{"id":9932,"date":"2021-01-18T17:27:06","date_gmt":"2021-01-18T17:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=151430"},"modified":"2021-01-18T17:27:06","modified_gmt":"2021-01-18T17:27:06","slug":"take-to-the-streets-with-call-for-protests-navalny-throws-down-gauntlet-to-kremlin-and-russian-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/01\/18\/take-to-the-streets-with-call-for-protests-navalny-throws-down-gauntlet-to-kremlin-and-russian-society\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Take To The Streets’: With Call For Protests, Navalny Throws Down Gauntlet To Kremlin \u2014 And Russian Society"},"content":{"rendered":"
For more than a decade, Aleksei Navalny has been one of President Vladimir Putin\u2019s most outspoken and influential critics in Russia, investigating high-level corruption, organizing protests, and traveling across the country to back opposition candidates in regional elections and nurture his network of political activists.<\/p>\n
\n\nNavalny\u2019s arrest has failed to rouse the population as a whole.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n
Authorities have responded with a campaign of near-constant harassment, jailing the Kremlin critic almost a dozen times<\/a> since 2011, repeatedly raiding the offices of his Anti-Corruption Foundation, and — Navalny asserts — staging an attempted assassination by means of poisoning that led to his extended convalescence in Germany since August.<\/p>\n
When he announced he would return to Russia on January 17, authorities made clear their intention to jail the Kremlin critic. That evening, Navalny was detained at the airport after arrival and taken to a police station outside Moscow, where he appeared before an improvised courtroom and a state prosecutor asked the judge to jail him pending a separate hearing on whether he violated the terms of his earlier parole.<\/p>\n
But striking footage from the previous evening continued to circulate online, showing riot police dispersing and detaining Navalny supporters as they awaited his expected arrival at Moscow\u2019s Vnukovo airport, and cars being blocked from exiting the area once news emerged that his flight was being rerouted to another airport, Sheremetyevo.<\/p>\n
\n\n\n[The Kremlin] fears the man with no name.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n
The Kremlin has denied involvement in the August poisoning —despite evidence from open-source investigations<\/a> that it was carried out by the Federal Security Service (FSB) — and has gone out of its way to downplay Navalny’s significance as a politician, with Putin calling him \u201cthe Berlin patient\u201d and \u201cthe man in question\u201d to avoid even uttering his name. But the scenes sparked by Navalny\u2019s repatriation, analysts say, expose the very real challenge he presents for the Kremlin and the reasons why authorities have moved so fast to jail him.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Kremlin has shown that for all its pretense of disinterest, it fears the man with no name,\u201d Russia expert Mark Galeotti wrote in a column.<\/a><\/p>\n
Navalny has made a name for himself despite facing what is arguably the Russian state\u2019s most powerful political weapon: a network of state-controlled TV channels that are well-funded, often take cues directly from the Kremlin, and have baselessly painted him as a Western agent. A September poll<\/a> by the independent Levada Center found that a majority of Russians see his poisoning as a publicity stunt, with only 15 percent blaming the Kremlin, despite the evidence of its complicity.<\/p>\n