A galvanizing opposition leader and Putin's fiercest foe

MOSCOW • Alexei Navalny faced each setback — whether it was a physical assault or imprisonment — with intense devotion and a sardonic wit.

When prison authorities put the 47-year-old Russian opposition leader in a tiny cell to punish him for minor infractions — allowing him access to a narrow concrete prison yard only in the early morning — he joked: “Few things are as refreshing as a walk in Yamal at 6:30 in the morning.”

President Vladimir Putin's fiercest foe who crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests was declared dead on Friday.

He was serving a 19-year sentence in an Arctic penal colony.

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 1,900 kilometres northeast of Moscow. He could not be revived; the cause of death is “being established,” it said.

Navalny had been in prison since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow to face certain arrest after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. Since then, he was convicted three times, and rejected each case as 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.”

Navalny was born in Butyn, about 40 kilometres 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 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 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 hospital before being sent to Germany.

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. Navalny and his wife, nevertheless, boarded a plane for Moscow on Jan. 17, 2021. On arrival, he told waiting journalists that he was pleased to be back, walked to passport control and into custody.

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

Hours after his death was reported, Navalny's wife, Yulia Navalnaya, made a dramatic appearance at a security conference in Germany and said she had 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, adding 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.”

Besides his wife, Navalny is survived by a son and a daughter.