Alexey Navalny (1976-2024)

The week before this newsletter was published Alexey Navalny, the Russian opposition politician, died in prison. While the medical cause of death is still unknown (and may never be truly known) there can be no doubt as to why he died or at whose hands – the latest in a long line of people to oppose Putin and pay the ultimate price, he had been kept in appalling conditions ever since returning to Russia after a failed assassination attempt in 2020. The authorities have announced they will be keeping Navalny’s body from his family for at least two weeks, with the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona finding evidence of a convoy of official vehicles leaving the prison late on the night of the 16th. Even without this fairly strong indication of foul play (transporting the bodies of dead prisoners to unknown locations in the middle of the night is not usual practice, even in Russia) there can be no doubt about the fundamentals of what has happened – there is no explanation of Navalny’s death that does not place the blame squarely at the feet of the Russian state, and the personal actions and orders of Vladimir Putin – whose hate for Navalny is so extensive that he has famously refused even to say his name.  

Navalny’s death has come as a shock to many. While there was always a reasonable chance that he would never leave prison, his murder remains shocking, in large part due to its timing, a month before the Russian presidential elections. Like the death of an elderly relative, the sudden arrival of an inevitable eventuality can often be shocking but not surprising, particularly when it seems to come almost out of nowhere – the Kremlin often starts the rhetorical justification of its actions before committing to them but did not give any hints that this was about to happen. The murder of Navalny now, before the upcoming presidential election, would have seemed more likely to come as part of a crackdown after Putin’s victory, and supposedly fresh mandate, in March. The go-to propaganda line from the Russian government (on the rare occasions that Navalny is mentioned on Russian TV) is that Navalny’s death must be natural since there is no reason for them to kill him now. In fact, as Navalny himself said when asked about the potential for his death before returning to Russia, his murder is a sign of the regime’s weakness – even (or perhaps particularly) from prison Navalny was the figurehead for an always fragmentary Russian opposition, and had an instinct for accessible popular protest that posed a threat to an increasingly unstable regime. He had to be killed, for posing even a minor threat. It is though also a sign of the regime’s strength that this could be done so brazenly without any fear of retaliation. 

The elephant in the room, as so often these days, is the war in Ukraine. Though some Ukrainian voices have condemned Navalny for past ultra-nationalist positions on Russian identity, he has spoken against the war in Ukraine since its outbreak in 2014, particularly since the invasion in 2022 calling for investigations into war-crimes and payment of reparations to Ukraine. Given that he was imprisoned on his return to Russia a year before the invasion it is hard to see what more he could have done. While some have questioned the wisdom of returning to certain imprisonment rather than remaining abroad (which may have allowed him to react more effectively against the war), its value as a symbolic act is immense, and similar to that of Zelensky’s famous rejection of the American offer of evacuation – both leaders accepted the threat of incredible physical danger as a necessary price to pay in order to show how committed they were to their people in a time of difficulty. Beyond the legitimacy and solidarity that this courage earned both figures within their respective countries, it also earned them crucial support and admirers in the West. 

In many senses Navalny is yet another victim of the war in Ukraine. The breach with the West caused by the invasion has significantly lowered the costs of full-scale repressions to the regime, much as has been the case with previous impositions of widespread sanctions – there is relatively little room for more easy retaliation. Though anyone who has paid much attention to Russia in the last ten years may now be feeling like a broken record, the fact remains that as ever, if we do not stand up to Putin now, he will feel emboldened to do this again. Though Navalny was in a class of his own there are plenty of other dissident politicians and activists currently sitting in Russian prisons, including British citizen Vladimir Kara-Murza, all of whose survival depends directly on the Western response to Navalny’s murder. As well as this, there is surely a moral imperative to support the cause Navalny died for and to punish his murderer. Fortunately, there is a clear way to do this – in reinforcing and redoubling support for Ukraine, both through sanctions and aid. With Ukraine having been forced to abandon the suburb Avdiivka in large part through lacking the military supplies to keep it, we are at risk of allowing Putin to literally get away with murder – of Navalny, but also tens of thousands of Ukrainians. 

Yulia Navalnaya, Alexey’s wife, announced on Monday that she would be taking up his work in fighting for a free Russia, in an emotionally charged video promising further investigations and the reasons behind her husband’s death. While the continued work of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation is valuable, the loss of a primary symbol of Russian opposition, a man who could genuinely claim to represent ordinary Russians and who returned to the country at the cost of his life, will be hard to overcome. Much like Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the Belarussian wife of an imprisoned politician whose presidential campaign threatened to unseat the country’s dictator in 2020, Navalnaya may struggle to maintain momentum and relevance from outside the country. That is absolutely not to say that she should return to Russia - hundreds of people across the country have already been arrested for protesting by placing flowers at memorials to political prisoners, and every conceivable opposition figure is dead, exiled, or imprisoned. As Putin refuses to allow even a tame token liberal candidate to run in opposition to him in the election, Navalny’s final plea to keep hope and not to give up seems now more difficult than ever.  

https://en.zona.media/article/2024/02/18/crossing 

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/02/16/putin-refused-to-say-his-name-heres-what-he-called-navalny-instead-a84109