An Interior Ministry officer removes handcuffs from Russian protest leader Alexei Navalny during a court session in Kirov, July 19, 2013. REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin
In a turnabout that is somehow not the least surprising, Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader sentenced to jail-time Thursday for trumped-up embezzlement charges, was freed pending appeal less than 24 hours later, and not because authorities have changed their mind about him.
Instead, this is pure politics: the mayoral campaign Navalny was contesting in Moscow would appear illegitimate if he does not participate. Protests that broke out Thursday could also explain the shift, though Vladimir Putin is not known for bowing to popular expressions of discontent. Rather, it appears incumbent Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, who has previously gone out of his way to ensure Navalny qualified for the contest by helping him gather the necessary support from municipal officials, doesn’t want his victory to be stained. Indeed, Sobyanin is a Putin appointee from Siberia who appears to be intent on earning his local street cred.
Navalny, ever the showman, was stunned to be awoken this morning and given at least temporary freedom.
“I request that you verify the identity of Prosecutor Sergei Bogdanov,” he said in the courtroom, joking that this could not be the same man previously on a crusade to silence him.
But the mayoral election generally is now a form of political theater, one that Putin, sensitive to his approval ratings and the fact that Navalny backers are not quite so few as to be totally dismissed, knows he must pull off to keep things on the right track. Navalny has no shot at overcoming Sobyanin’s (apparently real) popularity as a liberal friend of the Kremlin — his nationalist sentiments are not that popular in the city — but the campaign will offer an extended public platform for him to make a furious case against the status quo. He’s unlikely to arouse much popular support but if he does make a strong showing, one has to suspect that makes it tougher to justify jail-time. A suspended sentence might still be in the offing (to avoid martyrdom), but so long as he has access to his Twitter account, Navalny will be a force in public life. For a few more weeks, at least, Russia has a bonafide opposition leader, and in that sense, Navalny has won a small victory here.
Looking ahead, Navalny would seem to have established something of a positive brand in the face of official media reports that have mostly ignored or denigrated him. If and when he gets past the immediate legal troubles, Putin may have to find a way to deal with him more conclusively.
