In death, Navalny is even more dangerous to Putin’s lies

In one of them, made to prove that the Kremlin was behind his poisoning, Navalny reportedly impersonates a Russian security official to elicit information – a remarkable feat of investigative journalism in a police state. The videos about the palace built for Putin and the extravagant country estate of former president Dmitry Medvedev were seen by millions. His condemnation of the ruling United Russia party as a “party of crooks and thieves” became an indelible slogan.

Although he tried to run for office and urged followers to vote against Putin, Navalny was not a politician. Initially a member of the opposition Yabloko party, he broke with it because he was willing to support any faction that opposed Putin, whatever its ideology.

He was a crusader – against corruption, against evil, against venality and always against Putin. He revealed some of this in a series of published answers to questions posed by Boris Akunin, a popular Russian writer of mysteries who now lives in Britain and whose arrest was recently ordered in absentia by a Russian court for “justifying terrorism.”

Navalny spoke of his faith in God and science, of his love of literature, of his love of Russia. His favorite book, he said, was Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” which he read at 10 or 11.

What, Akunin asked, is the greatest source of evil? “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is the inaction of good people,” Navalny replied. And what brings the most benefit? “Participation in the battle of good and neutrality.”

That was his credo, the impossibility of standing to the side while evil ran rampant. Russians at all levels understand these spiritual crusades. They have turned Russian writers and artists into the most powerful opponents of authoritarians and autocrats, echoing and answering Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s challenge to “live not by lies.”

But while Solzhenitsyn and the dissidents of the Soviet era fought against a regime that denied freedom in the name of a utopian ideology, Navalny’s battle was against those who used the victory over communism to accumulate power and wealth. “I can’t stop myself from fiercely, wildly hating those who sold, pissed away and squandered the historical chance that our country had in the early ’90s,” he said in one interview.

Putin and his cronies, many of them veterans of the old KGB, understood the threat Navalny posed. They worked hard to silence him or drive him into exile with endless petty arrests, harassment of his followers and, in 2020, an infamous attempt to murder him in Siberia with a form of the nerve agent Novichok.

But Navalny survived and returned to Russia the following year, knowing that Putin would probably send him to the labor camps in which so many of Russia’s greatest dissidents languished, and that he might well die in one. He has been imprisoned since 2021 and was shipped last year to a remote and notoriously brutal camp known as “Polar Wolf,” high above the Arctic Circle.

Still, he continued to speak out, through occasional visits from his lawyers or through his organization and his family. Navalny’s website has been campaigning to challenge any claims that the result of next month’s presidential election in Russia should be seen as a popular endorsement of Putin’s rule. “Let’s break his plans and make it so no one would be interested in the concocted results of March 17, but all Russia would see and understand that the will of the majority is that Putin must go away,” was the call.

It is too early to gauge the immediate consequences of Navalny’s death. Much of the organized opposition to Putin has been crushed through arrests or flights abroad. But the rise of a new martyr will give new force to the questions and accusations Navalny leveled, making it that much harder for Putin to sustain the myth of serving Russian greatness.

Navalny was not afraid of suffering, and chose to fight for what he believed in. “I believe in real love,” he told Akunin. “I believe that Russia will be happy and free. And I do not believe in death.”