Can the Internet Defeat Putin?

A court in Moscow convicted Russia’s top opposition blogger, Aleksei Navalny, of criminal fraud. Navalny, who has been under house arrest for nearly a year, was given a suspended sentence and spared jail time. His younger brother Oleg, however, was sentenced to serve three and a half years. Aleksei Navalny is an anti-corruption activist and outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin, and the verdicts were seen as a cynical strategy to punish him without turning him into an imprisoned martyr.

Navalny, a 21st-century Russian dissident, presents a new kind of threat to the Putin regime. He was the first Russian activist to have used the Internet as an effective tool of political resistance. He didn’t ask people to revolt, he just called on them to file online complaints. He provided detailed instructions for appealing to the authorities, and asked his supporters to report everything from unrepaired potholes to suspicious government contracts. Navalny has proved that the Internet’s power is not just “virtual.” But it does have its limits. The opposition’s main obstacle will continue to be public apathy, which is an authoritarian government’s best protection. The Internet alone is not enough to overcome it.