On August 19, 2020, Russian politician, Alexei Navalny was shooting this campaign video.
He was in Siberia.
One of the many places where, in about 3 weeks, there would be local and regional elections.
But he wasn’t running for office.
He was urging people to vote out the ruling party, United Russia, led by the president,
Vladimir Putin.
He’s made many videos like this before and they usually rack up millions of views.
It’s this ability to reach people via the internet that has helped make Navalny the
face of Russia's opposition movement.
Soon after making his case in Siberia, he got on a plane bound for Moscow.
But the plane was suddenly diverted to Omsk.
Navalny had been poisoned.
And collapsed on the plane.
An investigation later revealed that he had been poisoned with Novichok, a highly-toxic
nerve agent, that was developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s.
It was also used, likely by Russia in 2018 to attack Sergei Skirpal, a former spy.
Navalny survived the assassination attempt and set off a movement unlike any in recent
history.
So how did he do it?
And why is he such a big threat to Putin?
On December 31, 1999, Putin became the President of Russia.
The Soviet Union had collapsed just 8 years earlier and the new Russian Federation was
slowly transitioning to democracy.
Previously, Putin had been a spy in the Soviet KGB and head of the Russian security service.
Roles that shaped how he wanted to govern as President.
So, he was trying to remake Russia in the image of the KGB.
Like if everything in the world could be as centralized, insular, and secretive as the
KGB, it would work well.
So in order to maximize his control, Putin surrounded himself with the most powerful
elements in Russia.
Starting with the media.
Police were sent into Russia’s independent media companies, charging their owners, and
bringing newsrooms under state control.
After federal television, it went on to regional television and then, it went to print newspapers.
It was like a flesh eating machine.
Whatever it could see that was functioning independently, it would gobble up next.
This hid Putin’s actions from the public so he was able to go after another powerful
element - Russia’s elections.
His regime manipulated who could run for office.
And that typically meant Putin’s party and a few fake candidates, sanctioned by the regime.
This was designed to splinter the opposition vote.
And on top of that,
The vote counting is rigged.
Meaning that it was nearly impossible to run against Putin or his party.
And that United Russia had control of the central and local governments all across the country.
But politicians weren’t the only threat to Putin.
He also went after Russia's oligarchs and their prominent friends to weed out some powerful
critics.
In the early 2000s, most of Russia’s wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few, very
powerful men.
Putin protected those that swore loyalty to him.
And those who didn't were either arrested on trumped up charges or mysteriously killed.
So, the most common way to get rid of somebody.
Is to bring them up on embezzlement charges.
Former Russian oil tycoon, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has been found guilty of embezzlement.
Russian tycoon, Boris Berezovsky, convicted of embezzlement.
A former Russian business man, he was accused of embezzling money, Nikolay Glushkov, the
cause of death is still unexplained.
That's how the judiciary is weaponized.
With the law on his side, within a decade, Putin insulated himself with the most powerful
elements on all sides.
And it was all held together by corruption.
Corruption is a structural feature of the regime.
It's not an inefficiency of the regime.
It's not a drag on the regime.
It's the core of the regime.
According to a report, over $400 billion were lost to corruption in Russia between 2000
and 2008.
But because Putin controlled the media, much of it was hidden.
Until a young lawyer named Alexei Navalny found a way to change that.
In 2006, Navalny started a blog where he wrote about corruption.
In 2010, he wrote that at least $4 billion was stolen out of the state-owned transportation
company, Transneft.
And he had proof.
He had bought stock in the company and was able to access internal documents
that plainly showed how government money was funneled into offshore accounts owned
by Transneft officials.
And this was just the beginning.
Navalny soon published investigations on corrupt oil schemes, land deals, and fraud at state-owned
banks by Russian oligarchs and politicians.
By posting straight to his blog, Navalny was circumventing state media to reveal corruption
and expose Putin’s regime in a way that Russians had never seen before.
All the while making a name for himself.
Like he thought that corruption was something knowable.
That that you could learn about it, you could systematize it.
And, again, you could take it seriously.
And I said, you know what?
I think we now have an actual politician in this country.
In 2011, huge protests erupted when Putin’s party won a majority in parliament despite
reports of voter fraud.
It was the largest wave of demonstrations Putin’s regime had ever faced.
And Navalny was one of the main organizers.
He was building on his investigations by speaking out publicly against corruption.
State television ignored the protests even as the police arrested more than 1,000 people
and went after the organizers.
One of the other ones was jailed, several were forced into exile, one was murdered,
Boris Nemstov.
And Navalny was the last guy standing.
Over time, he developed a talent for organizing protests and gained a following.
Then in 2013, he ran for mayor of Moscow.
And it stirred some controversy.
He had participated in Russian nationalist marches in the past.
And used ethnic slurs when referring to Russian minorities.
But people were still drawn to the main message of his campaign.
State TV didn’t give his campaign any airtime, so he relied on rallies, online crowdsourcing,
and an army of volunteers to spread the word.
But, just as he was gaining momentum, police arrested him on trumped-up charges of embezzlement
and sentenced him to 5 years in jail.
His supporters flooded the streets in protest.
Navalny was eventually released on bail and didn't win the election.
But, he went on to finish second place.
He continued to expose corruption through Youtube videos.
Like this one, in 2017, on the extreme wealth of Putin's ally, Dmitri Medvedev.
It reached millions and sparked another round of protests.
At the same time, Navalny was running for office again.
This time, against Putin for President.
Predictably, the regime struck back and disqualified him based on the previous embezzlement charges.
Further revealing just how rigged Russia’s laws and elections were.
But in 2020, Navalny found a way to take on the whole electoral system.
He called it Smart-Voting.
Instead of letting the opposition vote splinter among several dummy candidates, Navalny identified
one candidate and urged people to vote for the same one, even if they were backed by
Putin's regime.
It takes an incredible amount of public trust and charisma to get people to
unify behind a meaningless candidate.
But, its true, if you get enough people to do it, it actually can add up to meaningful resistance.
And it terrifies the Kremlin.
During that time, Navalny was the second most popular politician in all of Russia according
to some polls.
While Putin’s favorability ratings were slipping because of a struggling economy.
That made Navalny a threat.
And it explains why he was poisoned, possibly more than once.
Once he was very weirdly ill and once his wife, Yulia, was very weirdly ill.
They were looking for an opportunity, a place and a time and it finally seemed like it was
almost perfect.
But I think they did expect that they would be rid of him by now and they're not.
After the Siberia attack, Navalny recovered in a German hospital where he miraculously
survived.
A few months later, he went back to his investigations.
In December 2020, he tricked the secret agent who poisoned him into revealing how he did
it.
Then, in January, he returned to Russia knowing he would be arrested.
Police met him at the airport, and charged him with violating the parole from his 2014
embezzlement case.
While detained, his team released another video, this one attacking Putin directly.
It’s been viewed over 100 million times.
His supporters flooded the streets in over 100 cities across Russia.
A few days later, Navalny was sentenced to 2 years and 8 months in prison, sparking even
more protests.
Police have arrested more than 5,000 people while state media has downplayed it.
Even though Navalny ended up in prison again, his movement continued to play out on the
streets.
By exposing Putin's regime for a decade, Navalny might have found a way to build a movement
that could outlast his freedom.