestic politics. Navalny’s reappearance on the Russian stage sparked a series of large protests and a predictable sharp reaction from authorities. Can the opposition remain organized and united in light of this crackdown, or will Putin’s authoritarian turn be sufficient to maintain his grip on power?

Selected Quotes

Leonid Volkov

"Of course, 95% of our efforts are now being concentrated around the upcoming Duma elections. They are scheduled to take place in just four months from now, and I hope, we all hope, that they will become a real challenge for President Putin and United Russia, his political party. According to independent polling, the approval rating for United Russia is below 30% now, 27%, 28%, 29%, which barely corresponds to the place that the party now occupies in Russian political lives. The party almost occupies 80% of the seats in the State Duma and pretty much the same number in regional parliaments. Quite unfair for a party with 27% popular support or quite a gap to be filled by the Kremlin’s political masterminds. It’s actually quite a challenge for them and while we are sometimes being a little bit depressed with all the problems we have to overcome, all the challenges, and all the obstacles, when they freeze our bank accounts, when they detain our friends and colleagues, when they impose enormous fines on the protesters and so on, this is quite depressing because we are doing nothing bad, we are only exercising the very regular political activity, trying to participate in the election, and so on, but if we consider the problems that those guys in the Kremlin are facing, well, their problems are even larger.... Of course, elections in Russia are not fair. Of course, we have a long kind of set history of ballot-stuffing and all forms of election rigging. Still, they can’t do everything. Still, there are many regions of Russia where votes are being counted normally, where opposition has a lot of independent observers who could be sent to polling stations, and their ability to steal an election is enormous and still limited."

"On Monday, they have started interrogate very many members of our foundation, ex-employees, dozens of people who used to participate in our activities. Why? Because they kind of reinitiated this criminal case against Alexei Navalny, a very ridiculous case, an embezzlement case where the allegations are that he kind of made profit off the donations that people have sent to the Anti-Corruption Foundation. We are very proud of the fact that our organization always was running on crowdfunding from inside the country, always running on microdonations from hundreds of thousands of donors. So now on one hand, they are disqualifying all of those donors from further participation in Russia’s political life, because anyone who donated to an extremist organization will be not allowed to participate in elections in the foreseeable future."