From increased repression to well-fitting shirts

What did Alexei Navalny bring to modern politics?

A few days ago it became known about the death in the colony of Alexei Navalny, undoubtedly the most famous modern Russian opposition politician. “Verstka” interviewed political strategists and political scientists about how the activities of the deceased oppositionist changed Russian politics.

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“Navalny Cubes”, “Smart Voting” and “RosYama”

Political strategists interviewed by VERSTKA call Alexei Navalny and his team “one of the main innovators” of Russian election campaigns of the last decade. One of them named Navalny’s campaigning in the 2013 Moscow mayoral elections as a “new standard.” “Take the same propaganda cubes. He was not given the opportunity to engage in classic visual propaganda, and he came up with a brilliant solution. Lightweight, cheap, portable structures, yet noticeable and convenient as a place to attract attention. Then this technology was copied by everyone - from United Russia to the Rodina party,” notes a political strategist who worked in those elections.

The second innovation, in his opinion, was Navalny’s district meetings with voters, which also “sharply differed from the classic format” of such speeches. “Volodin also said that the courtyard is a political unit. How was it used before Navalny? United Russia members came and asked: “Where is the best place to put a bench?” “Classical” oppositionists distributed newspapers, came to scold the authorities, and, if resources allowed, they organized something like regional holidays. Roizman was a little different ; at meetings he had such a boyish, masculine conversation with people. For Navalny , such meetings became a full-fledged show, at which issues were raised much higher than benches and rotten pipes ,” he explains.

Another new technology was “Smart Voting” launched by FBK in November 2019. The foundation invited citizens to vote in parliamentary elections for candidates who had the greatest chance of defeating United Russia - and who were chosen by the foundation's experts. The first experience, according to participants and supporters of the project, proved its effectiveness. In the elections to the Moscow City Duma, Smart Voting candidates won 20 out of 45 seats, with 13 of them going to nominees of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Elections to the capital's parliament are held exclusively in single-mandate constituencies, that is, in all these cases, candidates supported by the FBK left the status of United Russia members without a mandate. Among them, for example, was the now former leader of the capital’s United Russia, Andrei Metelsky.

With the help of “Smart Voting,” Navalny has accomplished almost a revolution in practical politics , says political scientist Abbas Gallyamov. “In a situation where the authorities’ ratings are falling and the majority is becoming disloyal, the main tool in the hands of the regime in elections is the maximum dispersion of the votes of the dissatisfied,” the political scientist tells VERSTKA. “If they are dispersed, you can, even without a majority, win elections quite easily.” Navalny, with the help of Smart Voting, managed to create a machine that “breaks this method.” That is why he was so dangerous for the authorities, especially in the election cycle before the State Duma elections in 2021, when the politician was arrested, Gallyamov is sure.

The success of Smart Voting in the Moscow City Duma has sharply increased interest in it. Already at the next regional elections, in 2020, one of the main intrigues in the election headquarters was the number of people registered in this system in a particular region. Because of this, the attitude of all campaign participants towards Navalny’s Headquarters, the FBK representative offices that then existed in almost every major region, also changed. If previously they were approached mainly for training observers or for the observers themselves, now, in the words of a political strategist who worked at the headquarters of the opposition party in the 2020 regional elections, “ they began to look after the headquarters like a Swedish princess .” “Everyone wanted FBK to include their candidates in its mailing list. Many even believed that there was no need to conduct any other campaign, the main thing was to properly sell your client to the Navalists,” he says. But the result was “general disappointment”: “Yes, there were cases in Novosibirsk and Tomsk, where we can more or less confidently talk about the “UG effect” in the victory of the oppositionists. But in the overwhelming majority of regions, the influence of the UG on the voting outcome was illusory.”

In addition to purely electoral technologies, experts also recall “new methods of mobilization.” “Remember the same “RosYama”! Navalny's most successful people's project. You push three buttons and at the same time get involved in public life, create pain for the official and solve your own little problem ,” he said. The service was launched in 2011, and already in 2013, right before the mayoral elections, where Navalny was his main competitor, RosYama was praised by the capital’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin. However, after the launch of purely political projects of FBK, the activities of RosYama faded into the background.

“Volkov was then a very strong administrator, not without reason a mathematician. Navalny campaigned, but success in the technical and managerial implementation of projects is Volkov. “Thank God, he didn’t turn out to be a leader,” a source close to the internal political bloc of the presidential administration tells VERSTKA.

“He provoked increased repression”

According to the same interlocutor of Vorstka, Navalny and his team were among those who provoked the “accelerated tightening of the screws.” “The main thing he changed was, paradoxically, the strengthening of the repressive approach to domestic policy, because all the political technology things stopped working against him. And the longer the sentence lasted—not his imprisonment, but Putin’s—the more obvious it became. This means it’s time for strength, which we now see in all its glory,” says the source.

According to a political strategist who opposed Navalny’s team several times in elections and as part of public events, this effect from the oppositionist’s activities began to work as a result of the “Bolotnaya protests” in Russia at the end of 2011 - beginning of 2012, in which Navalny was one of the headliners. As an example, the interlocutor of “Vestka” cited “the destruction of even a frail party system and the polarization of all politics.” “The drastic simplification of the legislation on party registration has actually become its tightening. “Dwarves” like “Communists of Russia”, “Rodina” and other parties of social justice have emerged from all the cracks. And in classical parties like the Communist Party of the Russian Federation or A Just Russia, they suddenly realized that, in principle, they would be easy to replace. What did they do? They stopped even minimally being offensive and ran to lie down under the Kremlin for good,” explains the political strategist. As an example, he cites the degradation of A Just Russia: “Mironov came to the State Duma with a white ribbon on his jacket. Then they scared him, then he read the new laws, understood everything, and for ten years now he has been trying to be “more United Russia” than United Russia.”

But it is precisely the events of 2011-2012 that social activists interviewed by Vestka call the beginning of a mass observation movement. “For me, too, the observation was connected with the “movement” of 2011-2012. I thought then that Alexey was going too far when he said about United Russia, that it was a party of swindlers and thieves. I then checked my PEC - it turned out that Alexey was right,” says electoral analyst and election observer Ivan Shukshin.

The expert does not contrast Navalny with other monitoring organizations - he was part of the general movement. “ And of course, he made the greatest contribution to the increased activity of citizens . Now Grigory Melkonyants i is sitting, he also gave his freedom for the same thing. This is a common cause of tens of thousands of people who are not indifferent to the fate of the country, where Alexey played one of the main roles, ultimately giving his all,” concludes Shukshin.

“The movement really became massive in 2011, and Navalny got into this wave,” notes Stanislav Andreychuk, co-chair of Golos. “But it seems to me that I got it right, because the first mass volunteer movement, it seems to me, took place a year before, for example, after the flood in Krymsk. And then various mass movements like “Lisa Alert” began. Society somehow grew up at one point and election observation ended up in the same wave.”

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Fight against corruption

The role of FBK and Navalny in the fight against corruption cannot be underestimated, Gallyamov is sure. “Navalny was able to prove that the entire government from top to bottom is corrupt. And before him, of course, everyone guessed about this, but there was much less direct evidence,” the political scientist is convinced. The fact that now the corruption of the regime is one of its weakest points for public opinion is Navalny’s merit , the expert continues. In his opinion, investigations by the Anti-Corruption Foundation i prevented the authorities from focusing public attention on the fight against “external enemies” and generally removing internal politics from the discourse.

Indeed, one of Navalny’s main achievements “purely technologically” was the format of political investigation he introduced, says political scientist Ilya Grashchenkov. He reminds Vorstka about the extremely effective packaging and presentation of these materials through YouTube and other channels. One could even say that Navalny taught opposition activists and journalists how to conduct such investigations, agrees a political strategist who has worked on several campaigns in recent years. According to him, investigations by FBK and its founder have repeatedly become “pain in the ass” for his clients .

One of the most influential Russian oppositionists today, Maxim Katz, also says that Navalny’s team “made a blockbuster out of the anti-corruption investigation,” and cites as an example the FBK film about “Putin’s palace” in Gelendzhik, which has collected more than 120 million views on YouTube. In addition to the widespread dissemination of information, these investigative films became reasons for nationwide protests. For example, after the release of the film “He’s Not Your Dimon” (24 million views on YouTube) about the corruption of Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev, in March 2017, protests were held in 82 cities, attracting tens of thousands of participants.

“He criticized journalists [Navalny has repeatedly spoken critically about the work of journalists and the coverage of his investigations], but those same journalists learned a lot from him [in terms of investigations],” says Katz. “Some politicians have also learned: the image of a handsome, well-spoken man in a well-fitting shirt is very attractive .” According to Katz, after Navalny’s popularity soared, many politicians began to follow his example, including in appearance, especially representatives of the younger generation. Among them, the interlocutor of “Vestka” named politicians from the “New People” party, which is considered to be the most liberal of the parliamentary ones.

Cover: Dmitry Osinnikov

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