When the state-friendly Russian oil company Surgutneftegas held its annual shareholders meeting in the Siberian city of Surgut two years ago, the proceedings in the shabby auditorium started off as tightly scripted as a Politburo meeting. That is, until the moderator called for questions and Alexei Navalny took the stage. In front of some 300 stunned shareholders, Navalny, who owned about $2,000 worth of stock in the company, grilled senior management for several minutes about the company's minuscule dividends and opaque ownership. When he finished, there was a brief silence and then an unexpected burst of applause from a small group of shareholders in the back of the hall. The company directors were visibly flustered, said a Russian journalist present at the meeting. "They clearly weren't accustomed to being asked questions like that," the journalist said on condition of anonymity, citing company policy about speaking to other media. "They looked really uncomfortable."

Asking uncomfortable questions is what Navalny does best. An erstwhile activist in Russia's marginalized opposition movement, Navalny, 33, has eschewed electoral politics to focus his formidable energies on investigating companies owned by the Russian government and its minions. And in the two years since he crashed that shareholders meeting in Surgut, he has arguably become Russia's most relevant political renegade. He is demonstrating that there may be a tool more effective than the ballot box in keeping Russia's ruling class in check: stock.

A corporate lawyer with a degree in financial markets, Navalny has spent the past three years snapping up small stakes in publicly traded state-owned companies, many of which have senior government officials on their boards. Public listings provide these firms with crucial capital and international legitimacy, but in exchange, they're forced to adhere to a modicum of transparency that is absent from Russian politics. This is where Navalny comes in. Exploiting his status as a part owner, he harasses senior management with questions about how their actions may be affecting the bottom line. "All you need is one share to get into the room with these guys," Navalny says.