Russia.Post, October 25, 2024
The launch of Alexei Navalny’s posthumous book Patriot just about coincided with the announcement by his widow, Yulia, that she will run for president post-Putin. This coincided with conflicts between Russian opposition groups. The question of the fate of Alexei Navalny's political capital is becoming especially acute today.The original text was published in Russian in the Moscow Times. We are publishing a shortened version here with the authors’ permission.
The launch of Alexei Navalny’s posthumous book Patriot just about coincided with the announcement by his widow, Yulia, that she will run for president post-Putin.
Yulia admits that she is a political newbie, her own political path beginning just this year. Thus, there is no point in taking ratings of her as a politician or predicting her prospects at this point.
It is hard to imagine a woman leading today’s masculine Russia. Apart from Ekaterina Duntsova, try to recall another female name in the Russian political space in recent years.
Even simple women’s solidarity is lacking. The movement of wives and mothers of men mobilized for Ukraine was swiftly suppressed: their calls to bring home their husbands and sons failed to meet with mass support from other wives and mothers. In addition, elderly women represent a core Putin electorate. They are further proof that society is not ready to see a woman as Russia’s leader.
Thus, any political ambitions demonstrated by women, especially at the presidential level, is a challenge to the current regime’s foundations and values. Still, they can yield unexpected results: the campaign of Ekaterina Duntsova at the beginning of the year (along with Boris Nadezhdin’s – Russia.Post wrote about the opposition candidates here) briefly activated and brought out of the shadows the antiwar part of society, leading to lower support for the special military operation and higher support for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine and a transition to peace talks.
“Yulia Navalnaya, illuminated by the respect and admiration of Alexei, became a symbol of his memory and even of irrational hope in the moment of grief caused by his death.”
Now, she finds herself at the center of political expectations. It seems that she senses her responsibility and is trying to live up to them.
There are no free and fair presidential elections happening in Russia anytime soon. Thus, Yulia’s remark about running for president is not a specific plan for 2030 but rather a declaration of her intent to participate in Russian political life. And it has been very effective: the media has been buzzing for days, with a pickup in bot attacks on Yulia’s online posts offering further confirmation.
The presence of Yulia Navalnaya in the public space, along with the activity of other leaders and Alexei’s hundreds of thousands of supporters, who stand ready to continue his work when freer conditions permit, will serve as a reminder of him and therefore his ideas and aspirations. Russia will not be able to forget him.
‘Politician number two’
Alexei’s political activity was the first of its kind in Russia: he investigated and exposed corruption in videos watched by millions, ran for Moscow mayor in 2013, ran for president in 2017-18, created a nationwide network of “Navalny headquarters,” brought out thousands of people to protest and had the book thrown at him by the Kremlin. All this made him the most famous politician in Russia and the face of the Russian opposition across the world. Navalny is still referred to as “politician number two,” behind the irremovable Putin.
At the pollster Komkon, where your authors worked in Russia, we observed the 2013 Moscow mayoral election and witnessed Navalny’s enormous potential as a federal-level politician. Even though on trial in the infamous Kirovles case, Navalny, along with his team, ran an exceptionally effective and successful campaign.
In less than three months of campaigning and without access to broadcast media, Navalny managed to rise from 4% in the polls initially to 27% at the ballot box (officially). The Kremlin gave assurances that the election would be fair but was forced to use so-called “administrative levers” to win it. (Here and below, the data is from ExtremeScan unless otherwise noted).
It was truly the fairest election campaign in the history of modern Russia. Experts from the election monitor Golos found the 2013 Moscow mayoral election to be “unusually fair” but still called for Sergei Sobyanin’s victory to be verified by a special public commission.
Since Navalny had been predicted to garner 2% of the vote – mostly marginalized voters – the 27% that he actually received came as a shock, after which the authorities stopped letting independent candidates on the ballot, even in municipal elections.
In all subsequent elections, especially after the success of the Smart Voting strategy put forward by Navalny’s team for the 2018 elections, Kremlin political strategists (polittekhnologi) were on the lookout for any alternative candidates.
Campaigning for the Russia of the future, Navalny spoke the language of the youth, yet it was not only young Russians whom he inspired to action, but also progressive “adults.”
In 2017-18, Navalny organized large-scale protests across Russia against corruption and the entrenchment of the regime. The share of Russians who recognized his name soared from 7% in 2011 to 56% in 2017. Realizing the threat, the Kremlin launched a “special sociological operation”: survey agencies, on instructions from the Kremlin, began a large study of Russians’ attitudes toward Navalny’s activities.
“The Kremlin would use the findings of state pollsters to assess the threat posed by the opposition leader. Deeming the threat to be great, the authorities sicced the security services and state propaganda on Navalny.”
But Navalny’s fame continued to grow. He took second place in an April 2021 Levada Center survey where Russians were asked to name well-known contemporaries who inspired others with their example and activism.
The Kremlin’s campaign against Navalny did not stop even when he was in solitary confinement. Today, we see the results of that campaign in survey results. In a February 2024 study by OpenMinds, which tracks narratives in traditional and social media, 38% of Russians, parroting state propaganda, considered Navalny a “puppet of the West,” 37% associated his name with the fight against corruption, 26% with human rights, the same number with “treason” (predatel’stvo) and 25% with liberalism (the share of other responses is significantly less).
Levada Center respondents who did not approve of his activities, when asked to explain why, put his “selling out to the West” at the top of the list (22%), with answers like “he was paid by the West,” “he voiced their interests” and “he was a foreign agent, a traitor, a puppet.”
In contrast to these propaganda tropes, those who approved of Navalny’s activities used simple, “personal” language to explain why (“he told the truth,” “he was honest, direct,” “he fought with bureaucrats,” “he was a man’s man,” “he was charismatic,” “he knew his stuff”).
The ghost of Navalny
For many years, the authorities had tried to discredit Navalny, but when he returned to Russia in January 2021 (after being poisoned and recovering abroad), they finally cut him off from the world and did everything to make him forgotten. Yet Navalny remained the most famous politician in Russia, by a wide margin.
On February 16, 2024, he died in prison.
Right after this and amid the presidential race, on February 19-22, we asked respondents whether they would vote for Navalny if he were on the ballot.
Of the 85% who knew who he was, 12% said they would give him their vote. The figure rose to 22% among those under 30 years old and 17% among those whose financial situation had gotten worse over the last year. In the Northwestern Federal District, 19% were ready to vote for Navalny – St Petersburg has always been a relative bastion of opposition.
Still, the headline 12% marked the starting point for a deceased politician who had been officially declared a criminal, terrorist and extremist and deprived of the opportunity to speak to voters for two years – this was more support than Navalny sometimes received back when he was alive and running for office.
Forty-four percent of those against the Ukraine war said they would vote for Navalny.
Navalny’s death caused a stir in Russia and around the world. Within four days, 73% of Russians knew about it, of whom 22% (or 16% of all Russians) called it an important event. Among those under 30 and among opponents of the war, that figure was higher, at 34% and 65%, respectively.
Tens of thousands came to the farewell in Moscow and spontaneous ceremonies across Russia, despite the risks, which state propaganda did its part to inflate. Memorials appeared in many countries. Russian emigrants said goodbye to Navalny and expressed their solidarity with mourning compatriots.
But let’s be honest: not all of Russia said goodbye to Navalny.
Very few Russians expressed “positive” feelings over his death (5% of those who were aware of it reported “satisfaction” in our survey, with the same number in a survey by the Levada Center).
“The most common reaction to Navalny’s death was indifference.”
These 48% (of those who had heard the news) are the same people who often say “I am not interested in politics.” Another 18% had no “special feelings” about the event (also see our publication “Who is bidding farewell to Alexei Navalny”).
OpenMinds said: “a significant portion of respondents did not express any negative emotions regarding Navalny’s death.” The Levada Center reported that 69% of all respondents, or 55% of those who knew about the event, did not experience “any special feelings.”
Respondents to the OpenMinds study did not expect any rapid changes in Russia following Navalny’s death. Only 10% in the overall sample thought it might lead to political instability in Russia, while 8% saw the possibility of the opposition’s being defeated as a result and 10% supposed the opposition might unite in response.
The ‘other Russia’
Navalny had spoken of a final battle between good and neutrality. Can we say that he lost? To judge by the politically anemic, indifferent majority in Russia, the answer is yes.
That is not news, however. For a long time now, the largest segment of the country has not been the “party of evil” but rather the army of silence and nonparticipation. It was them that Alexei Navalny tried to reach when he contrasted good with indifference.
There is very much overlap between Navalny’s grieving “electorate,” our respondents who say “I do not support the special operation in Ukraine,” voters who queued to get the antiwar Nadezhdin on the ballot, and many emigrants. This is the “dissenting minority,” but it turns into millions and millions of people when projected onto the whole population of Russia.
Mourning and remembering Navalny marks one as belonging to the segment of society that constitutes the “other Russia.”