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Kremlin Critic Debugs Office. Tweets About It.

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

Video taken by Aleksei Navalny's colleague showing the wiretap device

On Monday, Aleksei Navalny, a blogger and anticorruption crusader who is perhaps Russia's most influential Kremlin critic, arrived at work and with the help of a wiretap detector provided by a colleague discovered that his office was bugged.

It was a scene out of the cloak and dagger days of the Soviet Union, except that Mr. Navalny proceeded to describe the entire affair in real time to his 274,271 followers on Twitter and then post a video about the discovery on his blog.

“Experts, what is this?” Mr. Navalny asked, posting a photograph of a device hidden behind the baseboard in his office.

Not content with his online experts, Mr. Navalny apparently summoned the authorities. Twelve police officers arrived along with wiretap experts who, Mr. Navalny reported, determined that the device was in fact equipped with a microphone. They also discovered a hidden video camera.

The police dusted for prints and wrote up a report.

Russian officials did not respond to the revelation, and the reaction among Mr. Navalny's supporters was hardly one of surprise.

“Shocker! Navalny's being listened to? I'd never have thought,” Ksenia Sobchak, a pop celebrit y turned government opponent, said in an apparently sarcastic remark on Twitter.

Last week, Mr. Navalny was charged with embezzlement and faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted. Such an outcome, as my colleague Ellen Barry reported, would signal a sharp escalation in President Vladimir V. Putin's efforts to defang Russia's opposition. Mr. Navalny was previously the target of an investigation into the same embezzlement case, but investigators dropped it in the spring saying they had found no evidence of wrongdoing.

So far, Mr. Navalny has tended to make light of his situation, taking frequent jabs at the authorities in the domain where he is strongest: social media.

Video of the police inspecting Mr. Naval ny's office

In a video later posted to his blog, Mr. Navalny said he and his colleagues, whom he described as “paranoid,” decided to check for bugs in his office “for the fun of it.”

“Honestly, I thought they'd hide them better,” he said.