Alexei Navalny and his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) team are among the best investigative reporters of our time.
They have documented the extreme corruption of Russian politicians and oligarchs, which goes beyond anything I would have imagined. The one on Vladimir Putin’s billion-dollar palace, financed through graft, is just one example.
It is no wonder that Putin fears Navalny, and has railroaded him into prison on trumped-up charges.
Russians are among the poorest people in Europe, the Russian government is among the most corrupt, and the gap between rich and poor is one of the highest of any advanced nation.
There is nothing more potentially explosive that showing the struggling Russian common people the extreme wealth and luxury in which their rulers live.
Of course rankings change year-by-year, and Ukraine also has extremes of poverty, corruption and inequality. The point is that such conditions may become intolerable when Russians are asked to make more sacrifices for the sake of winning a war of choice led by their government.
Navalny started the FBK in 2011. In 2013, he was indicted and convicted of embezzlement from his own foundation and given a suspended sentence. Most human rights organizations regard the changes as bogus.
In 2020, he was poisoned and received treatment in Germany. The FBK produced a documentary showing the Russian government was behind the poisoning. He returned to Russia in January, 2021, and was arrested for parole violation. He was tried in March on additional charges of embezzlement and sentenced to nine years in prison. He is appealing that sentence.
Meanwhile the FBK had been shut down and some of its workers arrested on charges of extremism. But it is continuing to produce videos, most of them with English subtitles, evidently from outside Russia. The independent Meduza news service has relocated to Latvia and The Moscow Times to the Netherlands.
I worked on newspapers for 24 years, and I especially enjoy FBK videos as great examples of investigative reporting—the ingenuity with which the investigators track down the facts, their professionalism in document the facts, and the clarity and wit with which they present the facts.