Navalny’s day in court: politics and protection

File Photo of Alexei Navalny Being Grabbed by Police at Protest

(Moscow News – Anna Arutunyan, Editor & Correspondent at themoscownews.com – July 8, 2013) With the verdict in opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s trial scheduled for July 18, the bets are on: will he get six years in jail like the prosecutors asked? Or a suspended sentence?

What’s interesting about this question is that the answer has very little to do with the actual charges Navalny is facing. When opposition figures are busted in Russia, the legal aspects of the bust bear increasingly little relevance.

Just take last week’s bribery bust of Yevgeny Urlashov, a man who left the ruling United Russia party in 2011 to become an independent mayor in the city of Yaroslavl in 2012.  Dramatic video footage showed masked men raiding his offices in what looked more like a drug bust than a bribery takedown. If you watched the footage, you came away with a very simple message: “get down on the floor.” That – and not the possibility that a Russian mayor could have accepted a bribe – seemed to be the whole point. Get down on the floor, we’re stronger than you.

In Navalny’s case, the legal aspect of his trial is so complicated that during his fiery closing statements he never once mentioned the embezzlement charges he’s facing. In what sounded more like a campaign speech, Navalny, a lawyer and anti-corruption blogger who emerged during the protest movement of 2011-2012 as its most likely leader and has floated his presidential ambitions, vowed to “destroy this feudal system, which robs you all.”

Meanwhile, the details of the embezzlement case itself – and Navalny’s alleged role in it – are just as indicative of the feudal regime that Navalny’s set out to destroy as that regime’s imprisonment of its foes.

Let’s look at what happened in the Kirov region in 2009. The point isn’t to show that Navalny committed a crime, because the way things are in Russia, any time you sell anything at a profit, you’re committing a potential crime. It’s to show that Navalny was benefitting from the same lord-vassal relationships that he’s out to destroy.

In 2009, Navalny was friends with Kirov region governor Nikita Belykh, a former leader of the SPS liberal opposition party. Belykh did not become governor in an election – instead, he was the recent beneficiary of then-President Dmitry Medvedev’s liberal agenda, which included appointing people like Belykh to powerful posts. But as often happens, Belykh recruited friends to advise him. There’s no crime in that.

Prosecutors allege that Navalny used his friendship with Belykh to force Kirovles, a lumber company, to hire a consultant close to Navaly to sell off timber on the cheap. The reality is you can hardly sell off anything, whether cheaply or not, without personal connections. Is that a crime? Again, it depends on who’s calling the shots.

In the end, Navalny and Belykh had a nasty falling-out – documented in hacked, leaked text messages in which Belykh basically told Navalny that he’s not going to protect him anymore (Belykh has since said the leaked text messages were real).

It’s a shame that Navalny hasn’t been more forthcoming about this episode, and that we know about it from private text messages revealed by a hacker. I don’t necessarily think that Navalny has something to hide, but this entire episode demonstrates that commerce depends entirely on how powerful your connections are.

Do your friends have the muscle to raid someone’s office and yell “get down on the floor?” If the answer is no – commerce is not for you.

Ironically, the best way to fight the “feudal regime” was through Navalny’s anti-corruption drive, his “RosPil” project that took off in 2010, in which he and a team of lawyers exposed state-sanctioned graft. It may have seemed like a gargantuan task, but Navalny was very gradually introducing the possibility of fighting corruption through legal means.

Instead, at some point he decided to take on the Kremlin itself. And as Omar from the TV show The Wire said, “You come at the king, you best not miss.”

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