Inside Alexei Navalny’s Long-Shot Bid to Beat Putin
The activist’s tour of Russia looks like a national campaign, complete with harassment of his staff and thousands of supporters in the streets. On the road with the presidential hopeful.
Navalny in Moscow on March 26.
Photographer: Aleksey Abanin/Kommersant via Getty Images
On the day Alexei Navalny arrived in the frozen Siberian city of Tomsk, a local coordinator of his campaign to unseat Russian President Vladimir Putin found herself locked in her own apartment.
The coordinator, Kseniya Fadeyeva, could unbolt the door but couldn’t open it. She called friends, who discovered that it had been sealed from the outside with insulation foam. As they had passed through the courtyard, they’d noticed that her car had been smeared with maroon paint, its tires punctured and its exhaust pipe lethally filled with the foam.