Ashurkov was told by the country’s then fourth richest man and his boss – Mikhail Friedman – to keep his activities secret. Together Navalny and Ashurkov began to design a new generation of online campaigning tools to mobilize Russia against corruption. His presence calmed people. Flanked by highly intelligent liberals, he looked less like a demagogue. ‘Look, nobody was more surprised than I was that this rich guy is coming to my office, sitting in my office and working with me,’ says Navalny. ‘Nobody believes me but I have never met any oligarchs or any Kremlin people. Ever.’ But nobody of course, did believe him.
As 2009 gave way to 2010, a team was beginning to form around Navalny. The country’s most famous editor, Evgenia Albats, saw leadership potential in him. The country’s most famous economist, Sergei Guriev, formerly close to Medvedev, started to advise him and arranged for him to do a World Fellowship at Yale University. One economist closely affiliated to the government even began boldly announcing to visiting foreign investors and analysts that he could be the post-Putin president. Their drift to such a troubling figure – ‘a democrat who is not delighted by the liberals’ – was an expression of the liberal establishment’s desperation as it became clear that Medvedev was unable, or unwilling to fight for Medvedevism. Navalny was their danger and their rabble-rouser, who gave them tingles as he ranted so charismatically. And they loved him for it.
Their fascination with Navalny was influenced by the Moscow intelligentsia’s belief that democracy had been a success in Eastern Europe as it was given a boost with a healthy dose of anti-Russian nationalism. It was widely believed that a shot of nationalism could reinvigorate the Russian democratic movement. In private the doyens that were becoming Navalny’s elite supporters spoke disturbingly as if they thought they could ‘control’ him. Many saw his charisma as a vehicle they could direct. There was even a rumour that he could be a Kremlin project. Whatever his eventual ties to the authorities, his growing number of friends in high places showed how unhappy and amphibious – living official and opposition lives – a segment of the elite had become. One well-placed source claims it was Medvedev himself who decreed inside the Kremlin that Navalny could not be harmed.
Medvedev helped Navalny in other ways too. The Kremlin stand-in had his own anticorruption ambitions. Chief amongst them was his zeal to rid the bureaucracy of its traditional backward practice of non-public disclosures of its expenses. Medvedev’s ambition to reform the system started creating loopholes for Navalny to humiliate it on a daily basis. This is how the opposition leader’s ‘Rospil’ was born. The name is a pun on the Russian word for ‘sawing off’, as in ‘sawing’ a chunk out of a budget. Its technique was decidedly early 2010s. Rospil tied together three big trends: the rise in philanthropy, the boom in the Internet and growing civil activism. It worked like this: volunteers across the country would pore over officials’ expenses, forced online by Medvedev, and alerted Rospil to suspected corruption. Donations would fund a small team of young Rospil lawyers who would then investigate them. This was a new kind of corruption fighting NGO – and a smash hit. Donations poured in – reaching over $270,000 and saving the Russian budget $1.3 billion.44
With Rospil going online in October 2010 there was now a small team working for Navalny. Rospil was an incredibly fashionable, though difficult job. This is because, for all Medvedev’s fighting talk, corruption was rife. In 2010, the huge bribes in the education sector alone were biting into household budgets. It was estimated that a place at a good Moscow nursery school would demand between $500 and $5,000.45 Entrance to a decent school could set you back between $1,000 and $50,000, whilst a place at a prestigious university between $5,000 and $20,000.46 This was not the end of it. Good grades in your final exams cost a backhander of $20 to $500.47 ‘I’d just had enough, I couldn’t take it anymore,’ explained Lubov Sobol, a young lawyer working for Rospil. Yet his team had noticed something unnerving in the way Navalny was increasingly being deified. Just as Surkov in his tract ‘the view from Utopia’ had said that the ‘idealization of the leader’ would always be the case in the country, so something of a ‘leader-saviour’ cult was developing around Navalny.
Two team members told me: ‘We get poems sent to us about Alexey, we get letters of joy, we got an invite for us all to come and live in a dacha for free all summer and of course lots of stuff that has nothing to do with corruption. For example it’s very common for us to get letters like – “Help! My roof is leaking, I suspect corruption,” – to be addressed to us.’ His staff venerated him but also found him a character. ‘Navalny is… an anger man,’ confided Rospil’s coordinator, but his colleague Lubov Sobol gushed: ‘Alexey is the best boss in the world. He is the most democratic man in the world. He is the perfect boss.’
As the last days of doubt before Putin’s announcement that he would be returning in 2012 drew near, Navalny was going viral. Within twelve months his blog started to hit over 100,000 readers, soaring to over 1.2 million monthly views and 200,000 followers on Twitter. Rospil was joined by Rosyama – a crowdsourced project that targeted bad roads, which picked up 30,000 online activists.48 Focusing on these projects, eschewing arcane debates on whether Russia needed a parliamentary or a presidential republic, a constitutional preamble with or without mention of ethnic Russian rights, or any of the other abstractions that obsessed the opposition, demonstrated that Navalny had understood why his entire political career up to this point, along with that of the entire Russian opposition, had been such a flop. In his rush for concrete projects, he was stealing from Surkov the very slogan he had invented for United Russia – ‘The Party of Real Deeds’.
A Hero of Our Time
But sometimes a phrase can be more powerful than an organization. All of this activism was crowned by one slogan: ‘United Russia is the party of crooks and thieves’. There is an element of genius in this catchphrase. It has a ring to it, an irony to it. It is both funny and furious. It was an instant way of expressing Russia’s frustration with the rent-seeking, oligarchic, oppressive system, without having to use those same clumsy words. To a certain extent the slogan had to have been evocative – because it went viral. Accidentally, it found the Achilles heel of Surkov’s propaganda. They could successfully hide embezzlement in the Kremlin from the public, but not the fact that petty provincial officials were corrupt – whom they had all encouraged to join United Russia, thus associating their greed with Putin even in the remotest Russian village.
This is why by the eve of the Russian parliamentary elections in 2011 over ten times more people knew the slogan – ‘the party of crooks and thieves’ – than knew who Navalny was. Pollsters estimated that a majority of Russians had heard the phrase used. And so it was that the tag ‘the party of crooks and thieves’ stuck like glue to United Russia. These words by themselves – freely circulating, viral words – were one of the most powerful grenades thrown at the Putin consensus, the first words that ever wounded the Putin party.