Alexei Navalny (1976-2024): The Death of a Putin Enemy

Like a slow train approaching and hitting a target caught in the tracks, Russian lawyer and opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death was perhaps foretold. His close friends, aides and family had feared so, as had most of the rest of the world not fascinated by the aura of ageing and paranoid strongmen. If you are Vladimir’s Enemy No 1, it might end a lot worse than being jailed in Vladimir (Correctional Colony No 2 in Vladimir Oblast some 100km east of Moscow). Navalny did not, of course, die so close to the Kremlin. After ‘disappearing’ for a couple of weeks in December last year, he reappeared in a penal colony in the Arctic town of Kharp whose prison authorities announced on Friday, February 16 that Navalny had collapsed after a walk and could not be resuscitated. Details about the manner of death, even a confirmation from the family were still awaited at the time of writing.

It all began in 2007, the year of Vladimir Putin’s retrospectively analysed speech at the Munich Security Conference that has since been interpreted as a declaration of war on the West after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The 2024 iteration of the same conference was underway when news of Navalny’s death broke. Tragic irony or grand design? With Russia, history shows it almost always ends in one way: badly. And it’s no use bothering with the larger questions in a country where governments can still change every few centuries or after 70-odd years, socio-political structures can be torn down from their foundations, and yet, a hundred years later still, nothing that mattered would have changed: things will always work as they always did no matter who’s boss. It was in 2007 that Alexei Anatolievich Navalny began what would become a political journey that would end in his lonely death in one of Russia’s severest prisons far from friends and family. That year, Navalny’s blog hit big news trawling the oil comoanies for evidence of official corruption. Over time, he found much, disclosed much, and paid a price that got steadily heavier. It’s owing to Navalny and his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) that the riches and lifestyle of the Putinistas, Russia’s 21^st century elite, became widely known and a younger generation weaponised the knowledge on social media, not least during the giant protests around Putin’s 2012 election. Today, Navalny’s organisations are banned as “extremist” and it was the charge of extremism that got another 19 years added to the nine-year sentence he was already serving. Had Navalny not died this Friday and had Putinistas remained in charge of their riches and their state after Putin, he would have been in his seventies by the time he got out of prison.

It’s pointless to talk about the charges against Navalny, whether there’s even the tiniest merit to any of those. The law, after all, is not the freest of agents in a dictatorship. But the body count of the recently deceased among the dictator’s enemies currently stands at this:

2015: Boris Nemtsov, opposition leader, shot dead on a bridge in the Kremlin’s neighbourhood;
2023: Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner boss and Putin’s confidant-turned-rebel, killed in a mysterious and still unexplained plane crash on after leading a revolt;
2024: Alexei Navalny.

And almost at the beginning, there was Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist assassinated in 2006, a murder and investigation that saw convictions eventually but no disclosure of who had ordered the hit.

Navalny was a brave man. Whether he could have built his Dream Russia after unseating Putin will never be known—and history has never been kind to those Russians who meant the country good. But his decision to return after nearly dying and then being treated in Germany for Novichok (a nerve agent) poisoning on a trip to Siberia in 2020 was what secured his place in history (as read by the world outside Russia) and cost him his life. The ghosts of the German communists who fled Nazism only to be murdered in Stalin’s Great Terror, too, would advise against going east, whether you belong to the land or not. But then, political activism as an émigré can do only so much and Navalny could not see the point of waging his righteous war from exile. Unfortunately, Russia is the land of eternal exile and he was not a free man in any sense of the term since he landed in Moscow in January 2021.

The tragedy of Russia is that its most liberated moment was in the chaos and collapse of the 1990s. Even two decades ago, authority could be challenged as a legacy of that ‘lost decade’. That is not the case any longer. Former world chess champion and Kremlin critic Garry Kasparov, accusing Putin of “killing” Navalny, has not spared the West which “treated Navalny’s poisoning and jailing as just another negotiating point”. He may have more than a case.

The question now is: After Navalny, who’s left?

Alexei NavalnyBoris NemtsovCorruption FoundationVladimir PutinYevgeny Prigozhin