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Will Russians Heed Navalny’s Call For Action?

William E. Pomeranz

Anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny received his five-year prison sentence last week, to the surprise of no one. After all, the Russian criminal system has a 99 percent conviction rate once a case goes to trial, and it was highly unlikely that a Russian judge would buck the system at this late date.

Will Russians Heed Navalny’s Call For Action?
Photo Credit: Valya Egorshin: http://bit.ly/1blq2G5

Anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny received his five-year prison sentence last week, to the surprise of no one.  After all, the Russian criminal system has a 99 percent conviction rate once a case goes to trial, and it was highly unlikely that a Russian judge would buck the system at this late date.

So the Russian government has seemingly silenced one of its biggest critics, the man who famously came up with the slogan “the party of crooks and thieves” to describe the country’s governing party, United Russia. Navalny possesses political aspirations as well, and the government evidently thought it best to defeat him in the courts before he gained further political traction at the ballot box.

Yet the phenomenon of a political trial is not new in Russia. It has been around for centuries, as both tsars and commissars relied on courts to give their political orders a fig leaf of justice. The tsarist courts proved more independent, and one can find several prosecutions that went awry and even ended up in acquittals. The Soviet courts made no such mistakes, and the famous show trials of the 1930s lacked even the superficial elements of adversarialness and fairness.

Read the full article on CNN.

About the Author

William E. Pomeranz

William E. Pomeranz

Director, Kennan Institute

William Pomeranz, the Director of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, is an expert guide to the complexities of political and economic developments in Russia, particularly through the lens of law. He leverages extensive, hands-on experience in international and Russian jurisprudence to address a wide range of legal issues, from the development of Russia’s Constitution to human rights law to foreign investment and sanctions. He is also the author of Law and the Russian State: Russia's Legal Evolution from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin (Bloomsbury, 2018).

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Kennan Institute

The Kennan Institute is the premier U.S. center for advanced research on Russia and Eurasia and the oldest and largest regional program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The Kennan Institute is committed to improving American understanding of Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the surrounding region though research and exchange.  Read more