At the end of January 2021, three experts on contemporary Russian politics — Dr Jan Matti Dollbaum, Morvan Lallouet and Dr Ben Noble — realised that no comprehensive English-language study had been published of the political career and significance of Alexei Navalny. The leading opposition figure had just returned to Russia — after treatment in Germany following a failed attempt on his life — only to be arrested by the Russian authorities.
The academics decided to produce such a study themselves, and Navalny: Putin’s Nemesis, Russia’s Future? (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2021) has been a tremendous success. It has been translated into eight languages so far, was selected by The Financial Times as one of the best books on politics in 2021, and has been nominated for the Pushkin House Book Prize. Join Dollbaum and Noble to hear them discuss their understanding of Russian oppositional politics, its development in the wake of the Russia’s war on Ukraine, as well as the political prospects of Navalny and his allies. The conversation will be moderated by Yulia Taranova, a doctoral researcher at King’s College London.
Alexei Navalny has had a spectacular political career. As an anti-corruption activist, politician, and protestor — as well as a "terrorist" and "extremist", according to the Russian courts — Navalny harnessed the power of the internet to take on the Kremlin. He has successfully politicised those who previously had little interest in politics, alerting them to rampant corruption and lawlessness at the highest levels of the state and its effect on their lives. Navalny galvanised support among young Russians in particular – those disillusioned with the veneer of Putin-era “stability” and "prosperity" that appeared to placate their parents’ generation.
As the Kremlin’s arch enemy, attempts to silence Navalny were numerous and increasingly nefarious. Dubious fraud cases were brought against him, one so outrageous that Mikhail Gorbachev called it "proof that we do not have independent courts". Finally, Navalny was poisoned with Novichok by FSB agents, who smeared the poison in his underpants – an ill-conceived plan outed in a videoed investigation by Navalny’s team and Bellingcat. Yet rather than remaining safely in Europe where he had been treated, Navalny returned to Russia to imminent arrest and imprisonment. Though currently locked up in Russia’s notorious prison system for the foreseeable future, Navalny arguably remains the second most important political figure in Russia.
Join Dollbaum, Noble, and Taranova either in person or online to explore the many dimensions of Navalny’s political life and his legacy, as well as the broader landscape of Russian opposition politics.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Dr Ben Noble is Associate Professor of Russian Politics at University College London (UCL SSEES) and an Associate Fellow of Chatham House. His research focuses on legislative politics, authoritarianism, and Russian domestic politics, with awards from The Leverhulme Trust, the Political Studies Association, and the British Academy. Ben frequently provides commentary and analysis on Russian politics for academic, policy, media, and general audiences.
Dr Jan Matti Dollbaum is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy (SOCIUM) at the University of Bremen, working on a comparative project on protest dynamics in Germany as part of the Research Institute on Social Cohesion (Forschungsinstitut Gesellschaftlicher Zusammenhalt). He is also an Associated Junior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, HWK (Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg) and an affiliated researcher at the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen.
Yulia Taranova MPP (Oxon), is a doctoral researcher at King's Russia Institute where she studies the transformation of public actors who identified themselves as liberals in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union (early 1990s) into anti-liberal advocates in Vladimir Putin's Russia (2010s). In 2017 she founded the Social Sciences Lab — a Moscow-based non-profit focused on developing and delivering educational programs for young social scientists in Russia — which was labelled a “foreign agent” and forced to close in summer 2021.