Modern martyr Navalny fought the Kremlin with fire and sword

How many attacks, torture and humiliating bullying can one person endure? A lot, as the Russian politician and activist Alexei Navalny proved. For the past fifteen years, the corruption hunter and lawyer has waged a bitter battle against the rule of Vladimir Putin. Like so many others, he ultimately had to pay for his resistance with death. News broke on Friday afternoon that Navalny had died at the age of 47. He died in the Siberian IK-3 penal colony Charp, 1,900 kilometers northeast of Moscow, where he had been held since December 2023.

The details of Navalny’s death are still unknown. In a statement, the prison said he became unwell during a walk and lost consciousness almost immediately. Earlier, his spokesperson Kira Yarmysj said he had problems with his circulation and suffered from dizziness, possibly due to a food shortage.

Sleep deprivation

From the moment of his conviction in 2021, which followed a bizarre poisoning in Siberia and a heroic return to Russia, the world watched helplessly as the apparently very strong politician was subjected to increasingly grotesque treatment by his jailers. They made life impossible for him with absurd bans and orders, sleep deprivation and hardship. Since a capsized initiative to set up a prison union, Navalny has spent most of his days in the ShIZO, the toughest form of isolation within the Russian penal system. A “damp and cold and unventilated doghouse,” as he described it.

At the end of last year, Navalny called on his supporters from his cell to vote ‘smartly’ for “every candidate except Putin” in the presidential elections in Russia, which will be held in mid-March. But when President Putin re-nominated for a fifth term in the Kremlin a day later, Navalny’s social media channels remained eerily quiet and his caustic comments did not materialize. His lawyers and supporters sounded the alarm. They were kept away from their client and he did not show up for the hearings, which he attended by video link from his prison camp near Moscow.

A new hearing was scheduled for early December, but the prison camp suddenly reported “electrical problems.” The hearing was adjourned and his lawyers waited for hours outside the camp for news of his condition.

Nineteen years in prison

Navalny served a sentence of more than 30 years. Last August, a Russian court sentenced the jailed Navalny to 19 years in prison for “financing extremism,” “inciting extremism” and “creating an extremist movement.” After Navalny’s arrest, his anti-corruption organization FBK was labeled an “extremist” organization last year. The FBK was disbanded and employees fled abroad, where they continued their work. Those who could not get away were arrested – many served long prison sentences.

In terms of repression, Navalny seemed to have seen it all. “I feel like a tired rock star on the verge of depression. I have reached the top of the charts and there is nothing left to strive for,” Navalny wrote with his trademark cheerful sarcasm on X.

It turns out he was wrong. In October, his three courageous lawyers, Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin, and Aleksey Lipster, were also arrested on suspicion of participating in an “extremist organization” for receiving and passing on Navalny’s notes. A fourth lawyer fled Russia. The completely unconstitutional arrest of his counselors, who were placed on the terrorism list at the end of November, caused a shock wave in the Russian legal profession. On December 1, Russia’s tireless Investigative Committee opened a new criminal case against Navalny, this time for “vandalism motivated by hatred.” It wouldn’t come to that again.

Resilience

The tall, blond politician was like the main character in a modern picaresque novel. A devil in a box, who emerged cheerful after every setback. His resilience, patience and energy to avert the harsh attacks on his person – physical or political – earned much international admiration. In court he never missed an opportunity to tell the corrupted, servile judges the truth. His fearlessness amazed friend and foe. His lawyer said in court last year about his unbridled appeals against judicial decisions NRC: “No prisoner dares to do that, everyone knows that complaining only causes more problems.”

By far his strongest example of survival came in the summer of 2020, when he collapsed in a plane over Siberia after being poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok. In Omsk hospital, where he was urgently admitted, the authorities tried to prevent his departure abroad. It was thanks to a dose of atropine, the persistent actions of his wife Yulia and the intervention of the then Chancellor Angela Merkel, that he narrowly survived the attack. In a coma, he was flown from Russia to recover in Berlin. No one in Russia, and certainly not Putin, expected to see him again after that. But that turned out differently.

Navalny wouldn’t be Navalny if he didn’t immediately look for the perpetrators of his poisoning. While still convalescing in the German countryside, he and a select group of confidants, including Bulgarian Bellingcat master sleuth Christo Grozev, conducted an investigation and discovered that members of the Russian secret service had been shadowing him for years. The bizarre denouement is one of the key scenes in the Oscar-winning documentary ‘Navalny’. Once fit enough to travel, Navalny stunned the world again in early 2021 by boarding a plane to Moscow with his wife. “A politician must be in his own country,” he explained the kamikaze action. After landing he was immediately arrested.

Youth

Alexei Anatolievich Navalny was born in 1976 in the hamlet of Butin, near Moscow. He grew up with his brother Oleg in the neighboring town of Obninsk and worked as a boy in his parents’ furniture factory. He went to study law in Moscow. On a Turkish beach holiday he met his great love, Yulia. The couple settled in a Moscow suburb and had two children, Zachar and Daria, as blond, cheerful and articulate as their parents.

Navalny devoted himself to his legal practice and quickly moved on to turbulent politics through his well-read blogs. At the age of 24 – Putin had just come to power – he joined the liberal Jabloko party and was elected as a councilor in the Moscow branch. In his blogs about politics, he sharply criticized Putin’s corrupt regime. His charisma, persuasiveness and ability to mobilize people made him, in the eyes of many, the leader who could pull the divided, mud-slinging liberal opposition out of the doldrums.

Social media has been at the heart of Navalny’s political work. While traditional journalism in Russia was increasingly restricted, the internet remained a haven for discussion and criticism. With his ability to manipulate power, to wrap harsh criticism in biting irony and with detailed evidence, he appealed to millions of Russians. His humor and youthful, streetwise In many ways attitude did the rest. Put in 2012 Time Magazine him on the list of the world’s most influential people. The big hit came at the beginning of 2021, when more than 100 million people watched his YouTube video about ‘Putin’s Palace’, a 1 billion euro complex on the southern Russian coast, which is said to belong to President Putin through constructions. “The most guarded place in Russia, a state within a state, Putin’s biggest secret,” Navalny said in the video. The Kremlin rejected the “pseudo-investigation”, Putin called it “boring”.

Radically right

With his criticism, revelations and unbridled pursuit of freedom, he not only angered Putin, many Russians also distrusted him. Putin supporters and critics from all walks of life, who preferred to cling to Putin’s promise of stability, or saw Navalny as a dangerous nationalist inciter. In the West he was held in high regard, but ‘at home’ he received mainly negative attention thanks to hatred and propaganda. It caused many opponents to wish him the hell he eventually got as a “traitor” or “CIA agent”.

But Navalny’s political beliefs were also controversial in broader circles. From 2006 onwards he supported nationalist and neo-fascist marches organized by right-wing radical groups. He supported Russian military action in Georgia in 2006 and made racist comments about Caucasian and Central Asian guest workers. His right-wing views cost him his Jabloko membership and gave him a reputation as a right-wing populist. And although he later expressed regret about some statements, he never completely distanced himself from them. “I have the same views as when I entered politics. I see no problem in working with those who represent fundamentally anti-authoritarian positions,” he said in an interview in Der Spiegel. In his eyes, any coalition was allowed to get rid of Putin. As far as he was concerned, the democratic process could only get started afterwards.

No longer eligible

In 2011, Navalny coined the term “party of thieves and thieves” for Putin’s United Russia. It stuck and brought him great popularity. Navalny was arrested and detained during demonstrations following fraudulent parliamentary elections that year. He spent his time in prison developing political strategies. In the fraudulent presidential elections of 2012, a key year in which Putin exchanged pennies with his loyal aide Dmitry Medvedev, he decided not to participate because they were not fair.

But at the next round in 2018, his chance was gone. Several lawsuits were set up against him, including the ‘Kirovles case’ and the ‘Yves-Rocher case’, in which he was accused of embezzling money. The latter would haunt him until his death: it became the reason for his conviction and stay in a prison camp. The Kremlin paid little attention to a 2017 ruling by the European Human Rights Court that the case was unlawful. Navalny was barred from participating in further elections because of his “criminal past.”

Ukraine

Navalny had to experience the Russian invasion of Ukraine from his cell. Through his channels he condemned the raid and called on his supporters in Russia to take to the streets against their bellicose tormentor in the Kremlin. Demonstrations occurred, but not on the scale he had hoped. They were hit hard. In turn, Navalny also disappointed the Ukrainians. They had hoped that he would support them unequivocally and use his internationally well-viewed social media platforms (Instagram: 3 million followers, YouTube: 6.4 million followers, TikTok 680,000 followers) to this end.

That unequivocal support was not forthcoming, which gave critics, especially from (pro-)Ukrainian quarters, ammunition to accuse him and his FBK employees of using the war for political gain. They argue that Navalny does not sufficiently use his online empire to support Ukraine. Criticism increased when a film about Navalny’s work and his poisoning won the Oscar for best documentary last spring. Because while Navalny condemns the war, many Ukrainians see him as an extension of the same Russian imperialist regime that has been bombarding them with bombs for almost two years.

Navalny’s death marks an equally dramatic and abrupt end to the life of the man, who seemed invincible even in his cell. The man who, for Kremlin critics in Russia, but even more so abroad, embodied the hope for a freer Russia.

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