The charges themselves were strange. Navalny was accused of helping to steal 16 million rubles (around $500,000) from a state-run timber company. The case had been closed by local investigators years before for lack of evidence but was reopened last summer for openly political reasons. The main prosecution witness was a former director of the timber firm whom Navalny had recommended be fired and investigated for corruption. The defense had little chance to present its own case. “They refused us everything,” one of Navalny’s lawyers, Olga Mikhailova, told me. “They refused us an opportunity to cross examine prosecution witnesses, refused us the chance to call our own witnesses, refused our request to conduct an independent analysis.” From the outset, it was clear where proceedings were headed. The point was to paint Navalny, the famed anticorruption fighter, as a crook, while quarantining him from politics and public life.

What ultimately made Thursday’s verdict inevitable was not what happened in the courtroom, but what Navalny represented outside of it. Put simply, Navalny, although far from a perfect politician or the savior of the opposition, was what the Kremlin fears most: an alternative, even a theoretical one. At the moment, Navalny is an untested political leader with limited public support — recent Levada Center polls showed him getting just eight percent of the vote in the Moscow mayoral race — and would have been unlikely to defeat the Kremlin’s incumbent, Sergei Sobyanin. He has openly stated his presidential ambitions, yet for now, he lacks national, presidential appeal.

But the logic of Putin’s rule does not require a person to be a true, credible challenger at the ballot box to be a threat. All that’s needed is that a person remind Russians that there is a choice at all, that the cynical and choreographed stage show of politics the last decade is not the only fate that post-Soviet Russia deserves or can aspire to. As Nickolai Petrov, an expert on Russian domestic politics at the Higher School of Economics, explained, the emergence of Navalny as the first opposition leader in years around whom many — liberals, nationalists, libertarians — could potentially coalesce was “dangerous because it could change the very model of the political system,” in which the public doesn’t so much choose between Putin and a concrete opponent, but between Putin and no one, between Putin and the abyss. There is no room, as Petrov put it, for “independent, uncontrollable actors. They simply do not have the right to exist.”