Rising Russian star takes on The Party

This one is for the Russian speakers among you. It’s a gem of a video, nearly an hour long, that epitomizes perfectly What Russia Is and What Russia Could Be.

In one corner, we have Alexey Navalny, an independent Russian corruption fighter who runs one of the country’s most popular blogs and has become something of a one-man Wikileaks (though he, an erudite lawyer, would hate that simplistic term). In the other corner, we have Yevgeny Fyodorov, a member of the ruling United Russia party and the head of the Duma’s economic policy and entrepreneurship committee.

Navalny caused quite a stir last week during an interview with Finam FM when he called United Russia “a party of swindlers and thieves.” Members of the party took great offense and have reportedly hired a lawyer to go after the man who is making their life increasingly difficult with investigations into official corruption. Rather than back down, Navalny hosted a poll via his blog and Twitter to see how many people agreed with his statement about the party (nearly 97 percent, 37,650 people did; he told me last week that “the only question is: who was the other 3 percent?!”).

Yesterday, Finam invited Navalny to debate Fyodorov, a stuffy bureaucrat in the most Soviet of senses. Navalny, passionate, well educated, with research and facts to back him up wins hands down. Fyodorov bases nearly all his argumentation on one line: all of Russia’s problems result from American attempts at global domination. Yes this is a man whose government is supposedly fully supportive of Obama’s “reset” policy.

Even if you don’t speak Russian, watch a few minutes just to see the differences in style. Navalny is on the left of the screen; Fyodorov on the right (but that’ll be obvious).