Top Putin Critic Targets Corruption ahead of Polls

The activist who has become a focal point of the protest movement against Vladimir Putin on Thursday laid out his vision for a Russia free of corruption, days ahead of presidential polls.

Alexei Navalny, a 35-year-old minority shareholder activist who has become known for his crusading blog against corruption, is not standing in Sunday's vote but is seen by many in the opposition as an alternative future leader.

In his first major policy article, published in the respected Vedomosti daily, he pinpointed the war on corruption as his core economic aim for Russia.

"The question 'what is your economic program?' often causes problems for opposition figures who have won popularity by being critical of the authorities," he said.

"My answer is simple," Navalny wrote. "Fighting corruption is my economic program."

"An honest government will be the first and most important achievement that will pave the way to solving other problems in Russia, social, economic, and security-related," he wrote.

"In Putin's Russia, it is not talent and hard work that makes billionaires, but having the right friends down at the dacha," he said.

Alleging rampant nepotism that allowed the 22-year-old businesswoman daughter of a regional governor to already become a millionaire, he added: "It is the sons of mayors who have become the most successful developers."

Winning many fans with his tongue-in-cheek blog-writing style in which he for years attacked corrupt state tenders and officials' taste for extravagance, the article is Navalny's first serious crack at a policy vision.

Expressing admiration for the anti-corruption drive of Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew, Navalny said the key condition for beating corruption was an "absence of untouchables of any rank and the inevitability of punishment."

Cutting out rampant bribery would boost Russia's economy by lowering prices and strengthening government institutions, and "inspecting state investment programs for corruption will expose massive resources," he wrote.

"No matter how many structural reform programs the Kremlin comes up with, not a single one will be realized because the whole system of authority is deformed by lawlessness and corruption."

Navalny transformed his online notoriety into politics ahead of the parliamentary elections last year, with a creative campaign against Putin's United Russia party whom he memorably labeled "crooks and thieves."

He later spoke and attended the mass rallies in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and spent two weeks in prison after being arrested, which strengthened his image as an opposition leader, though still unseen on Russian state television.

Earlier this week the young politician, a lawyer by profession who has among his clients a former top employee of jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, told the Dozhd channel that he wants to participate in presidential elections "when we make them free and fair".

He also said he supported an "escalation of the protests" after the presidential elections, including through pitching tents in a Moscow square to make the protest a more permanent phenomenon.

Russian media has dissected Navalny's biography over the past three months, lingering over his expulsion from the liberal Yabloko party several years ago and participation in the nationalist rally Russian March.

Article readers wished Navalny luck, with some commenting that "the Kremlin is afraid of this man more than of anything" simply because "he is calling things what they really are".