openDemocracy: Alexei Navalny's campaign: effective management or grassroots movement?

Navalny is conducting a dialogue with the Russian authorities via force. In this context, a sanctioned demonstration — it doesn’t matter what sound equipment you have — doesn’t mean anything. In order to pressure the Kremlin into changing the established scenario of presidential elections in March 2018, he has to constantly raise the pressure — and the level of risk. Only by crossing the boundaries of the permissible can Navalny make himself heard and push against such boundaries, at least a little. The problem is, with Russia’s most prominent protest leader now entering this kind of dialogue with the authorities, how far will Navalny remain open to dialogue with the people who are taking to the streets to protest? [...]

The real agenda — rising poverty, the state’s cruelty and lack of transparency, the never-ending stream of new taxes and cuts to social welfare — will bring more and more people out to protest. You can’t write these people directly into the ranks of Navalny supporters. They are of different views and different ages, but are members of pre-existing social movements. For instance, for people involved in initiative groups against the Moscow city “renovation”, the format of a sanctioned demonstration — where they can make connections and speak to one another — is far more useful than clashes with the police. What Navalny calls the “battle between good and neutrality” doesn’t happen in a vacuum, where there’s only the merciless authorities and the fearless leader of the opposition, but in society, at least a small section of which can still organise itself.

The paradox of Russia’s current protest movement is that it has taken the form of a vertically organised election campaign, when it is, in essence, a broad coalition. This is a “political machine”, and one which is more like a commercial corporation than a political party, where rank-and-file members possess at least formal mechanisms of control over the actions of the leadership. Here, everyone has their own, strictly defined area of work: experts propose solutions, professionals bring them to the public, and the public is left to follow them. The only real justification for this kind of model is that it is effective: the protest wave is building, its geographical spread is constantly growing, and it’s becoming hard to silence it.

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