Of all of Russia's opposition leaders, none have posed a bigger threat to the government of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin than the blogger and activist Alexei Navalny. A lawyer by training and a nationalist by conviction, Navalny, 35, has been at the forefront of the demonstrations that shook awake the Russian body politic last month, bringing tens of thousands of protesters onto the streets of Moscow for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union. A few days after the third and biggest demonstration on Dec. 24, when Navalny addressed a crowd of 100,000 people in Moscow, TIME's Simon Shuster caught up with him at a courthouse, where he was arguing a case for greater transparency at Russia's largest oil company, Rosneft. He drove back to his office afterward, where he runs a small legal firm, to continue discussing his plans for toppling Putin's government.
Before the recent wave of opposition protests, you were best known as an activist against corruption. But you've said that you had your eye on politics the whole time. How are these two aspects of your work connected?
I've always seen my campaigns against corruption as political work of a purer form than what opposition leaders usually do. All they do is hold roundtables and release political statements, which is all well and good. But there are concrete things that need to get done in order to achieve the basic goal of every opposition politician. That goal is to replace the people in power by putting pressure on the regime. One way to do that is to release political statements and appear on the radio. Another way is to file lawsuits against corrupt state corporations. I take the second approach. And it's very important to carry this through to the end, because my political work needs to always have new substance to it. Everyone needs to understand that my work addresses existing problems, and one of the crucial problems in Russia today is corruption. (See photos of massive protests in Moscow.)
Many observers have been quick to compare last month's demonstrations to the Arab Spring. Is this the way you envision it? Will Moscow have a revolution like the one on Kiev's Maidan Square in 2004? The one on Tahrir Square in Cairo last year? Or something else?
What we need is a peaceful scenario. Both Maidan and Tahrir were peaceful. Maidan was absolutely peaceful, Tahrir saw some unrest but was still peaceful on the whole. At this point, the authorities need to understand that they can prevent a Maidan by meeting our demands. If they don't, then we will continue to see peaceful protests in the streets. This is nothing new. Gandhi did it in his day, as did Martin Luther King. It's a time-tested method. The people come out onto the streets. They don't go fighting anyone or burning cars. They just stand there. Humanity has this historical experience of fighting injustice and tyranny. The way to proceed is by using this experience.
Who or what finally brought Russians out onto the streets after years of political apathy?
The mood of defiance brought them out. This is impossible to organize or orchestrate. I can't organize it because the people don't listen to me. When I worked at Yabloko [a liberal political party, where Navalny was an activist between 2002 and '07], we would try to organize a rally and 500 people showed up. But now there is a wave rising. Some people can claim to stand at the cusp of this wave, and yes, they can stand at the podium and address the crowds. But they didn't make this wave. Putin was the one who made this revolution. By falsifying the elections [on Dec. 4], Putin brought these people onto the streets. If he hadn't rigged the [parliamentary vote on Dec. 4] in Moscow, nothing would have happened. But no, they tried to bust through at the joint and ended up insulting so many people that there was a backlash. The people went into the streets. This is a natural reaction for any person. This has been happening for hundreds and thousands of years. They came out and said, 'That's it. No. We don't want this anymore. We want to do things differently.'
See photos of protests and counterprotests in Russia.
The Kremlin has started offering concessions in response to the protests. For one, it has proposed a law making it easier to register political parties. You've said that you want to create a party of your own. What will be the structure of this party and its political priorities?
Our goal is to make a party that is massive, effective and cheap. The last point is not the least important. We just don't have any money. We need to use new technologies, first of all the Internet, for the practical functions of the party, like a reconstituted Facebook. Many people call it Democracy 2.0. I'm a lobbyist and fanatic of this system. It should allow people to register online and verify their identities through a bank card or by some other means, and then let them take part in [the party's] decisionmaking, voting and so on. This gives a guarantee that everyone votes, that there is no vote rigging, that everything is open and there is legitimacy. This does not mean that the party is virtual and not real. In the present day, the split between the virtual and real worlds is irrelevant. The protest on Bolotnaya Square [on Dec. 10], was it real or virtual? Yes, it was organized by virtual means, on Facebook. But I think it was more than real enough. (Read "Occupy the Kremlin: Russia's Election Lets Loose Public Rage.")
But half of the Russian population does not have Internet access. Would your party just ignore them?
Every party looks for its own constituency. I can rely on people in big cities, where there is plenty of Internet penetration. Of course, I would like to attract people from villages, but I don't have money for that. What we do have already is a pool of millions of people we can reach through the Internet. We can reach them efficiently and on a daily basis. Sure, I would love to go talk to every grandma who lives in some village in the Ryazam region, but I don't have that possibility. You can only reach such people through television, but we don't control the television channels. So it's pointless to even talk about.
Nationalism has always been at the core of your politics. You have called for tight control of immigration, for the right to bear arms, and you have said that the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, a group banned last year for extremism and hate speech, is "as harmless as the girl scouts." Will your party represent these values? Will it be a nationalist party?
Consistency for me is everything. I am not ready to back away from my views. With age, everyone forms certain core principles, and I have a basic stand on the main issues. I only see one problem with my views. Maybe I didn't explain them clearly enough. That means I will keep explaining them, because people aren't afraid of my views. They are afraid of the word nationalism. (Read "Russia: The Revolution Will Be Tweeted and Facebooked and YouTubed.")
By necessity, we have no other way to refer to these views but as nationalism. The problem is that people associate this word with some abstract nationalist menace. But when people talk about the nationalism of Navalny, we're talking about very simple things. I support limits on illegal immigration, including through visa requirements for visitors from Central Asia. When you enter the U.S., you need to give fingerprints. Yes? Yes. Did the U.S. build a wall on the border with Mexico? Yes, it did. And Obama voted for that wall. So how is my position on immigration more nationalistic than even the Democrats in the U.S.? Few American politicians would step out in support of visa-free travel with all of Latin America. But we have a visa-free system with Central Asia. And when it comes to arms control, yes, I think that arms should be more accessible to our citizens. At home I have two rifles, and do I go shooting people out my window? No. We have hundreds of thousands of hunting weapons in circulation, and the number of crimes committed with legally registered guns is minimal, microscopic.
But any crook in the country knows where to buy a gun. You go to Chechnya and buy an automatic for 3,000 rubles. This agenda is not even part of the radical right. It is a standard position, often held for instance in the U.S. mainstream. I wouldn't say this is a populist position at all. More likely the majority of citizens would not support it. And when it comes to the [Movement Against Illegal Immigration], I'm not saying they're sweet guys. I'm saying they are all different. They are marginals because they have been pushed underground. But if they are the ones talking about illegal immigration, our goal is to make sure illegal immigration is not only discussed in the radical underground, but in the political mainstream. Our goal is to bring this discussion out of the context of beating the crap out of the all the immigrants and into the framework of imposing visas, ensuring that [immigrants] have insurance, ensuring they are paid a minimum wage, and everything else that exist in other countries.
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The movement you are helping to lead poses a serious threat to the people in power. Moreover, you have said that you want to put Putin and his circle on trial if they are deposed. If push comes to shove, they could respond with force to defend their authority. Are you ready for bloodshed if that's the direction it goes?
Do I want bloodshed? No, I don't. But am I ready for the possibility that force will be used against us? Yes, I am ready. Any politician who fights with our corrupt regime needs to be ready for that. If he's not ready, he's got no place here. The battle here has certain terms. [The state] opened a criminal case against me a year and a half ago. I knew this would happen, and it happened. I knew they could arrest me for 15 days at a protest, and they did [on Dec. 5]. But that's part of life. We are in a political situation where a person can be put in jail for nothing. So that's what we're fighting against. And the fact is, you shouldn't go walking in the woods if you're afraid of the wolves. (See how corruption and abuse of power are threatening Russia's economy.)
But in your speeches to the crowds last month, you took a very provocative tone, as if to goad the authorities. You said from the podium that you would "chew through the throats of those animals," referring to Putin's United Russia party, which you call "the party of crooks and thieves." You said that the protesters are ready to "take the Kremlin now." Why do you say this if you want a peaceful scenario?
I say this because it's true -- we can take the Kremlin now. But we're not going to because we're a peaceful people. We simply have to demonstrate our strength. Everything we're doing amounts to nothing without posing a potential threat. These people who gathered are totally peaceful, they don't want a fight. But potentially, if their rights are ignored, they can do a lot. And that threat is the driving force of reform. If [the authorities] understand that people are gathering just to make political demands, to take part in flash mobs and take pictures with each other, they'll say, 'Big deal. So a few thousand of them got together and took pictures arm-in-arm.' But who's afraid of them? Nobody. So we need to make clear that these people came out because the government doesn't work anymore. They demand change and they will continue to demand it. We need to make clear that there is a palpable threat. It exists. We can take the Kremlin now.
Your favorite political weapon has always been the Internet. Why did you choose this approach?
Well, this all came out of necessity. It wasn't that we were so tricky that we came up with the Internet. It's that the Internet is all we have. The only difference is some politicians were inclined to evolution, and others weren't. Those [others] couldn't adapt to the Internet. They kept saying, 'We demand access to television. Give us one hour of airtime, and we'll change everything.' But anything less than television wasn't good enough for them. I had a different approach. I understood that I'll never be on television. Nobody will give me airtime. I have no money. I have no oligarch friends, and don't have any particular desire to make oligarch friends. So the only thing I had to count on were my concrete abilities, like the North Korean motto: Rely only on yourself. And I developed my own methods. I did what I could. I started filing lawsuits [against state corporations] and telling people about it online. This all looked marginal and funny. But with time my audience grew. And now my blog has more readers than most newspapers have. There are 1.5 million unique views on my blog per month. It just grew over time. And it grew mostly because of the fact that there is no freedom of information. People don't get free and objective information. So they go to find it on the Internet. If the things I write in my blog were to be said on television and written about in the broadsheets, then nobody would need me or the Internet. But you can't say these things on television, so when I began saying them on the Internet, I had a sort of exclusive. And when people went online to find some information, they came to hear my exclusive. This was the only free place for discussion and information available. (See the top 10 Twitter controversies.)
Still, this online community has stayed online until only the past month or so, when they started attending street protests en masse. You have explained this shift as something called the 76-82 effect, referring to the Russians born, like yourself, between 1976 and 1982. Can you explain this theory?
This is the Moscow baby boom. And it has come of age. Actually, the name 76-82 comes from an insanely popular community on Livejournal [Russia's most popular blogging site], called 76-82, where people write about memories that they share with people from this generation. Things like, I don't know, chewing gum, movies, the Communist youth camps of a very particular sort, at the end of the Soviet Union, in the late '70s and '80s, where the kids were still technically [Communist Young] Pioneers, but nobody really believed in the [Soviet] system anymore. There are tons of these people. They are the biggest generation of working-age Russians, and they got stuck somewhere between the Soviet Union and modern-day Russia.
They are now taking up more and more positions in society and have developed firm political views. A huge number of these people have now had the opportunity to travel, to go to the Czech Republic, to Germany, wherever, and to realize that we could live this way too. So they start asking themselves, Why can't we live like they do? What's the reason? There is no objective reason. On the contrary, there are reasons why we should live even better. But we don't. People don't like this. So for this generation, the anti-American and anti-Western rhetoric doesn't work nearly as well as for the rest. The main thing that Putin and his gang maniacally use to fight the opposition is that we are all some kind of American-funded monsters. But people understand that this is a load of crap. Sure, Americans have their interests. But the people of this generation, they understand that our existence is not defined as a conflict between East and West.
Read "Twenty Years After Independence, Russia Is in No Mood to Party."
Some pundits, supporters and even random people on the street have started calling you Russia's next President. How do you react to this kind of excitement around you? Is it justified?
When the opposition parties were voted out of the State Duma [Russia's lower house of parliament] in the 2003 elections, it created a situation where it was impossible to judge who is popular. This process of comparing pricks at the ballot box is usually done, in a healthy society, through elections. But we haven't had competitive elections in Russia in years. Since 2003 I've watched various attempts to choose some opposition leader who can pose a challenge to Putin. But they couldn't choose one, because there is no mechanism. They use subjective criteria. They say, 'Well, I used to be a minister. I used to be a Prime Minister. I'm loved by the intellectuals.' But this is pointless. I've long said that we need to hold some kind of primaries, where the opposition leaders can decide who among them really has the mandate of the people. At the same time, a lot of [other opposition leaders] don't like the Navalny cult of personality. There's a lot of buzz around me right now, mostly because the political playing field has been stomped flat over the past 10 years. I don't like that myself, because it's impossible to always be this Internet hero. Everyone loving you can change quickly into everyone demanding that you make miracles, and when you don't, their love quickly turns to hate. (See photos of a country house in the former Soviet Union.)
Your oratory style has not done a lot to ease the concerns of many in the liberal opposition that you are a right-wing fanatic. Why do you continue to speak that way every time you take the stage?
I don't know if I even have an oratory style. It's more like loud screaming into a microphone. I never studied it, and that's the only way I know how to do it. But it's true, suddenly [the pundit] Maxim Sokolov goes writing that this is how Hitler addressed the crowd. Well, what can I say? I know some people got scared. Sure, I screamed loud. I got too emotional, but what can I say? I really hate the people in power. I hate them with every fiber of my being. That's what drives me in almost everything I do. And I don't see any need to hide that. So I scream.
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