Navalny, who does much of his campaigning over the Internet, is a key figure in Ben Judah’s Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell in and out of Love with Vladimir Putin. Judah is clearly both fascinated and troubled by Navalny, whom he describes as ‘a pure product of Putinism’. By this he means that Navalny’s hip, online populism is what you get when authoritarianism succeeds in completely quashing conventional opposition, both in institutions like parliament and in the print and electronic media. In the event, Navalny (who is clearly a brave man) was released pending an appeal.

At the opposite end of the spectrum of public regard, on 23 March this year the oligarch Boris Berezovsky was found dead, apparently by his own hand, in a luxury mansion outside London. In his final media interview – which, incidentally, was with Judah, a journalist as well as an analyst with the European Council on Foreign Relations – Berezovsky accepted responsibility for beginning the ‘destruction of independent journalism’ in Russia.

Berezovsky was, in fact, one of the architects of the system against which Navalny now rails. Judah tells us that, ahead of the 1996 elections that saw Boris Yeltsin returned to the presidency, Berezovsky and fellow oligarchs like Mikhail Khodorkovsky were so worried by the prospect of a victory by the Russian Communist Party that they used their wealth to comprehensively debauch media coverage of the campaign and the elections themselves.

Then, ahead of the presidential elections in 2000, Berezovsky was among those who chose Putin – presumed to be a lightweight who could be easily controlled – to replace Yeltsin. Yet having done so, Putin turned on his sponsors and forced Berezovsky into exile. Berezovsky’s confession to Judah – ‘I ask for forgiveness for what led to the power of Vladimir Putin’ – may have been self-serving, but it was also clearly heartfelt. Judah’s narrative is thus framed by the careers of Berezovsky and Navalny, twin emblems of post-Soviet Russian politics.

Although the collapse of the USSR offered the prospect of freedom, the 1990s proved to be a time of great suffering and disappointment for Russians, both in terms of economic hardship and political opportunities foregone. The privatisation of the state sector turned into the pillage of a resource-rich economy by a few privileged insiders. Khodorkovsky was the egregious example: according to Judah ‘for a mere $350 million he got proven oil reserves far larger than Mexico, Angola or Norway’. It was on Yeltsin’s watch that conflict first engulfed the North Caucasus, and the crowning disaster was the 1998 Russian loan default, which wiped out the savings of the middle class.

Starting from this low point, Putin was well placed to build a solid power base. He elevated Berezovsky’s manipulation of the media from a tactic into a system: ‘telepopulism’, Judah calls it. He mustered formal political support through the creation of the United Russia party, and informal support through the Nashi youth movement, which can flood Moscow with one hundred thousand Putin supporters, alienated kids from the post-Soviet rustbelt, at the drop of a hat. He splintered and then co-opted the political opposition, both at the federal and provincial level. His greatest stroke of good fortune was the turnaround in Russia’s oil and gas sector, due to both increased production and rising global oil prices. Putin effectively renationalised the sector and used the flood of oil revenues to ‘stabilise’ the economy, increasing public sector payrolls, reviving the middle class, and fostering the super rich. With an economy one-third the size of Japan’s, Russia had five times as many billionaires.

Putin’s political ascendancy began to falter in mid-2008 when, debarred by the constitution from a third consecutive term as president, he allowed First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to take over the top job. Putin himself stepped back to the prime minister’s position, but in the following four years, the juxtaposition of Medvedev’s ineffectual espousal of reform with the reality of pervasive corruption and repression, together with the dire impact of the global financial crisis, destroyed what Judah calls ‘the Putin consensus’. Even more worrying for the Kremlin, the hydrocarbon boom of the last decades is now definitively over: global oil prices are down, Soviet-era oil fields are nearing final exhaustion, and new oil deposits are proving difficult to bring into production.

Putin returned to the presidency in mid-2012, having rewritten the constitution to allow him to stay in power until 2024 – which if it comes to pass will put his tenure in the Kremlin on a par with that of Stalin. The disenchantment was such that ‘the winners of Putinism began to feel like losers’, culminating in December 2011’s mass anti-Putin demonstrations in Moscow. These constituted the most impressive rejection of Putin to date, but then, as Judah entitles one of his chapters, ‘Moscow is not Russia’; the vast bulk of the Russian population lives outside the major cities and remains, seemingly, politically inert.

Judah’s post-Soviet Russia is as scary, fascinating, and impervious to preconception as any of its predecessors. For example, because of his resistance to Soviet communism, the Nobel prize-winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was once assumed in the West to be a liberal – and yet he wound up a fervent Putin supporter. There is no reason to assume the ‘islamophobe’ (Judah’s term) Navalny would be any more likely to conform to Western liberal prescriptions. In fact, there is no particular reason to assume that Navalny will be any more effective than previous high profile opponents of Putin, like the chess champion Gary Kasparov in the mid-2000s. As the author and left-wing Kremlin opponent Kirill Medvedev put it recently in the London Review of Books: ‘Navalny-worship is far from being the opposition’s only problem … until it connects with a genuine social programme the authorities will be able to paralyse it with a dozen well-placed arrests.’

Some of the issues Judah touches on are worth a book in themselves. Precisely because ‘Putinism’ renders formal, conventional politics irrelevant, the Runet – the Russian Internet – has developed into the most important online political forum in the world. And the Kremlin didn’t see this coming. Putin served as head of the FSB (the KGB’s successor) in the late 1990s – just at the point when Beijing was recognising the Internet as a unique and dire threat to party control. But Putin’s FSB passed up the opportunity to aggressively police the Internet at a time when only a handful of Russians were online. Now, Judah argues, it’s too late to clamp down.

Then there is religion. The revival of the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church has been extraordinary and unforeseen; as a conservative, Putin of course welcomes this, but, as Judah points out, as a politician he cannot regard the growing power of the church with complete equanimity. What would happen if the Patriarch of Moscow sided with the opposition against the Kremlin? Thus it was that ‘Pussy Riot’s’ February 2012 performance Mother of God, Drive Putin Away, staged on the altar of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, proved a godsend to Putin. It reinforced the popular perception that the opposition was a bunch of weirdo élitist apostates. And because the Patriarch needed the Kremlin to make an example of Pussy Riot, it drove a wedge between the opposition and the church.

Where does Russia go from here? Eleven more years of Putin, or virtual revolution on the Runet? As Judah and observers like Kirill Medvedev point out, the opposition is so narrowly based it is hard to see the real thing happening. One way or another, you won’t be hearing much about it in Australia. Earlier this year the Australian Broadcasting Corporation announced it would no longer base a correspondent in Moscow: Russia has lost the struggle to keep Australia’s attention. Why should we care? Among many other reasons, because post-Soviet Russia is just one more on the growing list of countries whose drift towards authoritarianism shows that capitalism and democracy are, in fact, far from inseparable.