Six months after opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny died in a Russian prison above the Arctic, Konstantin A. Kotov wakes up and finds an apartment under siege in Moscow.
After smashing the door, the Russian officer set out to confiscate everything he had with Navalny, up to the 2018 presidential election and the campaign button in the book written by his brother. They then arrested Mr. Kotov and took him away.
His alleged crime: Donate to Navalny's Anti-Corruption Fund about $30 ago three years ago. The Kremlin considers it a militant group.
The death of Mr. Navalny a year ago, who once led tens of thousands of Russians against the Kremlin on the streets of Moscow, took a serious blow to Russia's already plagued opposition. Many of the movements fled abroad amid crackdowns on objections that began before President Vladimir V. Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but escalated to the war.
Even in Navalny Dead's move in ruins, authorities have chased people with ties to his organization within Russia. Some view the ongoing prosecution as a repressive Russian machine operating on autopilots. Others see Moscow, which views the legacy of opposition figures as a lasting threat.
“It appears they're doing it not as a new campaign, but from habits,” said Sergei S. Smirnov, editor-in-chief of exiled media outlet media Zona.
However, the FSB, the domestic intelligence agency in Russia, believes that it is strangled political undergrounds that present the same risks to the Kremlin, where the Bolsheviks posed before the fall of the Russian monarchy in 1917. Andrei Seldatov, the Russian author, said: Security facility expert.
“The comparison between the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution is embedded in the heads of those people,” Soldatov said on a London phone call. “The Emperor Russia collapsed due to the great war and the large political parties operating underground.”
Authorities focus on a wide range of targets.
Last year they followed journalists who remained in Russia, continuing to cover Navalny's ordeal, accusing them of working with his organization.
Antonina Favorskaya, a reporter for the Sota Vision Media Outlet, was arrested last March on suspicion of “participation in an extremist organization.” She was later accused of filming footage Navalny's colleagues used on the media platform.
Favluskaya, a rare reporter who attends Navalny's court hearing shortly before his death, addressing the court via video links from his Arctic prison colony on the day he died I filmed a known video of.
Russian authorities later arrested three more journalists, all of which went to trial together. One of the accused, Artyom Kriger, said he and others were accused of filming an interview on the streets of Russia for Navalny's YouTube channel.
There are no verdicts yet.
Moscow also pursued accusations against Navalny's lawyers.
Last month, a court about 80 miles east of Moscow sentenced three lawyers to Navalny in a five-and-a-half-year prison term for passing correspondence from imprisoned politicians to allies. The court found that it was equivalent to “participating” in Mr. Navalny's illegal movement.
Navalny's lawyers argued that it was being tested for routine legal work, including passing communications on behalf of incarcerated clients.
A lawsuit attempting to punish ordinary Russians for making donations to Navalny's team was also born in court, just as small as $3.
Russian authorities have charged at least 15 people with funding extremist organizations to send donations to Navalny's Anti-Corruption Fund. In the past few months, local media have reported such accusations against doctors in Bisk, IT engineers outside St. Petersburg, and UFA political activists.
“These may just have been the transfer of 500 rubles to the Anti-Corruption Fund in the past,” said Kotov, a 39-year-old activist who works for a human rights group, referring to the amount, referring to the amount. It's a little over the dollar.
By the time the donation case was opened against him, Kotov had long been on the radar of Russian authorities to oppose Kremlin abuse.
In 2019 he was one of the first people to be arrested under new Russian laws that restricted freedom of assembly with “unauthorized protests.” (The law laid the foundation for an almost complete protest ban that later helped soften Russia during the war.)
He spent 18 months in prison, most of which was spent in strict facilities in the Vladimir region of Russia about 60 miles east of Moscow.
Shortly after Kotov's release, Navalny returned to Russia and recovered from fatal poisoning abroad in Germany. Within weeks, Navarry ended up in the same prison where Kotov was imprisoned.
That year, a Russian court banned and settled Navalny's anti-corruption fund, labeling it with extremists. Control criminalized fundraising from ordinary Russians who had floated the group for many years.
Navalny's top aide appeared on YouTube and urgently pleaded for a donation to keep the organization alive, saying it had resolved a secure system for the transfer of funds to non-Russian bank accounts.
Kotov felt a personal connection to see how Navarri landed in the same prison where he was suffering. He signed up to donate 500 rubles a month, believing that the new platform was safe.
“It was my gesture to show that I didn't agree to liquidate the Anti-Corruption Fund. “I wanted him to continue doing what he does.”
Six months later, in January 2022, Kotov became nervous and stopped giving. But by then it was too late. Part of the transaction revealed foreign bank information from the Anti-Corruption Fund to Russian authorities by including reference to the group's name in the transfer data. Donations were not safe.
The following month, Putin invaded Ukraine and urged Kotov to go out on the streets of Moscow and protest the war. He was soon arrested and spent the following month in prison. Two and a half years later, authorities came to his apartment and arrested him with six 500 rubles donations he had made to Mr Navalny's fund. He pleaded guilty.
The court released him under house arrest. At first, he thought he would stay in Russia. Other donors charged with the same crime were fined.
However, in December, a Moscow court found Ivan S. Tishchenko, a 46-year-old cardiac surgeon, was guilty of sending 3,500 rubles of donations to Mr Navary's foundation. His sentence: 4 years in prison.
Dr. Tishenko had joined repeated donations to the Anti-Corruption Fund before Russian authorities banned it as an extremist in 2021.
Natalia Tikonova, lawyer for Dr. Tishchenko, described the verdict as “too harsh for those who never intend to save thousands of lives and undoubtedly harm Russia's constitutional orders.” .
Kotov, wary of returning to Russian prisons, fled to Lithuania this year.
In an interview from there, Kotov explained how Navalny expressed his hope that “President Putin will not be immortal, but at some point this regime will end.”
“Alexei Navalny was a symbol of the beautiful Russia of the future and a happy Russia of the future,” he said. “When that symbol disappeared, I began to feel even worse.”
“But we are still alive,” he added. “You can't give up.”
