Alexei Navalny has now joined the long list of Putin critics who have paid a high price for dissent.
“Do you think Vladimir Putin is a killer”, the interviewer asked President Joe Biden in March 2022. “Mhmm, I do”, came a reply which led to an explosion of anger from the Kremlin. Although many eyebrows were raised in the West at the direct answer from the US president, many world leaders believed that Biden was spot on. Russia’s president is a killer and few doubt that last week he authorised the murder of his arch-enemy, Alexi Navalny. Moments after news of Navalny’s death was whispered in his ear, a delighted Putin was seen smiling as he addressed workers at a forge and press plant on the outskirts of Moscow. Putin maintained his hallmark trait of not deigning to refer to his adversary despite ample opportunity to do so, but his face said it all. In the past decade, Navalny and Putin have been locked in a brutal battle royal that was unlikely to end without the death of one of them. And now it has finally happened.
Navalny has been a thorn in the side of the Kremlin for years. He was the defining symbol of what already seems like a distant period of Russian history, when there was still some optimism that democracy may gain a hold in the country. From the time Putin came to power in 2000 there was a pseudo-form of democracy, but even that was shattered when the protests that followed a clearly rigged election rattled the Putin regime. Navalny won 27 percent of the vote in Moscow’s mayoral election in 2013, despite fierce state interference, signalling that even in Russia’s managed authoritarian form of democracy there was still room for electoral surprises. Throughout the decade, Navalny mobilised Russia’s opposition on numerous occasions, particularly targeting corruption, an issue that resonated with many Russians.
Combining his skills in using social media and a lawyer’s knack for unearthing precise, prosecutorial evidence with innate gifts as a communicator and a keen sense of the issues ordinary Russians cared about most, Navalny was able to attack the Putin regime in ways that had eluded more conventional liberals. His most popular YouTube film, “Putin’s Palace”, which revealed the $1.3 billion building which he claims was built using stolen laundered money, has been seen by more than 120 million viewers globally. The YouTube documentary “Don’t call him Dimon”, exposes in meticulous detail the rampant corruption of the Russian prime minister and close Putin associate, Dmitry Medvedev. Attracting more than 45 million views, the viral film helped Navalny organise protests in around 100 cities and towns across Russia in 2017. This national network of Navalny supporters, never enjoyed by any other opposition figure, allowed him to destroy the Kremlin’s insistence that he was just another lonely liberal in an ivory tower in Moscow, dreaming up implausible reforms.
It was the image in 2017 of a Russian police officer trying to pull two young boys down from a lamppost in Pushkin square that became a symbol for Navalny’s supporters across the country. Until then, the Kremlin had thought that Putin’s propaganda had largely succeeded on Russia’s youth, who were too young to remember the momentary, unbridled reforms of the 1990s and had never known democracy. The belief among the glitterati in the Kremlin was that following years of indoctrination and top-down rule, this generation had been taken out of politics altogether. “Keep out of politics and leave it to the professionals—we will then let you enjoy the benefits of high oil prices, western luxuries and a rising standard of living”, was the Kremlin’s message. This myth was shattered by Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation and social media, which allowed him to build up the first nationwide opposition political organisation in Russia’s post-Soviet history. Even with the threat of ever-tightening repression, both covert and overt by the Russian authorities, Navalny captivated the youth in Russia in ways that the Kremlin could not, posing a real threat to the long-term stability of the regime. Navalny had to be stopped.
He was supposed to have died in 2020, when he was poisoned with the deadly nerve agent Novichok. He fell unconscious on a plane to Moscow after a visit to Tomsk in Siberia. For days he teetered on the edge of death, while his supporters tried to negotiate his release for treatment abroad. Russian doctors stalled for time, citing low blood pressure among other bogus reasons to keep him under their care. After two days in a coma the hospital let him go, probably on the assumption that he would never return. He was flown to the Charite hospital in Berlin, where it was established that the Soviet-era poison had been smeared on his boxer shorts, confirming widespread suspicions of Kremlin involvement. “Vladimir the Underpants Poisoner”, as Navalny later nicknamed Putin when interviewed on German media.
Navalny miraculously survived the poisoning, even joking with an interviewer saying that “none of Putin’s projects are successful”. He then carried out a project with the investigative site Bellingcat which exposed the plot to kill him, even duping one of the Russian FSB agents involved into a confession on video. Then, to everyone’s surprise, in 2021 Navalny returned from Berlin to Russia, saying exile was never an option. “If your beliefs are worth something, you have to be willing to stand up for them – and if necessary, sacrifice something”, he said on Twitter. He was immediately arrested and then began a series of prosecutions on elaborate criminal charges as he was shuttled from prison to prison, and finally to a remote colony, the “Polar Wolf” prison in Kharp, just beyond the Arctic Circle in Russia’s far north, known for its brutal conditions. His treatment increasingly showed the cruel and petty nature of his persecutors. Between August 2022 and his death, Navalny would be sent to a punishment cell 27 times, for a total of more than 300 days for minor infringements. According to a former inmate, a particularly unpleasant punishment involved prisoners being forced to assemble in the courtyard in light clothing at temperatures as low as -30 degrees centigrade and being doused in cold water. He never lost his sense of humour, sniping at Putin from behind bars and ridiculing his tormentors in the courts as they carried out a perverse form of justice.
Alexei Navalny has now joined the long list of Putin critics who have paid a high price for dissent. The simple fact is that if you criticise Vladimir Putin you die. If you have any doubt, just consider some of the corpses piled high before and during his time in power. These include Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who revealed Putin’s atrocities during the Chechen war, who was gunned down in 2006. Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB officer who revealed the extent of Putin’s corruption was poisoned on Putin’s orders with polonium in London in the same year. Boris Nemtsov, the charismatically talented Russian politician who coined the phrase “crooks and thieves” to describe Putin and his coterie, was murdered on the edge of Red Square in 2015. Sergei Skripal, the former Russian intelligence officer, and his daughter Yulia, were fortunate to avoid the same fate in 2018 when the nerve agent Novichok was smeared on their front door handle by Putin’s men. The list goes on and on.
So why did Vladimir Putin give the order to kill Navalny, a claim made by his press secretary, Kira Yarmysh? For many, the answer to this question is obscure as Navalny was no obvious threat to the Russian Czar while shackled in prison with the minimum of contact with the outside world. Perhaps a reason is that Navalny’s supporters hoped he’d eventually re-emerge from Putin’s gulags and lead Russia into breaking with its grim past of repression. Incarceration was just something he’d have to endure and risk in his long, defiant and uncompromising campaign to prod the conscience of the Russian people and cajole them into ousting Putin and smashing the system he and his KGB pals created.
But the corrupt Russian dictator appears to have feared even this small possibility. As Anne Applebaum so elegantly put it in the Atlantic last week, even behind bars Navalny was a real threat to Putin, because he was living proof that courage is possible, that truth exists, that Russia could be a different kind of country. For a dictator who survives thanks to lies and violence, that kind of challenge was intolerable. Now Putin will be forced to fight against Navalny’s memory, and that is a battle he will never win.
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently Visiting Fellow at the University of Plymouth.