MOSCOW – The Kremlin has been trying for years to ignore opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny in order to avoid losing his name.
But by Sunday, Russian officials had drastically reversed the course.
President Vladimir V. Putin’s spokesman appeared on a first-hour program on state television and denied Mr. Navalny’s claim that Putin has a secret palace on the Black Sea. On another exhibition program, the host gave 40 minutes to mr. Navalny devoted, described as ‘political pedophilia’. And the evening’s news report shows tweets from Western officials in support of Mr. Navalny as proof that he works against Russian interests.
The all-encompassing attack on Mr. Navalny on Sunday underlined how the opposition leader dramatically returned to Russia a week earlier and his arrest and changed the landscape of Russian politics.
Mr. Putin is still in control of the levers of power. But Russians dissatisfied with their president – long a weak, diverse and atomized group – suddenly have a clear leader over whom to rally, and the government appears uncertain about how to fight back.
On Saturday, tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets in support of Mr. Navalny in more than a hundred Russian cities – protests on a scale not seen in the country in years. Quiet Siberian cities saw thousands of people, while a survey in Moscow showed that more than one-third of the participants had never protested before.
“People are tired of this authoritarian regime, of the chaos, of the corruption,” said Viktor F. Rau, a liberal activist in one of the Siberian cities, Barnaul. “Navalny was the spark.”
With more protests planned for the coming weekend, and a court hearing that Mr. Navalny could be sent to prison for years planned on February 2, a new repression of the opposition and a harsh prison sentence could give his leader a setback, leaving even more people taking to the streets.
Either way, analysts say, the disagreement between the Kremlin and its critics is poised to escalate and add new volatility in a country in which Mr. Putin now has a clear biggest opponent in the political arena.
Mr. Navalny has been a bat for years, but his poisoning last summer in what Western officials say was a coup attempt, followed by his daring return to Russia, has sharply increased his stature. The Kremlin denies any involvement in the poisoning.
“For me, it’s basically a revolution,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a foreign scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center, referring to Mr Navalny’s new breadth. “We are going to see a long period of confrontation between the opposition and the authorities, and it is very difficult to say how it will end.”
Saturday’s protests brought together the often feuding elements of Russia’s opposition: pro – Western urban liberals, leftists, libertarians and nationalists.
According to a journalist there in Vologda, about 300 kilometers north of Moscow – one of the many remote cities with surprisingly large crowds – the approximately 1000 protesters who marched for Mr. Navalny collapsed, including communists and coronavirus deniers. Some people spray-painted “Putin is a thief” and a rudeness on the walls of the local government.
The journalist, Sergey Gorodishenin, explained the great rise through people’s heated resentment over injustices in the legal system, the construction of local parks and the hardships of the pandemic.
“I think the next demonstration will bring more people, not less,” he said. Gorodishenin said. “We have never seen anything like it in Vologda.”
Mr. Putin has previously survived protest movements.
In 2012, more than 100,000 people protested in Moscow. In 2017, Mr. Navalny again causes a wave of nationwide unrest. In 2019, the contested run-up to the Moscow city council election began a summer of protests in the capital. And last summer, thousands of people gathered weekly in the Far East city of Khabarovsk in support of a popular governor who was arrested after falling out with the Kremlin; more than six months later, the governor remains behind bars.
Analysts are keeping a close eye on how prominent figures in Russian culture and business respond to the protests. Last week, for example, social networks wondered that Russian pop star Alla Pugacheva was following her pro-Putin ex-husband on Instagram, and Mr. Navalny followed.
Me. Stanovaya said that the size of the protest action Mr. Navalny has given the kind of political legitimacy that could lead to more people in the Russian elite supporting him, at least privately. A more violent response to future protests – on Saturday, police stalled protesters but withheld intense methods such as tear gas – could have further unintended consequences.
“People expect an increase in violence on the part of the regime,” said Ivan Kurilla, a historian at the European University of St. Petersburg. “The optimistic scenario is that such things cause a kind of crack in the elite.”
The Russian authorities indicated that they would follow a hard line, and announced a series of criminal cases against protesters, including for the crime of blocking streets.
To in favor of mr. To play Navalny is that his blunt, populist anti-corruption message has hit a cross-section of society. His investigation, published last week into Putin’s alleged secret palace – complete with details such as a $ 850 toilet brush – has been viewed more than 80 million times on YouTube, and the Kremlin seems compelled to take note.
“Putin is certainly not tied to toilet brushes,” state television presenter Dmitry Kiselyov said Sunday night in a refutation of sorts. “He’s a person of a different scale.”
On Saturday, a team led by Aleksandra Arkhipova, a social anthropologist in Moscow, examined a random sample of 359 protesters in the capital and found that 42 percent of them had not yet attended a protest. When the team investigated the protest marches in Moscow in 2019, it was 17 percent, she said.
Mr. Navalny makes Russians think twice about problems such as corruption that they otherwise take for granted.
“Navalny says things that are true of virtually every inhabitant of Russia in the depths of his soul,” she said. Arkhipova said. “He says we should not accept it – that it is not the natural order of things.”
One of Saturday’s first protesters in Moscow was Maria Zhuravlyova, a 29-year-old manager at a technology company. She came out with her friend Grigory Orlov (25) to censor and violate rights under Mr. Putin to oppose.
“A lot has piled up for people,” she said. “I think we have a long way to go.”
Ivan Nechepurenko reported from Moscow. Oleg Matsnev and Sophia Kishkovsky contributed research.