Alexei Navalyn in front of the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer in Moscow.
(3 of 4)
In November 2010 he posted evidence on his blog of a $4 billion embezzlement scheme at a state corporation, causing a sensation in the Russian and international press. A month later, he launched his most famous website, RosPil, which changed the face of online activism. It allowed readers to dissect government tenders--like orders for a fleet of cars or diamond-encrusted wristwatches--for signs of corruption or embezzlement. In just over a year, the site's lawyers and volunteers found irregularities in state contracts worth about $1.3 billion, according to RosPil's tally. Many of those tenders have since been annulled.
Like most of Navalny's campaigns, RosPil stood out for its pragmatism. Instead of the polemics and pamphleteering that preoccupy most of Russia's old-school opposition groups, Navalny focuses on specific issues, such as corruption and potholes, and invites his fans to help redress them with the crowdsourcing power of the Internet. Early last year, when he put out a call for donations to hire lawyers for RosPil, he raised $230,000 in two months, with the average donation being less than $10. "Masses of people were basically hiring me as a sheriff to do the oversight work the government was failing to do," Navalny says.
With their donations, Navalny's online supporters took that step from idle blogging to political action, and that is when Russia's security services began to take notice. In the spring of 2011, Yandex. Dengi, the Russian equivalent of PayPal, received a request from the FSB, the main successor to the Soviet KGB, to hand over the personal details of everyone who transferred money to Navalny's website. Yandex complied, and the people on that list soon began getting phone calls demanding to know why they supported Navalny. But the harassment backfired. Donations began pouring in many times faster. Official attempts to get dirt on Navalny uncovered little except that his parents' grocery store sold vodka after legal hours.
His main vulnerability has been his strident nationalism, which has always been at the core of his views. In 2007 he co-founded the National Russian Liberation Movement, known as NAROD, and published its manifesto on his blog. It focused mostly on immigration policy, declaring that "those who come into our home but do not want to respect our law and traditions must be kicked out." It also called for all law-abiding citizens to have the right to bear arms. Navalny owns several, and in 2007, when a group of thugs broke up a political debate he was hosting, he shot one of them four times with a traumatic pistol, a nonlethal weapon that fires rubber bullets. After a lengthy investigation, all charges against him were dropped.