A galvanizing opposition leader and 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.

Just hours after his death was reported, Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, took the stage at a security conference in Germany where many world leaders had gathered and said she considered cancelling her appearance.

“But then I thought what Alexei would do in my place. And I’m sure he would be here,” she said, while noting that she was not sure if she could believe the news coming 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.”

Navalny was born in Butyn, outside Moscow. He received a law degree from People’s Friendship University in 1998 and did a fellowship at Yale in 2010.

He gained attention by focusing on corruption in Russia’s murky mix of politicians and businesses.

Navalny’s work had pocketbook appeal to Russians’ widespread sense of being cheated, and it carried stronger resonance than more abstract and philosophical concerns about democratic ideals and human rights.

He was convicted in 2013 of embezzlement on what he called a politically motivated prosecution and was sentenced to five years in prison, but the prosecutor’s office later surprisingly demanded his release pending appeal. A higher court later gave him a suspended sentence.

Navalny’s popularity increased after the leading charismatic politician, Boris Nemtsov, was shot and killed in 2015.

In 2017, after an assailant threw green-hued disinfectant in his face, seriously damaging one of his eyes, Navalny joked in a video blog that people were comparing him to the comic book character The Hulk.

Much worse was to come. While serving a jail sentence in 2019 for involvement in an election protest, he was taken to the hospital with an illness that authorities said was an allergic reaction, but some doctors said it appeared to be poisoning.

A year later, he became 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 sent 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.

Russian authorities then raised the stakes, announcing that during his time 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 boarded a plane for Moscow on Jan. 17, 2021.

Last month, he explained why he returned, saying: “I don’t want to give up either my country or my beliefs.”