Alexey Navalny's War on Russian Corruption

Neither Navalny’s home nor his office seems especially well protected, and when Navalny files a suit he frequently uses his home address. As I rode the metro back from his apartment, I wondered about the risks he was taking. When we first met, at a sushi restaurant near his office, he spoke about what he sees as the cowardice of liberal Russian businessmen—his natural constituency—who are too scared to stand up to government corruption. “I don’t understand this position,” he said. “First of all, it’s boring. Second of all, forgive me if this sounds pompous, but it’s better to die standing up than live on your knees.” He was similarly dismissive of the people who think that he or anyone else is fighting a well-oiled, repressive machine. “I disagree, because the people who work in business at a high enough level can tell you that there’s no machine at all,” he says. “It’s all a fiction. That is, they can destroy a single person, like Magnitsky or me or Khodorkovsky. But, if they try to do anything systemically against a huge number of people, there’s no machine. It’s a ragtag group of crooks unified under the portrait of Putin. There’s no super-repressive regime. There are no mythical Cheka agents that we need to be scared of. It’s just a bunch of crooks.” When things happened to opponents of the system, he said, it was because they showed up individually. “But if tomorrow ten businessmen spoke up directly and openly we’d live in a different country,” he said. “Starting tomorrow.”

[From New Yorker: "Net Impact"]