Rebelling against the Tsar is very costly  

It takes a lot of courage to demonstrate at 20 or 30 degrees below zero, knowing for sure that, in addition to the usual beatings, electric shocks and pepper spray from the riot police, dungeons and interrogation rooms in detention centres will rumble with cries of pain and be stained with one's own blood. In Vladimir Putin's Russia, the fight for freedom is not a parlour game, and the testimonies of the thousands of demonstrators detained since the opposition leader Alexei Navalny returned from Germany in a new challenge to President Putin's all-powerful rule can testify to this.   

Since Boris Yeltsin handed him power in exchange for a guarantee of his own impunity, Putin has progressively monopolised all the levers until he has become a de facto reincarnation of the absolutism of the tsars. The fact that there is a constitution, made and modified to suit him, and that elections are held regularly does not in any way equate the current Russian regime with a real democracy. Indeed, a system that, by means of all kinds of manoeuvres and subterfuges, prevents parties and leaders whose main disadvantage is that they advocate different lines of behaviour from those promoted by the Kremlin from freely taking part in elections cannot be described as such. Of all those eliminated so far for representing a threat, present or future, to Putin's power, the one who is causing him the most headaches is precisely Alexei Navalny, who at 44 years of age has become the real bête noire of Russia's new tsar.   

Since denouncing "the falsification of the 2011 legislative elections" and branding United Russia, the political formation behind Putin, as "the party of swindlers and thieves", Navalny has frequently appeared in court and just as often visited prison; he and his family have been subjected to threats, harassment and personal and house searches, while his supporters have suffered intimidation and violence from those under orders not to tolerate his protest movements.   

Navalny has not, however, built a solid body of political doctrine. In fact, he was expelled from the liberal Yabloko party in 2007 because he was considered an ultra-nationalist. He then founded his own party, The People movement, in which he emphasised his Russian nationalism vis-à-vis ethnic minorities, especially Muslim Chechens. The rise of his popularity and prestige is based on the fact that he has become the biggest whistleblower and whipping boy of the corruption rampant in the circles of power that surround and protect Putin, targeting Putin directly. All the pressures exerted on him, including the sentence that condemned him to several years in prison in 2014, with a provisional suspension of the application of the sentence, and disavowed as unjust by the European Court of Human Rights, did not succeed in bringing him to his knees.   

After he had reported an initial attempt to be poisoned during one of his stays in prison, someone decided - Navalny directly accuses Putin himself - that the job of eliminating him once and for all should be completed. This would have been the case last summer if, once he had been poisoned with novichok, the plane in which he was travelling from Siberia to Moscow had not been grounded in view of his condition. After multiple international pressures, Navalny was transferred to Germany, where the neurological toxin that nearly killed him was certified. One of the FSB (former KGB) agents was caught in a video phone trap, in which he confessed that the target was not killed precisely because of that unforeseen crash landing. Putin himself would refer to the matter with an attempted irony: “If they'd wanted to [poison him] then they probably would have finished the job” he said with the smugness of a seasoned KGB agent.   

Now sentenced to three and a half years in prison, to be served in a so-called penal colony (formerly a forced labour colony), Putin and his inner circle hope that the defiance of his supporters at home will abate and that international pressure will fade. After all, where are the demonstrations and protests across Europe over the annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014?   

In 2021, Russia will hold numerous local elections in addition to the general Duma elections scheduled for September. With Navalny eliminated, the main question is whether his baton will first be picked up by local leaders who risk being denied the right to participate. The unusual thing about the demonstrations for Navalny's freedom has been that they have been held all over Russia, from Moscow to Vladivostok, from the warm shores of the Black Sea to the ice of St. Petersburg or Yekaterinburg. And a surprising increase in the number of women there, thus revealing that their role as subservient and self-sacrificing may be changing by leaps and bounds.   

On the other hand, it will not be easy for Vladimir Putin to dilute the shock of the two-hour video showing in detail the exclusive luxury of the Guelendzhik palace. An estate and facilities that evoke the absolute and opulent power of the tsars over a people who have been forced to live in misery for the rest of their lives. The fact that Putin has had to come out and deny that such a facility belongs to him, and that it fell to an oligarch, who happens to have been close to Putin since childhood, to claim ownership, has opened a breach of mistrust towards the man widely regarded in Russia as the architect of the country's return to the pride of being a great power.