Say hello to Alexei Navalny's libertarian multimillionaire backer
Last week Evgenia and I released an episode where we talked about Alexei Navalny’s neoliberalism (which we’ve now opened up to the public). We stressed that Navalny isn’t against oligarchs or even the existence of an oligarchy, he’s simply against Putin’s oligarchs. Well, we came across another data point that confirms our view of things.
And that data point is Evgeny Chichvarkin.
Chichvarkin is an exiled former Russian billionaire now living in London. He’s famous for setting up “Evroset,” one of the biggest mobile phone store chains in Russia. He fled to the UK after being forced to sell his company in a shady Kremlin-connected oligarchic corporate raid and has since become a fashionable merchant, sporting a Nicholas II mustache, wearing ridiculous outfits, selling wines and spirits, posting workout videos from Dubai, and professing a philosophy of freedom and hedonism. He’s into opposition politics, too, and a big Navalny fan.
While Navalny was being treated for poisoning and recuperating in Germany, Chichvarkin was his guardian angel. He bankrolled Navalny housing costs and picked up some of his medical bills. And this not the first time Chichvarkin helped out with Navalny’s political struggle. He’s been backing him for years and even started a fund in 2019 to allow Russians to donate to Navalny’s campaign while maintaining anonymity. Some of these people, he told Svoboda, were children of the Kremlin elite who wanted to support Navalny without their parents finding out.
What’s interesting about Chichvarkin is that he’s a committed libertarian and has long been known as an active backer of libertarian and “free-market” causes in Russia, including providing funds for Russia’s Libertarian Party — a necrotizing outgrowth of a political movement started in America and foisted on the world by Charles Koch.
Evgenia first became aware of Chichvarkin’s libertarian activism almost a decade ago while shooting her documentary about Russian libertarians. She never finished the doc, but she put together a couple of short clips from her footage — including a teaser intro and various interviews with party leaders and members. They are a weird, thoroughly colonized bunch of people. They host tea parties and wave around Gadsden flags in the middle of Moscow, as if it has any relevance to Russian politics.
For all his whacky beliefs in the science of libertarianism, Evgeny Chichvarkin is an unexpectedly likable character. He sorta reminds me of Nathan Barley — if Nathan had been an exiled Russian mini-oligarch instead of just a rich kid. Chichvarkin’s usually very candid, too. And recently he’s been on a media blitz, talking to Russian and Ukrainian journalists about why he supports Navalny and how he believes Navalny’s politics are now much closer in alignment with his own libertarian and free-market views.
Navalny and his supporters have worked to obscure Navalny’s own politics in the service of building as big and diverse base of support for his movement as possible. So Chichvarkin’s interviews and media appearances — even if very brief — are unique and important, giving us a tiny glimpse into the conversations Navalny has in private with his moneyed backers.
For instance, in an interview with a Ukrainian journalist last month, Chichvarkin mentioned discussions he and Navalny had about privatizing Russia’s energy infrastructure…
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—Yasha Levine