Opposition leader was Putin’s fiercest foe
Alexei Navalny, who crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-kremlin protests as President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe, died Friday in the Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence, Russia’s prison agency said. He was 47.
The stunning news — less than a month before an election that will give Putin another six years in power — brought renewed criticism and outrage from world leaders toward the Russian president who has suppressed opposition at home.
After initially allowing people to lay flowers at monuments to victims of Soviet-era repressions in several Russian cities, police sealed off some of the areas and started making arrests.
About 30 were detained in St. Petersburg, according to local media. Shouts of “Shame!” were heard as Moscow police rounded up more than a dozen people — including one with a sign reading “Killer” — near a memorial to political prisoners, according to the OVD-INFO monitoring group. The group said arrests occurred in several other cities.
Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service reported Navalny felt sick after a walk Friday and lost consciousness at the penal colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-nenets region about 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow. An ambulance arrived, but he couldn’t be revived; the cause of death is “being established,” it said.
Navalny had been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow to face certain arrest after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin. He was later convicted three times, saying each case was politically motivated.
After the last verdict, Navalny said he understood he was “serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of life of this regime.”
Hours after his death was reported, Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, made a dramatic appearance at a security conference in Germany where many leaders had gathered.
She said she had considered canceling, “but then I thought what Alexei would do in my place. And I’m sure he would be here,” adding that she was unsure if she could believe the news from official Russian sources.
“But if this is true, I want Putin and everyone around Putin, Putin’s friends, his government to know that they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family and to my husband. And this day will come very soon,” Navalnaya said.
Praise for Navalny’s bravery poured in from Western leaders and others opposing Putin. Navalny’s health has deteriorated recently and the cause of death may never be known, but many of them said they held Russian authorities ultimately responsible — particularly after the deaths of many Kremlin foes.
President Joe Biden said Washington doesn’t know exactly what happened, “but there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something Putin and his thugs did.”
The Russian SOTA social media channel shared video of Navalny — reportedly in a prison courtroom Thursday — laughing and joking with the judge via video link on one of several hearings about conditions in jail.
Before his arrest, Navalny campaigned against official corruption, organized major anti-kremlin protests and ran for public office.
In Putin’s Russia, political activists often faded amid factional disputes or went into exile after imprisonment, suspected poisonings or other repression. But Navalny grew consistently stronger and reached the apex of the opposition through grit, bravado and an acute understanding of how social media could circumvent the Kremlin’s suffocation of independent news outlets.
He faced each setback — whether a physical assault or imprisonment — with intense devotion and sardonic wit. When authorities put Navalny in a tiny cell because of minor infractions — allowing access to a narrow exercise yard only in the early morning — he joked: “Few things are as refreshing as a walk in Yamal at 6:30 in the morning.”
Navalny ally Lyubov Sobol told the Associated Press that Russia’s repressive climate makes any rallies over his death risky, and “people could get long prison terms for taking part in a peaceful protest.”
In the absence of a ”guiding star” like Navalny, she said, “people will have an even greater fear of repressions, seeing the government’s impunity.”
Navalny was born in Butyn, about 25 miles outside Moscow. He received a law degree from People’s Friendship University in 1998 and did a fellowship at Yale in 2010.
Whenever Putin spoke about Navalny, he made it a point to never utter his name, referring to him as “that person” or similar wording, in an apparent effort to diminish his importance.
While in jail in 2019 for an election protest, he was hospitalized for what authorities called an allergic reaction, but some doctors said it appeared to be poisoning.
A year later, he fell severely ill on a flight to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk. The plane made an emergency landing in the city of Omsk, where he spent two days in a hospital before being flown to Germany for treatment.
Doctors there determined he had been poisoned with a strain of Novichok — similar to the nerve agent that nearly killed former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in 2018. Navalny was in a medically induced coma for about two weeks.
The Kremlin vehemently denied it was behind the poisoning, but Navalny challenged that with an audacious move: releasing the recording of a call he said he made to an alleged member of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, who purportedly carried out the poisoning and then tried to cover it up. The FSB called the recording a fake.
Russian authorities then announced that while in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of a suspended sentence in one of his convictions and that he would be arrested if he returned home.
Navalny and his wife nevertheless flew to Moscow on Jan. 17, 2021. On arrival, he told waiting journalists he was pleased to be back, walked to passport control and into custody.
Last month, he explained why he returned, saying: “I don’t want to give up either my country or my beliefs.”
Besides his wife, he is survived by a son and a daughter.