The Dissident by David Herszenhorn

Author:David Herszenhorn [M. HERSZENHORN, DAVID]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2023-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

For Navalny, the key deceptive development was Medvedev’s December 2008 nomination of Nikita Belykh, the former leader of the Union of Right Forces political party, to be governor of the Kirov region, a forested area located between Moscow and the Ural mountains.

Belykh was a year older than Navalny and one of the brightest young prospects in Russian opposition circles. The Union of Right Forces was founded by Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar—the main proponents of Russia’s post-Soviet liberal economic reforms—and would always be tarnished by the negative fallout of privatization, which yielded Russia’s oligarchic system. Vast, previously state-controlled wealth, much of it tied to Russia’s seemingly boundless natural resources, had ended up in the hands of a select few, many of them robber barons.

Originally, Navalny cheered those so-called reforms. But he later concluded that Chubais was a hypocrite and the man primarily responsible for Russia’s path toward authoritarianism and crony capitalism. After preaching the gospel of private ownership, Chubais went on to earn a fortune running two state-owned companies, the power monopoly called Unified Energy System of Russia, or UES, and Rusnano, the government-financed nanotechnology firm.

“As an erstwhile devotee of Yeltsin and Chubais, I can say that Chubais arouses more negative emotions in me now than Putin does,” Navalny told Voronkov. “It’s to none other than Chubais, I believe, that we owe the existence of Putinism.”

In 2015, Navalny got a chance to confront Chubais personally with his allegations of hypocrisy, appearing opposite him during a live, televised debate moderated by Ksenia Sobchak on TV-Rainn. Navalny opened by quoting “a wonderful, very smart person” who in 2006 said: “‘State capitalism is inefficient, almost always corrupt, and strategically not viable.’ In 2006, that person was Anatoly Borisovich Chubais.” Navalny said Chubais had betrayed his younger self and that Rusnano should not exist in its state-owned form.

Chubais replied by saying that while Navalny had a potentially bright future as a politician, he was viewing the world in overly black and white terms. “Alexey Anatolyevich,” Chubais said, “please don’t confuse the term ‘state capitalism’ with the term ‘state company’—these are not quite the same thing, or rather not at all the same thing.”

Navalny accused Rusnano of squandering public funds; Chubais insisted that the state could play a useful role as an incubator of innovation. The debate was anticlimactic, with no knockout blow from either side.

Future disagreements and disappointments aside, Navalny, in the late 2000s, had good reason to find common cause with the Union of Right Forces, known by its Russian acronym SPS.

Other founders of the party included avowed democratic politicians like Boris Nemtsov, the first post-Soviet governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region who later served as energy minister of Russia and as deputy prime minister in the late 1990s. He went on to become a deputy chairman of the State Duma, and the head of the SPS faction in the Duma, from 2000 to 2003.

Belykh had been a member of the legislative assembly in his native Perm region, which is adjacent to Kirov.

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