Alexei Navalny has been jailed. But he'll still be spooking Vladimir Putin

T he sum of €700 (£618) is not large in the context of Russian corruption, but it is a lot to spend on a toilet brush. Then again, sprawling presidential estates have a lot of toilets, which must be cleaned to a standard delivered only by Italian designer brushes.

Details like that are what make Alexei Navalny’s recent film about Vladimir Putin’s personal fortune so potent. The anti-corruption campaigner’s documentary has been viewed more than 100m times. Thanks to aerial drone footage and digital reconstructions based on leaked architectural plans, ordinary Russians have had a guided tour of what Navalny describes, without exaggeration, as a modern-day Versailles. They see what has become of money that might otherwise have been spent easing the burden of economic stagnation and the pandemic.

Navalny was handed a three-and-a-half year prison term on Tuesday, notionally for breaching terms of parole relating to an old fraud conviction. (His actual prison time will be reduced to two years and eight months to account for time already served under arrest.) His defence had been that he could hardly have complied with previous court orders because he was in Berlin, in a coma, recovering from a brush with the deadly nerve agent novichok. Also, the original conviction had been a politically motivated sham, and his poisoning was ordered by the Kremlin.

He told the court he was being targeted so as to intimidate anyone else who might think of criticising Putin. The judge was unpersuaded by that account, preferring the prosecution’s claim that he had dallied in Germany to evade justice. That verdict is hardly surprising. The official government line is that Navalny’s campaigns are espionage and terrorism; that he is a sower of chaos and a corrupter of young minds; that the novichok was administered by foreign agents.

That vilification, pumped out by the state propaganda machinery, has shaped many Russian opinions, or at least successfully seeded confusion about the whole business. But there have been large rallies across the country demanding Navalny’s release. (Some demonstrators have brandished toilet brushes – the standard plastic ones, spray-painted gold.)

This is hardly a national uprising, but such widespread defiance of Putin is significant. The Kremlin, spooked by last year’s pro-democracy eruption in Belarus, isn’t taking chances. Riot police have dispersed crowds with gratuitous force. Thousands have been arrested. But what alarms Putin most are protests in the regions, including Siberian towns where January frosts would usually prevent people gathering outdoors. Navalny’s popularity was thought to be confined to the more urbane dissidents in Moscow and St Petersburg.

It is hard work, chipping away at the official cult of Putin as mythic strongman. For millions, he is the one who restored national dignity after the humiliating loss of Soviet superpower status. He is the guarantor of stability after the chaos and unrestrained criminality that defined Russia in the 1990s.

Navalny’s films cleverly trace the current president’s own riches to that decade of rampant corruption, when state power and mafia culture merged. Putin is a product of that time. He rose from small-time bureaucratic hustler in the St Petersburg municipality, via Boris Yeltsin’s entourage, to the throne itself. He is not the man who cleared up the mess. He is the mess.

The KGB background does put Yeltsin’s successor in a different category to the first generation of oligarchs. Their theft of national resources was arranged by privatisation. Putin oversaw the expropriation of those stolen assets, but not for redistribution to ordinary Russians. It was a hybrid victory of spy agency “black ops” and mafia turf war. The private business clan was ousted by the siloviki – the security gang.

That doesn’t make Putin’s nationalist rhetoric entirely insincere. He is serious when it comes to restoring Russia’s status in the world, spending more on foreign military adventures, sponsoring coups and sabotaging democracy in other countries than he does on swanky real estate for himself. Overseas meddling is the face of Putinism that western governments notice and decry. It is also something many Russians can appreciate. Denunciation by the old Nato adversaries proves that Putin’s way is working. It delivers a dividend in national pride to compensate for economic disappointment.

But that is a broken business model. The siloviki know a lot about geostrategic mischief and siphoning cash from oil and gas exports, but not so much about wealth creation and investment. As Catherine Belton explains in Putin’s People, the essential book about the Kremlin coterie, the regime is a fusion of cold-war statecraft and post-Soviet gangsterism. The key players, with Putin as the figurehead, told themselves they were saving Russia by securing control of its resources. The boundary between self-enrichment and national renaissance blurred, then disappeared.

That concept of power incarnate has deep historical resonance for some Russians. Putin is the tsar, say his fans: of course he has a palace! (Although he denies the palace is his.) But Navalny has struck a chord, especially for the generation that has grown up under two decades of unchanged leadership. They are not animated by superpower nostalgia and are more likely to see Putin as godfather of all the leeches who attach themselves to anything that makes money in Russia, getting fat and giving nothing back.

Navalny’s films also speak to that audience with humour. The labyrinthine schemes of kleptocracy are conveyed with a particular brand of laconic Russian sarcasm. Opposition figures have called Putin’s gang common thieves before (and paid a heavy price for it), but Navalny is the first to have captured in such rich colour the voracity of the greed, the concupiscent grubbiness, the sheer trashiness, familiar to all Russians from the swagger of their local small-town bandits. He focuses on the pettiness of the ruler he described in court as “that little man in his bunker”.

Putin is not going anywhere. There are no signs of schism inside the regime and no incentive to switch from the trusted techniques for staying in power: suffocate dissent, discredit enemies with state media, stitch up elections. Many Russians either buy into the Kremlin’s line or are worn down, steeped in the fatalistic culture that sees something immutable in the people’s drudging compliance with a remote, self-serving elite.

Still, the Navalny case has stirred something. My Russian friends say it is far too early to know exactly what, but they report a change. Partly it is the effect of prolonged economic malaise. Partly it is the sheer boredom of a generation whose life prospects have congealed in the stale air of Putin’s Russia. Partly it is the shrewd way that Navalny has tunnelled underneath the strongman cult, broken into his gaudy palace and got under his skin.

Previous opponents have criticised Putin for abuse of power, but that’s just another way to make him look strong. Navalny does something subtly different that is more threatening to a gangster. He makes Putin look small.

• Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist