The protests in Russia probably won't topple Putin

But Alexei Navalny has tapped into something deep about Russia.

Vladimir Putin and Alexei Navalny. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

In August last year, protests erupted across Belarus as long-standing dictator Alexander Lukashenko locked up his political opponents and declared victory in a blatantly rigged election. Now, in neighbouring Russia, Vladimir Putin’s arrest of prominent opposition leader Alexei Navalny has provoked similar unrest and calls for his release. Navalny returned to Russia last week after spending five months in Berlin recovering from a botched Novichok attack, an attempt on his life which Navalny’s team claim was a direct order from the Kremlin. Anti-government sentiment has not been seen on such a scale in Russia for several years. Emerging images of riot police attacking peaceful protestors and locking up dissidents evoke parallels with events in Belarus. Putin had hoped that he could avoid similar scenes in Russia, but with every move he makes against Navalny the opposition movement grows stronger.

Rather than silencing Navalny, the Kremlin’s failed attempt to poison him has dramatically increased his profile. The failure of the assassination is embarrassing enough for the Russian government alone, but Navalny’s release of an utterly surreal audio recording in December, in which he poses as an FSB official and coaxes his suspected attacker into outlining the details of the assassination attempt, has proved a humiliation for Putin on a much larger scale. Returning to Russia on January 17 on the budget airline Pobeda (meaning “victory” in Russian), Navalny was detained as he stepped off the plane in Moscow. But this merely prompted Navalny to go for the jugular again: the day after his arrest, Navalny’s team published a video outlining the story of corruption behind Putin’s billion-dollar “palace” in Krasnodar-Krai. His call for action at the end of the now-infamous “Putin’s Palace” video – a call met by protestors across the country on January 23 – has at the time of writing been watched by over 70 million people. Navalny has so far proved himself to be one step ahead of Putin.

Navalny’s relentless attempts to expose government corruption are not the reason for the Russian president to be concerned. Navalny’s use of social media to bypass state censorship has proved difficult for the Kremlin to control, and provided him with outreach to dissatisfied Russians. His detention and impromptu trial in a police station on the outskirts of Moscow prompted youths to create parody videos on TikTok of trials in bizarre locations. Content highlighting the perceived absurdity of the Russian government’s actions has now been seen by an estimated 300 million people on the app. To an increasingly disillusioned and outward-looking youth population, Navalny has become the symbol of a crusade against authoritarianism.

It is important to note that Navalny has quite a problematic past. A known Russian nationalist, he supported the 2014 annexation of Crimea and has been accused of making racist remarks about the people of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Though the Kremlin has weaponised his past to undermine him, their mistreatment of the opposition leader has turned his detainment from a political issue to a humanitarian one.

Though Navalny was already an established figure in Russian politics before his poisoning in August 2020, the government has insisted that he is a fringe figure in domestic politics. But the protests in support of him across Russia’s 11 time zones, in more than 70 towns and cities, demonstrate that the government’s treatment of Navalny has triggered a strong reaction. Although mass protests in Putin’s Russia are not unprecedented, this time the government’s ruthlessness has made Navalny the figurehead of a pro-democratic, human rights-based movement despite some of his unsavoury views. What we have seen in Belarus and are now seeing in Russia is that the authoritarian methods on which their leaders rely for population control can have the opposite effect. Indeed, fear of the security forces has waned and violent crackdowns simply fuel the opposition’s sense of urgency. Any harsh action toward Navalny will inevitably be met with outrage. Simultaneously, if Putin does nothing then the confidence of pro-democracy leaders and the noise they make will grow.

Going forward, there are questions about what these protests may mean. Are they likely to result in Navalny’s release and any immediate reform to Russia’s political system? Probably not. But whether the protestors’ demands are quickly met is not the most important point. Instead, Putin’s failure to silence Navalny has substantially weakened public perceptions of state power, perhaps setting in motion a movement that develops beyond the Kremlin’s control. While Lukashenko has clung to power in Belarus, he has lost almost all legitimacy as protests continue. A similar situation in Russia is not beyond the realm of possibility in the coming weeks and months.

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