A week ago, Yulia Latynina described Alexei Navalny, who coined the term ‘the party of crooks and thieves’ as ‘the only electable Russian’.   She called the tireless anti-corruption blogger the ‘single public figure who has a good chance of winning support from either a radical uprising or a moderate revolution.‘  His arrest at the anti-Putin protests which swept across Moscow yesterday, may therefore, as Julia Ioffe notes in the New Yorker, prove another misstep for the Kremlin:

The problem for Putin’s government is that, unlike the other two hundred and ninety-nine or so people arrested, Navalny is as close to a real celebrity as the Russian opposition has. He is also the one coherent, galvanizing, and viable figure among them. Despite his flirtations with nationalists, he is a brilliant political tactician and ad man: within three months of his coining the meme “party of crooks and thieves” to describe the ruling United Russia, one third of Russians polled said they identified United Russia as crooks and, yes, thieves.