Courage to the Point of Insanity: Alexei Navalny’s Return to Russia

Wealth of Nations Podcast

On August 20th 2020, Alexei Navalny became violently ill on a flight to Moscow. Navalny, who was evacuated to a hospital in Germany, had been poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok by the FSB, Russian security services. Navalny, a long time pro-democracy and anti-corruption activist, had been a thorn in Vladimir Putin’s side. Navalny was the closest Vladimir Putin had to a competitor in the 2018 Russian presidential election, and helped organize the unified front in the 2019 Moscow Duma elections that nearly saw the opposition take control of the municipal government of Russia’s most important city. Until now, the Russian government has attempted to frustrate Navalny with spurious and absurd court cases that have seen him jailed 10 times in the last decade for short periods of time, and banned from running for all public office. The attempted assasination marks the government taking a much more aggressive stance towards political opposition.
After recovering from his poisoning, Navalny pretended to be an aid of a senior general and got a recording of the member of the team that attempted to kill him admitting his crimes and the methods that he used in one of the most bizarre stories of the year. Navalny, believing there is little he could do for his country from abroad, and returned to Russia on January 17th. Navalny was almost immediately arrested on charges of violating his parole by leaving Russia to get treated for poisoning by his own government. Navalny is currently facing 13.5 years in prison on fabricated charges of corruption and embezzlement. As Navalny was arrested by the government, his team released a documentary of Vladimir Putin’s palace that covers grounds 39 times that of Monaco. Valued at $1.4 billion, the palace has luxuries like two helipads, and underground ice rink, a private strip club, and $800 toilet brush. Navalny alleges that oligarchs and cronies have paid for this palace, with the wealth ultimately coming from the Russian people. The video quickly gained over 50 million views worldwide, with it the most viewed Youtube video in Russia.
Protests from Vladivostok to St. Petersburg have been organized on January 23rd to call for Navalny’s release. Over 40,000 people have taken to the streets in Moscow. Justas impressively, massive protests have been organized in smaller cities like Yekaterinburg and Kazan where approximately 10,000 have come into the streets. The government has arrested over 3,400 to keep the protests under control Russia has seen similar sized protests after 2018 and 2019, and it is far from clear these protests show any real risk to the government of Putin. Nevertheless, these protests are just more cracks in the firmament of Putin’s dictatorship over Russia. Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s long time ruler, is seeing truly dangerous protests destabilizing his regime. Opinion polls show support for Putin steadily declining, with polls show his disapproval for Putin rising from 17% to 34% from 2018 to 2020. The combination of stagnant growth, massive corruption, and spectacular mismanagement of COVID-19 have sapped Putin’s support. While Putin remains firms in power today, the opposition to his regime is slowly gaining strength.