What has Putin’s invasion of Ukraine meant for the opposition to him at home?

Morvan Lallouet on Alexei Navalny, anti-war protests, and the future of Russian politics.

They’ll arrest you even if your sign says nothing. As Russian police haul away demonstrators against Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, the arrests include people holding nothing but blank white posters. More than 14,000 protesters have been arrested in Russia since the war began. One of the most emphatic voices encouraging activists is the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny—a charismatic young politician who became his country’s leading critic of President Vladimir Putin, survived an assassination attempt by poisoning, and was imprisoned last year on fabricated charges. “You need to go to anti-war rallies every weekend,” Navalny told his followers on social media last week, “even if it seems that everyone has either left or got scared.” He calls his supporters “the backbone of the movement against war and death” and describes the war in Ukraine as “unleashed by our obviously insane tsar.” What is the war doing to the politics of opposition in Russia?

Morvan Lallouet is a doctoral candidate in comparative politics at the University of Kent and the coauthor of Navalny: Putin’s Nemesis, Russia’s Future? Lallouet says that—despite the protests and Navalny’s calls to action—prospects for meaningful political opposition in Russia are bad and getting worse. With Navalny’s political organization banned last year and Putin now taking unprecedented steps to quash free speech and the free press, Lallouet says most Russians are likely to rally around their leader, at least for a while. The war may even create dynamics that undermine opposition efforts, including an exodus of young, educated people and a rise in anti-Western sentiment caused by the imposition of sanctions and perceptions of “Russophobia.” Lallouet is reluctant to speculate about the likelihood of Putin being removed from power in the current crisis, but if that were to happen, Lallouet says, it’s far from certain what kind of leadership would replace him.

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Graham Vyse: What do we know about the anti-war demonstrators we’re seeing in Russia?

Morvan Lallouet: Ultimately, it’s not a lot of demonstrators—probably a few thousand in Moscow and Saint Petersburg plus a few hundred or a few dozen in other cities. Many of them seem to be fairly young, though we have very little indication of their demographics. The protests seem mostly to be spontaneous, not expressions of a mass movement. In fact, the political infrastructure to organize a mass movement doesn’t really exist in Russia today. Several groups have urged Russians to demonstrate, including one of the last legal liberal parties in the country, Yabloko—along with Alexei Navalny and his supporters, but Navalny’s movement has been outlawed and essentially dissolved.

Vyse: What does the broader political opposition look like these days?

Lallouet: The first thing to understand is that Russia has what’s called systemic opposition as well as non-systemic opposition. Systemic opposition is tolerated, able to participate in elections, and has members in the Russian parliament. Most parties in the systemic opposition are generally supportive of Putin’s foreign policy toward Ukraine. Non-systemic opposition, by contrast, isn’t allowed to participate in elections or appear on television. It’s been fairly repressed in recent years.

The most important movement within the non-systemic opposition was Navalny’s. Navalny is fairly young, born in 1976. He rose to prominence in the late 2000s, as he investigated corruption. He published his findings on his blog—at a time when there was a very lively Russian blog scene—and gained standing in the opposition, becoming one of its leaders. In late 2011, he was arrested for his part of a mass movement against fraud in parliamentary elections. In 2012, he helped lead a protest against Putin’s return to the presidency.

Vyse: Then he ran for mayor of Moscow, yes?

Lallouet: He ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013, and he started building a political movement. When he tried to be a candidate in the 2018 presidential election, he created a network of what he called “headquarters” to support him—and to support activism in general. Other liberal movements declined or stagnated, and he became the most prominent leader standing for the rule of law, democracy, and fighting corruption. [At the end of 2017, Russia’s Central Electoral Commission barred Navalny from running in the election, citing a previous fraud conviction.]

In 2020, Navalny was poisoned. He was evacuated to Germany for medical treatment. [He accused Putin of responsibility for his poisoning, and an investigative report implicated Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) in the attack, though the Kremlin denied involvement.] In 2021, Navalny returned to Russia, was arrested immediately after he landed in Moscow, and was sent to jail for violating the terms of his parole conviction from a previous legal case. He remains in jail, and his movement has been thoroughly incapacitated. Russia designated it as an “extremist” group, meaning it’s now banned. That’s one of the reasons of why there aren’t many organized forces in the country that can oppose the war today.

More from Morvan Lallouet at The Signal:

“Initially, we’re apt to see a rally-around-the-flag dynamic, which will make things quite difficult for the opposition in Russia and people there opposed to the war. The question is how the war turns out. How long will it drag on? What will be the economic consequences for ordinary Russians? Those consequences look quite serious at the moment, but who will Russians blame for them? Will they blame the West for over-sanctioning their country or will they turn against Putin, in which case the opposition could benefit over the longer term? It’s very difficult to make predictions at this stage, but the shorter-term effects of the war seem overwhelmingly negative for the political opposition in Russia, with massive censorship and increased repression.”

“Another development that may have negative consequences for the opposition is the mass emigration we’re starting to see from Russia. It’s too early to assess whether we’re talking about tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people leaving the country, but those who are leaving seem mostly to be young, educated, and from the country’s bigger cities—people who might have skills they can market in the West or savings allowing them to leave. If this emigration continues on the mass scale it appears to be happening on, it will potentially deprive the opposition of an important constituency.”

“Everyone expects that Navalny will spend many years in jail. He built the most influential opposition organization in Russia—totally independent from the Kremlin—and that’s probably the reason why the authorities wanted to take him down and destroy his movement. They wanted to dismantle any institutional legacy he might have created. It’s difficult to say whether he could be elected, because the political ideas he represents are probably minority views in Russia today. Now, if his movement had been allowed to compete freely in Russian elections, I have no doubt it would have won seats in parliament and maybe won in some big cities. That movement would have been able to influence Russian politics, even if it had yet to develop support among a majority of the Russian people.”