In 2007, he began the anti-corruption campaign that has become his signature issue. He bought small numbers of shares in major Russian companies, including state-run energy giants Gazprom and Rosneft and energy-transport company Transneft, used his shareholder status (and his legal skills) to obtain information about their finances, and then published evidence of their corruption on his LiveJournal blog, including copies of incriminating documents.
His allegations proved explosive. There was a general awareness in Russia that corruption was pervasive in Russian business, but uncovering or prosecuting the specifics of those dealings was seen as a perilous activity.
Navalny’s blog turned that perception on its head. His work replaced general presumptions of corruption with specific, outrageous accusations. His documentation of graft and theft made the officials involved appear clumsy and foolish, not intimidating. And by exhorting his followers to engage in similar activism, Navalny began to normalize anti-corruption campaigning, turning it into something that ordinary people do in their spare time, rather than the futile quest of lone idealists with high tolerance for risk.
Russia and the Declining Ruble
Russia still has reserves of $370 billion, but it also has foreign-currency debts of more than $600 billion.
The News in Moscow
Over the last dozen years of good oil-funded living, middle-class Russians have developed the habit of travelling to warmer climes for the two weeks of idleness the law grants them at the start of the year, but even with tickets booked and paid for, many discovered that they could not afford hotels or food. One friend told me that she was considering cancelling her trip just to see what would happen in Moscow with so many Russians staying there involuntarily: “Maybe people will storm the Kremlin.”
.. But the most surprising thing about Black Tuesday was that it was a surprise to Russians at all. The economy had been shrinking for at least a year, and the slowdown had looked catastrophic for months, at least to the economists who were warning of looming stagflation. The American and European sanctions imposed over the war in Ukraine and the Russian counter-sanctions, especially the ban on many imported foods, made things worse. Layoffs had been common since spring. In July, food prices spiked by about ten per cent. The currency had been slipping for months, and the fall of oil prices in autumn dealt the economy a final blow. Against this backdrop, a drop in the exchange rate, even as much as eleven per cent in a single day, seems predictable. So why didn’t Russians see this coming?
.. After nearly fifteen years of systematic destruction of public space, engineered by Putin, the normal ways by which regular people absorb information about the state of their country are gone. Only a person who had lost his livelihood or half his savings would have been able to report that the economy was failing.
Putin’s Bubble Bursts: Where Did The Money Go?
Usually, the way a country ends up with a lot of foreign debt is by running trade deficits, using borrowed funds to pay for imports. But Russia hasn’t run trade deficits. On the contrary, it has consistently run large trade surpluses, thanks to high oil prices. So why did it borrow so much money, and where did the money go?
Well, you can answer the second question by walking around Mayfair in London, or (to a lesser extent) Manhattan’s Upper East Side, especially in the evening, and observing the long rows of luxury residences with no lights on — residences owned, as the line goes, by Chinese princelings, Middle Eastern sheikhs, and Russian oligarchs. Basically, Russia’s elite has been accumulating assets outside the country — luxury real estate is only the most visible example — and the flip side of that accumulation has been rising debt at home.