Alexei Navalny: Putin critic facing ‘Stalinist’ 20 years in jail | World News

Few people are harder to silence than Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition icon who is the only person able to drum up large-scale anti-Putin protests on home soil.

If anyone else were in his current position, it would be hard to imagine ever hearing from them again.

Only three years after surviving Novichok poisoning, the 47-year-old, by far Putin’s most popular critic in Russia, is currently on trial for ‘extremism’ charges in a high-security prison where he’s already serving a nine-year term.

Russian state prosecutors want him jailed for another 20 years in a ‘special regime colony’ home to the country’s most fearsome and violent inmates – where his family and friends would be unable to help in case of any more sudden mysterious ‘illnesses’.

Navalny himself said he expects a ‘Stalinist’ sentence of 18 years, and has been told to brace for another trial on terrorism charges.

Yet the former lawyer has shown a knack for getting his voice heard and undermining the Kremlin in even the most challenging situations.

The son of a Soviet army officer and an economist, Navalny spent most of his childhood around military bases in the Moscow area.

Spending summers with his grandmother, who lived near Chernobyl, Ukraine, would eventually instil a healthy suspicion of authority in him at a young age.

A nine-year-old Navalny witnessed part of the Soviet attempted cover-up of the 1986 nuclear disaster, when officials ordered locals to plant potatoes in irradiated soil to supposedly show there was no danger from exposure.

He joined a liberal political party while a student in the early days of Putin’s reign, when there were a range of groups in Russian parliament who seemed to be having a meaningful contest for people’s votes.

But the Russian president managed to unify most conservative parties under his rule in 2001 and spent the following years stamping out dissent and helping oligarchs to build up vast business empires in return for political loyalty.

Navalny’s platform grew from 2008 after he found a loophole which allowed him to discover dodgy practices at state-owned Russian companies by buying small numbers of shares in them.

He launched a blog to publicise his findings, which turned into a portal for whistleblowers reporting embezzlement that eventually got more than a million visits a month.

This forced the Kremlin to acknowledge at least $30 billion a year was being embezzled each year from Russia’s huge network of nationalised industries.

Navalny then began channeling his popularity into protests, helping to fuel the largest demonstrations in the post-Soviet era when widespread evidence of vote rigging emerged over Russia’s 2011 parliamentary elections.

In 2013, he received his first long prison sentence of five years for embezzlement – the day after announcing he was running in Moscow’s mayoral race.

But he was unexpectedly freed and given a suspended sentence the following the day when thousands of protesters took to the streets, and went on to win 27% of the vote against the Putin-backed candidate’s 51%.

That moment is one of several ‘near misses’ that suggests the Kremlin sees Navalny as too dangerous to turn into a martyr.

He went on to receive another suspended sentence in 2014 – which was enough to bar him and his party from standing in national elections in 2016 and 2018 while allowing them to cause a nuisance from the sidelines.

Russia experts called it the pinnacle of a new Kremlin policy, masterminded by Putin’s aide Vyacheslav Volodin, of ‘competition without change’.

‘(Putin) fears me and he fears the people I represent’, Navalny said at the time.

This strategy was tested to its limits in 2020, when Navalny was poisoned with the Soviet nerve agent Novichok while campaigning ahead of regional elections.

His wife Yulia had him flown to Berlin where he was placed in a coma and took three weeks to recover.

Arrested as he landed back in Moscow for charges linked to an old fraud case, he used his first speech back on home soil to urge his followers to ‘not be afraid’.

Ilya Chumakov, an activist who visited Navalny the day before he collapsed from his poisoning, asked why he wasn’t dead yet.

‘He replied that it wouldn’t be beneficial for Putin. That it would lead to him being turned into a hero,’ Ms Chumakov said.

Despite being imprisoned, Navalny has managed to continue embarrassing Putin by ferreting out statements through his team.

He also turned Russia’s bureaucracy to his cause, filing bizarre forms requesting things like a kimono, balalaika and pet kangaroo for his cell which had to be processed by officials.

Since moving to high-security jail, he now only appears in grainy videos from court hearings which he has used to attack Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

‘(Russia) is floundering in a pool of either mud or blood, with broken bones, with a poor and robbed population, and around it lie tens of thousands of people killed in the most stupid and senseless war of the 21st century’, he said at his last hearing in July.

According to a BBC reporter present at the trial, the feed was cut half way through and Navalny hasn’t been seen since. But he some how managed to send text of his speech to supporters, who posted it online.

‘You cannot shut my mouth,’ he said.

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