With Alexey Navalny's Sentence, Putin Chooses the Hard Way: The New Yorker Alexey Navalny was registered as a candidate for the Moscow mayoral race on Wednesday; in a recent poll, he ranked second, with eight per cent of decided voters. On Thursday, he was found guilty of embezzlement, sentenced to five years, and handcuffed and taken into custody right in the courtroom. With that, the Putin government had chosen the hard way to eliminate a man who had evolved into a political challenge. There is no doubt that the charges against Navalny - which he denies, saying that the evidence is fabricated - are politically motivated. Navalny is a highly popular blogger, an anti-corruption crusader. He dared to challenge the most powerful people in Russia, and now is paying for it. There's nothing new about the Kremlin using its law enforcement and the judiciary machine to further political goals. Nor is there anything new about unlawful trials and hard verdicts. What is new is that, this time around, the political motive is impossible to disguise. Navalny had managed to do what nobody else had: he beat the system Putin had put in place to effectively bar any unwanted figure, group, or party from entering the political realm. He built a following in a country where mass-media outlets are under tight government control. He took on Russia's high-ranking officials and large companies. He encouraged others to act. Don't just rage and grumble over the government lawlessness and corruption, he would say; do what I'm doing - pore over the official postings on government procurement, and you'll find plentiful evidence of corruption. He thus gave those who joined his effort a sense of "We can get them" - rare in a country where "Nothing depends on us" is the pervasive perception. He persuaded people to donate money to his cause - another amazing achievement in Russia, where trust is scarce. On a radio show, he called the chief pro-Kremlin party, United Russia, "a party of crooks and thieves." The nickname stuck. Navalny had already become fairly popular in social networks when, in late 2011, Moscow became the scene of mass protests, and he instantly gained real-life popularity as well. Then, this summer, he tried to put his name on the ballot. Navalny is made for politics. He is thirty-seven years old and has energy and charisma; he's brave and handsome, and has a beautiful wife who stands firmly by his side. She was there, on Thursday, in the courtroom. Another asset is his wit. He knows how to be funny, and he likes it. "In this giant tough world of the so-called Russian politics ... Navalny is the only one who knows how to laugh. He laughs even as he enters the courtroom," Yuri Saprykin, a Russian blogger, wrote. The Kremlin had long seen Navalny as most unwelcome. Officials repeatedly detained him and put him under short-term arrest. They opened legal proceedings against him about two years ago, but the charges - embezzlement as a result of organizing a theft of timber, in a region where he temporarily served as an aide to the governor - looked so trumped up that the case was closed. Navalny, characteristically defiant, demanded that the prosecutor's office apologize to him for opening the case, even as he predicted, in his blog, that the case would be reopened. He was right: proceedings were resumed, and ended with today's five-year sentence, plus four years for his co-defendant, Pyotr Ofitserov. In a way, Navalny had outstripped the government: the Kremlin failed to nip him in the bud, before he rose to popularity, and now his elimination is a risky business. His arrest might provoke a new wave of major protests. For a while, it looked like the Kremlin would opt for a softer game with Navalny, despite its large-scale assault, in the past year, on activists and civil society. Navalny was not barred from running, as many other unwanted contenders in various races have been in the past. He was allowed to open a headquarters and send enthusiastic volunteers out in the streets. The judge in the reopened case even scheduled the hearings so Navalny could travel to Moscow and file the necessary paperwork for his candidacy. And throughout, Navalny continued to disclose high-level corruption. The government game appeared to be: let him run and lose, maybe with a modest share of the vote, so he will no longer look like a rising political star, then celebrate the incumbent's victory in a fair and competitive election, and only then, with Navalny diminished, have him sentenced and jailed. This plan looked plausible yesterday, when the incumbent, Mayor Sergey Sobianin, said that Navalny would be able to continue his campaign. But no such luck. The Kremlin opted for the hard way - underscoring its shift to repressive policies. "Predictable and inevitable," Mikhail Khodorkovsky, another victim of the repressive political machine, commented. "We will not wake up tomorrow in "another country," " a Russian blogger echoed, "we will wake up in the same shit." An open campaign turned out to be a risk the Kremlin would not accept. The hard way - a victory for the hard-liners, some of whom saw Navalny as a personal nemesis because of his anti-corruption disclosures - means that Putin's policy of purging the Russian scene of independent and defiant figures will be stepped up. Once you opt for repression as an instrument of politics, you don't tend to stop. Navalny's campaign headquarters announced that they will continue operating in the form of a protest or a boycott - the sentence disqualifies him as a candidate. Muscovites have gathering to voice their anger in one of Moscow's central squares. As I am writing, the police have barred entry to it; a few thousand people are crowded nearby, chanting "Putin is a thief!" and "freedom!" Elsewhere in Russia, hundreds of people are reported to be joining protests. But most of those who resent Putin and his governance will likely be demoralized and frustrated by the sight of Navalny being led away. Navalny's courage and fortitude earned him many admirers and supporters, and he has incessantly called for them to act as he does. "All these years I was learning - together with you - to organize in an environment of state propaganda, intimidations and a lack of funds," he wrote in a blog post the day before his verdict. He continued: Today we can raise funds. ... We can investigate better than any structures entrusted with investigations. ... We can ... fund and publish newspapers. ... We can organize rallies... We know how to collect a hundred thousand signatures... It is clear what to do, how to do it and how to fund it. The main thing is to gain courage, forget about laziness and act. But Navalny's supporters are learning slowly. And with a limited and mostly timid following, Navalny is not a Russian Nelson Mandela, not yet. If he is Russia's chance for a political renewal, that chance will have to be for the future - not for now. Read Julia Ioffe's 2011 article about Alexey Navalny. Photograph by Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters.