: Alexey Navalny Is Succeeding Where Putin’s Other Opponents Have Failed. Why? #WorldNEWS It was minus-61 degrees Fahrenheit in Yakutsk, about 300 miles south of the Arctic Circle, on Saturday, but

Alexey Navalny Is Succeeding Where Putin’s Other Opponents Have Failed. Why? #WorldNEWS
It was minus-61 degrees Fahrenheit in Yakutsk, about 300 miles south of the Arctic Circle, on Saturday, but the people still came. The scene was like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie: a queue of dimly visible figures against the whited-out backdrop of a snow squall. They had come to show solidarity with Alexey Navalny, the imprisoned leader of the Russian opposition, who had been arrested upon his return from Germany where he was recovering from an attempt on his life. Navalny had called for a January 23rd nationwide protest on social media.
So they came, without government permits, all across Russia’s eleven time zones. They were on rooftops in Vladivostok. Protestors thronged the city squares of Novosibirsk and Irkutsk, where they chanted “We will not leave. ” Authorities roughed them up, even the kids, in Moscow, where as many as 20,000 turned out, some to chant the common refrain “Putin is a thief!;” others to pelt riot police with snowballs. In St. Petersburg, during daylight hours, one young couple carried flowers and told reporters they were on a date; in the same city, after nightfall, a cop kicked an elderly woman in the stomach, launching her backward, onto the ground. (She’d simply asked why he and his colleague were detaining another demonstrator. ) In all, a reported 3,000 Russians across 100 cities were arrested this weekend on behalf of one man.

Who is Navalny? To the Kremlin, officially, he’s either a nonentity, a convicted fraudster, or a dangerous CIA agent sent to foment regime change, or all of the above. To Westerners, he’s the dissident who survived a state assassination plot, then helped solve his own attempted murder. To millions of Russians, Navalny is the country’s most famous and persistent gadfly, the unavoidable vivisectionist of its crooked ruling class. He’s also very funny.
The videos his Anti-Corruption Foundation put out mix satire, pop culture, and zippy animation with a connect-the-dots forensic approach to exposing oligarchs, ministers and law enforcement officials, who aren’t exactly hiding their ill-gotten gains by showing up in public with wristwatches worth many times their annual salaries. If there’s a theme to Navalny’s oeuvre, it is that Russia’s modern kleptocracy is the offspring of an unholy matrimony between former mid-level KGB officers and a post-Soviet nomenklatura of bandits in business suits. Both species, he insists, are singularly embodied in Vladimir Putin.
As Navalny sat in his Moscow jail cell, the Anti-Corruption Foundation released a two-hour video he’d recorded in Germany about a corruption scandal implicating Putin, which had originally been brought to light ten years ago.