Putin critics of many stripes rally around Navalny

MOSCOW» Aleksandr Pasechnik, a socialist, sees jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny as part of the “liberal intelligentsia.” Mikhail Svetov, Russia’s bestknown libertarian, recoils from Navalny’s economic populism. Olga Nikiforova, a monarchist, long refused to believe that Navalny was poisoned.

Yet despite their misgivings, all three risked arrest to join the protests that swept across Russia last weekend calling for Navalny’s release — and were considering doing so again Sunday.

“Entering a phase of intense crisis is a lesser evil than this slow degradation of the country,” Pasechnik, 42, said. “We need this catalyst, now.”

Opposition to President Vladimir Putin has long come in many hues — from Stalinists who dream of resurrecting the planned economy to nationalists who want to restrict migration and annex more of Ukraine to urban liberals who long for democracy and closer ties with the West. Rarely have these disparate groups come together as they have in the last week around Navalny

— because the moment has arrived, more and more Russians say, when they can no longer abide passive acceptance of Putin.

“Navalny has, for the first time, sparked a Russian protest movement against the president,” said Konstantin Gaaze, a sociologist at the Moscow School for Social and Economic Sciences. “It is a historic moment for the country.”

Putin is in position to ride out the protests, as he has in the past, using a sprawling security apparatus adept at stifling discontent while avoiding large-scale repression that could inflame passions further. Even many of the protesters themselves said it would take far bigger crowds to persuade the Kremlin to change course.

Putin’s usually atomized critics have come together around the figure of Navalny, 44, not for his political views but because he is perceived as a symbol of the main source of the anger that many Russians feel toward the Kremlin: injustice.

Nikiforova, the monarchist, who is 37 and works as a screenwriter in Moscow, initially went along with the narrative of a Russia rising from its knees under Putin that is piped out constantly by state TV. She remembered the broken street lamps of the postSoviet 1990s, the used needles discarded by drug addicts cracking underfoot on Moscow’s sidewalks. She saw the possibility of wealth and hopes of a revival under Putin, who took power in 1999.

Years later, after she became a parent, she saw the failings of Russia’s schools, courts and hospitals. But she still believed that Putin’s government could improve. And she refused to accept that the state he ruled had something to do with the atrocities attributed to it in the West — like the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014 or the poisoning of Navalny in Siberia last summer.

Things changed after she saw the investigations that Navalny published in December about his own botched poisoning.

“He won’t stop on his own,” Nikiforova wrote on Facebook on Jan. 23, in a post that has since garnered 6,600 “likes,” comparing Putin to an abusive husband. “This is a moment when a great number of people just can’t take it anymore.”

She said she would like Russia to be a constitutional monarchy, like Britain, but said that Naval

ny’s precise political views were now beside the point.

Vladimir Milov, a former deputy energy minister and now an adviser to Navalny, said the opposition leader’s team did not view ideology as an important factor in mobilizing protesters. “The vast majority of people who come out are not partisans of any ideology or have specific views — they just want change in the country,” Milov said. “Most people who participate in protest movements are just tired of corruption.”

Among those who had never attended a Navalny rally before was Pasechnik, a blogger and filmmaker who wants Russia to be a socialist democracy in which the means of production belong to the state. When Navalny led major

protests in Moscow in the winter of 2012, Pasechnik saw him as part of a subversive “fifth column” planted inside Russia by the West. As most Russians did, he celebrated Putin’s annexation of Crimea two years later. But he was disappointed that the Kremlin did not bring eastern Ukraine into the fold as well.

He says he finds Navalny just about as distasteful as he finds Putin, seeing both as beholden to the capitalist West. But he sees the current protests as the best chance to try to bring change, offering an opening for movements such as his own. And he called for solidarity with Navalny over his persecution by the state, cautioning that “what happened to him could happen to any of us.”