It is probably no coincidence Putin’s nemesis died before the election

ALEXEI NAVALNY’S power was that he understood the criminal, murderous nature of Vladimir Putin’s regime. He also understood the Russian public – their concerns, lives, and preoccupations – in a way that many liberals who dominated the anti-Putin opposition seemed to struggle with. That is what made him uniquely dangerous for the Kremlin.

Navalny was one of a handful of brave, self-sacrificing activists jailed for challenging Putin’s regime.

In particular, Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin, two other vocal political critics of the regime, who remain in jail for condemning the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and refusing the opportunity to flee into exile. They are alive, for now. But they must be acutely aware that they too could suffer Navalny’s fate.

In the Kremlin’s eyes, Navalny had something that set him apart from many of his liberal peers. He had a knack of marrying political grievances and the material concerns of ordinary Russians in a way many other opposition leaders did not.

Navalny’s investigations into the specifics of Kremlin corruption, with details about the palaces, yachts and property empires accumulated by everyone from Putin downwards, struck a chord and gained him a greater profile than most opposition leaders. He attracted a ferociously loyal following, sometimes to the irritation of others in the fractious galaxy of anti-Kremlin activists.

Navalny’s style could make even natural sympathisers uncomfortable. His appearances in the 2000s at the Russian March, an annual gathering of ultra-nationalists in Moscow, and early anti-immigration rhetoric, made liberals suspicious and was often used by the Kremlin and its allies to smear him as a dangerous populist.

In 2011, he raised eyebrows when he told a huge anti-Putin demonstration that they were numerous enough to take the Kremlin if they wanted to. For many in the cautious, middle-class crowd, conditioned to fear the bloodshed and excesses of revolution, that kind of rhetoric was alarming.

These were the comments of an ambitious politician who could sense the public mood and has a hard-headed understanding of where votes lie.

During the 2000s in Russia, immigration was an enormous issue. Most Russian voters are indeed instinctively conservative. Navalny had credibility, and an instinctive understanding of the Russian public. He was also undeniably – almost unbelievably – courageous.

After surviving a Kremlin assassination attempt in 2020, he insisted on returning to Russia, even though it meant imprisonment at the

‘In the Kremlin’s eyes, Navalny had something that set him apart from many of his liberal peers’

hands of the very people who had just tried to murder him.

Put all that together, and you had a lightning rod in-waiting: charismatic, brave, uncompromised by the current regime’s crimes but also – unlike many opposition leaders who understandably fled to the West – difficult to smear as unpatriotic.

Confined to an Arctic punishment cell, he posed no immediate threat but one day, the Russian public would tire of Putin’s insane war, the unending tide of coffins from the front, and the burdens and privations of the war economy. The inevitable flurry of local protests about bread prices or conscription notices need not make a revolution but add a rallying point, for example, a jailed leader with Navalny’s profile, credibility, and political acumen, and you have the ingredients of the Kremlin’s worst nightmare.

It is probably not a coincidence that he died a few weeks before the March presidential “election” where Putin will rubber-stamp another six years in office. His death will strike fear and hopelessness into the minority who hate the Kremlin and its mad war. More importantly, it buys a few more years in which even disillusioned Russians will have little choice but to shrug and say: “If not Putin, who?”