Alexei Navalny’s widow pledges to continue opposition leader’s work
The widow of Alexei Navalny said on Monday that she would carry on her husband’s work to challenge Russian President Vladimir Putin’s autocratic rule, presenting herself for the first time as a political force and calling on his followers to rally alongside her.
Navalny’s sudden death in prison, which was announced by Russian authorities on Friday, left a vacuum in a decimated Russian opposition. His supporters had wondered whether his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, who long shunned the spotlight, might step in, despite immense challenges, to fill the void.
In a video released on Monday, Ms. Navalnaya, 47, signaled that she would. She said she was appearing on her husband’s YouTube channel for the first time to tell his followers that the best way to honor his legacy was “to fight more desperately and furiously than before.”
“I am going to continue the work of Alexei Navalny and continue to fight for our country,” Ms. Navalnaya said. “I call on you to stand beside me, to share not only in the grief and endless pain that has enveloped us and won’t let go. I ask you to share my rage, to share my rage, anger and hatred of those who have dared to kill our future.”
The nearly nine-minute video, which showed Ms. Navalnaya seated with her hands folded on a marble surface under dramatic lighting, was crafted as an introduction of sorts to a new leader of the fractured pro-democracy movement against Mr. Putin. Long plagued by infighting and competing egos, the movement has withered under a multiyear crackdown in Russia that has left its most prominent leaders exiled, jailed or dead.
Ms. Navalnaya had often pushed back against suggestions that she enter politics, telling Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine last year that “I don’t think this is an idea I want to play with.”
On Monday, however, she presented a different face in trying to rally her husband’s followers, suggesting that there was no alternative and saying that the movement should derive strength from his memory.
The dangers and hurdles Ms. Navalnaya faces in trying to assume her husband’s mantle and unite the opposition to Mr. Putin from outside Russia are significant.
The Russian government in 2021 disbanded Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation inside the country by declaring it an extremist organization, sending the group’s main investigators fleeing into exile, where they continue to work and try to reach Russian audiences.
Ms. Navalnaya cannot return to Russia without the threat of arrest. In June 2023, amid rumors that she might attend one of her husband’s many trials, the state-owned network RT quoted an unidentified law enforcement source as saying that Ms. Navalnaya could be arrested on charges of supporting an extremist organization if she were to return.
And much of Navalny’s appeal to his followers was personal, thanks to his unyielding humor, muckraking zeal and infectious certainty about the capacity for individual Russians to change the country in the face of cynicism and repression.
Ms. Navalnaya, seething with anger, suggested on Monday that she had no choice but to try. The immediate cause of Navalny’s death remains a mystery, but his family and team have accused Mr. Putin of killing him through a brutal incarceration.
“In killing Alexei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul,” Ms. Navalnaya said on Monday. “But I have another half left, and it is telling me I have no right to give up.”
She echoed remarks from President Joe Biden last week blaming Mr. Putin for her husband’s death and suggested Navalny’s team was investigating the circumstances of the death.
“We will name names and show faces,” she said.
She also directly addressed a question that many of Navalny’s followers have been asking after his death: Why did he return to Russia after his poisoning in 2020, knowing that he would almost certainly be killed?
In theory, she said, Navalny could have taken up a new life in exile and stopped speaking out against Russian corruption and fighting.
“But he couldn’t,” she said. “Alexei more than anything else on Earth loved Russia, loved our country and you all. He believed in us, in our power, in our future and that we deserved better.”
“
I call on you to stand beside me, to share not only in the grief and endless pain that has enveloped us and won’t let go. I ask you to share my rage, to share my rage, anger and hatred of those who have dared to kill our future.” Yulia Navalnaya widow of Alexei Navalny