Who's Afraid of Alexei Navalny?
Josdua Keating, writing in Slate...
Vladimir Putin’s government, often praised by both its defenders and its enemies for its toughness and decisiveness, rarely seems more vexed and uncertain than when dealing with opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Earlier today, in a surprising move, a Moscow court suspended Navalny’s three-and-a-half year sentence on fraud charges that were widely seen as a laughably trumped-up pretext to punish him for his outspoken opposition to the Russian government. This isn’t the first time Navalny had gotten off with a warning: In July 2013, he was freed on bail after receiving a five-year sentence for embezzlement that prompted massive street protests by his supporters in Moscow. This time, however, the court didn’t just let Navalny go; it jailed his brother Oleg, a former postal worker, instead. Not only is the Russian criminal justice system blatantly being used to punish the Kremlin’s critics. Courts are now now apparently willing to take family members as hostages to get the point across. (The brothers are alleged to have masterminded a plot to overcharge a subsidiary of the cosmetics brand Yves Rocher for its shipping to Russia, though the French company never issued a complaint.)
f the intent in letting Navalny out but jailing his brother was to keep Navalny under control without turning him into a martyr, it appears to have backfired. Hundreds of demonstrators gathered despite freezing temperatures to protest Oleg’s fate in Moscow’s Manezh Square, including Navalny himself, who showed up in violation of his house arrest from his earlier conviction, apparently still wearing his court-ordered ankle bracelet, and was quickly rearrested along with over 100 others. The demonstrators were also met by a large crowd of counterdemonstrators, who accused Navalny’s supporters of trying to turn Manezh into a “Maidan”—a reference to the “Euromaidan” protests that toppled Ukraine’s Russian backed government in February. Even dissident performance artists Pussy Riot, who seem to have given up their DIY punk rock aesthetic for perfume-commercial glam, released a new video for the occasion in support of Navalny.
Full article
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2014/12/30/alexey_navalny_re_arrested_in_moscow_can_putin_silence_russia_s_most_prominent.html
Yes, I know it's
gauche to post two pieces in the same forum back-to-back, but the Putin-Navalny dynamic fascinates me, as I'm convinced that one of these men will be dead---and not of natural causes!---within a decade.
