The anti-corruption crusader who became Putin’s biggest foe
Alexei Navalny 1976–2024
Alexei Navalny was an improbably upbeat warrior for a free Russia. As the leading domestic critic of Vladimir Putin, the activist and politician loved to expose the absurdity of Kremlin corruption through his drily funny videos, and his enthusiasm inspired people to take action. One 2017 segment explored the excesses of Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev’s luxury estate, including a pond complete with a duck house; it prompted protests across Russia that drew thousands of people, some bearing giant rubber ducks. Jailed a dozen times on trumpedup charges of fraud and embezzlement, Navalny, who died in a Siberian prison camp at age 47, kept on joking through trials that were rigged against him. He could find humor even in the 2020 poisoning that almost killed him, when Kremlin agents smeared the deadly nerve agent Novichok in his underclothes. Putin “will enter history as a poisoner,” he said in 2021. “We had Yaroslav the Wise and Alexander the Liberator. And now we will have Vladimir the Poisoner of Underpants.”
“By all accounts, Navalny had an ordinary Soviet childhood,” said Foreign Policy. Raised mostly near Moscow, the Red Army officer’s son spent summers with his grandparents in a small western Ukrainian village until the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown rendered the area uninhabitable—“a formative moment” that awakened him to the terrible toll of official malfeasance. After earning degrees in law and finance, he became an activist investor in state-owned energy companies, which gave him a front-row seat to the rise of the oligarchs. Navalny wasn’t always ideologically consistent, said the Financial Times. Entering politics in 2000, the same year Putin became president, he joined the liberal-left Yabloko party but was ousted in 2007 for his “incendiary comments” against immigrants and Muslims. He also participated in far-right marches, though he soon returned to liberalism. But he shrewdly recognized that outrage over Kremlin corruption was an issue that united many political factions, and he seized on “the vast potential of online media” to reach people unfiltered. In 2015, after the assassination of liberal leader Boris Nemtsov, he became the de facto leader of anti-Putin opposition forces.
“His activism drew retribution,” said The Wall Street Journal. Navalny was jailed the day after he was confirmed as one of six candidates for mayor of Moscow in 2013, though he ultimately won nearly a third of the vote. In 2016, an attacker hurled antiseptic in his face, partially blinding him, and the following year he was jailed for leading anticorruption protests that drew tens of thousands of people. Barred from running for president in 2018 because of his arrest record, he encouraged voters to boycott and was poisoned in police custody the next year. But his “most dramatic brush with death” came in August 2020, said The Guardian, when he collapsed in pain in the middle of a Siberia-to-Moscow flight. His wife, Yulia Navalnaya, succeeded in getting him airlifted to Berlin, where he spent months recuperating from Novichok poisoning. Defying Kremlin warnings, Navalny returned to Moscow and was immediately arrested for “breaking parole.” Soon after, his YouTube account posted an exposé about Putin’s obscenely vast $1.3 billion mansion by the Black Sea that sparked more nationwide protests.
In prison, Navalny “faced increasingly harsh conditions,” said The New York Times. He spent more than 300 days in solitary confinement in a tiny, freezing concrete cell, where he was slowly starved and repeatedly deprived of sleep. Prison guards denied him treatment for his debilitating leg numbness and severe stomach pain, thought to be lingering effects of Novichok. Prison officials said Navalny collapsed following a walk, but they did not release his body, and his friends say he was murdered. Throughout his prison ordeal, Navalny had maintained a façade of good cheer, even releasing a video calling himself Santa Claus after he was sent to a prison above the Arctic Circle. And he continued to urge Russians to hope for a better future. “The Putinist state cannot last,” he wrote in January. “One day we’ll look over, and he will be gone.”