For years, Alexei Navalny remained clear on a key message: he was a Russian opposition politician and he was determined to stay in Russia. Exile, he believed, would lead to political irrelevance, and calling on Russians to oppose Vladimir Putin from the safety of the west would mark him as a hypocrite.
Navalny stuck to this belief as the political climate in Russia deteriorated and the space for dissent narrowed ever further, and even after he was poisoned with novichok in 2020, leading to his ill-fated decision to return early the next year.
Russian authorities have been trying various methods to shut Navalny up for more than a decade. Initially, some in the Kremlin thought he could be allowed to remain on the political scene as a release valve for disgruntled urban Russians. A dangerously good performance in the 2013 Moscow mayoral vote put paid to that. Instead, authorities moved to launch various criminal cases against him.
In 2014, Navalny was put under house arrest and his brother, Oleg, was given a three-and-a-half-year jail term, widely seen as a way to put pressure on him. Some suggested he might be of more use to the Russian opposition movement abroad and at liberty rather than in Russia and potentially sent to join his brother in jail.
Late that year, padding around his small apartment in a nondescript suburb of Moscow wearing an ankle tag, Navalny scoffed at the idea that it might be better to leave. “If I want people to trust me then I have to share the risks with them and stay here. How can I call on them to take part in protests and so on if they are risking things and I am not?” he said.
And so he stayed. For years, Navalny and his Anti-Corruption Foundation worked out of a suite of offices in a business centre not far from Avtozavodskaya metro station, just outside the centre of Moscow, where he would greet visitors with a roguish grin and seemingly endless resources of energy, as he and his team put together investigations into the corruption of Putin’s inner circle.
There are many brave and intelligent Russian opposition figures but none have the natural political talent of Navalny. After starting out as a hardline nationalist, making statements about minorities that would lead many liberals to be wary of him for years to come, Navalny later became known for his anti-corruption work and fiery oration at opposition rallies.
Navalny was dangerous to the Kremlin because he did not just talk about human rights and democracy, although he talked about them as well. His main danger to the regime lay in the way he showed, in slickly produced and well-researched videos, how the rot of corruption started at the top.
That many officials are corrupt is something most Russians can agree on, and part of Putin’s cunning was portraying himself as a fighter against this corruption rather than the creator and main beneficiary of a system that encouraged it. Far from being a “good tsar fighting bad nobles”, Putin was the worst of them all, Navalny showed.
During his attempt to stand against Putin in the 2018 presidential election, Navalny did grassroots politics in a more authentic way than anyone over the past two decades in Russia, even if he was predictably kept off the ballot in the end.
He set up local headquarters across the country and travelled far and wide to spread his message, often winning approval in unexpected quarters from a population starved for years of political alternatives. On the campaign trail in the industrial city of Chelyabinsk, Navalny gave a speech at a protest over the construction of a new processing plant that would further pollute the city’s air.
A group of people, presumably sent by local authorities, started chanting loudly to disrupt his speech. Navalny brushed them off with his characteristic humour, pointing out that he had a microphone and they didn’t, so it was pointless to keep shouting.
“Look, if you don’t like me, don’t vote for me. I’ve come today and I’ll be leaving this evening. But the plant will stay here and it’s going to poison you and your families. Is that what you want? Keep chanting if that’s what you really want,” he said.
The protesters piped down, looking sheepish, and began to listen to Navalny as he launched into one of his diatribes about corruption in Putin’s system.
Even though authorities made sure Navalny did not get on to the ballot in 2018, for many people it was a mystery that he had even been allowed to campaign. There were always those who wondered whether Navalny was “someone’s project”, allowed to continue his work as an outlet for people to let off steam, or used by one of the Kremlin clans to wage vendettas against others.
It was a question that Navalny got a lot, and unsurprisingly it tended to annoy him. “Fucking morons,” he told the Guardian in 2017 when asked about people who were suspicious of his liberty. “‘Why haven’t they killed you, why haven’t they locked you up?’ People are always asking me this. Look, I have no answer to that question.”
Those questions receded after his poisoning. In a 2022 documentary shot in Germany during his recovery from the novichok attack, Navalny was asked to record a message in case he was killed on his return to Russia. The clip of his answer was much shared after the reports of his death broke on Friday.
“The only thing that is needed for the triumph of evil is the inaction of good people. So you should not remain inactive,” he said, looking straight into the camera with a serious expression. Then, unable to keep taking the question seriously, he cracked a smile, turned away from the camera and began laughing.
After the poisoning, Navalny returned to Russia defiant and was swiftly locked up. Isolated in prison, his absence from the public space has been acutely felt, especially after Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
While his messages from prison in the last three years have still contained his trademark wry humour, there was a sense of a lost opportunity as wartime Russia became a darker and more dangerous place. Perhaps, if Navalny had not returned, he would have been able to coordinate the million-plus recent Russian émigrés into a powerful anti-war movement. Instead, much to the anger of many Ukrainians, the Russian emigration has remained fragmented and often apolitical.
Now, Navalny’s voice has been silenced for ever. It is too early to say if his death was a result of the cumulative toll on his health from a nerve agent poisoning followed by three years in harsh Russian prison conditions, or if he was helped on the way.
Putin has fewer constraints than ever before as he seeks another six years in office in rubber-stamp elections next month in which even mild opposition figures have been barred from running. Bridges with the west are burned over the war in Ukraine, there is an international criminal court warrant for his arrest and his regime is subject to multiple rounds of sanctions. His rants in a recent interview with the former Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson suggest a leader who has retreated far into his own world. He may believe there was little to lose by settling an old score.
The Kremlin always claimed Navalny was a minor political figure but clearly he loomed large in Putin’s consciousness, as shown by the Russian leader’s longstanding refusal to utter his name, which bordered on the pathological, and by the lengths to which the FSB hit squad went to poison him.
In recent months there have been murmurs that western leaders might try to include Navalny’s name in a list of people to be part of a potential prisoner exchange between Russia and the west.
Sergei Guriev, an economist and longtime Navalny ally, said in September that he knew from “direct and indirect” correspondence with Navalny that the politician’s insistence that he would remain in Russia no longer applied. Guriev called on western leaders to lobby Putin to include Navalny in any exchange.
“The situation has changed. He cannot work in Russia, he cannot employ anyone. If he were to be exchanged or somehow managed to leave, he would stay away,” Guriev said.
Navalny was now prepared to live the life of an exile that he had dreaded for so long, rather than die in prison. But it was not to be. Instead, he has become the latest in a long line of people to die at the hands of the Putin regime.
• This article was amended on 19 February 2024 to clarify that Tucker Carlson is no longer a Fox News presenter.
