RUSSIALINK: “Essential Reading: ‘Navalny: Putin’s Nemesis, Russia’s Future?’; The first English-language book about Russia’s most famous modern dissident” – Moscow Times

File Photo of Alexei Navalny Marching on Street with Others in Background; adapted from image at commons.wikimedia.org with credit to Evgeny Feldman, subject to Creative Commons license; original image at commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FEV_1795_(cropped1).jpg, with license information at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en and creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode

(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Felix Light – Aug. 29, 2021)

Alexei Navalny is a complex and contradictory figure. A Russian opposition leader banned from the ballot for almost a decade; a muckraking exposer of corruption in a country without a free press; a protest leader whose popular appeal remains limited. A new book seeks to demystify Russia’s most famous modern dissident, delving into the life and career of Navalny and the movement that he built.

“Navalny: Putin’s Nemesis, Russia’s Future?” hardly needs to justify itself. Even as Navalny’s decade-long dual with the Russian state entered its most dramatic phase in January and February this year — with Navalny returning to Russia after having survived a suspected Novichok poisoning and unmasking one of his would-be assassins via prank call from German exile — there was no English-language book on the opposition leader’s career. This book arrives to fill the gap, written by three authors who are all academics with a focus on Russian politics.

The three authors — Ben Noble of UCL, the University of Kent’s Morvan Lallouet and Jan Matti Dollbaum of the University of Bremen — have not written a biography in the conventional sense. Instead, Navalny the man is chopped into three roughly even-sized, chapter-length components, each with a distinct set of roots stretching back into the opposition leader’s formative years.

First is the anti-corruption activist who makes his name by buying up shares and dredging up graft in big public corporations before graduating on to blockbuster exposes of the lifestyles of oligarchs, prime ministers and — ultimately — President Vladimir Putin himself.

Next comes the politician, a youthful shock therapist whose disillusionment with the unevenly shared fruits of economic reform see him drift from center-left liberalism to hard-right nationalism, before alighting on a catch-all populism that sees him banned from electoral politics after coming close to upsetting the Kremlin’s candidate for Moscow mayor in 2013.

Last we have the protestor, the charismatic rabblerouser at the forefront of the 2011-12 protests against election rigging, who leveraged that experience into creating a genuinely nationwide opposition movement. The protests over Navalny’s imprisonment in the spring of this year were the largest in geographical reach in more than a century.

This series of winding tours through Navalny’s life and times does a fine job of presenting an account of the various different contexts that have shaped Navalny’s political trajectory.

In their title, the authors set out to answer the question of whether Navalny might be Russia’s future. As it happens, events this year have provided an even more definitive answer than that provided in the book. Few could have anticipated how ruthlessly — and how successfully — the Kremlin has smashed, criminalized and sidelined Navalny and his movement. Half a year since his return home, it is harder than ever to imagine that the man in the IK-2 penal colony might yet be Russia’s future.

Excerpt from Chapter Two of “Navalny: Putin’s Nemesis, Russia’s Future?”: The Anti-Corruption Activist.”

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