The Social Movement of Alexei Navalny

Abstract

The article focuses on the major stages of development of Alexei Navalny’s social movement in 2017-2019 on the federal and regional levels. The movement aims to form and mobilize the supporters of Alexei Navalny in the movement’s structural elements to carry out opposition activities in large cities. In the long-term, the movement wants their activists to participate in regional and local elections. The movement is developing in the context of slowly growing socio-economic and political dissatisfaction in the country and the government’s aim to restrict public expression of concern. The conditions make the movement look for new formats of manifesting people’s discontent. The weakness of the movement is Alexei Navalny’s non-eligibility to hold the office and absence of Navalny’s political party. His image of a “fringe” and “protesting” politician created by the television media prevents him from becoming a respectable and worthy of support politician for the majority of Russians.