In his posthumously published memoir, Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, describes how the campaign for mayor of Moscow in 2013 that launched his political career was directly inspired by American grassroots politics as depicted in The Wire, David Simon’s seminal HBO series about crime and power in Baltimore.
“I was banned from appearing on television or in the papers, so I decided to communicate directly,” writes Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison in February, a death seen to have been ordered by Vladimir Putin, the authoritarian president Navalny opposed.
