The order, which is due to last for at least two months and also forbids Navalny from using the internet or speaking to the media, has been placed on the 37-year-old lawyer, political and financial activist and politician by a court in Moscow who claimed he had violated rules barring him from leaving the Russian capital. 

Navalny has denounced the ruling as baseless and said it was meant to silence him.

"I believe the new measures are based on trumped up grounds in order to restrict my political activities," said Navalny.

Navalny and his supporters had published a damning report in January alleging massive corruption regarding preparations for Sochi 2014. 

Navalny had been conducted, what he claimed, was a forensic investigation into every Olympic budget and contract he could get his hands on.

"Because for this $50 billion spent on the Olympics, Russia could have renovated the country," he said on the eve of the Games.

"But instead of that, the Olympics turned out to be a notorious monument to Vladimir Putin, a monument to embezzlement, a monument to corruption."

Navalny's group, called the Fund for the Fight Against Corruption, issued a report on its findings to coincide with the start of the Games.

He claimed that one new railway line from the Black Sea coast to the mountain competition sites cost more $10 billion (£6 billion/€7 billion), the entire cost of Vancouver 2010.

The report accused Putin of hiding costs by reclassifying them as infrastructure projects, and of rewarding friends with lucrative contracts and plenty of assistance from state-owned companies.

Vladimir Putin released several high-profile prisoners before Sochi 2014 but is now being accused of having a major crackdown on opponents, including Alexei Navalny ©Getty Images

Putin critics claim that the Russian President is determined to crack down on opponents following the overthrow in neighbouring Ukraine of Viktor Yanukovich as the country's leader. 

Navalny  is currently serving a five-year suspended sentence on a theft conviction and has been charged with theft and money-laundering in a separate case that has not come to trial.

They say Putin is also clamping down on dissent after agreeing to the release of long-jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and two members Pussy Riot before the Sochi Olympics, which ended last week.

Navalny was one of hundreds of people detained last week at protests against the jailing of seven activists convicted of rioting and attacking police at a demonstration against Putin on the eve of his inauguration to a six-year third term in 2012.

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