Alexey Navalny: Russia's Julian Assange?

Alexey Navalny is decidedly not a journalist; the young corporate lawyer has dabbled in property development, the stock market, and politics (in the late 1990s he joined the liberal opposition party Yabloko and in 2005, he founded a kind of youth movement with Maria Gaidar, the daughter of one of Yeltsin's top economic advisers, called Da! or Yes!). He has a master's degree in finance and currently runs his own law firm from a small office in the center of Moscow. His résumé reads like an ambitious Russian entrepreneur's. Except that Navalny has also become the country's leading anti-corruption crusader, described variously as "a one-man WikiLeaks" and "a kind of Russian Julian Assange or Lincoln Steffens."
His public interest work, which he undertook on his blog several years ago, largely focuses on issues of transparency, corruption, and shareholder rights. (Navalny got his start as a muckraking blogger by purchasing a small number of shares in several state-owned enterprises to get an insider's view of how they operate and by exposing the fraud he discovered.) Early this year Navalny launched a new site, RosPil, designed to harness the power of the web and his devoted readers. It relies on simple crowd sourcing methods whereby registered users and a group of experts review public documents for wrongdoing and post their findings. Anyone can submit a government request for tender (a bid for services) to the site and, if it looks dubious enough, it is promoted to the main page. This has become far easier for the average citizen to do under President Medvedev who, two years ago, announced that all government requests for tender would be posted online. Once the documents have been published on RosPil, registered members evaluate the complaint and decide whether it should be pursued. If they vote yes, Navalny showcases the alleged fraud on his blog.
Two remarkable things have happened since Navalny started RosPil: after an appeal for contributions to the site in February this year, Navalny raised more than $120,000 in a week, highly unusual in Russia for a journalism website (it broke fundraising records according to Yandex, Russia's leading search engine); more remarkably yet, according to the site, RosPil has caused the annulment of about $12 million in requests for tender, as well as the resignations and public shaming of several government officials. Revelations range from the absurd (the Interior Ministry ordering a gilded bed for its suburban residence) to far more serious allegations of fraud and embezzlement...

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Adam Federman @'The Investigative Fund'