On Navalny and Prokhorov

If you think about it, in theory the notion of a political tandem forming between billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov and blogger Alexei Navalny is an interesting proposition.  Each compliments the other almost perfectly  Prokhorov brings name recognition, financial stability and business connections, Navalny brings street cred, web connections and opposition chops.

A recent poll from Levada shows that a shocking 64% of Russians have never even heard of Navalny and only 14% (barely a third of those who have heard of him) would even consider voting for him for president.  Navalny’s name recognition soared upwards in 2011, from just 6% in April 2011, to an amazing 34% in June 2012.  But then more recently, it has plateaued.  The number had increased to just 37% by March 2013.

Prokhorov’s name recognition is much better, at most a fifth of the Russian population is unable to identify him.  But Prokhorov’s name recognition doesn’t help him with electability, his level is nearly as low as Navanly’s.  Just 18% of Russians said they were prepared to consider casting a vote for a political party organized by Prokhorov, and when he ran for president he was soundly repudiated, taking less than 8% of the vote. That’s because Prokhorov’s credibility is extremely low.

A clear majority of Russians who have read it (granted, a very small group) are prepared to believe that Navalny’s anti-corruption reporting is valid. Less than 20% of Russians who have read them reject his reports, while only about a quarter is unable to decide (still, that’s a surprisingly large 46% of Russians who know Navalny questioning him on critical facts).

As such, Navalny’s credibility within his cult of followers is far higher than Prokhorov’s, since 40% of Russians are prepared to believe Prokhorov is a puppet controlled by the Kremlin while only 30% believe he is his own man.

There are three main problems, though, with a Prokhorov-Navalny tandem. First, Navalny is headed to prison.  He’s been charged with embezzlement in a move very similar to the one that sent oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky to the big house, and he has said he expects to be convicted.  Second, Prokhorov is exactly the type of person Navalny has spent his adult life attacking for corruption. And third, Russians are almost certainly correct when they conclude Prokohorov isn’t a serious reformer and is in fact a Kremlin puppet.

That’s to say nothing of the opposition movement’s persistent failure to show any signs of being able to cooperate and form such unions.  Each and every time something of the sort has been tried, it’s ended in abysmal disaster.

As such, comparing the two only serves to emphasize the pathetic weakness of Russia’s so-called opposition.

Bloggers get it Wrong on Navalny

Two of our favorite Russia bloggers are Brian Whitmore (blogging at The Power Vertical) and Vladimir Kara-Murza (blogging at Spotlight on Russia).  So we were deeply disappointed to see both publish highly misleading reports on the activities of their fellow blogger Alexei Navalny.

Recently, both Whitmore and Kara-Murza wrote about the resignation of United Russia State Duma Deputy Vladimir Pekhtin, who was exposed by the blogsphere as owning vast property holdings in the U.S.A. even as he viciously attacked Americans and Russians who sympathize with American values.  Both Whitmore and Kara-Murza credited Navalny with bringing down Pekhtin, with Whitmore writing acidly that Navalny had “claimed a scalp.”

But the actual truth about Pekhtin was not to be found on either Power Vertical or Spotlight on Russia. It was found instead on the website of Andrei Tselikov (a blog called RuNet Echo operated by Global Voices).  Tselikov reveals that it was not Navalny at all who brought down Pekhtin, but an anonymous physicist blogging from Spain under the moniker “Dr. Z.”  As Tselikov reports:  ”Curiously, while Navalny thanked Dr. Z for giving him a ‘heads up’ on Pekhtin, he never made it clear that around 80% of the materials he posted were first found and published by Dr. Z.”

“Curiously” is the type of language that the milquetoast bloggers at Global Voices use when they want to denounce outrageous misconduct like plagiarism, which is what Navalny is clearly guilty of.   His failure to give due credit to Dr. Z, attempting to steal the thunder for himself, obviously misled both Whitmore and Kara-Murza, who didn’t look deeply enough before lauding Navalny with credit he simply did not deserve.

Whitmore and Kara-Murza also missed another important component of the story.  Their one-sided reporting implies that the downfall of Pekhtin highlights Navalny’s ever-growing power and influence, but the reality is that it shows the exact opposite.  We are delighted to see Navalny return to his roots, bringing publicity to the work of others in rooting out instances of corruption in Russia, which is where his talents lie. But his doing so only further emphasizes the total and disastrous collapse of Navalny’s so-called “movement” seeking to bring political change in neo-Soviet Russia.  Every promise Navalny ever made about that movement was broken, and now it has completely given up its feeble attempt to run candidates for office.  Whitmore’s grossly misleading headline “Advantage Navalny” has it exactly backwards. Advantage:  Putin.

As we’ve said many times before, there is far too much breathless, fawning, rose-colored reporting about the Russian opposition by those who oppose Vladimir Putin.  What these reports routinely fail to remember is that in the end the opposition faces a fundamental obstacle nearly impossible to overcome:  They are comprised of Russians, and Russian vices inevitably bring them down.  We’ve said from the very beginning that Navalny is a dead-end for Russia, he simply has far too many classically Russian faults to be the country’s Gandhi or Martin Luther King.  He’s not even Che Guevara.  He’s just a pretender, whose exploits have sucked all the oxygen out of the opposition room and prevented a more viable alternative from emerging, something that can only delight Putin and help Russia further down the road to national collapse.

An Election in Russia?

On Monday, voting closed in the Russian opposition’s online election.  170,000 had signed up for the process, but only 98,000 actually took the trouble to document their identity.  Of the registered voters, only 82,000 actually went to the polls to cast their votes.

The spinning began immediately.

Navalny Turns to Communism

Once again, this time shouting that “there is not enough personal anger in this fight,” Alexei Navaly has led a street demonstration in Moscow against Vladimir Putin.  He has proved unable to maintain the size of the demonstrations, which are now half what they were in their heyday, and unable to expand their geographic reach beyond Moscow – a feeble gathering of barely 2,000 showed up in St. Petersburg.  The demonstration was called a the March of Millions, and indeed sex months ago Navalny had promised to have a million or more on the streets. But the size of gatherings has moved in the opposite direction from what he predicted, consistent with what we have said from the beginning.

In fact, as has been the pattern, it was quite difficult to get a clear picture of how man people there actually were on the street this past Saturday. Reuters and Financial Times said it was 50,000. AFP said 40,000. AP and New York Times lacked the courage to quote any figure.  Russian police said it was just 14,000 while the psychotic left-wing charlatan Sergei Udaltsov claimed it was 150,000.

Meanwhile, in craven fashion, Putin’s press secretary refused to comment on the fact that tens of thousands were calling for Putin’s ouster on the streets of Moscow, while he sojourned in Sochi and met with the dictator of Belarus.

Navalny sounded desperate, and vaguely like a new sort of Russian Communist. He screeched:

The other side knows that they stand to lose millions, their yachts and their houses on the Cote d’Azur . . . we have to see our fight for freedom and for equal rights as concrete things. The destruction of corruption means the country’s riches for all of us and equal rights mean equality for all our children and not just cushy jobs for the children of the Kremlin elite. We have come out and demonstrate to ensure the future for ourselves and for our families. We have to come out as if we were going to work.

Navalny, it seems, has abandoned his ludicrous claim that he would force the Kremlin to hold a new round of less corrupt national elections that would allow him to gain a foothold in power.  Now, he appears to be courting the support of the Communist Party, by far the  largest single group in attendance (their red flags dominated the protest square, along with the black-white-yellow banners of the Russian Nazis). One demented Communist went about declaring:  ”Death to the Bourgeoisie!”  The Party itself beamed with pride, stating that the protests had turned “notably red.”

This is what Russia’s so-called protest movement has come to. Navalny has failed so miserably that his last best hope is to become a communist, just another way of leading Russia into the same sort of darkness favored by proud KGB spy Vladimir Putin.

Another Disastrous Demonstration in Moscow

Russia’s opposition movement turned to violence on Sunday, after it was embarrassed by yet another puny turnout.  It bloodied police officers and pro-Kremlin journalists and it vandalized property. It became a mob, and a small one at that.  Once again, Russia sunk to a new low.  Its only accomplishment was that finally it forced the Kremlin to escalate the violence used against it, but that came at the cost of losing its own credibility and being led by a throng of neo-Nazis (Udaltsov), crypto-fascists (Navalny), Communists and hopelessly confused, leaderless, agendaless followers.

Yevgenia Khvoshchinskaya, a 30-year-old education specialist who was carrying a poster referencing Russia’s Decembrist revolutionaries of the 19th century, told the New York Times:  “I don’t know why I came. The last protests did not achieve anything. There is no program. The people are tired.”

Photos after the jump.

Mr. Navalny and his Ludicrous Lies

Well, game over.

First Aleksei Navalny told us he would force Putin to hold a new round of parliamentary elections.

It did not happen.

Then he forgot about promise #1, and replaced it with a promise that his “meetings” would grow dramatically in size, first to 200,000 and then to one million.

That did not happen either.  To the contrary, the turnout got smaller.

The he forgot about promise #2, and replaced it with a promise that Putin would be forced into a humiliating runoff election in his bid to return as president.

Once again, no such thing occurred. To the contrary, Putin won in a landslide.

Now, there won’t be another election in Russia for five long years. Does anyone in their right mind believe Navalny can sustain his momentum for even five weeks, much less five years? Will anyone in their right mind pay any heed to any more of his ludicrous lies?

They will not.

More Idiotic Gibberish about Russia on the Pages of the New York Times

The Gray Lady has published yet another ludicrously inane piece of disinformation about Russia.  On Sunday, Andrew Kramer wrote about a recent Kremlin effort to Photoshop opposition leader Navalny next to Boris Berezovsky under the headline “Smear in Russia Backfires, Online Tributes Roll In.”

The article is misguided at its core.  The fraudulent photograph was not published online but in the physical press, and its purpose was not to undermine Navalny with his online supporters.  To the contrary, it had the exact opposite purpose, to destroy any vestigial support Navalny might have with the mainstream press and in the general, non-virtual, population.