INTRODUCTION
By 2013, journalist Alexei Navalny had published over a dozen reports charging Russian oligarchs and corporations with corruption. He showed the actual receipts. Navalny purchased small amounts of stock in the companies and gained access to their financial statements. He had also been arrested at least three times and served two jail sentences. In 2013, Edward Snowden stole American secrets and became a celebrity after then absconding to Russia.
These story arcs intersected last January, I believe, resulting in the strange disappearance of Edward Snowden.
I’ve been fascinated with Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald since they first mounted the world stage. To say that I’ve also been skeptical is a bit of an understatement. I’ve also been interested in Alexei Navalny since I became aware of him as a Moscow mayoral candidate in 2013.
A visual aid would help, I think, to understand the strange disappearance of Snowden.
A TIMELINE
ANALYSIS/OPINION
Putin was afraid.
Alexei Navalny received billions of page and video views on his anti-corruption website through the years. The early targets had been on the periphery—random oligarchs and corporations—but the focus began to shift to Putin’s inner circle, his puppet Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, and then, finally, over to Putin himself.
Within one week, over 100 million people viewed the video implicating Putin in “The World’s Biggest Bribe,” and that video motivated many of the millions of protestors who risked injury and arrest and their lives to protest.
Putin’s regime was forced to detain tens of thousands of protestors.
The regime had to completely dismantle Navalny’s national apparatus even though that allowed the mask to slip, even though it proved that democracy and dissent were no longer permitted in Russia.
Moreover, the Tomsk elections showed that Navalny’s movement had electoral legs, even in the strangest of places. Winning 27% of the vote in a Moscow mayoral election was one thing; actually winning races in Siberia was quite another. Navalny instituted a “smart voting” system that would make it easier to beat Putin’s United Russia party at the polls.
And, so, Putin micromanaged the situation, which included holding a literal or metaphorical gun to Edward Snowden’s head. The plug was pulled on Snowden, and the celebrity thief acquiesced, even though it meant no new freedoms for millions of Russians.
A cover story was created: Snowden wanted to spend more time with his new baby.
What makes me think that Putin may have personally micromanaged the Snowden hiatus? The sabbatical tweet itself. It was either the most tin-eared message of all time, or it was a cruel joke, a total dick move:
At the time of the tweet, thousands of Russians were being arrested every day, and a hero to millions of them, Alexei Navalny, had recently been poisoned with a nerve agent and was on trial for his freedom, and, so, of course, Snowden—or Putin—tweets, “Stay free.”
Total Dick Move.