8/26/20
When Aleksei Navalny and three colleagues left on August 18 to drive 250 kilometers south to Tomsk, a group of plainclothes officers trailed him. In Tomsk itself, every detail of his two-day visit -- including the location of his rented apartment and the names of people he met -- was recorded. "Law enforcement noted no suspicious contacts that could be linked to a poisoning," read an article by the Moskovsky komsomolets tabloid that detailed the depth of this surveillance and cited anonymous officials in Russia's security services. The article was published on August 21, the day after Navalny collapsed on board a plane flying to Moscow and was hospitalized after an emergency landing in Omsk. Navalny now lies comatose in a Berlin hospital, where German doctors say he appears to have been poisoned with a potentially dangerous chemical. The Kremlin has rebuffed Western calls for an immediate investigation. The fact that details of Navalny's movements were recorded and leaked to a pro-government newspaper wasn't wholly surprising. But the leaks conspicuously omitted the fact that despite the blanket surveillance, security agencies implausibly failed to detect when the toxin may have been ingested.
It's a system reliant not only on covert and open surveillance, but also the collaboration of freelancers who trail Navalny's every move to produce so-called "kompromat," or compromising material that can be shared with friendly media and aired to the population at large, driving the narrative that the opposition itself is venal. The Russian doctors who initially treated Navalny issued contradictory statements about his health and the presence of toxins in his body. According to Navalny's spokeswoman, his wife, and his private doctor, they actively opposed his transfer to Germany under pressure from police officers and unidentified men who kept watch over the Omsk ward during Navalny's treatment there. The Kremlin has denied surveilling Navalny or working with pro-government channels. But Mikhail Rubin, the author of the Proekt investigation, said the notion that the Kremlin would be clueless as to how he fell ill did not stand up to scrutiny. "With that amount of surveillance, with such a large number of resources focused on Navalny, they should at least have some idea of what happened to him," Rubin told the Meduza news site. "We can state that with certainty."