“As I became more famous, I was sure my life became safer … It would be problematic for them just to kill me,” Alexei Navalny once told a film-maker, drily adding: “I was very wrong.”
Yet the official announcement of the death of the 47-year-old, who remained Vladimir Putin’s most prominent opponent even from behind bars, was profoundly shocking. Many feared he would die in the notoriously brutal Arctic penal colony where he was incarcerated. Fewer expected it so soon or so suddenly, perhaps because of his apparently indomitable spirit. He seemed in reasonably good health, though gaunt, when he spoke via video link to a court hearing on Thursday, and cheerfully mocked the system.
