Six months after the opposition chief Aleksei A. Navalny died in a Russian prison above the Arctic Circle, Konstantin A. Kotov woke as much as discover his Moscow condominium below siege.
After breaking down the door, Russian officers set about confiscating every part to do with Mr. Navalny, all the way down to a marketing campaign button from the activist’s 2018 presidential run and a guide written by his brother. Then, they arrested Mr. Kotov and took him away.
His alleged crime: donating roughly $30 three years earlier to Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, which the Kremlin considers an extremist group.
The dying one yr in the past of Mr. Navalny, who once led tens of thousands of Russians against the Kremlin on the streets of Moscow, dealt a critical blow to Russia’s already beleaguered opposition. A lot of that motion has fled overseas amid a crackdown on dissent that started earlier than President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, however escalated with the struggle.
Even with Mr. Navalny useless and his motion in tatters, the authorities have been going after individuals with hyperlinks to him and his group inside Russia. Some see the continued prosecutions as a repressive Russian machine working on autopilot. Others see a Moscow that views the opposition determine’s legacy as a permanent menace.
“They appear to be doing it extra out of behavior, relatively than as a brand new marketing campaign,” mentioned Sergei S. Smirnov, the editor in chief of the exiled media outlet Mediazona.
However there are additionally senior officers within the F.S.B., Russia’s home intelligence service, who see themselves as strangling a political underground that presents the identical danger to the Kremlin that the Bolsheviks posed earlier than Russia’s monarchy was toppled in 1917, mentioned Andrei Soldatov, a Russian writer and knowledgeable on the safety institution.
“The comparability to the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution is embedded in these individuals’s heads,” Mr. Soldatov mentioned by cellphone from London. “Czarist Russia crumbled due to an enormous struggle and a significant political celebration working underground.”
The authorities have targeted on a variety of targets.
Final yr, they went after journalists who remained in Russia and continued to cowl Mr. Navalny’s ordeal, accusing them of cooperating along with his group.
Antonina Favorskaya, a reporter for the Sota Imaginative and prescient media outlet, was arrested final March on fees of “taking part in an extremist group.” She was accused of filming footage later utilized by Mr. Navalny’s associates on their media platforms.
A uncommon reporter to attend courtroom hearings for Mr. Navalny shortly earlier than his dying, Ms. Favorskaya shot the final identified video of him addressing the courtroom by way of a video hyperlink from his Arctic jail colony the day earlier than he died.
Russian authorities later arrested three extra journalists and put all of them on trial collectively. Artyom Kriger, one of many defendants, mentioned he and others stood accused of filming interviews on the road in Russia for Mr. Navalny’s YouTube channel.
There has but to be a verdict.
Moscow additionally pursued fees in opposition to Mr. Navalny’s attorneys.
A courtroom some 80 miles east of Moscow final month sentenced three attorneys for Mr. Navalny to as a lot as 5 and a half years in jail for passing correspondence from the incarcerated politician to his allies. The courtroom dominated that it was tantamount to “taking part” in Mr. Navalny’s unlawful motion.
Mr. Navalny’s attorneys insisted they had been being tried for routine authorized work that features passing on communications on behalf of imprisoned shoppers.
Circumstances looking for to punish peculiar Russians for making donations to Mr. Navalny’s workforce, a few of them as paltry as $3, have additionally cropped up in courts.
Russian authorities have prosecuted no less than 15 individuals on fees of funding an extremist group for sending donations to Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund. Up to now few months, native media reported such fees in opposition to a doctor from Biysk, an IT engineer from a St. Petersburg suburb and a political activist from Ufa.
“These are merely individuals who possibly simply transferred 500 rubles a very long time in the past to the Anti-Corruption Fund,” Mr. Kotov, a wiry 39-year-old activist who works for a human rights group, mentioned, referring to a sum that may be a little over $5.
By the point a donation case was opened in opposition to him, Mr. Kotov had lengthy been on the radar of Russian authorities for rallying in opposition to Kremlin abuses.
In 2019, he was one of many first individuals to be arrested below a brand new Russian regulation proscribing freedom of meeting at “unsanctioned protests.” (The regulation laid the groundwork for a close to complete protest ban that later helped pacify wartime Russia.)
He spent 18 months in jail, most of it at a harsh facility in Russia’s Vladimir area, about 60 miles east of Moscow.
Shortly after Mr. Kotov’s launch, Mr. Navalny returned to Russia, having recovered overseas in Germany from a near-fatal poisoning. Inside weeks, Mr. Navalny would find yourself in the identical jail the place Mr. Kotov had been jailed.
That yr, a Russian courtroom outlawed and liquidated Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, labeling it extremist. The ruling criminalized fund-raising from peculiar Russians that for years had stored the group afloat.
Mr. Navalny’s high aides took to YouTube and made an urgent plea for donations to maintain the group alive, saying that they had labored out a safe system for supporters to switch funds to a checking account exterior Russia.
Mr. Kotov noticed how Mr. Navalny had landed in the identical jail the place he had suffered, and felt a private connection. He signed as much as give a 500 ruble donation per 30 days, believing the brand new platform was safe.
“It was my gesture to point out that I didn’t agree with the liquidation of the Anti-Corruption Fund and that I supported Aleksei Navalny, who was in jail,” Mr. Kotov mentioned. “I needed his actions to proceed.”
Half a yr later, in January 2022, Mr. Kotov acquired nervous and stopped the donations. However by then, it was too late. A number of the transactions had revealed the Anti-Corruption Fund’s international financial institution info to Russian authorities by together with a reference to the group’s identify within the switch information. The donations had not been safe.
The next month, Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine, prompting Mr. Kotov to exit within the streets of Moscow and protest the struggle. He was rapidly arrested and spent the following month in jail. Two and a half years later, the authorities got here to his condominium and arrested him for the six 500 ruble donations he made to the Mr. Navalny’s fund. He pleaded responsible.
A courtroom launched him below home arrest. At first, he thought he would keep in Russia. Different donors charged with the identical crime had gotten away with fines.
However then, in December, a courtroom in Moscow found Ivan S. Tishchenko, a 46-year-old coronary heart surgeon, responsible for sending 3,500 rubles in donations to Mr. Navalny’s basis. His sentence: 4 years in jail.
Dr. Tishchenko had subscribed to recurring donations to the Anti-Corruption Fund effectively earlier than Russian authorities outlawed it as extremist in 2021.
Dr. Tishchenko’s lawyer, Natalya Tikhonova, described the decision as “too harsh for an individual who saved hundreds of lives and undoubtedly by no means meant to trigger any hurt to Russia’s constitutional order.”
Mr. Kotov, cautious of a return to Russian jail, fled to Lithuania this yr.
In an interview from there, Mr. Kotov described how Mr. Navalny had represented hope “that Putin isn’t immortal, that in some unspecified time in the future this regime will come to an finish.”
“Aleksei Navalny was the image of an exquisite Russia of the longer term, a contented Russia of the longer term,” he mentioned. “When that image was gone, I began to really feel a lot worse.”
“However we’re nonetheless dwelling,” he added. “We will’t quit.”
