Putin Critic Gets 5-Year Jail Term, Setting Off Protests

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Russian officers held back protesters in Moscow on Thursday. Crowds turned out to protest the verdict against Aleksei Navalny. More Photos »

KIROV, Russia — Russia’s most prominent opposition leader was sentenced to five years in prison on Thursday for embezzlement, setting off protests that condemned the verdict as part of a campaign by President Vladimir V. Putin to corral the opposition and block the rise of a popular challenger.

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Aleksei A. Navalny, who famously branded the president’s United Russia political machine the “party of swindlers and thieves,” was apparently singled out by the Kremlin after having grown in stature from his beginnings as an anticorruption blogger and leader of street protests to a populist candidate for mayor of Moscow.

But it may ultimately be that same popularity — and the threat of further unrest — that keeps him free for at least some time. In what has the fingerprints of a politically designed plan, the public prosecutor, shortly after the handcuffed prisoner was led away, called on the judge to allow his release on Friday pending his appeal. That could keep Mr. Navalny out of prison for more than a month, perhaps temporarily neutralizing the anger at the verdict while allowing him to run for mayor in September.

As crowds of demonstrators swirled near Manezh Square in Moscow on Thursday night, Dmitri Gudkov, a political opposition leader and member of Parliament who attended Mr. Navalny’s sentencing, wrote on Twitter: “Tomorrow morning he may be released. Manezh, this is thanks to you!” That was later confirmed by Vadim Kobzev, Mr. Navalny’s lawyer, who called it “a clearly political decision.”

The Navalny case has captivated Moscow. When speaking before a crowd, Mr. Navalny projects a raw, common-man’s charisma. He was the point person in a popular opposition movement in which huge numbers of demonstrators poured into the streets demanding the rule of law and political reform. But when Mr. Putin returned to the presidency, his crackdown managed to discourage or frighten many of Mr. Navalny’s supporters — young, professional, tech-savvy Russians — into silence.

Mr. Navalny, however, refused to be cowed, and while others fled to preserve their freedom, he willingly stood trial.

The sentence represented a threshold for the Kremlin. For the past 12 years, Russian authorities typically refrained from using blunt force to sideline political challengers. Opposition members would be banned from government-controlled television, overwhelmingly the most powerful influence on public opinion. They would be co-opted with jobs or platforms, discredited by the release of embarrassing material or jailed with 15-day administrative sentences.

But Mr. Navalny’s sentence was a rare case in which a political opposition leader was transparently silenced using Russia’s criminal justice system.

“I think it’s always hard to say which point is the bifurcation point, the threshold after which there is irreversibility,” said Sergei Guriev, a public supporter of Mr. Navalny’s and a prominent Russian economist who recently fled to France, fearing his own political prosecution. “But this is certainly one of the big moves.”

“The message is that whatever you do, even if you do socially useful things, if you are in opposition to the government, you are going to jail,” Mr. Guriev said. He added: “He is the face of the Russian opposition. He is the face of the younger generation. What happens to him determines the future of Russia.”

Mr. Putin has shown a willingness to tolerate a certain amount of dissent, particularly on the Internet. But he has drawn the line at political challenges, as he did with the oil billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was imprisoned in 2005 after he began backing independent political parties to oppose the Kremlin. He remains in prison.

Mr. Navalny, 37, a lawyer, had long dismissed the trial as a charade based on trumped-up charges, a contention backed by the United States and the European Union. He remained defiant, spending much of the three-hour session in a local court here posting messages and photographs on Twitter, ignoring an order from Judge Sergei Blinov to shut off all cellphones and denouncing the evidence against him as “falsified.”

Before being led out of court, he sent followers one last message: “O.K. Don’t miss me. And most importantly — do not be lazy.”

If his conviction is upheld on appeal, Mr. Navalny will be banned from public office for life. He has said he wants to be president one day, but he posed a different sort of threat: a steadily growing popularity combined with an incorruptibility that made him impossible to co-opt and a relentlessness in embarrassing officials by disclosing their corrupt dealings.