Alexey Navalny at a march in memory of the murdered Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov in Moscow, February 2017. Photo (c): Ilya Pitalev / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.
Over the last several months, it’s become clear that Alexey Navalny’s anti-corruption and presidential campaigns have become the most effective vehicles for galvanising the pent-up social and political grievances most Russian citizens hold. Navalny is a peculiar figure, not easily describable by foreign analogies (and hardly as “Russia’s Trump”, as Alexey Sakhnin and Per Leander called him in a recent Jacobin article). He is certainly not of the left, but in another Jacobin article, Ilya Budraitskis, Ilya Matveev, and Sean Guillory have argued that the Russian left could benefit from the political opening his figure has provided and should be open to participating in those parts of his movement that create democratic opportunities (a suggestion for which they have received much hate-mail).
