Anne Applebaum

Russia’s new dissidents

Putin’s latest opponents are vulgar, pragmatic – and effective

Alexei Navalny, the de facto leader of the demonstrators who thronged freezing Moscow on Christmas Eve, minces no words. On ­rospil.info, a website he founded that is dedicated to the investigation of local and municipal corruption, he introduces the topic like this: ‘Why is all of this necessary? Because pensioners, doctors and teachers are practically starving while the thieves in power buy ever more villas, yachts, and the devil knows what else.’

Nor does Navalny shy away from sharp visual imagery. Another one of his projects is to collect photographs of potholes, crumbling motorways, cracking bridges and other road catastrophes waiting to happen. On his personal blog, where he posts running commentary on the nefarious activities of Russia’s most famous corporations and covers the protest activities of himself and his supporters (demonstrations, lawsuits, prison), Navalny uses a particularly arresting photograph on the top left corner of every page. It shows a large, furious, red-faced man. The man is brutally strangling an equally massive, equally red-faced opponent.

The photograph is apt, for Navalny is the first real post-Soviet dissident. He is protesting against the recent falsified parliamentary elections, and he is angry. His fans and online followers are angry too. All of Navalny’s sites routinely refer to Russia’s business and political leaders as crooks, bandits, criminals and thieves. They also contain clear information about how to complain to the authorities about corruption or sloth, and about how to proceed if the complaint isn’t acknowledged. They are deliberately transparent — rospil.info lists its bloggers and legal advisers by name — and they contain a good deal of technical, legal information. At his photo project, the rules and regulations governing road repair and safety are listed in full.

Navalny, his colleagues and his followers differ from a previous generation of Russian democrats. The dissidents left over from Soviet times — the chess champion Gary Kasparov, the human rights activist Ludmilla Alexeeva — already seem to belong to another era.

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