Your Starbucks latte is ready, Mr. Navalny

Roughly three weeks ago, Russian police and pro-Kremlin activists started harassing Alexey Navalny’s volunteers with renewed vigor. The nationwide surge in raids on the opposition politician’s campaign offices followed an announcement by the head of Russia’s Central Election Commission, claiming that Navalny would only appear on the presidential ballot next March “by some miracle,” referring to federal laws that prohibit his candidacy as a recently convicted felon. Local headquarters have been ransacked, campaign literature has been confiscated, and volunteers have been beaten up and locked behind bars.

On July 21, activists in St. Petersburg from a local branch of the Open Russia movement, founded by former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, shared on YouTube an amateur advertisement for Navalny’s presidential campaign. Apparently filmed at a local Starbucks, a series of customers order cups of coffee, telling the baristas that their names are all “Navalny.” Each time a drink is ready, the staff yells out, “Navalny, your coffee’s ready!” The advertisement concludes with a message reading, “The authorities don’t get it: Navalny is each one of us. It’s everyone who’s tired of the mess in this country. Navalny should [be allowed to] become a candidate in the 2018 presidential election.”

The ad recalls another production from August 2013, when film editor Maxim Perepelkin published an animated video in support of Navalny’s Moscow mayoral candidacy. The video’s premise was that Moscow election law states that voters can add any symbol they wish to their ballots to indicate support for a candidate. Perepelkin’s montage shows drawings of cats, flowers, fish, and all manner of objects and creatures dancing on ballots cast for Navalny, all accompanied by music from the English rock band The Leisure Society. The ad ends with Navalny's protest-inspired campaign slogan: “One for all, and all for one.”