Alexey Navalny- a personality in every sense of the uncommon. Judge for yourself: a former adviser to the governor of the Kirov region, the former leader of the Union of Right Forces, Nikita Belykh, a fiery fighter against corruption and at the same time a democrat who was expelled from Yabloko for excessive nationalism.
Alexey Navalny- maybe either how Khodorkovsky finds himself in places not so remote (the flywheel of all kinds of cases Navalny unwinds- either ascend high (he aims for the presidency - but not everyone shares his views). Somebody connects Alexei Navalny with the old Yeltsin-oligarchic group (he directly calls Navalny almost a chick of Voloshin's nest), and someone, on the contrary, says that criminal prosecution is a method of raising his ratings (on the principle "the people love the persecuted" - and with direct references to historical analogies With ).

Alexei Navalny exposes corruption at VTB

Alexey Anatolyevich Navalny
Occupation: public figure, Advisor to the Governor of the Kirov Region
Date of birth: June 4, 1976
Place of birth: Moscow region
Alexey Anatolyevich Navalny(b. June 4, 1976, Moscow region) - Russian political and public figure, publicist.

Alexei Navalny is awarded for the fight against corruption

Alexey Navalny- one of the founders of the National Russian Liberation Movement "People", a former member of the Federal Political Council of the Yabloko party, executive secretary of the Committee for the Protection of Muscovites.
In 2008 Alexey Navalny founded the Union of Minority Shareholders, a public organization that protects the rights of private investors. Actively working on the problem of increasing the transparency of the costs of natural monopolies.
Alexey Navalny- the author of one of the most rated public political and business blogs (magazines) in LiveJournal.

Education of Alexei Navalny

In 1998 Alexey Navalny Graduated from the Faculty of Law of the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia.
In 2001 Alexey Navalny Graduated from the Faculty of Finance and Credit of the Financial Academy under the Government of the Russian Federation.

Alexei Navalny's career

In 2000 Alexey Navalny joined the Russian United Democratic Party "Yabloko". In 2002, he was elected to the regional council of the Moscow branch of the Yabloko party. From April 2004 to February 2007, he was the head of the apparatus of the Moscow regional branch of the RODP Yabloko.
In 2005 Alexey Navalny became one of the founders (together with Maria Gaidar, Natalia Morar and others) of the YES! Youth Movement. Coordinated the project "Police with the people". Since 2006 - coordinator of the "Political Debates" project, editor-in-chief of its television version "Fight Club" (TVC, 2007). As a host of political debates, he was directly involved in the incidents during the debates of Maria Gaidar and Eduard Bagirov, as well as Maxim Kononenko and Yulia Latynina, which were widely covered in the press.
June 23, 2007 Alexey Navalny became one of the co-founders of the People movement. In December 2007, during a meeting of the Bureau of the Yabloko party on the issue of expelling Navalny from the party, he demanded "the immediate resignation of the chairman of the party and all his deputies, the re-election of at least 70% of the Bureau." He was expelled from the Yabloko party "for causing political damage to the party, in particular, for nationalist activities."

Public activities of Alexei Navalny in 2008-2010

May 15, 2008 Alexey Navalny announced that he and a group of like-minded people intend to find out why the oil of the largest Russian state-owned companies is being sold by trader Gunvor and who its beneficial owners are; he said that the companies Rosneft, Gazprom Neft and Surgutneftegaz, whose management was unsuccessfully contacted by minority shareholders for clarification about Gunvor, were hiding information from shareholders about their cooperation with the oil trader.

Alexey Navalny stated:
In my second education securities specialist, so I have always followed the stock market and the state of our corporations in general. The fact that they are robbing their shareholders has always been obvious to me. The first thing that interested me was the strange situation with the offshore oil trader "Gunvor". I was sure and still am sure that Gunvor's profits are funds that are actually stolen from me and other shareholders. Therefore, I demanded to disclose the conditions under which this intermediary works.
Alexey Navalny was repeatedly noted in the publications of Forbes magazine, Novaya Gazeta, Vedomosti, Kommersant, and other publications.
It is a minority shareholder in almost all large Russian companies, including Surgutneftegaz, Transneft, Rosneft, Gazpromneft, Gazprom, TNK-BP, VTB Bank. As a shareholder Navalny, according to journalist Oleg Kashin, "regularly makes scandals, accusing the top management of companies of numerous abuses."

Alexey Navalny- a well-known expert in the field of ensuring the transparency of natural monopolies, protects the rights of minority shareholders. By filing lawsuits against the management of companies, it seeks disclosure of information on issues that directly affect the income of shareholders and the transparency of companies.
Alexei Navalny was recognized person of the year- 2009 by the authoritative Russian business newspaper Vedomosti.
Also Alexey Navalny is the author (and performer of the widely circulated meme "United Russia -".
Alexey Navalny- one of the leaders of the opposition, is a member of the Coordinating Council, which many political analysts call a structure. created for him personally.
Alexey Navalny- possible next president of Russia. At least he has the ambition.

Moscow zugzwang
Navalny's incident is not someone's oversight, it is a system error, a failure of the entire "political program", which finally proved to be a powerful "glitch". And it runs the risk of repeating itself in the future: the incident of Khodorkovsky or the incident of Medvedev
Whatever the outcome of the election of the mayor of Moscow, their winner is known - this is Alexei Navalny, regardless of whether he becomes mayor (which is unlikely) or not. In the same way, the name of the main loser is also known, although it is not included in the ballot - this is Vladimir Putin.
The Moscow elections are more like a medieval jousting tournament, in which the leader of the list - Sergei Sobyanin - is simply appointed to fight in place of the king. In a sense, he even arouses sympathy - it is not easy today to cover for the king. His acquisitions in this tournament are doubtful, but the losses can be quite significant.

There is no political reason why Alexei Navalny would regret participating in this election campaign, just as there is no political reason why the Kremlin would consider Navalny's participation in the elections beneficial to itself.
Alexey Navalny thanks to these elections, he jumped out of the virtual Internet test tube into the field of real practical politics. The Kremlin, having allowed his participation in the elections, could not keep him in this test tube, which means that he lost, regardless of how many votes the election commissions give to Navalny. By and large, the latter is of little concern to anyone. Elections for many Muscovites ended before they even started.

What is the main risk for Navalny today? That he will be put in jail. By participating in the Moscow elections, he certainly does not increase this risk. If the authorities consider it possible and necessary to “close” Navalny (no matter how), then they will do it anyway. But in the light of the elections, it will be more difficult for her to do so. Whatever the Kremlin does, its actions will be interpreted in a negative sense for it. If they don't jail Navalny, that means they're afraid; if they jail him, it means they're even more afraid.
The situation is developing in such a way that the election of the mayor of Moscow very quickly degenerated into a referendum on confidence in Putin. And in this case, it doesn’t matter whether Navalny wins in the end or not. It is important that it gives a significant part of society the opportunity to express itself politically. Sobyanin's attempts to bring the discussion back to regional soil are only partially successful. For the “angry townspeople” driven into a corner, but not vanishing into thin air, voting for Navalny became a form of manifestation of their civic position. Navalny has ceased to be a real person, he literally turns into a "symbol of change" before our very eyes. Other candidates in this case are simply not taken into account. And this is just the beginning of the journey.

The fact that the Kremlin failed to prevent this referendum is the first strategic miscalculation by the "Volodino" administration since the time of the "swamp unrest". There is no “good” way out of this situation for the Kremlin, it was categorically impossible to “enter” it. And the point is not so much in some direct negative consequences, but in the fact that indirectly this “referendum” indicates that by no means everything in the “kingdom” is under control, which, no matter how strong the power is, but by no means all processes she is able to manage. Somehow, more and more often, the apocryphal story of the young Lenin comes to mind, who told the gendarmes that "the wall is rotten - touch it, it will fall apart."

The problem that the Kremlin faces in the person of Navalny is very specific. This is the problem of not having a good move, a situation that chess players often face. Can Navalny be imprisoned? There is little that can stop this today. Will this be a good move? Unlikely. Wherever you throw, everywhere - a wedge. The stability of the regime rests on the tacit approval of an apolitical majority. But abrupt gestures can quickly put an end to this apoliticality. Therefore, no matter how the authorities swagger, they are not particularly interested in rocking the boat. If Russia enters an “active” political regime, it will not seem like much to anyone. And Navalny, by coincidence, just turned into such a “red button”, which immediately begins to howl like a siren when it is touched. So it turns out that everything seems to be possible and at the same time nothing is impossible.

Actually, in chess, this situation is called "zugzwang" - a situation in which one or even both sides at once have no useful or even neutral moves, and any movement of the pieces leads to a deterioration in their own position. In this case, of course, the possibility of "not walking" is missing. In everyday language, such a situation is called “you can’t do it and you can’t not do it.”

Everything the Putin administration tried to do last years, is an attempt to “not go anywhere”, to take and stop the political “chess clock”. For her, the most comfortable position is the position of doing nothing. No peace, no war, more precisely - no dictatorship, no democracy. While pulling back society here and there, the authorities, meanwhile, tried not to go beyond the flags that marked the “zone of uncertainty”. Certainty is the death of the current regime and the end of stability.

Navalny’s casus lies precisely in the fact that he lures the authorities out of the “comfort zone”, deprives them of the opportunity to do nothing, forcing them to make “outrageous” decisions that, under other conditions, the authorities would not want to take, because they can spill the same “ dark wine" of Russian history, about which Berdyaev and his contemporaries wrote so colorfully. Nobody in the Kremlin cares whether Navalny becomes mayor or not, whether he gains a lot or a little (this is exactly what they learned to "control"). The Kremlin is concerned about the question, what to do with it then? To plant or not to plant? If planted, when? Before or after? Plant earlier, smear the elections. Plant later, you'll get a ready leader. If you don’t plant at all, they will consider you “weak”. You can try to discredit Navalny by passing him off as his own project (the questions asked to Putin at Seliger show that this is also in the plan). But what if the people actually believe in it and follow Navalny like a second Yeltsin? It would be better not to do anything at all, but in the context of the elections it will be almost impossible.

At the same time, Navalny is not a problem of today, not someone's oversight (they overlooked, missed, finished playing, played too much, and so on). This is a systemic mistake in Russian politics, a failure of the entire "political program", which finally proved to be a powerful "glitch". Paradoxically, if not Navalny, then something like that was bound to happen sooner or later. This is a failure of politics, not specific politicians.

Elements of irrationality can accumulate inside the system for a long time, for decades, but not indefinitely. There comes a moment after which this irrationality begins to "shoot". As a rule, this happens when several long-running scenarios reach a climax in their development, and then it turns out that both plays are played on the same stage, and all the actors are involved in two performances at once. This is exactly what happened with the Moscow elections.
There was one game "in the long run" - with the opposition. It was necessary to correctly decompose it, dismember it and pack it into cells. In general, it almost succeeded, Navalny was left in this scenario for dessert. He was competently “soaked” in the sauce to serve in a liquefied form. It was assumed that if Navalny was fed “in portions” to the people, then people would eventually swallow his arrest and removal from the political scene. This plan had its own timetable, its own performers and its own inspirers.

And there was another game, also not short, started by the removal of Luzhkov - with Moscow, where it was necessary to approve "his" person, capable of supporting the Kremlin in tough times. Governing Moscow is not a sinecure in every sense of the word, which is why it took such a "heavyweight" as Sobyanin. It was impossible to risk Sobyanin, and therefore it was decided to legitimize him before Russia enters a period of political and economic turbulence. And this game had its own schedule, its own performers and its own inspirers.

And now these two games are superimposed on each other. Do you think the Kremlin did not understand that Navalny would "get into" the Moscow elections? They also understood how - there are generally much more smart people than is commonly thought, and most importantly, they have enough money to pay smart people who will think for them. Therefore, the view of the Kremlin as a bunch of “worthless people” is flattering for its opponents, but absolutely populist. But knowing and being able to prevent are two different things. Each plan developed independently over many months, if not years, and the Kremlin did not have the opportunity to jump out of the game in either the first or the second case. This is a systemic failure due to the general irrationality of the political course.

Precisely because this is a systemic failure, it can be assumed that the Navalny incident is only the first call. A second, and even a third, will inevitably follow. Another zugzwang on a national scale is on the way - this time with Khodorkovsky. If in relation to Navalny the authorities solve the dilemma "to imprison or not to imprison", then in the case of Khodorkovsky everything is exactly the opposite - "to release or not to release."

And there are certainly no good moves left. The authorities are afraid of releasing Khodorkovsky, partly irrationally, partly quite rationally - they are afraid that he will consolidate the opposition, they are afraid that they will see this as a sign of weakness, and so on. In order not to release it, you need to start a third case. This will make the Kremlin's attitude towards Khodorkovsky more definite than it would like. I'm afraid that the ECtHR's recent decision was the last one in which the court managed to avoid assessing Khodorkovsky's case as a political one. Moscow will not receive such concessions anymore. Killing Khodorkovsky is also not an option. Who knows how the "dark wine" of Russian history will react to this...

That is, it is best for the Kremlin that Khodorkovsky continue to sit on his own. The Kremlin really wants to skip this move, but it's impossible to miss it: like it or not, you'll have to move. Moreover, they will have to move at the very moment when, according to all calculations, another game should enter the final stage - with the Medvedev government. This decision can also be delayed, but it must not be taken at all. It is quite possible that these two games will overlap, as happened already in the case of Navalny and the Moscow elections. And what if Navalny and Khodorkovsky also overlap?

In general, these two events - the September elections in Moscow and the impending "cold summer of 2014", when it will be necessary to decide what to do with Khodorkovsky - set a certain corridor of turbulence through which Russia will have to pass in the very near future. Most likely, she will leave this corridor as a country that has changed a lot. I don't dare to say whether she will stay with Putin or without him, whether she will live better or worse (for anyone), but she will be different than now. Moscow zugzwang is not a one-time event, it is now a new fashionable political style.

Graduated from the Faculty of Law of the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia in 1998.

In 2001, he graduated from the Faculty of Finance and Credit of the Financial Academy under the Government of the Russian Federation with a degree in securities and exchange business.

In 2010, he took a six-month course at Yale University under the Yale World Fellows program.

Political activity in the ranks of the Yabloko party

In the late 1990s, Navalny worked as a lawyer in the development company ST Group, then traded on the stock exchange and worked as a lawyer in various companies.

While still studying at the academy, in 2000 Navalny joined the Russian United Democratic Party Yabloko. At the end of 2001, he worked at the headquarters for the election of deputies of the Moscow City Duma (at the same time he was a member of one of the district election commissions as a representative not of Yabloko, but of the Union of Right Forces party).

In 2002, Alexei Navalny was elected a member of the regional council of the Moscow branch of Yabloko. In 2003, he already led the Yabloko election campaign in the State Duma elections in Moscow. In April 2004, Navalny became chief of staff of the Moscow branch of Yabloko and remained in this position until February 2007. In the summer of 2004, he was elected executive secretary of the Committee for the Protection of Muscovites, created under Yabloko, which opposed the compact development. Since 2006, he has been a member of the federal council of Yabloko. In addition, throughout this period he was deputy chairman of the Moscow branch of the party.

In August 2005, Navalny was included in the Public Council of the Central Administrative District of Moscow. In November of the same year, Navalny became one of the initiators of the creation of the Youth Public Chamber, an organization whose goal was the participation of youth in legislative initiatives. In the Moscow City Duma elections themselves, held in December 2005, Navalny ran on the Yabloko-United Democrats list. In July 2007, Alexei was forced to resign, and six months later, in December 2007, he demanded "the immediate resignation of the party chairman and all his deputies, and the re-election of at least 70 percent of the bureau." In response, he was expelled from the Yabloko party with the wording "for causing political damage to the party, in particular, for nationalist activities."

Participation in social movements

Navalny is known as an organizer and active participant in many social and political movements. Back in 2005, as a member of Yabloko, Navalny was one of the organizers of the YES! - Democratic Alternative”, participated in the implementation of a number of projects. In particular, Navalny was mentioned as the coordinator of the YES! For freedom of the media!” and the project "Police with the people". As part of a law enforcement project, Navalny and his associates conducted raids on police stations in order to verify that the rights of detainees were respected.

At the beginning of the next year, Alexey became one of the founders of the Political Debate project, the essence of which was to organize public meetings between politicians and public figures. In addition to "Debate", Navalny also organized a parallel project for the TVC channel - television program"Fight Club", which, despite its high rating, was closed after several issues.

In the fall of 2006, Navalny was listed as one of the organizers of the Russian March, which was being prepared by nationalist organizations, although he himself denied this fact.

On June 23, 2007, Alexei Anatolyevich became one of the founders of the "People" movement, the ideology of which was chosen as "democratic nationalism" - the struggle for democracy and the rights of Russians. Participation in the creation of this movement had a negative impact on his membership in the ranks of the Yabloko party. According to some reports, today the movement has ceased to exist. Now some representatives of nationalists consider Navalny's activities nothing more than populism.

In addition to creating the People movement and leaving Yabloko, in 2007 Alexei appeared in a scandal related to his Political Debate. In February, radical nationalists led by Maksim “Tesak” Martsinkevich appeared at a debate between publicists Yulia Latynina and Maxim Kononenko, to whom Navalny gave the floor, confirming his nationalist convictions. Nevertheless, after the debate, Navalny was among those who filed a police report against Martsinkevich.

In 2008, Alexei began to actively engage in the so-called. "investment activism", the essence of which was to buy a small number of blocks of shares in large companies. In particular, he was a minority shareholder in Surgutneftegaz, Transneft, Rosneft, Gazpromneft, TNK-BP, Sberbank and VTB. After the purchase of shares, he demanded, as a shareholder, the disclosure of information about the activities of management, on which the income of shareholders and the transparency of companies could depend. At the same time, Navalny indicated the Gazprom corporation as his main opponent. In December 2009, Navalny, together with the Russian version of Forbes magazine, organized a project to protect the rights of minority shareholders - the Shareholder Protection Center, for which he was recognized as "Private Person of the Year" in the Vedomosti newspaper and "Person of the Year" in the Stock In Focus exchange review. .

At the beginning of 2009, Alexey became a non-staff adviser to the Governor of the Kirov Region. And in the summer of the same year, he headed a non-profit organization - the Foundation for Supporting the Initiatives of the Governor of the Kirov Region.

After the resignation in September 2010 of Yuri Luzhkov from the post of mayor of the capital, "virtual elections for the mayor of Moscow" were organized on the Internet, in which 45% of the Internet users who took part in the elections voted for Navalny.

In December 2010, Alexey launched his new anti-corruption project - the RosPil website, the main content of which was information about dubious government launches. A year later, his blog was recognized by the visitors of the competition site as the best Russian-language blog.

On May 30, 2011, Navalny launched the RosYama Internet project, which he said was aimed at encouraging the Russian authorities to improve the condition of roads. On the pages of the project, users were asked to post photos of damaged sections of roads with the address. After that, the system automatically generated the text of the complaint, which was proposed to be submitted to the traffic police. After 37 days, the system also automatically generated a letter to the prosecutor's office, which was proposed to be sent if there was no response to the complaint.

In October 2011, another scandal occurred on the Internet related to the publication of Navalny's correspondence with US State Department officials, Western funds, Russian businessmen and politicians. A heated discussion unfolded around this event in some media and blogs, and opinions in it differed sharply: someone believed that these were the machinations of Navalny's competitors, others that this was a cunning move by Alexei himself. Navalny himself did not comment on the situation.

Repeatedly, Alexei Navalny became a participant in mass demonstrations. It started back in 2006, when he, as an observer from Yabloko, took part in the mass march of nationalists “Russian March”. Two years later, he again participated in the Russian March, but already as a member of the People movement.

On November 5, 2011, Navalny again became a participant in this action, which took on an especially large scale, which was due to the upcoming elections to the State Duma (they took place on December 4).

On December 5, 2011, Navalny spoke at a rally sanctioned by the authorities and held by the Solidarity movement on Chistoprudny Boulevard. The purpose of the rally was to express disagreement with the results of the elections and accuse the authorities of large-scale fraud. Speaking to a crowd of thousands, Navalny, in particular, called United Russia a "party of swindlers, thieves and murderers," and called on the participants in the demonstration to "disobey police officers."

After the end of the event, he, along with several hundred more participants, took part in an unauthorized march to the building of the Central Election Commission of Russia on Lubyanka, during which he was detained by the police. Ilya Yashin, an opposition leader and co-chairman of the Solidarity UDM, was detained with him. The next day took place court hearing, during which judge Olga Borovkova found both guilty of resisting law enforcement officers and sentenced them to 15 days of administrative arrest. This decision caused dissatisfaction among the supporters of the opposition. The arrested Navalny and Yashin themselves filed a complaint with the European Court, considering their detention unlawful. Amnesty International recognized Navalny and Yashin as "prisoners of conscience". Navalny was released from custody on December 21.

In March 2012, he participated in the organization and conduct of protest actions before the presidential elections in Russia.

On May 9, he was arrested for 15 days for participating in an unauthorized public event on Kudrinskaya Square. During the arrest, according to official sources, Navalny resisted the police and shouted anti-government slogans. According to the oppositionist, on the square where the festivities took place, “about 50 people were detained, many of them were released without a protocol being drawn up.”

In May 2012, Navalny launched a new project called +1% Self-Respect. Within the framework of the project, anyone could receive a bank card, while 1% of purchases made with the card went to the account of the Anti-Corruption Fund in Russia.

In the same 2012, Navalny launched a website that was designed to file complaints about the work of housing and communal services. The site was launched in November 2012 under the name "RosZhKH".

In addition, Navalny initiated the creation of a new campaign project called "The Kind Machine of Truth", with the help of which it was planned to disseminate information about the corrupt practices of the authorities.

In June 2012, Navalny became a member of the Board of Directors of Aeroflot, as well as a member of the Human Resources and Compensation Committee of the Board of Directors of Aeroflot. In early 2013, the oppositionist was not nominated to the new board of directors of this company.

Litigation in the Kirovles case

In May 2011, a criminal case was initiated against Navalny under Article 165 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, namely, “Causing property damage by deceit or breach of trust in the absence of signs of theft.” Navalny was suspected of misleading the director of the State Unitary Enterprise Kirovles, Vyacheslav Opalev, and persuaded him to conclude an unprofitable deal for the supply of timber. The amount of damage caused was estimated at 1.3 million rubles. In the course of the work of the investigators, no corpus delicti were revealed. For this reason, the Investigative Committee for the Volga Federal District in April 2012 refused to open a criminal case against Navalny. However, in May 2012, the case was raised again. The reason was the publication of correspondence between Navalny and Governor Nikita Belykh about their financial relationship, including regarding the “Kirovles case”. On July 31, 2012, Navalny was charged with embezzling someone else's property on an especially large scale (Article 160 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). In January 2013, the investigation into this case was completed, and Navalny was presented with the materials on the case for review, after which they will be submitted to the court.

During the investigation of the Kirovles case, the illegality of the lawyer status of an oppositionist. Investigators found that Navalny received the status illegally, and information about his work experience in the legal profession is unreliable.

Personal life

Navalny is married and has two children. Wife - Yulia Navalnaya. Children - Daria (born in 2001) and Zakhar (2008).

Navalny is an active blogger, in addition to the above projects and a blog in LiveJournal, he has his own personal website. He loves rock music, often compares himself with the musician Yegor Letov.

Awards

Recognized as the "Person of 2009" according to the newspaper "Vedomosti" (2009).

Winner of the "virtual election of the mayor of Moscow", organized by the newspaper "Kommersant" (2010).

He was included by the editors of the site Openspace.ru in the list of "Heroes of 2010" "for working behind enemy lines" and took first place in the voting of site visitors (2010).

Alexei Navalny's blog on LiveJournal became the winner in the "Best Blog of a Politician or Public Figure" nomination.

In September 2011, the men's magazine GQ awarded Navalny the "Person of the Year" award in the "Chief Editor" nomination.

Navalny is number one on the list of "25 Russians representing Russia's 'driving force'" according to the British newspaper Financial Times (2011).

In April 2012, Times magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny is a lawyer, popular opposition blogger and public figure, founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, chairman of the Progress Party. In the past, he was a member of the board of directors of Aeroflot. He ran for mayor of Moscow in the 2013 elections and finished second.

The main activity of Navalny is aimed at combating corruption. Among the most high-profile investigations by FBK Navalny and his team are the case of Igor Chaika (son of Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika), Vladimir Yakunin's "fur coat store", Dmitry Peskov's watch, Vladimir Pekhtin's real estate, Sergei Shoigu's mansion, the plane and Igor Shuvalov's "king-apartment", "secret empire" Dmitry Medvedev. Navalny also actively advocated the ratification in Russia of the 20th article of the UN Convention, which provides for punishment for illegal enrichment of officials.

In 2013, Navalny was found guilty in the "Kirovles case", but three years later, the European Court of Human Rights recognized the case as politically fabricated and sent the verdict for review, but the court again returned a guilty verdict.

In December 2016, Navalny announced his intention to take part in the 2018 presidential election.

Childhood. Education

Alexei Navalny was born in the military town of Butyn near Moscow. His father, Anatoly Navalny, a native of the Chernobyl region, graduated from the Kiev military school, after he was assigned to Moscow. Mom, Lyudmila Ivanovna, grew up in a village near Zelenograd, graduated from the State University of Management, worked as a laboratory assistant at a research institute that produced microelectronics, and later worked at a woodworking factory.

In 1993, Navalny's parents opened a wicker weaving workshop in the Odintsovo district of the Moscow region on the basis of a bankrupt factory, where Lyudmila Navalnaya had previously worked.

In 1994, a young man graduated from the Alabinsky school in the village of Kalininets near Moscow and entered the law faculty of the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia, missing one point for admission to Moscow State University. In 1999, he became a student at the Financial Academy at Russian government, studied at the Faculty of Finance and Credit, and in 2001 received a diploma in the specialty "Securities and Exchange Business".

Much later, in 2010, he became a Yale World Fellow. Every year, the university selects about 15 gifted people, mostly from third world countries, and invites them to Yale for six months to study the global problems of our society.

Labor activity and business

While still studying at RUDN University, Navalny got a job as a lawyer at Aeroflot Bank. In 1997, he registered Allekt LLC, and in 1998 he began working for the Chigirinsky brothers' ST-group (now Snegiri). There he worked for about a year, dealing with currency control and antitrust law. In 1999, two things happened - Navalny left the ST-group and received a law degree.

Public and political activities

In 2000, Alexei Navalny joined the Yabloko Democratic Party and was a member of the party's Federal Political Council. Two years later, he was elected to the regional council of the capital branch of Yabloko. From 2004 to 2007, Navalny headed the apparatus of the Moscow regional branch of the party.

In 2007, Navalny was expelled from Yabloko. The reason given was "causing political damage to the party, in particular, by nationalist activities." As Navalny himself argued, the real reason for his exclusion is the demand for the resignation of Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky.

In 2004, Navalny founded the Committee for the Defense of Muscovites, a city-wide movement against corruption in urban planning and the violation of citizens' rights. A year later, Alexey, together with like-minded people, stood at the origins of a new youth movement called "DA!". He also began to coordinate the project "Police with the people."

Since 2006, Navalny has coordinated the Political Debates project and acted as the chief editor of the Fight Club program on TVC.

In 2007, he co-founded the national democratic movement "People" along with writer Zakhar Prilepin and Sergei Gulyaev. It was planned that subsequently the "People" would join the "Other Russia" coalition, but this did not happen.

Political debate between Navalny and Lebedev

In 2008, Navalny founded the Union of Minority Shareholders, an organization that protected the rights of private investors.

Navalny took part in the nationalist marches "Russian March". In 2008, he witnessed the brutal detention of the leader of the "Slavic Union" Dmitry Demushkin by riot police, and was ready to defend him in court.

In 2008, information appeared about the creation of the "Russian National Movement", which included organizations " Great Russia”, “People”, DPNI. Navalny said that the movement plans to participate in the elections to the State Duma. But in 2011, the movement ceased operations.

Navalny's video in support of the People movement

In 2009, Navalny became a freelance adviser to the governor of the Kirov region Nikita Belykh, who, as the site's editors would like to note, was arrested in the summer of 2016 on charges of accepting a bribe.

Anti-corruption activities

In May 2008, Navalny announced on his blog that, together with like-minded people, he intended to find out why the oil of large Russian state-owned companies was being sold by trader Gunvor. According to Alexei, he appealed to the leaders of Rosneft, Surgutneftegaz and Gazprom Neft, but did not receive an explanation. By the way, Navalny is a minority shareholder in the companies Surgutneftegaz, Rosneft, Gazpromneft, VTB.

At the end of 2010, Navalny announced the creation of the RosPil project, which intended to fight abuses in public procurement. By May 2011, the project reported on the discovery of fraud with state auctions in the amount of 1.6 billion rubles, and with the help of RosPil participants, fraud worth 337 million rubles was stopped. The project received an award from The BOBs international blog competition as the most useful resource for society.

In 2011, Navalny registered the Anti-Corruption Fund (FBK). Economist Sergey Guriev, entrepreneurs Vladimir Ashurkov and Boris Zimin invested in the project.

"Party of crooks and thieves" - the author of this famous Internet meme is Alexei Navalny. The phrase was born on February 2, 2011 on the air of Finam FM. Soon there was information that ordinary members of the party were offended and plan to sue. In response, Navalny initiated a poll on his blog: "Is United Russia a party of crooks and thieves?" 96.6% of the respondents, the total number of which was 40 thousand, answered “yes”.

Navalny on the air of "Fimam FM"

In mid-2011, Alexei Navalny launched the RosYama Internet project as part of the FBK, which was supposed to encourage the Russian authorities to improve the condition of roads in the country. On the pages of the project, users posted pictures of damaged roads, on the basis of which the system generated complaints to the traffic police. In the absence of a response within the stipulated time, RosYama employees sent a letter to the prosecutor's office.

In early 2012, Navalny and his team launched the RosVybory project to monitor the presidential elections. About 17 thousand observers took part in the project.

The Alexei Navalny Anti-Corruption Foundation positions itself as the only non-profit organization in Russia that investigates acts of corruption among the highest echelons of power.

The head of the Russian Railways, Vladimir Yakunin, to whom the Foundation attributed the presence of a “modest” dacha near Domodedovo with an area of ​​​​several tens of hectares, fell under the FBK’s sights more than once. Most of all, Internet users were struck by a separate room given over to a “fur coat store”.

A lot of noise was made by Igor Shuvalov’s private plane discovered by Navalny, on which they flew to exhibitions of his Welsh Corgi dog breed, as well as the official buying apartments on one floor of an elite high-rise building on Kotelnicheskaya Embankment. FBK estimated the total cost of pre-repair apartments at 600 million rubles.

Navalny in the election of the mayor of Moscow

Alexei Navalny put forward his candidacy for the post of mayor of Moscow in the 2013 early elections from the RPR-Parnassus party.

And about. Mayor Sergei Sobyanin commented on Navalny's actions as follows: “To be honest, I don't know what prospects Navalny's candidate has. We have done everything possible to register it, so that Muscovites have the opportunity to have a greater choice among candidates for mayor of Moscow.”

Judicial persecution. Case of Kirovles

On December 5, 2011, that is, the day after the elections to the State Duma, Alexei Navalny spoke at a sanctioned rally on Chistoprudny Boulevard. The Muscovites who came to the rally expressed their disagreement with the results of the elections, made accusations of fraud against the election commission and the United Russia party.

After this action, Navalny and like-minded people went on an unauthorized march to the Central Election Commission of Russia, where he was detained by the police. The next day, Navalny was found guilty of resisting law enforcement officers and sentenced to 15 days of administrative arrest. Navalny was released on December 21.

On May 9, 2012, Navalny was again sentenced to 15 days in prison. This time - for participation in an illegal public event on Kudrinskaya Square, the so-called Folk Festivals, which became a mass sign of protest against the dispersal of the March of Millions, which took place earlier, on May 6. The participants of the march were dissatisfied with the fact of Vladimir Putin's inauguration. This detention and arrest Navalny appealed to the European Court of Human Rights.

In May 2011, a criminal case was opened against Alexei Navalny under Art. 165 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation - "causing property damage by deceit or breach of trust." It was about the fact that Navalny and businessman Pyotr Ofitserov, the owner of the Vyatka Forest Company, allegedly misled the director of the State Unitary Enterprise Kirovles Vyacheslav Opalev, as a result of which he signed a contract unprofitable for his enterprise and suffered damage of 16 million rubles.

Navalny denied his guilt, citing the biased nature of the case, since shortly before that he presented information on cuts in Transneft on his blog, and also accused Opalev of “creating completely unthinkable schemes” for the sale of logging. According to Navalny, he achieved the dismissal of Opalev and a complete audit of Kirovles, which was the reason for initiating the case.

Navalny: "The Truth about Russia, Power and Putin", 2011

After litigation, the case was dismissed on April 10, 2012. The reason is the absence of corpus delicti. Later it was resumed by order of the leaders of the TFR. However, on May 29 of the same year, the decision to dismiss the case was canceled.

The case was brought back to court in April 2013. Testimony of witnesses for the prosecution indicated that cooperation between Kirovles and VLK was unprofitable for the former. However, VLK's partners testified that the timber was shipped to them at market prices, and they have no claims against both defendants in the case. The governor of the Kirov region, Belykh, who spoke at the trial, also stated that the activities of VLK did not harm the region.

On July 18, 2013, Navalny was sentenced to five years in prison and a fine (500,000 rubles), Officerov was sentenced to four years in prison and a similar fine. The verdict was made during the election campaign of Navalny in the mayoral elections.

During the next day's appeal hearing, Navalny and Ofitserov were released on bail. In the course of further consideration, violations were found in the issuance of a guilty decision, and the real terms were replaced by conditional ones, while maintaining the fine. Alexei Navalny appealed to the ECHR, which in February 2016 confirmed the violation of the rights of the accused in the Kirovles case, but did not recognize the case as politically motivated, as Navalny's and Ofitserov's lawyers insisted.

The Kirovles case: Navalny's last word

At the end of 2016, the court again began considering the Kirovles case. The new verdict, according to Navalny, literally repeated the previous one. The defendants were again sentenced to 4 and 5 years probation. On the same day, the ECHR condemned the verdict, calling the goal of the entire process the exclusion of Navalny from the country's political process.

Alexey Navalny 2018

In December 2016, Navalny announced that he intended to take part in the 2018 presidential election, thereby launching his election campaign, during which he, along with like-minded people, opened a number of campaign headquarters in major Russian cities.

Alexei Navalny is aiming for the presidency

In March 2017, the Foundation posted on YouTube a 50-minute film “He is not Dimon to you”, which was an investigation of a “multi-level corruption scheme” with the participation of Dmitry Medvedev. Three weeks later, thousands of people rallied across Russia demanding answers from Medvedev about the information contained in the video.

"He is not Dimon to you"

On March 26, during an unsanctioned rally on Tverskaya Street, Alexei Navalny was detained by law enforcement agencies. He was fined (20,000 rubles) for organizing an unsanctioned rally, and also sentenced to 15 days of administrative arrest for "resisting the lawful demand of a police officer."

On June 12, Russia was swept by the second wave of opposition rallies. This time, Alexei did not have time to leave the entrance, as he was detained by the police. The Simonovsky District Court of Moscow arrested him for 30 days, accusing him of repeatedly violating the rules for holding rallies: on the evening of June 11, he called on supporters to go to an unauthorized procession on Tverskaya Street, where a festival of reenactors was taking place at that time, instead of an agreed rally on Sakharov Avenue. In total, more than 800 people were detained during the opposition rally in Moscow.

As part of the election campaign, the politician held a number of large-scale rallies in Russian cities.

The Central Election Commission refused to register Navalny for the presidential elections due to a criminal record in the Kirovles case, despite the decision of the ECtHR, which recognized him as politically engaged. After that, Aleksey called for a boycott of the elections and announced the date of the all-Russian voter strike - January 28th.

How Mikhail Prokhorov bought a villa from Alexander Khloponin

For the action against the inauguration of Vladimir Putin “He is not your king” (held on May 5, 2018), ten days later, Navalny was arrested for 30 days. The election campaign ended, and the FBK returned to its main activities: it caught Mikhail Prokhorov in a bribe to Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Khloponin, found a Parisian apartment for 2 million euros from propagandist Aram Gabrelyanov, etc.

Personal life of Alexei Navalny

Alexei Navalny is married. The oppositionist's wife's name is Yulia, Abrosimova's maiden name. They met in 1999 at a resort in Turkey. The couple are raising two children: daughter Daria (born 2001) and son Zakhar (born 2008).

For a long time, the couple lived in a small apartment in one of the panel houses on Lyublinskaya Street, Maryino. However, at the end of 2016, the oppositionist said that he was looking for housing for rent, as his grown children began to live in the same room.

Alexey Navalny now

In August 2018, the FBK posted a video investigation involving State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin and his 82-year-old mother, Lidia Barabanova, a former school teacher. The oppositionist cited evidence that the woman owns an apartment worth more than 200 million rubles, as well as several businesses, one of which was registered quite recently. Navalny's team claimed that Barabanova was a figurehead for registering companies, and that her son was their true owner. The video caused a wide resonance, given that a few days earlier, Volodin publicly predicted the complete abolition of pensions in the absence of pension reforms and advised the people gathered in the hall to play more sports in order to live to retirement age.

FBK: Vyacheslav Volodin's mother's apartment and business

Having found an error in the text, select it and press Ctrl + Enter

It is also a story about how, using free software and inexpensive components, a small team created a complex system for collecting signatures across the country. There are no complex technical solutions in the project, but there are many important little things that cannot be foreseen based on typical IT development experience.

For convenience, the material is divided into four posts, which are best read in sequence.

This technical material, but many of the issues that are discussed here are incomprehensible without a minimum knowledge of the current political context, so it is described to the necessary extent. If for some reason the word “Navalny” scares you (it will appear several more times) or the mention of democratic institutions, just do not read this text. Political issues will not be discussed in the comments.

Campaign goal

Registration of Alexei Navalny as a presidential candidate.

Tasks assigned to the IT department

(in chronological order):

Preliminary registration of all who are ready to sign for the nomination of our candidate;
- Ensuring the operation of the network of headquarters throughout Russia;
- Creation of a system for collecting 315 thousand ideal signatures.

Historical and political context

If you do not have a parliamentary party, then you need to collect signatures to participate in elections. This is a defensive procedure that is used to keep "inconsistent" candidates out of the elections.

Endless possibilities for refusal of registration are laid down at the level of collection rules:

• The collection of signatures is strictly limited in time;
• According to the law, a small percentage of the required number of signatures is allocated for marriage, it is impossible to hand over signatures with a good margin;
• It is impossible to verify signatures on your side, since the data of voters must correspond to the FMS database, to which only state bodies have access;
• A graphologist, when checking at the CEC, can reject any signature and does not bear legal responsibility in case of an error;
• The verification scheme itself assumes that there will be a significant percentage of false positives (the paradox of Bayes' theorem as a barrier in elections).

We have already encountered this in Novosibirsk, when we were collecting signatures for participation in the elections to the Legislative Assembly.

To collect signatures in Novosibirsk, we created the Reaper system, which was focused on collecting signatures "in the field" and on cubes, managed the collectors' routes, took into account all signature lists, and made it possible to rank signatures based on the results of various checks.

Collectors in Novosibirsk brought more than 16,000 signatures, of which we selected and handed in the best 11,722. Despite a tough selection process, the election commission’s working group found many “invalid signatures,” and the election commission refused to register candidates. Read more about the absurd reasons why signatures are invalidated.

The new system was built taking into account the accumulated experience of collecting signatures and their subsequent protection in the election commission.

Features of the new collection of signatures

For the collection of signatures for the nomination of a presidential candidate, even more stringent conditions are established:

No more than 315,000 signatures must be submitted;
- At least 300 thousand signatures must be recognized as valid;
- No more than 7500 signatures are counted from one region;
- For a short collection period (from December 27 to January 31) there are long new year holidays when many go on vacation.

Taking into account previous experience and new requirements, we have adopted the following basic principles.

All-Russian network of headquarters

Due to regional quotas, it was impossible to work in, say, the ten largest cities. 315 thousand signatures could be collected if at least 40 cities were covered. It is more difficult to collect signatures in sparsely populated regions, therefore, in practice, for successful collection, it was necessary to open headquarters in most regions of the country.

The forecast for the number of signatures at the time of the successful completion of the collection shows that in large cities the number of people willing to sign would significantly exceed the regional quotas. Moscow (127 thousand) and St. Petersburg (63 thousand) did not fit on the screen.

Collection of signatures only at headquarters

For house-to-house collection, we would have to hire several thousand pickers. Everyone who has ever worked with paid collectors (or, for example, sociology students) knows that not all of them are equally reverent about the procedure and not everyone overcomes the temptation to simply “draw” a signature or two. Careless filling leads to a large percentage of marriage, and "drawing" signatures is such a common problem that the CEC provides for checking by a graphologist. Even the presence of a graphologist in the state and the exemplary execution of several statements to the police cannot 100% rid the headquarters of the "draughtsmen" (we checked). In addition, the collector can add signatures not only out of malicious intent, but also, vice versa, in order to “help the headquarters”.

We knew that when collecting "in the field" we would definitely introduce "toxic pickers", as was the case in Novosibirsk. Toxic collectors intentionally make mistakes in the voter's data (for example, they replace one digit in the passport number). Their task is to increase the number of invalid signatures above the limit after which the electoral commission refuses to register. Novosibirsk spent a lot of effort to clean up toxic signatures. When collecting throughout the country, this is not possible.

Only in stationary headquarters could it be possible to ensure the sufficient quality of signatures, the conditions for accurately filling out signature sheets and their safety.

Multi-stage signature verification

Perfect signatures are a mathematical abstraction. The real collection of signatures is a complex and difficult process. Even honest and well-trained collectors make mistakes, and given the lack of time, administrative pressure and provocations, there will be even more marriages.

We have a lot of data on how errors appear. According to our experience, in the signature lists collected in a completely honest manner, there will be about 10% of the signatures that the election commission recognizes as invalid.

We had to hand over not just good signatures, but signatures that the election commission would accept. For this, several stages of verification and a ranking mechanism were necessary - in order to select and hand over only those signatures that would most likely pass the checks of the election commission, no matter how absurd we considered them.

Passport scan for each signature

Without a scan, all responsibility for the quality of the signature lies with the assembler. If he accidentally or intentionally made a mistake in the passport number, we will never know.

From experience, we have found that only errors in copying passport data into a signature sheet and data entry errors easily exceed the allowable 5% limit, even if signatures are collected in comfortable conditions and by conscientious collectors.

Having a scan of the document, we could carry out several independent stages of signature verification and make corrections.

In addition, our lawyers were preparing to fight for every signature in court. Last time there was a large category of rejected signatures, about which we knew for sure: the signature matches the passport, but we checked it against an outdated and error-ridden database. A single database and the availability of scans would allow lawyers to automate the process of preparing complaints in such cases.

Of course, it was only possible to scan a passport at headquarters, otherwise it would be impossible to ensure a sufficient level of personal data security.

Synchronization with electronic database

All operations with signatures and subscription lists, all statuses and movements were to be reflected in the electronic database. The signature collection system was supposed to control all stages of collection and detect errors. Only in this way would we maintain order (and mental balance) when working with hundreds of thousands of physical objects.

What has been done in the new version of the system

• In order for us to have somewhere to collect signatures, we have deployed a network of regional headquarters. The IT infrastructure of the headquarters consists of several physical servers, a number of virtual machines, 70 routers, 230 cameras and 189 complete workstations. More than 250 people use the system from the inside at the same time.
• In order to have time to bring several hundred thousand people to headquarters in a short period of time, we started registering voters on the 20!8 website in advance, where they previously confirmed their data.
• To reduce the number of errors, we have created a system that allows independent verification of the correctness of filling out the signature sheet. The system consists of several web applications and a mobile application for two platforms.
• To upload data to the system, we assembled (and partially manufactured) a set of equipment for scanning passports, thought out a scheme for the secure transfer of personal data and implemented it at all headquarters.
• To ensure that the formatting of the address was correct from the point of view of the election commission, we launched a search in the FIAS database and, together with lawyers, seriously tinkered with it to take into account all the requirements of the law.
• In order to (partially) secure the headquarters and have additional arguments in the courts, we have established a 24-hour video surveillance and recording system.
• In order to test the infrastructure, mechanics, clarify the data and prepare the headquarters for the collection, we conducted a large preliminary verification procedure for voters, through which 81,750 people passed.
• We have developed appearance subscription list, a list logistics system at headquarters, and a physical storage and quick access system for the central headquarters.

Core technologies of our web applications

Main backend language: Python.
Frontend: JavaScript, jQuery, React, D3.js.
Frameworks: Django (6 pcs), aiohttp (1 pc).
Database: PostgreSQL, Redis and others.
Full text search: Sphinx.
HTTP server: Nginx, Varnish.
Testing: Jenkins, Browserstack, RobotFramework, Locust.
Monitoring: Zabbix, Elasticsearch, Kibana, Sentry.
Deploy: Ansible and other tools.
Server configuration management: Chef.

Part one: Navalny 20!8 website

We had to bring several hundred thousand people to the headquarters in a very limited period of time. To do this, we started the registration of supporters right on the day the campaign started. Recruiting and registering supporters is one of the main tasks of the Navalny 20!8 website, so there is a registration form on almost every page.

Since all this is needed not just for the sake of beautiful numbers, it was important for us to know that the registered supporters are real people, not bots, to be able to keep in touch with them and understand in which city they are registered (in order to predict the fulfillment of quotas by region). Therefore, registration on the site was quite complicated and required confirmation of the phone number. In order not to deceive ourselves and others, we recorded only people who filled out the entire questionnaire and confirmed their phone number as potential signatories. Therefore, on home page instead of a million plus (total registrations) we now only have 706,513 "future signatures".

From the point of view of site building, this is a fairly ordinary product. The site is made on Python + Django + PostgreSQL, standard ORM and standard admin panel are used. For a year and a half, the site has experienced several updates: sections were added, the work of the registration form changed, the texts and images on the pages changed. We tried not to complicate the design so that it was possible to lay out building blocks, thanks to which some sections went from idea to launch in three days.

Approximately half of the visitors to any modern website come from mobile devices. We tried to make the site convenient for everyone, so the layouts were drawn and typeset for correct display on any screen width, starting from 320px.

Headquarters map

The only complex interactive element that visitors see is a map of Russia with headquarters marked on it. When the number of headquarters exceeded 50, it became difficult to navigate the map due to proximity markers in the European part of the country. Initially, the map was conceived as a purely decorative element, but suddenly filled with functionality, so for those who have already appreciated the federal nature of the campaign and just want to find their city, we have made a list mode.

The map was made using the beautiful and versatile d3.js library. We decided to write our own script, and not use standard Google Maps or Yandex.Maps because of the map projection. There are many ways to unfold the Earth's ellipsoid on a plane. In the Mercator projection, objects are very stretched at northern latitudes, and we need more space in those areas where the main large cities are concentrated. In addition, in the Mercator projection, Russia looks rather strange. We chose the Albers-Siberia conic projection, which is more familiar from geography textbooks.

Russia healthy person(Albers conic projection) and Smoker's Russia (Mercator projection)

Content Management

The editorial section of the site is of little interest. The usual Django admin panel with minimal customization is used. With limited development resources, it is more profitable to teach several users of the admin panel how to use a standard tool than to spend time creating a really convenient one.

Some solutions that make life easier for the editor were taken from other projects. For example, a tool for typography of texts on the client side. Our typographer is convenient in that it easily connects to any text or string input field. Information about the state of autotypography (on / off) is stored as a non-printable character at the end of the line and does not depend on the backend in any way.

To work with the complex content of posts and news, we use a block editor, which is also used on many other projects:

Blocks are of different types, each project has its own set. Each block contains content and may contain settings. Block data is stored in the database as json, and the markup inside the text block is stored in markdown format.

For display, blocks are converted to the desired format: HTML for a post, text for indexing, RSS or XML for Yandex.Zen, JSON for a mobile application, and so on. Thus, we get a predictable result on any device with fairly complex content formatting.

The first version was based on the Sir Trevor code. Later, when it became difficult to maintain Sir Trevor's spaghetti code, the editor was rewritten in React.

Analytics

The most interesting from a technical point of view takes place in the admin panel of the site. From there we watched the flow of registrations.

At first, the analytics was rather primitive: graphs of the number of registrations of different types over time. But we wanted to see the dynamics by region and track the impact of various events on the number of registrations. So the long-awaited analytics appeared:


On this screen there is a summary of information for the entire life of the site, a schedule for a certain period and a list of events for this period. You can highlight a peak on the chart and try to understand what event caused it. Most often, this is the publication of another video with an investigation on Navalny's YouTube channel. The largest increase in signatures was given by videos about the machinations of regional officials.

The chart is made on d3.js, and the filtering of events by time and headquarters is implemented using the Crossfilter library. This solution allows, on the client side, without interface brakes, to operate with registration data for an interval of more than a year in increments of 1 hour. On the this moment that's 12 megabytes of data (1.3 MB in gzip).

A small text report with key indicators of the registration base and progress for the previous day was automatically sent to all project participants on a daily basis.

City and region

We also have a huge table, where for each region of Russia the main indicators of preparation for collecting signatures are listed:

The numbers in this table did not want to converge at first. The amount by city was significantly less than the number of registrations. It turned out that when filling out a questionnaire on the site, people unexpectedly often make mistakes in the name of their city or use non-standard names:

Moscow - 2.5% errors and 579 spellings;
- St. Petersburg - 12.6% errors and 767 spellings;
- Komsomolsk-on-Amur - more than 20% of errors and abbreviations, 75 options.

An incorrect estimate of the number of supporters could lead to incorrect planning of the network of headquarters and campaign events. I had to think about how to turn the user input of the city name into the standard name of the region. I didn't want to use auto-completion mechanisms for KLADR or FIAS for such a simple form. Therefore, we took a list of the 700 largest cities in Russia, added a list of typical spellings (“spb”, “n-sk”) and did a non-strict search on them ranking by the Levenshtein distance (this is a measure of the difference between two sets of characters).

We assigned each city from the list to one of three categories according to the distance to the nearest headquarters: the headquarters is in the city, the headquarters is close (urban agglomeration), the headquarters is far. The distance from the headquarters was taken into account when estimating the number of people who would arrive at the right time and sign. In the analytics, we separately counted all signatories and “available” (confirmed mail, lives in the city with headquarters or nearby).

This graph shows how the campaign has become more and more regional over time. The share of new registrations from Moscow and St. Petersburg decreased from 35% to 15%.

SMS and mail

Another technical difficulty was sending SMS and letters. Gateways are not very good at delivering messages, especially to foreign numbers. But we wanted to get the cleanest and most reliable base of supporters, so the second part of the registration form required to verify the phone number via SMS. For reliable sending, we made a rotation of three gateways: if the message was not delivered, then the re-sending went through another gateway. In addition, individual gateways could be turned off when failures occurred on their side. SMS code deliverability is one of the parameters monitored:

The graph shows that there were two failures in the operation of the gateways. The share of delivered SMS dropped sharply on February 21 and April 17-18 due to failures in the message sending queue. And on July 15, we changed the layout of the registration form, this is also noticeable on the chart.

We send a large number of letters from a database of over 700,000 email addresses. Someone subscribed to the news, someone should receive an event notification. In addition, each address must be confirmed according to the 2-opt-in rules (this is when a link is received in the first letter that you need to click on, confirming the subscription to the newsletter). At the beginning of the campaign, we used the ActiveCampaign service, but it is expensive and incredibly slow. When the database exceeded 300 thousand contacts, it became impossible to work. Therefore, we have written our own CRM / mailing service, which allows you to generate mailing lists and chains of letters according to the necessary samples. Mailgun is now used to deliver letters.

Deferred Task Queues

Sending mail or SMS through the API of third-party services is an operation that takes a significant amount of time. Such operations need to be performed asynchronously so as not to slow down the user interface and not put the entire application under load. Initially, all asynchronous tasks worked through Celery with Redis as a broker. Each letter or SMS message created a task in the Celery queue, after which a free worker processed this task. But this approach turned out to be unreliable and too resource-intensive.

Once we received more than 10 thousand registrations in an hour (no, we were not shown on TV, it was a “+1” campaign). 10 Celery workers couldn't handle it, users started to notice a significant delay in receiving SMS and mail.

After this incident, we abandoned Celery in favor of the simplest PostgreSQL-based queue. Tasks from the queue were sorted by “daemons” in python, one for each message delivery channel. Once every 10 seconds, the daemon took a bunch of tasks from the queue and sent data to the mailing API in one packet. Task grouping drastically reduced the load on the server, and the use of a custom queue made debugging and monitoring extremely easy.

Celery turned out to be too complex a tool for our task. It requires thoughtful configuration and monitoring through external utilities like Flower, which itself consumes a lot of resources. On other projects, we try to use a simpler solution - RQ + Redis.

Comparison of the complexity of RQ and Celery from the article about working with asynchronous tasks.

Development process

How is the process of creating the site "Navalny 20! 8" from the point of view of developers? We do not adhere to any one methodology, but use approaches from different systems. For example, managers set tasks in Trello with a structure similar to a kanban board, and developers use certain Extreme Programming practices.

Approximately half of the team is located in the Moscow office, while the rest work remotely. Moscow employees can participate in campaign meetings so as not to work better understand big picture, but we discuss the tasks of the IT department separately. Regular calls allow everyone to synchronize and understand the main direction of work at any given time.

Most of the project participants work on it full time, but some tasks were done by developers temporarily involved in other projects, or even volunteers. For example, volunteer Ilya almost completely made a map of headquarters for the main page.

The source code is stored in a git repository on the Bitbucket platform. A separate branch is created for each serious new task. We do not raise a staging server for each branch, they all merge into develop to run on a single test server. After testing, the developer responsible for the task makes a pull request to the master. The team leader looks at the code and, if everything is fine, starts the deployment. For big tasks, developers do detailed descriptions what needs to be checked and what can go wrong during deployment.

Deploy is organized very simply. We have a tool that responds to a webhook from Bitbucket (or a button from its interface), pulls the code from the desired branch, copies it to the server, and runs the update script there. The script is in Makefile.

Running "make update" will update dependencies, migrate, post-process static files, and, if all went well, restart the uwsgi server. We try to make migrations so that they do not break the old code, so in case of deployment errors, everything continues to work.

Development began on September 18, 2016. Since then, there have been 1228 commits, 200 pull requests, deployments over 600 times in production, and 67 branches in the repository (most of them are now closed).

About design

In the project team, only two people constantly worked on the design (an art director with a product function and a designer), while both of them are actively involved in other projects of the campaign. Therefore, the approach to design was extremely utilitarian.

In the design of IT products, we are always guided by two main principles:

1) Information for the most “lazy” and uninvolved user should be in the most visible place (this is how we, for example, determined the initial places of blocks and sections on the site);

2) The fewer people will use the final product, the less we try to decorate it (save development resources) and the more input efforts we can allow for each user (it is often more efficient to train several people than to spend time implementing new features that will save user efforts or avoid mistakes).

Therefore, our low-user internal systems tend to look like a wireframe* that has come to life, and everything that a campaign supporter encounters is part of the overall visual communication, strictly obeys the corporate style and common sense.

An IT system for collecting signatures is a very complex, multi-component project with limited resources, so the main part of the work of designers was on paper, in meetings and in Google docs, and not in a graphic editor (in our case, Sketch).

The project has a lot of complex circuits that you just want to draw, and all the electronic tools for drawing circuits found on the go did not suit us. Sometimes we used draw.io, but more often we drew directly on paper. The most important diagrams were hung on the project board. Paper “tickets” with questions for discussion at meetings were also attached there.

From paper diagrams and scripts agreed with lawyers, we collected prototypes in marvelapp.com in order to once again check the logic and make sure nothing is forgotten. Only after that, the layouts were transferred to development.

Depending on the task, we used different methods research and design. So, before doing the long-awaited analytics, we conducted a series of interviews with all potential users of the system (from the chief of staff to the person sending mailing lists) and, based on their wishes, we were able to assemble a very simple interface that served as a campaign dashboard for a long time.

On one page, we saw the flow of registrations, we could see the events that affect it, and find out how our supporters are distributed by city. We also collected ratings of cities by the number of signatories (this allowed us to monitor the effectiveness of headquarters and told us whether we had chosen the right cities for opening new headquarters) and tabular analytics.

For the verification interfaces and the collection of signatures itself, the absolute priority was the speed of the operator. The collection takes place under severe time constraints, so we tried to save every second and at the same time reduce the number of potential user errors.

According to our calculations, with the existing number of headquarters and under the condition of a continuous flow of people, each picker should have taken no more than 6 minutes per person - from “hello” to the completion of the collection procedure.

Verification and collection of signatures through the IT system is a procedure completely invented by us, so we chose MVP testing on real users of the system as the main method for verifying our solutions. So we tested the basic protocol and the first verification interface on employees of the Moscow headquarters, and then went to three different cities(St. Petersburg, Chelyabinsk and Ulyanovsk) to observe real users in the process of work. For projects like this The best way quickly make a list of things and user cases that could be forgotten or not foreseen at the design and development stage.

After making minor changes to the interface, verification was launched at all campaign headquarters. As a result, we managed to reduce the processing time of one questionnaire to one and a half to two minutes per person.

Testing

RobotFramework was used for automated testing. To cover the most critical functionality of the project, acceptance and functional tests were written, and their automatic launch was configured. Jenkins was used as the CI system.

The most important function of the site is user registration, which involves phone confirmation via SMS code. To test messages with codes, a GSM modem with a test SIM card and Asterisk was configured. The SMS code was sent to the mail, from where it was already available for testing.

Found bugs were added to Trello as tasks for developers.

Server infrastructure

The site "Navalny 20!8" continues to work and smoothly becomes the site of the voters' strike campaign, so the information embargo has not yet been lifted, and the story will be short. The server part consists of three levels: backend, caching proxies and edge servers. All configurations are managed through chef, so a server with any role can be quickly raised on a new virtual machine.

The database and application instances work on the backend, each application on its own virtual machine and with its own ip. All servers exist in multiple instances, and the database is replicated in master-slave mode to another machine.

The proxy server has Varnish installed, which deals with caching requests to certain addresses and various url-dependent restrictions. If the backend fails, the site can work indefinitely from a proxy server, only the user registration mechanism will break.

Edge servers are engaged in static caching and ssl termination (then the traffic goes through the VPN network). The essence of these servers is to distribute the bulk of traffic and protect the rest of the infrastructure from attacks. These are weak virtual machines with a gigabit channel in different data centers. The load is distributed by DNS balancing. Edge servers contain a minimum of configuration and, if necessary, can be easily raised in a few minutes. The maximum useful traffic that we had on edge servers was 5 Gb / s for several hours.

Pictures, styles, javascript, json data are stored in such a way that the file name includes a hash of the contents of this file (for example, style.28fa1c7b1761.css), so all these files can be cached forever on the server and in the browser. The main volume of traffic is given from edge servers. Then only requests to content pages pass, and this is about 25 times less data.

Sometimes CloudFlare connects instead of edge servers, but we try to return to our servers, because CloudFlare does not always have good accessibility from Russia. Individual providers, even the largest ones, regularly begin to block their ip (traces of Roskomnadzor).

Conclusion

Collect signatures for traditional style(without a special IT system, with paper, pen and spreadsheets in Excel) - it's like flying a balloon to the moon: yes, if you take a lot of balloons, you can even take off and hide in the clouds, but it's physically impossible to reach the goal in this way .

In order to collect such signatures that the election commission will have to accept even from an undesirable candidate, we began to create this complex infrastructure. In this chapter, we talked about the very task set before us, and about preparing for its solution.

It tells about the selection and configuration of headquarters network equipment, the development of your own document scanner and the organization of video surveillance of headquarters premises.

The third chapter will describe the process of creating applications for collecting signatures and everything related to working with physical signature sheets.

The fourth chapter talks about project management, the team, the timeline, and a little about the results.

Tags:

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• bulk
• interface design
• website development
• 20!8

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Alexey Anatolyevich Navalny- public figure, politician, positions himself as an investment activist investigating corruption in Russia, founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, author of a popular blog in LiveJournal. In 2013, Alexei Navalny lost to Sergei Sobyanin in the Moscow mayoral elections. In December 2016, he announced that he was going to participate in the presidential elections in Russia in 2018, building an election campaign on the same corruption investigations like the film about Dmitry Medvedev "He is not Dimon to you."

early years and the education of Alexei Navalny

Alexei Navalny was born on June 4, 1976 in the military town of Butyn, Odintsovo district, Moscow region.

As Alexei Anatolyevich himself likes to tell, his family comes from Ukraine. Most of relatives live in the Kiev region and Pereyaslav-Khmelnitsky. He himself feels partly Ukrainian.

Navalny's father Anatoly Ivanovich Navalny, was born and graduated from school in Zalesye (formerly the Chernobyl region, now the Ivankovsky region, Kiev region). Navalny Sr. graduated from the Kiev Military School of Communications. After graduating from college, he began to serve in the Moscow region.

Navalny's mother Lyudmila Ivanovna Navalnaya, originally from Zelenograd, Moscow Region, studied at the Moscow Institute of Management named after Sergo Ordzhonikidze, worked as a laboratory assistant at the Zelenograd Research Institute of Microdevices. Currently, Alexei Navalny's parents are co-owners of the Kobyakovskaya wicker weaving factory.

Grandfather - Ivan Tarasovich Navalny was a carpenter. Alexei's grandmother Tatyana Danilovna. All their lives the old people worked at the local collective farm in Zalesye. Little Alyosha spent every summer until 1986 (before the Chernobyl accident) in their village.

As the son of a military man, Alex changed several schools. In this regard, he confidently asserted that "military children do not have childhood friends, because military children move all the time."

Navalny's idol in childhood and to this day - Arnold Schwarzenegger. Perhaps Alexei learned to fight from his hero, because he said that only high school students could defeat him at school.

After graduating from the Alabinsky secondary school in 1993, Alexei Navalny entered the law faculty of the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia, graduating in 1998. In 1999 he entered the Financial Academy under the Government of the Russian Federation (specialty "Securities and Stock Exchange Business") and graduated in 2001.

Work and business of Alexei Navalny

While still at the university, Alexei Navalny began his business career. In 1997, an enterprising young man founded Nesna LLC (hairdressing services). True, Alexei soon sold the company. But in the same year, Navalny registered Allekt LLC. Navalny worked as a deputy director for legal issues in this firm, and at the same time got a job in the ST-group development company. Worked on real estate, currency control and antitrust law (1998-1999). For some time he worked at Aeroflot Bank. Rotating in business structures, Alexei Navalny faced both violations of the law and corruption.

Alexei Navalny has a stake in family business LLC "Kobyakovskaya wicker weaving factory" (in the Odintsovo district of the Moscow region). He has 25% authorized capital, the rest of the shares are owned by his relatives.

Entrepreneurship was in full swing from the young Navalny. Together with friends from the Faculty of Law of the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia, in 2000 Aleksey opened the firm "N. N. Securities. Alexey Navalny had a 35% stake in this company and worked as its chief accountant. "N. N. Securities was engaged in trading securities on the stock exchange. The young entrepreneur himself said that he became interested in playing on the stock exchange. The irrepressible excitement led to the fact that Alexei Navalny lost (as he said) "the few money" that he had, and the company went bankrupt.

Cheerful Aleksey Anatolyevich in 2001 co-founded Eurasian Transport Systems LLC, which made money on cargo transportation.

Politics and social activities of Alexei Navalny

Back in 2000, Alexei became a member of the Yabloko party and even its Federal Political Council. And from 2004 to 2007 he became the head of the regional branch of the RODP "Yabloko". But in December 2007 he was expelled from the party with the wording "for causing political damage to the party, in particular, for nationalist activities."

Alexei Navalny in the party "Yabloko" (Photo: navalny.com)

Since 2006, Alexei Navalny has been the founder various projects and public organizations such as "Political Debates", "Union of Minority Shareholders", "Committee for the Protection of Muscovites", "Police with the People". Together with Maria Gaidar and Natalia Morari organized the Youth movement "YES!". Raised awareness, being the host of the Urban Chronicles program on the Ekho Moskvy radio station, was also the editor-in-chief of the Fight Club program at TVC.

In 2009, Alexey Navalny, as a non-staff adviser to the Governor of the Kirov Region, worked with former leader"Union of Right Forces" Nikita Belykh, subsequently arrested on charges of corruption (taking a bribe on an especially large scale).

Alexey Anatolyevich became interested in the program of Yale University (“Yale World Fellows”). Each year, about fifteen gifted people are selected from this program. different countries. Garry Kasparov, Evgenia Albats, Sergei Guriev and Oleg Tsyvinsky, considering Alexei Navalny very promising for the study of global problems of international understanding, gave him a recommendation. In 2010, Alexei completed the prescribed six-month course. According to the leader of the Communist Party Gennady Zyuganov, "Mr. Navalny is a political 'product' made in US labs for yet another pogrom against Russia."

In 2013, Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny competed with Sergei Sobyanin in the Moscow mayoral elections. Took second place. Then Alexey headed the Central Council of the political association "Party of Progress".

Candidate for mayor of Moscow A. Navalny met with voters (Photo: Mikhail Metzel / TASS)

And finally, in 2016, Alexei Navalny entered the presidential path. On the Dozhd TV channel, he announced his participation in the presidential elections in Russia, which will be held in 2018.

On December 25, 2017, the Central Election Commission refused to register Alexei Navalny because he did not have a passive electoral right due to an outstanding conviction for a serious crime. In turn, the oppositionist threatened the authorities with a strike of voters and an appeal to the Constitutional Court, SP wrote earlier. However, the 2018 elections took place without Navalny.

Alexei Navalny and the fight against corruption in Russia

Alexei Navalny in his political activities relies on the fight against corruption in the country. Since 2008, he has been investigating what he believes to be corruption cases. He uncovered violations in various funds, published articles on the investigation of corruption cases in Russia. In his blog, which Navalny maintains on LiveJournal, he discusses and gives advice on how to effectively fight corruption. According to media reports, in 2008, Alexei Anatolyevich acquired shares in almost all large Russian companies, then, as a minority shareholder, accused the top management of companies of numerous abuses, filing lawsuits, Navalny tried to increase the transparency of the companies.

In 2010, Alexei Navalny created the non-profit public project RosPil, with the help of which he fought elements of corruption in public procurement. As part of the project, website users reported corruption, experts conducted an assessment, and project lawyers wrote complaints to regulatory authorities demanding the cancellation of corrupt purchases.

Realizing that the fight against corruption works well in politics and responds to public demand, Alexei Navalny continued his investigations. In 2011, Navalny created the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a non-profit organization that brought together previous anti-corruption projects. The Anti-Corruption Fund includes the coordinators of Navalny's projects RosPil, RosYama, RosVybory, The Kind Machine of Truth, and RosZhKH.

An important part of the activities of the Anti-Corruption Foundation has become documentaries dedicated to the investigations of the Navalny Foundation. In December 2015, Alexei Navalny posted on the Internet the film "The Seagull", in which the Anti-Corruption Foundation shared its investigation into the activities of the sons and colleagues of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Yuri Chaika. The film aroused great interest and in the same month received a special prize at the Artdocfest festival. Yuri Chaika called Navalny's investigation custom-made and false. The Swiss Attorney General's Office, responding to the complaint of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, found no evidence of corruption in relation to Artem Chaika.

Navalny's second high-profile film was " He is not Dimon”, released in March 2017. The film of the Anti-Corruption Foundation tells that the Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Medvedev allegedly owns multi-billion dollar real estate, spearheads a multi-level corruption scheme using charitable foundations and various organizations. Navalny's film about Medvedev also aroused great interest, gaining more than 2.5 million views on YouTube in the first day alone. Prime Minister's Press Secretary Natalya Timakova called Navalny's film a propaganda attack, and the press secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov, commenting on the FBK investigation, noted that "these are not the first examples of the work of this famous convicted citizen."

At the same time, a group of deputies State Duma The Russian Federation from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation proposed to the State Duma Committee on Security and Anti-Corruption to check the information of the Anti-Corruption Fund.

Alexei Navalny in the FBK office (Photo: fbk.info)

It was under the pretext of a lack of reaction to the investigation of the Navalny Foundation that Aleksey Anatolyevich managed to bring a lot of people to rallies at the end of March in a number of Russian cities. On March 26 in Moscow, according to the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 7,000-8,000 people gathered on Tverskaya Street. According to media reports, about 1,000 activists were detained, including Navalny himself, who was then fined 20,000 rubles for organizing an unauthorized mass rally in the center of the capital and arrested for 15 days under Art. 19.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses (CAO RF) for disobedience to a lawful order of a police officer.

Criminal cases of Alexei Navalny

Navalny has been a witness in a number of criminal, administrative, civil and arbitration cases. But he is also the accused and the defendant, for example, in the well-known "Case of Kirovles". Alexei Navalny was accused of being an adviser to the governor of the Kirov region, in May-September 2009, in collusion with the director of the Vyatka Forest Company, Pyotr Ofitserov, and the general director of Kirovles, Vyacheslav Opalev, organized the theft of more than 10 thousand cubic meters of timber in the amount of over 16 million rubles . Aleksey Anatolyevich was sentenced in 2013 by the Kirov Regional Court to 5 years, later the term was replaced by a suspended sentence. In 2016, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation overturned this verdict “in view of the decision of the European Court of Human Rights, which found a violation of the right to a fair trial in the investigation documents.” On February 8, 2017, the Leninsky District Court of Kirov re-sentenced Navalny and his partner Pyotr Ofitserov to 5 and 4 years of probation.

On June 15, the Kirovles company filed a lawsuit to recover 16 million rubles in compensation from Alexei Navalny, Petr Ofitserov and Vyacheslav Opalev in the embezzlement case. In July, the Nikulinsky Court of Moscow ruled that they must pay 2.1 million rubles to the Kirovles company. Thus, the court satisfied the claim of Kirovles against Navalny only partially.

Alexei and Oleg Navalny, accused of embezzlement from the Yves Rocher cosmetics company (Photo: Artem Korotaev / TASS)

In the Yves Rocher case, Alexei Navalny was charged along with his brother Oleg. The company accused Navalny of fraud and money laundering. On December 30, 2014, Navalny was again sentenced to 3.5 years of probation.

In May 2017, the news that the well-known businessman Alisher Usmanov filed a lawsuit against the FBK for the protection of honor and dignity caused a big stir. In addition, in a special video message, Usmanov responded to accusations against him by Alexei Navalny, in the first day alone, over 6 million people watched the video on all social networks. In the second appeal, Usmanov again criticized the opponent, comparing Navalny with Bulgakov's hero Polygraph Poligraphovich Sharikov.

On May 15, 2018, the Tverskoy Court of Moscow appointed Navalny 30 days of arrest for disobeying the police at a protest rally that took place on May 5 in Moscow and was not agreed with the authorities.

In June 2018, the Simonovsky Court of Moscow extended for another year the probationary period for opposition politician Alexei Navalny in the Kirovles case, obliging him to report to the Federal Penitentiary Service four times a month.

"SP" reported that on the morning of October 14, Navalny was released after 50 days of arrest.

On October 15, Alexei Navalny announced that he had become a defendant in a criminal case initiated under Article 128.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation: “Slander combined with accusing a person of committing a grave or especially grave crime.”

According to him, the plaintiff in this case is an employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Pavel Karpov, in whom the Anti-Corruption Fund headed by Navalny found “elite real estate objects, luxury cars, etc., and in quantities that are by no means available to an employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs even with the highest salary.

"Duel" with Zolotov

After Alexei Navalny published on his website an investigation titled “Rosgvardia’s Potato”, which alleged that the Rosgvardia was buying food at inflated prices, the head of the Rosgvardia, Viktor Zolotov, recorded a video message in response to Navalny’s accusations. The head of the National Guard challenged the politician to a duel and promised to turn him into a chop in just a few minutes. Also, General Zolotov called Navalny "an opposition pug, a product from an American test tube, a clone and a puppet." According to Zolotov, the politician has been given the task of throwing mud at everyone in order to destabilize the situation in the country.

On October 18, Free Press reported that Alexei Navalny responded to the challenge of the head of the National Guard, Zolotov, to a duel, reserving the right to choose weapons and the place of the duel.

“I accept your challenge, and, as expected, I choose a place and weapons. Our duel will take place in the form of live debates on Channel One or any other federal channel, ”he said on his YouTube channel.

Viktor Zolotov, in turn, recalled that he invited Navalny not to a debate, but to a competition of a different kind, but promised to answer the oppositionist, although he still does not know in what format

Political views of Alexei Navalny

Alexei Navalny positions himself as a national democrat. At the same time, he denies the label of a nationalist attached to him. Although earlier Aleksey Anatolyevich noted that nationalism “should become the core political system Russia”, was a participant in the nationalist marches “Russian March”, spoke out against migrants who go to Russia with their “very peculiar values”.

In the election program Alexey Navalny continues to focus on the corruption of power and the fight against bureaucracy. The first point of his program is the introduction of a large one-time tax for the oligarchs, which compensates for the injustice of privatization. It also offers full exemption from taxes, regulation and reporting for individual entrepreneurs, radical debureaucratization of housing construction, which will reduce housing prices, and other things that tempt the voter.

Alexei Navalny with his wife and children (Photo: navalny.com)

Family of Alexei Navalny

Alexei Navalny is married to Yulia Borisovna Navalnaya(Abrosimova). Has a daughter, Daria (2001) and a son, Zakhar (2008).

Brother - Oleg Anatolyevich Navalny. Until May 2013, he worked as Deputy Director of the Automated Sorting Centers company, a branch of Russian Post, First Deputy Director of the EMS Russian Post Express Delivery campaign.

As befits a politician, Alexei Navalny is very active on social networks, posts his photos on Instagram, retweets on Twitter, and posts on Facebook. Navalny does not miss the chance to promote himself, so in August he responded to the request of one of the portals, which announced an award among users for a video with a politician. As a result, Alexei Navalny and his wife filmed a video of a walk around the city and sent it to journalists. According to the politician, he was paid only 10 thousand rubles, the news reported. Alexei Navalny said that he was waiting for the remaining amount, otherwise he would go to court. And the politician promised to transfer the received money to his election fund.

Navalny does not always succeed in PR, for example, a photo posted on Instagram at the end of August, in which Alexei enthusiastically eats noodles with the caption “I love doshik”, caused a wave of parodies and fotozhabs on the Internet. The phrase “Navalny eats doshirak” has become a meme, a photo of a politician is attached to a variety of historical characters, however, it is not clear whether such a stir is in favor of the oppositionist himself.