Standing on the podium that night, leading them in cries of “We exist,” Mr. Navalny radiated loose-limbed confidence, like a man who expected to win. The crowd’s cheers made it obvious: If Moscow’s desk workers, or “office plankton,” were to become an army, Mr. Navalny belonged at its head.
On Wednesday, Mr. Navalny, 36, will go on trial, facing charges of embezzling $500,000 from a timber company that could result in a prison sentence of up to 10 years. And that army is nowhere to be seen.
Fear has transformed the political atmosphere in Russia since that night nearly 17 months ago, as President Vladimir V. Putin has made it clear that he is willing to use harsh means to extinguish street protests.
Around two dozen protesters may face sentences of 10 years or more resulting from a brawl that broke out with the police at a march last May, and two members of the protest band Pussy Riot are serving two-year sentences for performing an anti-Putin song in a church. Stiff new fines have been introduced, and nonprofit groups have been forced to label themselves “foreign agents.” Discouraged, people show up in meager numbers for demonstrations these days.
High-profile opposition supporters have been tracked down individually and issued chilling warnings, either implicit in searches or transmitted directly from the Kremlin. Many of Mr. Navalny’s large donors have distanced themselves in recent months, he said. He does not expect them to rise up in his defense if he is imprisoned.
“The majority of the elite or business elite, they are people with liberal views, but they are cowardly, they are simply afraid of everything, they are trembling all the time, so they will be quiet,” he said. “They are being quiet now.”
He added: “Man is weak. I am not blaming anyone, but man is weak.”
Mr. Navalny has spent the past few weeks trying to etch a lasting image in the public imagination before the trial, to be held in the provincial capital of Kirov. He said, not for the first time, that he would like to be president of Russia. He has shared details like what he will pack for prison (slippers, sweat pants, sneakers with Velcro closures).
And he has explained why he decided not to leave Russia with his family, despite the strong possibility that he will be sent to prison.
“I don’t want to go anywhere,” he told one interviewer. “I want my children to live here and speak Russian. I want to pass on a country which is a little better. I do not want, when I am an old grandfather, for them to say to me that I sat and was silent.”
Meanwhile, the state is bracing for a highly charged criminal trial, the first in post-Soviet history of such a prominent opposition leader. A previous embezzlement case was closed by investigators last spring for lack of evidence, but it was revived a few months later after Mr. Navalny published exposés about the top federal investigator.
Russian authorities do not hide their loathing of Mr. Navalny. Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the investigative committee, told a newspaper last week that Mr. Navalny’s online anticorruption campaign had made the embezzlement case into a priority for the authorities.
“If a person tries with all his strength to attract attention, or if I can put it, teases authorities — ‘look at me, I’m so good compared to everyone else’ — well, then interest in his past grows and the process of exposing him naturally speeds up,” Mr. Markin said.
He went on to suggest that Mr. Navalny had been trained in the West to topple Mr. Putin’s government, referring acidly to the semester he spent at Yale University’s World Fellows Program, a leadership training program for midcareer professionals.
Mr. Navalny is the first important Russian political figure to emerge from social networks, a platform largely beyond the Kremlin’s control.
The son of a Soviet Army officer, he trained as a real estate lawyer and dabbled in both liberal party politics and Russian nationalism. But what made him famous were his online exposés; he sued state-owned companies as a minority shareholder and published their accounting documents online. His following on Twitter and LiveJournal bulged into the tens of thousands, and on the night of the first large protest, he cashed in on it, summoning “nationalists, liberals, leftists, greens, vegetarians, Martians.”
And they came.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/world/europe/trial-of-russian-activist-aleksei-navalny-to-begin.html?partner=rss&emc=rss