It will be days if not weeks and months before we know some version of the truth of what happened in a grim Siberian jail to Alexei Navalny, the greatest leader Russia never had.
But, it’s the timing that sent a chill down many people’s spines. Because this wasn’t any old Friday in February. It was the first day of the Munich Security Conference, a key global summit attended by world leaders and the Nato secretary general. And top of the agenda this year is the threat to Nato itself.
A threat that just ramped up another notch. “I think Putin is showing he has total impunity. That’s his message,” says Vera Krichevskaya, the co-founder and ex-editor-in-chief of Russia’s last independent TV news station, Dozhd, or TV Rain. She is crying when I call. “I’m speechless. Speechless. It’s so painful. I’m a mess.
“I’m sitting here with two letters that Alexei sent me last year from prison,” says Krichevskaya. “I’m re-reading them now and both were such a source of energy, source of hope, of optimism. They were full of jokes. It’s impossible to believe.”
There was no one else like . But his reported death and the west’s utter weakness in the face of Russia’s aggression and the ticking of the timebomb to Nato’s future that a second Trump term represents is the ever-present chill that underlies this year’s discussions at the Munich conference.
Was the timing a coincidence? Or that among the delegates was Yulia, Alexei Navalny’s wife? Hours after the news of her husband’s reported death broke, she showed the courage that Navalny had modelled to the Russian people for the past decade and a half, standing on the stage and saying that she’d asked herself: “Should I stand here before you or should I go back to my children? And then I thought: what would Alexei have done in my place? And I’m sure that he would have been here, standing on this stage.”
He would have. Navalny’s courage was never in doubt. Though the excitement and energy of the protests that erupted across Russia in response to his decision to fly back to Moscow, knowing he faced imprisonment after the failed assassination attempt on his life, now belongs to a different era.
It was an era that began in thebrief period from 2008-2012 when Putin surrendered the presidency, and both the TV station Krichevskaya co-founded and Navalny emerged, sharing that spirit of optimism. It’s that optimism, she says, that is Putin’s deadliest enemy.
“It was his spirit that Putin had to kill, it was his biggest threat. It’s what Navalny had and what he distributes to others. What I’ve been thinking for the last couple of months, that Putin is breaking the spirit of Ukrainians, with help from American congressmen. That’s not about his position on the battlefields, that’s about breaking the spirit of the people. He’s saying that evil will win.
“For me and many of my friends, we were sure he would survive. It was our unconditional belief. He was so strong. We thought he would survive no matter what. We had no plan B.”
Dozhd’s current editor-in-chief, Tikhon Dzyadko, has just come off air when I talk to him on Friday night. Forced into exile after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it now broadcasts from the Netherlands. “People are broken,” he says. “We were ringing people to get them on air and we received a lot of refusals. People just don’t know what to say. They are speechless. It’s such a terrible thing. The same reaction from our viewers. They are absolutely broken, absolutely lost.”
For Dzyadko and many Russians, a clip from the documentary Navalny, a winner at last year’s Oscars, is where they’ve turned for comfort: to the words, spoken by Navalny, of what his death would mean. “If they decide to kill me,” he says, “it means that we are incredibly strong. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good people to do nothing. So don’t do nothing.”
“We have to remember what he said in the movie,” says Dzyadko. “It is the end of an era. At the same time, this new era should be the beginning.” But he can’t answer the question of who could replace him. “Frankly, I don’t know. There’s no one. We have to find the Navalny in ourselves.”
It’s a massive uphill climb for anyone. Not least the staff of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, his movement-in-exile, who have campaigned tirelessly for his release and continued to broadcast around the clock about the war.
Last winter, I visited their headquarters in Lithuania, to profile Maria Pevchikh, Navalny’s protege who, in his absence, had taken over his brilliant, innovative YouTube investigations into corruption. Since then, she’s been promoted to the top job: chair of the board.
Navalny’s presence was everywhere not least on the wall of Pevchikh’s office with a portrait of him bearing his words: “Be Scared of Nothing.” His final, unerasable message not just to Russia, but to us too.
Because Putin is a threat far beyond Russia’s borders. What has yet to be seen, what this year’s Munich Security Conference is urgently discussing, is whether we are reading the messages – sadistic, cruel, vicious, unmistakeable – that he’s once again sending us.
