Alexei Navalny attends the march in memory of murdered opposition politician Boris Nemtsov in Moscow, February 2017. (c) Ilya Pitalev / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.
There has been quite a bit of whiplash in the way Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most promising opposition leader, has been regarded. One moment, he’s touted as Russia’s Vaclav Havel, who is about to ride in on a white horse and drain the putrid Kremlin swamp. Then the next, we remember Navalny’s deep nationalist sympathies and freak out that he’s really going to be another Trump or Zeman, an anti-establishment populist who will, inadvertently or not, unleash a wave of xenophobic rage among his supporters if he comes to power.
