<p>Was Alexei Navalny’s nationalism sincere or strategic—and how did it evolve over time? What can this tell us about Russian politics? Although historically a less diverse country at the level of everyday interactions, Russia saw the massive growth of an ethnonationalist movement in the first decade of the new millennium. Historically, nationalism and liberalism have been allies rather than opponents as a modern understanding of politics might suggest. Yet for Navalny this was more an alliance of convenience than one of conviction. This essay argues that Alexei Navalny compromised his liberal principles to make alliances with nationalist extremists in his early years as a means of attracting support in his political endeavors. The article evaluates this argument through, first, an analytical narrative biography, which draws on newspapers and interviews and second, a web-scraped corpus of his blog posts that is analyzed for terms corresponding to three categories. The essay ends by asking why extremist appeals had this role in Russian politics.</p>