Alexei Navalny, a persistent thorn in the side of Russian President Vladimir Putin, died on Feb. 16, 2024, in prison, authorities said.
Long lines of Russians endured subzero temperatures in January 2024 to demand that anti-Ukraine war candidate Boris Nadezhdin be allowed to run in the forthcoming presidential election. It was protest by petition – a tactic that reflects the legacy of Alexei Navalny, the longtime Russian pro-democracy campaigner. Authorities say Navalny, a persistent thorn in the side of Russian President Vladimir Putin, died in prison on Feb. 16, 2024.
That effort to protest the election seems all the more poignant following Navalny’s death. It reflected the heart of a strategy that Navalny developed over more than a decade and that I have written about since 2011. Navalny emerged as a political force in 2011, when he kicked off a large national protest movement ahead of the 2012 parliamentary election by labeling Putin’s United Russia the “Party of Crooks and Thieves.” He held contests to create memes to illustrate the slogan and mobilized voters who did not support Putin’s party.
Navalny won almost 30% of the vote – double that expected – and claimed that the only reason Putin’s hand-picked candidate, Sergei Sobyanin, had got above the 50% needed to secure a first-round victory was due to a falsified vote. These interviews underscored Navalny’s relationship with the people. Many of the volunteers rejected the idea that they were working for him. Instead, they were volunteering because they admired Navalny’s tactics. They liked his political style. They wanted change in Russia.
Research by Russian scholars Mikhail Turchenko and Grigorii Golosov shows that the tool has had a very significant effect on voters and increasing turnout, opposition votes and popular attention on elections. These protests inspired a new generation of activists. They also marked new levels of police brutality against pro-democracy demonstrators in the streets and in the years since.
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