Notorious Navalny’s place in Russian politics, pt. 1 w/ Russian political scientist Stanislav Byshok

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In this two-part release of “On the Barricades,” hosts Boyan Stanislavski and Maria Cernat speak with a pair of academics inside Russia to get at some truth about the figure so well heralded by the West, the “oppositionist” and “honest” challenger to Putin, Alexei Navalny. There’s been some backlash after the Navalny extravaganza and misportrayal went perhaps too far in the Oscar-winning documentary with his name. It’s time to get a better grip on the Russian political system as a whole and Navalny’s role in it.

In this first episode of two, we speak again with Dr. Stanislav Byshok, who is a Russian political scientist living in Moscow. He is frequently described as a scholar deconstructing nationalism and populism in international researcher databases. He's written a number of books and reports on current Russian, Ukrainian, and European politics, including one called “Navalny: the man who stole the forest.”

We discuss the Russian political system and whether Putin has any genuine threats to leadership in the party system. Is Navalny indeed a threat to Putin, and does Putin see it that way? Then we hear an overview of Navalny’s political career and changing way of branding himself and rhetoric: to what extent is/was he a nationalist, or anti-immigration, in his politics at different points? To what extent can we say he is a liberal democrat, and how does that look in Russia? Navalny also wrote a memorandum about the Russia-Ukraine war about a month ago from jail, saying that Ukraine should return to its 1991 borders, which included Crimea. What to make of this while the war continues?