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Aleksei Navalny, Putin Critic, Is Spared Prison in a Fraud Case, but His Brother ... - New York Times




Play Video|0:30

Navalny Reacts to Judge’s Sentencing



Navalny Reacts to Judge’s Sentencing



Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, spoke after a judge suspended Mr. Navalny’s jail sentence, but ordered his younger brother to serve a prison term of three and a half years.


Video by Reuters on December 30, 2014. Photo by Pavel Golovkin/Associated Press.





MOSCOW — Hours after being spared prison on Tuesday in a criminal fraud trial widely viewed as political revenge, the Kremlin’s chief antagonist, Aleksei A. Navalny, broke out of house arrest and tried to join an unsanctioned antigovernment rally, daring the authorities to throw him in jail.


They refrained, but in a twist that clearly caught Mr. Navalny, the normally unruffled political opposition leader off guard, the court ordered that his younger brother, Oleg, who was also charged in the fraud case, serve three and half years in prison.


The jailing of the brother, a former postal worker generally viewed as a pawn in a larger battle, signaled that the Kremlin was adopting a heavy-handed strategy in seeking to suppress Mr. Navalny’s political activities by sidelining him without transforming him into a martyr.


“Aren’t you ashamed?" Mr. Navalny cried out in dismay at the young judge, Yelena Korobchenko, as she read the verdict.


“Why are you jailing him?” Mr. Navalny shouted, with tears in his eyes. “This is a dirty trick. To punish me more?”




Aleksei A. Navalny, a prominent Kremlin critic, was detained at a rally in Moscow on Tuesday. Anton Belitski/Associated Press

Some analysts said that was precisely the goal.


“Kremlin liberalism,” Lilia Shevtsova, an expert on Russian domestic politics at the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote in a post on Facebook. “Let’s put him on a long leash. We can always shorten it. And the brother gets a real sentence. This means that we take a family member hostage! And we can make his life in prison unbearable.”


A trenchant critic of Russia’s rampant corruption, Mr. Navalny became a hero to the tens of thousands of Muscovites who took to the streets to protest vote rigging in parliamentary elections in 2011. Mr. Navalny, whose politics combine liberalism with an earthy nationalism, refused to back down when Vladimir V. Putin returned to the presidency in 2012 determined to suppress the incipient democracy movement and reduce individual and news media freedoms.


Over the last two years, the government has harassed him, filing corruption charges in several cases, none of them justified, independent legal analysts said. But the Kremlin has been leery of treating him too harshly, wary of provoking a backlash.


On Tuesday, an infuriated Mr. Navalny left the courthouse after receiving a three-and-a-half-year suspended sentence and began walking through the streets toward Manezh Square, near the Kremlin, where the unauthorized rally was to take place, but he never made it. He was stopped by the police, officials said, not to arrest him but merely to escort him back to his apartment. He has been under house arrest for 10 months in the case — widely understood to be political retribution for his aggressive opposition to Mr. Putin.



“You just asked about house arrest; well, house arrest is irrelevant in comparison with what is going on in our country,” he said in a brief phone interview with the Echo of Moscow radio station as he walked along. “It’s not about my brother, my family or myself, or any other concrete person. It’s about the disgusting, mean things happening now, happening for years now, because we have just been sitting at home.”


He was seized by the police outside the Ritz Carlton Hotel on Tverskaya Street, which he had just joked that his supporters should take by storm because it would be more comfortable than where he would probably spend the night. In the end, though, the authorities seemed equally determined to avoid further confrontation and returned him to his apartment, though they posted five officers outside the door.


Not long after he was seized, the riot police moved in to disperse the rally on Manezh Square, where the crowd had dwindled to about 1,500. More than 200 people were arrested, but there were no reports of violence.


The Kremlin’s relatively cautious treatment of Mr. Navalny may have been reinforced lately by the country’s mounting economic problems. Although the annexation of Crimea last spring pushed Mr. Putin’s popularity to stratospheric heights, the ensuing Western sanctions and a simultaneous worldwide drop in oil prices have battered the Russian economy — and the fortunes of average Russians, whom the Kremlin is anxious not to antagonize.






Navalny on Putin, Being Bugged and Revolution


Larger economic and geopolitical concerns may have also factored into the decision to keep Mr. Navalny out of jail, to avoid yet another point of contention with the West.


The suspended sentence will keep Mr. Navalny out of prison, but under Russian law, his felony conviction makes him ineligible to seek public office for 10 years after the sentence is completed. And even if he intended to make a swift return to the political arena, his actions would now be shadowed by fear of harm befalling his brother in prison.


In a recent interview published in the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Oleg Navalny, who, like his brother, is married and has two young children, said he understood the risks of his brother’s political activism.


“We absolutely knew that sooner or later this all would touch us,” he said. “It is easy to influence a person through his family.”


Outside the courtroom, several dozen supporters of Mr. Navalny said they believed that his brother’s sentence was meant to punish him.


“So they have taken him hostage,” said Vera Kashtanova, a 70-year-old retiree huddled in a heavy fur coat against the morning frost.


Ms. Kashtanova said that she had not joined in protests, either during the Soviet era or under Mr. Putin, until this year, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea.


“I am a Sovok,” she said, using slang that means an old-fashioned Soviet person. “But I am an enlightened Sovok.”


As with the unexpected pardon last year of another Putin enemy, the former oil tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the verdict seemed to underscore the all-encompassing power — and capriciousness — of the Russian leader and the system that he appears to command, often by oblique signals.




Play Video|3:36

Navalny Shakes Up Moscow Mayor’s Race



Navalny Shakes Up Moscow Mayor’s Race



In 2013, as Moscow prepared for its first mayoral elections in a decade, the anti-corruption candidate Aleksei A. Navalny energized the youth vote, irritating the Kremlin.


Video by Ben Solomon on September 5, 2013.

After nearly a year under house arrest, Mr. Navalny, a lawyer who led months of street protests that followed parliamentary elections tainted by accusations of fraud in December 2011, and who then ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Moscow in 2013, has said he no longer had hope that Russia’s future can be determined at the ballot box.


“What are we going to go out on the streets for?” he asked in a recent interview. “There are no elections at all anymore. Talking about falsifications is absurd because none of us are allowed to run.”


Far from cowering, Mr. Navalny has publicly and repeatedly accused Mr. Putin and his closest associates in and out of the government of theft and corruption on a vast scale. More recently, he accused them of fomenting war in Ukraine to secure and expand power.


He has also made no secret of his presidential ambitions. And though he has lived for years on the brink of lengthy imprisonment, he has shown no willingness to leave Russia the way other prominent critics of Mr. Putin have done in recent years.


Gennadi V. Gudkov, a former member of Parliament, compared the sentencing of the opposition leader’s brother to the policy of detaining relatives used in Chechnya by the Russian security services and a regional leader, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, against Islamic militants.


“Putin supports Kadyrov’s idea of punishing relatives,” Mr. Gudkov said.


Mr. Navalny’s Twitter account, which has at times been managed by his wife or supporters after a court order prohibited him from using the Internet, featured a message after the ruling saying, “Of all possible sentences, today’s is the most vile.”


The fraud case against Mr. Navalny that was decided Tuesday is just one of numerous criminal prosecutions that have been brought against him in recent years. All of them are generally regarded as a response by the authorities to his political activism.


In July 2013, Mr. Navalny was convicted of embezzlement after being accused of stealing nearly $500,000 from a state-controlled timber company while working as an unpaid adviser to the governor of the Kirov region east of Moscow.


In a dramatic scene, he was sentenced to five years in prison and led from the courtroom in handcuffs, only to be released the next day by a judge who agreed to hear an appeal in the case.


It was while free from prison in that case that Mr. Navalny ran for mayor of Moscow. He drew a surprisingly strong 27.2 percent of the vote despite facing overwhelming obstacles in standing against the Kremlin-backed incumbent, Sergei S. Sobyanin.


In Kirov, the charges were considered baseless by many legal experts and had been thrown out after a local investigation. The case was resurrected by federal officials in Moscow, and the Kremlin made little effort to mask the political motivation of the prosecution.



Andrew Roth, Andrew Kramer and Alexandra Odynova contributed reporting.










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