The Thorn in the Heart of Kremlin

Vladimir Putin became the President of Russia in 1999. Putin had worked as a spy in the KGB and FSB. His time as a spy in the Soviet Union shaped his views on how a nation should be governed. He came to believe that a state can run efficiently if it is centralized and secretive. Putin goes on to shape post-cold-war Russia into what it is today. 

Most of the riches of Russia were concentrated in the hands of an oligarchy. Putin first went after the Russian oligarchy. He rewarded those who supported him and found ways to get rid of those who didn’t. Several members of the Russian oligarchy who opposed Putin went on to have mysterious deaths or were put into prison on embezzlement charges.  

Once Putin had Russia’s oligarchy on his side, he went after the nation’s media. He exposed “corrupt media” by charging several media owners with embezzlement. He got the once-free press under his control, allowing him to maintain a good reputation in the eyes of the public. 

Controlling the press allowed Putin to achieve his next goal. Putin’s regime passed laws that fundamentally changed how elections in Russia took place. These laws permitted parties to run for the elections only if they were supported by the United Russia Party, the ruling party. These laws were passed to split the opposition votes to make it extremely hard to run against Putin and United Russia. Furthermore, the vote-counting system of Russia has been accused of being rigged by Putin. 

Putin held these major elements that he used to control Russia with corruption. According to several reports, Russia lost over $427 billion between 2000 and 2008. Due to the lack of transparency in the government and the controlled press, the Russian people were in the dark regarding the issue

Alexei Navalny Enters the Picture

Putin’s plan on governing the nation was running perfectly and nobody bothered to question his regime. Nobody at least until a young lawyer named Alexie Navalny enters the scene and starts a movement that turns Putin’s system upside down. 

Navalny started writing a blog on corruption in 2006. Over the years he exposed several corruption schemes taking place in Russia. A major one was about money laundering the state-owned transportation company named Transneft. He claimed that over $4 billion was laundered from the company and that he had proof for these claims. Navalny stated that he bought stocks of the company and was able to access information regarding the spendings of the company. He noticed that the company was transferring money into offshore accounts and shell corporations. The article exposing the scandal caught the attention of the people. It was the first time that anything of this scale had been brought to the spotlight. This article was one of many that the young lawyer wrote exposing several corrupt land deals, state-owned bank frauds, and money laundering schemes. 

Alexei Navalny was on the road to show the Russian people exactly how their government worked and this scared Kremlin. The following year in 2011, people took to the streets in a protest organized by Alexei Navalny and his supporters against the re-election of the Putin government despite the massive reports of voter fraud. This was the first of many protests to come of this magnitude. The media which was controlled by the government turned a blind eye to these protests despite the police arresting over a thousand people. The government went after those who organized these protests until Alexei Navalny was the last man standing. 

Over the next few years, Alexei Navalny gained a public reputation for exposing the government and conducting protests. With the public on his side, Navalny ran for the office of mayor of Moscow in 2013. The state-controlled media didn’t provide Navalny with coverage. Thus he relied on rallies, online campaigns, and a large number of volunteers to pass his message. Before the elections, however, the government arrested him on embezzlement charges. Although Navalny did get out on bail, he didn’t win the elections. He went back to using his online presence to expose the Russian government. 

Alexei Navalny’s online campaigns led to another protest against the government after which he decided to run against Putin for President. Navalny was disqualified based on previous embezzlement charges, which led to another round of protests. These protests and campaigns continued for a while with no major changes. Until 2018 when Alexei Navalny came up with a system to take down Putin, a system he called “Smart Voting”. In Russia, the votes against the United Russia party are split between several smaller candidate parties. Alexei Navalny brought up the system of “Smart Voting” where he picked one candidate and everyone in the nation would vote against Putin for that candidate. This would take Putin out of the office, and threatened to drop down the system built by Putin that was as fragile as a house of cards. 

Novichok- Soviet Nerve Agent

On 20 August 2020, Alexei Navalny was flying from Tomsk to Moscow. When he got on the flight. Everything seemed all right until they were midway into the flight when he collapsed. The flight rerouted and landed on Omsk to get medical help. Navalny was hospitalized in Omsk where his blood was taken for sampling. The doctor stated that there was no conclusion from the blood tests and that it was natural causes. Things started getting very suspicious when Navalny was put into a medically-induced coma in the ICU and government officials turned up not allowing his family to go inside the unit. 

Over the next few days, the Cinema for Peace Foundation helped get Navalny on a plane to Berlin where his blood was tested again. The results showed that Navalny had been poisoned with a Soviet/Russian nerve agent named “novichok”. The agent is used only by the Russian forces to take out spies. After recovery, Navalny returns to Russia to face Putin face-to-face. Unsurprisingly, as soon as Alexei Navalny reached the Moscow airport, he was arrested because he did not turn up for a set of parole charges made up by the Russian government. 

Poisoning the only actual opposition party leader of the government is a new low, even for Putin. Russian crowds took to the streets on a protest of a scale larger than any Russia had seen before. Alexei Navalny might never be president of Russia. However, he has managed to start a movement much larger than him, and in doing so has become the thorn in the heart of the Kremlin.