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The Evolution of Alexey Navalny’s Nationalism
Yevgenia Albats, a Russian investigative journalist and a close friend of the Navalny family’s, told me that she persuaded Navalny to attend the Russian March. In 2004, Albats had returned to Moscow after defending her doctoral dissertation in political science at Harvard. In the preceding four years, Putin had taken control of the media and dismantled the electoral system, effectively destroying Russian politics as it had been constituted. Older, experienced politicians were disoriented. But a crop of younger activists, who had not experienced party politics in what had been a somewhat functional electoral system, were rearing to go. Albats, who had researched grassroots organizing during her years at Harvard, started gathering the young activists in her Moscow apartment. About twenty people of different political stripes—from social democrats to libertarians to religious-rights activists—attended Tuesday-night seminars with Albats for about a year, she told me by Zoom from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is wrapping up a research fellowship. Albats was in her late forties and an observant Jew. Navalny, in his late twenties, was the oldest among those who gathered at her house but also the least articulate and least educated: most of the others had gone to prestigious colleges, while Navalny was a military brat with an undergraduate law degree from a decidedly second-tier school. For as long as she has known him, Albats told me, Navalny has been teaching himself how to be a politician: he taught himself public speaking; while he was under house arrest a few years back, he taught himself English. In the absence of politics, in the absence of any public conversation, little remained to form political alliances around. Putin was trafficking in nostalgia for the Soviet empire. The only alternative seemed to be broadly ethno-nationalist ideas, which also addressed a sense of humiliation—and these were emerging both on what could be roughly described as the left and vaguely designated as the right. Activists who didn’t share ethno-nationalist ideas believed that they had to form alliances with Russia’s emerging nationalist movements. The chess champion Garry Kasparov, for example, who quit the sport in 2005 to launch a political career, created a joint movement with the National-Bolshevik Party. At the time, he told me that only a united front could overthrow the Putin regime, and only after that should pro-Western liberal democrats like him hash out their differences with the ethno-nationalists. Albats recalled that it was in this context that she told Navalny that he should attend the Russian March. They went together. “I wore a giant Star of David that I made sure could be seen from a distance,” she told me. “He took a lot of shit for walking with a kike.” Their efforts to engage people in conversation failed, and after three years they gave up.
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