Late on a snowy evening, Alexey Navalny, a lawyer and blogger known for his crusade against the corruption that pervades Russian business and government, sat in a radio studio in Moscow. Tall and blond, Navalny, who is thirty-four years old, cuts a striking figure, and in the past three years he has established himself as a kind of Russian Julian Assange or Lincoln Steffens. On his blog, he has uncovered criminal self-dealing in major Russian oil companies, banks, and government ministries, an activity he calls “poking them with a sharp stick.” Three months ago, he launched another site, RosPil, dedicated to exposing state corruption, where he invites readers to scrutinize public documents for evidence of malfeasance and post their findings. Since the site went up, government contracts worth nearly seven million dollars have been annulled after being found suspect by Navalny and his army. Most remarkably, Navalny has undertaken all this in a country where a number of reporters and lawyers investigating such matters have been beaten or murdered.

Alexey Navalny calls his pursuit of corrupt institutions “poking them with a sharp stick.” Photograph by Stefano de Luigi / VII NETWORK

By now, Russia’s reputation for corruption is a cliché, but it is impossible to overstate how it defines public life at every level, all the way to the Kremlin. Russia is one of the few countries in the world to slip steadily in Transparency International’s annual rankings. Out of a hundred and seventy-eight countries surveyed in 2010, Russia ranks a hundred and fifty-fourth, a spot it shares with Cambodia, Guinea-Bissau, and the Central African Republic. Corruption has reached such extremes that businesses involved in preparing the Black Sea resort of Sochi for the Winter Olympics of 2014 report having to pay kickbacks of more than fifty per cent. The Russian edition of Esquire recently calculated that one road in Sochi cost so much that it could just as well have been paved with, say, nine inches of foie gras or three and a half inches of Louis Vuitton handbags. In October, President Dmitry Medvedev announced that a trillion rubles—thirty-three billion dollars—disappears annually on government contracts. This is three per cent of the country’s G.D.P.

In the studio, Navalny sat next to Evgeny Fedorov, a doughy, bespectacled member of the Duma and a fairly high-ranking member of United Russia, the political party led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, which today dominates Russia. Fedorov had been invited on the air to debate an assertion that Navalny had made in the same studio two weeks earlier. When asked by a radio host what he thought of United Russia, Navalny had said, “I think very poorly of United Russia. United Russia is the party of corruption, the party of crooks and thieves. And it is the duty of every patriot and citizen of our country to make sure that this party is destroyed.” United Russia announced its intention to file suit against Navalny for slander. Unfazed, Navalny responded with a poll on his blog asking readers whether they agreed with his assertion that United Russia was in fact a party of crooks and thieves. (Of forty thousand respondents, 96.6 per cent agreed with Navalny.) Then he announced a contest to design a poster using the “crooks and thieves” line as a slogan.

Sitting beside Navalny in the studio, Fedorov fumbled nervously with a stack of colored folders and a thicket of scribbled notes. Without looking at him, Navalny drew a sheet of paper from a slim file in front of him and began to read through a list of members of United Russia’s leadership council. He pointed out that one of them, the former governor of oil-rich Bashkortostan, had unified the region’s oil industry and installed his son as the chairman of the resultant conglomerate. Navalny then noted that the governor of the Krasnodar region, where Sochi is, had a twenty-two-year-old niece who had somehow come to own a major stake in a multimillion-dollar pipe factory, a poultry plant, and a number of other businesses. The governor of the Sverdlovsk region (Boris Yeltsin’s birthplace), Navalny said, has an eighteen-year-old daughter who owns a plywood mill and a dozen other local businesses. “How does all this wonderful entrepreneurial talent appear only in the children of United Russia members?” he asked. “What business schools did they attend?”

Fedorov dismissed this as meaningless invective. (All the officials have denied any wrongdoing.) He accused Navalny of terrorism and of working to undermine the country, implying that he was receiving financing either from the C.I.A. or from the U.S. State Department, if not both.

“Honestly, what you’ve just said is shocking,” Navalny said, perfectly deadpan. “I thought that, since you brought so many documents with you, you’d be able to raise substantive objections about the facts of corruption in United Russia, which, I think, are totally obvious.”

Fedorov also wanted to contest Navalny’s assertion, taken from the official property declarations posted on the Russian parliament’s Web site, that Fedorov, a career civil servant, is the owner of five apartments, a house, a summer cottage, and two cars, one of which is a Mercedes. The house is a wreck, Fedorov protested, flashing pictures to the host, and he owns only four apartments. As for Navalny’s assertion that United Russia provides political cover for the corrupt officials in its ranks, Fedorov had a simple bit of advice: “It’s pointless to discuss each of these examples on its own. There is a clear procedure. In instances where the law is broken, the procedure works,” he said. “Write to us. The President even said so himself: ‘Give us the facts!’ ”

“But I’ve been writing for many years,” Navalny burst out. “That’s the whole point!”

Three centuries ago, when Peter the Great was trying to turn feudal, agrarian Russia into a modern state, he encountered a major source of friction inside the system. “Corruption affected not only the finances of the state but its basic efficiency,” Robert Massie wrote in his biography of the Tsar. “Bribery and embezzlement were traditional in Russian public life, and public service was routinely looked upon as a means of gaining private profit. This practice was so accepted that Russian officials were paid little or no salary; it was taken for granted that they would make their living by accepting bribes.”

Despite the wild fluctuations of Russian history since the early eighteenth century, not much has changed in this regard. Almost anyone can be bribed—sometimes with horrific consequences. In August, 2004, two passenger planes fell out of the sky within three minutes of each other, killing eighty-nine people. It turned out that they were downed by two female suicide bombers who had bribed an airport security officer with five thousand rubles—around a hundred and seventy dollars—to let them onto the planes. Government officials don’t just accept bribes but actively solicit them: businesses have become used to approaches by officials who hint that a certain sum will prevent “problems.” It has not gone unnoticed that many civil servants live in luxury that doesn’t square with their modest official salaries. United Russia’s own survey of people who wanted to join the party showed that almost sixty per cent said they were motivated by a desire to solve personal problems, and nearly half were drawn by the opportunity to earn money on the side.

In recent years, Medvedev, eager to lure foreign investors back to Russia, has declared war on corruption. Nonetheless, according to the Interior Ministry’s Department of Economic Security, the size of the average bribe has quadrupled since Medvedev’s election, and many state projects are now undertaken simply to create a pool of money that can then be siphoned off by interested parties. Elena Panfilova, the head of Transparency International’s Russian operation, told me that there are two reasons for this: first, as the government fights corruption, bribery becomes more risky, and so the price goes up. “Second, is what is called the Last Day of Pompeii syndrome,” she said. “Everything’s about to collapse, so grab everything you possibly can.” This has led to such scenes as police pursuing the car of a federal official, who began to toss a million rubles out of the window for fear that the cops would catch him with the bribe money and arrest him.

Fighting corruption in Russia is a dangerous business. “Alexey is causing tangible harm to corrupt, criminal, crooked officials who are not used to people standing in their way,” the Internet entrepreneur and opposition blogger Anton Nossik said. “It’s more dangerous here now than it used to be. Corporations are clearly not into killing—they use P.R. and the courts—but some small official in the provinces whom Alexey deprived of his million dollars could easily send someone after him.” Such things have happened before. A lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky uncovered a scheme by which a group of Interior Ministry officers allegedly stole two hundred and thirty million dollars from the state. In 2008, those same officers had him arrested as he was seeing his children off to school. For nearly a year, Magnitsky was kept in Moscow jails, in conditions so filthy that his health rapidly deteriorated. Denied treatment, he died handcuffed and screaming in pain. He was thirty-seven. There is also the recent case of Mikhail Beketov, a journalist who published exposés of corruption and abuse of authority in the Moscow region and was beaten so badly that he is now crippled and unable to speak.

Navalny and his supporters are keenly aware of such brutal reprisals. “I have a lot of respect for what he’s doing, but I think they’ll arrest him,” I was told by a high-ranking employee at a state corporation that Navalny is investigating. “He’s taunting really big people and he’s doing it in an open way and showing them that he’s not afraid. In this country, people like that get crushed.” When I asked Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila, if she was afraid for her son, she melted into tears before I even got the question out. “I have forgotten what normal sleep is,” she said. “I believe in what he’s doing, he’s doing the right thing, but I’m not ready. I’m not ready for my son to become a martyr.”

Lyudmila and her husband, Anatoly, own a wicker factory, which they founded in the mid-nineties, southwest of Moscow. I met her in her office there, and she showed me a black-and-white photograph of two young parents holding a crying baby. “Here he is, with his mouth open, like always,” she said.

Alexey was born in June, 1976, near Moscow, in Butyn, a military town closed to the public. His father was a Red Army communications officer. Lyudmila was a young economist and a loyal Communist. Navalny’s paternal grandmother was a Ukrainian peasant, and Alexey spent the first nine summers of his life at her cottage, in the countryside just outside Chernobyl. In late April, 1986, when Navalny was ten, his uncle called Lyudmila, and told her she shouldn’t send Alexey that summer: there had been an explosion at Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant. As the Soviet government downplayed the disaster, Navalny’s entire paternal family was evacuated and resettled. Many of them suffer from thyroid and liver problems to this day. “Alexey doesn’t talk about it much, but Chernobyl had a very big influence on him,” Lyudmila says.

Navalny grew up in a series of military towns in the Moscow region. He was a capable but unexceptional student with a habit of telling his teachers what he thought of them. In 1993, he entered Peoples’ Friendship University, in Moscow, famous for educating students from the Soviet Union’s Third World allies, and decided to study law. He recalls finding his college education uninspiring and corrupt: slipping a fifty-dollar bill into your exam booklets insured a passing grade. He graduated in 1998.

While he was still in school, he went to work at a Moscow real-estate company. “Working there taught me how things are done on the inside, how intermediary companies are built, how money is shuttled around,” Navalny says. At the same time, he obtained a master’s in finance, and, in 2001, he quit real estate to be a full-time stock trader. He also married a young economist named Yulia Abrosinova, whom he met when they were both vacationing in Turkey.

In 1999, in the fading days of Boris Yeltsin’s Presidency, Navalny joined Yabloko (meaning “apple”), a party that had represented the liberals in government since soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. After Putin came to power, in 2000, Yabloko was increasingly marginalized. Navalny quickly became frustrated with the party dynamic and, as Sergei Mitrokhin, the current party head and Navalny’s political mentor, puts it, “made his presence known.” According to Navalny, “There was constant antagonism between the normal people in the party and some kind of hellish, insane, crazy mass of the leftovers and bread crusts of the democracy movement of the eighties.”

In 2005, Navalny teamed up with Maria Gaidar, the daughter of a legendary Yeltsin-era economic reformer, to create a movement called Da! (Yes!). Da! set out to engage an emerging generation of Russians who were too young to have experienced the end of Communism and had come of age in a wealthier, more apathetic time. Its aims were diffuse, but the movement spread to many Russian cities. One key component was the hosting of debates. “The idea was that, because there are no free debates and no free media, we decided we’re just going to rent a bar, invite two people, and they’re going to debate,” Navalny explains. “To our surprise, it was a super-popular project. The limiting factor was the size of the space.” Gaidar has described it as “an alternative way to socialize,” and this proved to be one of the project’s biggest legacies. Young Russians met older, more established politicians and journalists. The debates—witty, raucous, bawdy—gave a community of politically engaged Russians a chance to form the kinds of rivalries and allegiances that the Putin administration was working to dissolve. They ended when neo-Nazis and soccer hooligans started showing up and brawling. (Navalny was arrested for roughing up one of the intruders.)