Six months after the opposition chief Aleksei A. Navalny died in a Russian jail above the Arctic Circle, Konstantin A. Kotov woke as much as discover his Moscow house beneath siege.
After breaking down the door, Russian officers set about confiscating all the things to do with Mr. Navalny, all the way down to a marketing campaign button from the activist’s 2018 presidential run and a guide written by his brother. Then, they arrested Mr. Kotov and took him away.
His alleged crime: donating roughly $30 three years earlier to Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, which the Kremlin considers an extremist group.
The dying one yr in the past of Mr. Navalny, who as soon as led tens of hundreds of Russians in opposition to the Kremlin on the streets of Moscow, dealt a severe blow to Russia’s already beleaguered opposition. A lot of that motion has fled overseas amid a crackdown on dissent that started earlier than President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, however escalated with the conflict.
Even with Mr. Navalny useless and his motion in tatters, the authorities have been going after folks with hyperlinks to him and his group inside Russia. Some see the continued prosecutions as a repressive Russian machine working on autopilot. Others see a Moscow that views the opposition determine’s legacy as an enduring menace.
“They appear to be doing it extra out of behavior, relatively than as a brand new marketing campaign,” mentioned Sergei S. Smirnov, the editor in chief of the exiled media outlet Mediazona.
However there are additionally senior officers in the F.S.B., Russia’s home intelligence service, who see themselves as strangling a political underground that presents the identical threat to the Kremlin that the Bolsheviks posed earlier than Russia’s monarchy was toppled in 1917, mentioned Andrei Soldatov, a Russian creator and professional on the safety institution.
“The comparability to the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution is embedded in these folks’s heads,” Mr. Soldatov mentioned by telephone from London. “Czarist Russia crumbled due to an enormous conflict and a significant political occasion working underground.”
The authorities have centered on a variety of targets.
Final yr, they went after journalists who remained in Russia and continued to cowl Mr. Navalny’s ordeal, accusing them of cooperating along with his group.
Antonina Favorskaya, a reporter for the Sota Imaginative and prescient media outlet, was arrested final March on expenses of “taking part in an extremist group.” She was accused of filming footage later used by Mr. Navalny’s associates on their media platforms.
A uncommon reporter to attend courtroom hearings for Mr. Navalny shortly earlier than his dying, Ms. Favorskaya shot the final recognized video of him addressing the courtroom through a video hyperlink from his Arctic jail colony the day earlier than he died.
Russian authorities later arrested three extra journalists and put all of them on trial collectively. Artyom Kriger, one among the defendants, mentioned he and others stood accused of filming interviews on the road in Russia for Mr. Navalny’s YouTube channel.
There has but to be a verdict.
Moscow additionally pursued expenses in opposition to Mr. Navalny’s attorneys.
A courtroom some 80 miles east of Moscow final month sentenced three attorneys for Mr. Navalny to as a lot as 5 and a half years in jail for passing correspondence from the incarcerated politician to his allies. The courtroom dominated that it was tantamount to “taking part” in Mr. Navalny’s unlawful motion.
Mr. Navalny’s attorneys insisted they have been being tried for routine authorized work that features passing on communications on behalf of imprisoned purchasers.
Instances looking for to punish strange Russians for making donations to Mr. Navalny’s crew, a few of them as paltry as $3, have additionally cropped up in courts.
Russian authorities have prosecuted a minimum of 15 folks on expenses of funding an extremist group for sending donations to Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund. In the previous few months, native media reported such expenses in opposition to a doctor from Biysk, an IT engineer from a St. Petersburg suburb and a political activist from Ufa.
“These are merely individuals who possibly simply transferred 500 rubles a very long time in the past to the Anti-Corruption Fund,” Mr. Kotov, a wiry 39-year-old activist who works for a human rights group, mentioned, referring to a sum that could be a little over $5.
By the time a donation case was opened in opposition to him, Mr. Kotov had lengthy been on the radar of Russian authorities for rallying in opposition to Kremlin abuses.
In 2019, he was one among the first folks to be arrested beneath a brand new Russian legislation proscribing freedom of meeting at “unsanctioned protests.” (The legislation laid the groundwork for a close to whole protest ban that later helped pacify wartime Russia.)
He spent 18 months in jail, most of it at a harsh facility in Russia’s Vladimir area, about 60 miles east of Moscow.
Shortly after Mr. Kotov’s launch, Mr. Navalny returned to Russia, having recovered overseas in Germany from a near-fatal poisoning. Inside weeks, Mr. Navalny would find yourself in the identical jail the place Mr. Kotov had been jailed.
That yr, a Russian courtroom outlawed and liquidated Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, labeling it extremist. The ruling criminalized fund-raising from strange Russians that for years had saved the group afloat.
Mr. Navalny’s high aides took to YouTube and made an pressing plea for donations to maintain the group alive, saying that they had labored out a safe system for supporters to switch funds to a checking account exterior Russia.
Mr. Kotov noticed how Mr. Navalny had landed in the identical jail the place he had suffered, and felt a private connection. He signed as much as give a 500 ruble donation monthly, believing the new platform was safe.
“It was my gesture to point out that I didn’t agree with the liquidation of the Anti-Corruption Fund and that I supported Aleksei Navalny, who was in jail,” Mr. Kotov mentioned. “I wished his actions to proceed.”
Half a yr later, in January 2022, Mr. Kotov bought nervous and stopped the donations. However by then, it was too late. A few of the transactions had revealed the Anti-Corruption Fund’s overseas financial institution data to Russian authorities by together with a reference to the group’s title in the switch information. The donations had not been safe.
The next month, Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine, prompting Mr. Kotov to exit in the streets of Moscow and protest the conflict. He was shortly arrested and spent the subsequent month in jail. Two and a half years later, the authorities got here to his house and arrested him for the six 500 ruble donations he made to the Mr. Navalny’s fund. He pleaded responsible.
A courtroom launched him beneath home arrest. At first, he thought he would keep in Russia. Different donors charged with the identical crime had gotten away with fines.
However then, in December, a courtroom in Moscow discovered Ivan S. Tishchenko, a 46-year-old coronary heart surgeon, responsible for sending 3,500 rubles in donations to Mr. Navalny’s basis. His sentence: 4 years in jail.
Dr. Tishchenko had subscribed to recurring donations to the Anti-Corruption Fund effectively earlier than Russian authorities outlawed it as extremist in 2021.
Dr. Tishchenko’s lawyer, Natalya Tikhonova, described the verdict as “too harsh for an individual who saved hundreds of lives and positively by no means meant to trigger any hurt to Russia’s constitutional order.”
Mr. Kotov, cautious of a return to Russian jail, fled to Lithuania this yr.
In an interview from there, Mr. Kotov described how Mr. Navalny had represented hope “that Putin isn’t immortal, that in some unspecified time in the future this regime will come to an finish.”
“Aleksei Navalny was the image of an exquisite Russia of the future, a cheerful Russia of the future,” he mentioned. “When that image was gone, I began to really feel a lot worse.”
“However we’re nonetheless residing,” he added. “We will’t quit.”
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