Alexei Navalny
Alexei Navalny's voice Sorry, your browser either has JavaScript disabled or does not have any supported player. You can download the clip or download a player to play the clip in your browser. recorded August 2013 Problems playing this file? See media help. Alexei Anatolievich Navalny (Russian: Алексе й Анато льевич Нава льный, Russian pronunciation: [ɐlʲɪkˈsʲej ɐnɐˈtolʲɪvʲɪtɕ nɐˈvalʲnɨj]), born 4 June 1976) is a Russian lawyer, political and financial activist, and politician. Since 2009, he has gained prominence in Russia, and in the Russian and international media, as a critic of corruption and of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has organized large-scale demonstrations promoting democracy and attacking political corruption, Putin, and Putin's political allies; and has run for political office on the same platform. In 2012, The Wall Street Journal described him as "the man Vladimir Putin fears most." A self-described "nationalist democrat", Navalny is a Russian Opposition Coordination Council member and the leader of the registered Russian political party Progress Party (Russian: Партия прогресса), formerly People's Alliance (Russian: Народный Альянс). [not in citation given] In September 2013 he ran in the Moscow mayoral election, supported by the RPR-PARNAS party. He came in second, with 27% of the vote, losing to incumbent mayor Sergei Sobyanin, a Putin appointee. His vote total was much higher than political analysts had expected, but Navalny and his allies insisted that the actual number was still higher, and that authorities had committed election fraud in order to prevent a runoff election from taking place. Navalny came to prominence via his blog, hosted on the website LiveJournal, which remains his primary method of communicating with the public. He has used his blog to attack Putin and his allies, to organize political demonstrations, to post documents showing Putin and his allies to be engaged in unsavory behavior, and most recently to promote his campaigns for office. He has also been active in other media: most notably, in a 2011 radio interview he described Russia's ruling party, United Russia, as a "party of crooks and thieves", which soon became a popular epithet. Navalny has been arrested numerous times by Russian authorities, most seriously in 2012, when federal authorities accused him of three instances of embezzlement and fraud, all of which he denied. In July 2013 he was convicted of embezzlement and was sentenced to five years in a corrective labor colony. Russia's Memorial Human Rights Center recognized Navalny as a political prisoner. Navalny was released from prison a day after sentencing. The prison fine was suspended in October 2013. In February 2014 Navalny and his brother were prosecuted on embezzlement charges and Navalny was placed under house arrest and restricted from communicating with anyone but his family; he was sentenced in December 2014 with another suspended prison term of 3.5 years and his brother received an actual 3.5-year prison sentence.