January 23, 2021

Tens of Thousands Across Russia Are Protesting Alexei Navalny’s Arrest

Clashes with police quickly turned violent.

Pavel Golovkin/AP

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Large demonstrations in support of Alexei Navalny, the prominent Kremlin-critic who was jailed last week upon returning to Russia for the first time since he was poisoned in an August assassination plot, erupted across the country on Saturday, with police quickly turning violent against protesters demanding Navalny’s release. 

On January 17, Navalny was immediately detained after flying to Moscow from Berlin, where he had spent months recovering from a nerve agent attack that nearly killed him. Western authorities traced the assassination attempt on Navalny back to Russia’s domestic intelligence agency—responsibility for which Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to deny. If the Russian state had wanted to kill Navalny, Putin—a former KGB officer before he entered politics—said in some rather harrowing comments in December, they would have “finished the job.”

The return and subsequent detention of the Kremlin’s most prominent opposition leader are now sparking the country’s largest protests in years, as demonstrators call for the government to drop its charges that Navalny is guilty of violating parole conditions—charges they say are nothing but an attempt to silence Putin’s critics. The Guardian reported that 1870 people have been arrested so far—including, reportedly Pavel Golovkin, Navalny’s wife. Footage from the protests show riot police violently attacking protesters:

The demonstrations drew the support of several United States lawmakers, including Rep. Adam Schiff, the lead impeachment manager in Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial over the former president’s efforts to coerce Ukraine into intervening in the presidential election. “Russians are taking to the streets today in the freezing cold to peacefully demand freedom, human rights for all their citizens, an end to corruption, and the immediate release of Alexei Navalny,” the Democrat tweeted as images rolled in. ” I stand with them. The United States, and the world, must stand with them, too.”

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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