Here's what Blinov did not say in those three hours. Thirty-three of the 35 prosecutorial witnesses actually briefed on Navalny's behalf. The defense was not allowed to call any witnesses of its own. V.N. Opalev, the one man upon whose testimony Blinov claims to have hung his prefabricated judgment, often forgot his lines and contradicted himself. At one point, as the BuzzFeed's Max Seddon reminds us, Opalev offered the "wrong" evidence and so the "right" kind was simply read aloud for him, to which he replied that, yes, "it was like that."

Historical comparisons ought not be stretched too far, but observers aren't wrong to detect a whiff of the 1930s creeping into 2010s. In 1936, as Stalin began liquidating the Bolshevik opposition blocs to his dictatorship, a low-ranking Trotskyist called Holtzman was put on trial, accused of "terrorism" and attempted assassinations of the Soviet leadership. Among the invented targets was Stalin himself, who then helped invent Holtzman's verdict. The state claimed that the defendant had met up with Trotsky's son Sedov in Copenhagen's Hotel Bristol. There was one minor error, however. The Hotel Bristol had burned down in 1917. So Soviet propagandists had to come up with a new location without overtaxing their imaginations; thus the Café Bristol became the furtive rendezvous spot for plotting to dismantle the people's first socialist democracy.

No one ever accused Navalny of being furtive; up until today, he was running a long-shot campaign to get elected mayor of Moscow and he's openly stated his intention of one day running for president, two contingencies now foreclosed by a criminal conviction. (There is still some wriggle room for the mayoral race, apparently, related to the timing of an appeal, but Navalny withdrew his candidacy a few hours ago, promising only to continue if he's released from jail.) His activity has been out in the open, published on LiveJournal and on Twitter. That was the point, after all, to awaken everybody to what's been happening around them for over a decade. He wants to dismantle Putin's "managed democracy," which he has cleverly and charismatically exposed as a racket of gargantuan proportion, where oligarchs have been given government titles and KGB agents from "St. Pete" have been given chairmanships on the boards of oil and gas giants -- what Navalny called a "repulsive feudal order that sits like a spider in that Kremlin." Anyone standing in the way of this order, or telling the truth about the criminality that sustains it, is hereby deemed dispensable either through murder, public vilification in the state-controlled organs, or imprisonment. A martyr can do only so much from a labor camp. Ask Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oligarch sentenced for fraud, or Pussy Riot's Mary Alekhine, who was beaten in prison today.