Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s most potent critic has died

Written for Ukraine Story

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny participates in a march in memory of Russian politician and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in Moscow on Feb. 24, 2019 Image/TheAustralian

Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s most potent critic, has died in the Arctic Circle penal colony where he was imprisoned, according to Russian authorities.

Navalny was serving a 19 year sentence after a series of convictions widely recognized as attempts to remove him from being a threat to the Putin government.

For years, Navalny was known for his charisma and unwavering determination to fight for a democratic Russia in opposition to the Putin regime as it became increasingly autocratic.

In 2011, his anti-corruption campaigns made waves in the highly sanitized Russian political world. After taking part in Moscow rallies against the rigging of the December parliamentary elections, he was arrested and jailed. Completing a ten day sentence, he then took part in one of the largest opposition rallies in Moscow’s post Soviet history. Following the 2012 election, Putin used the protests as justification for the intensive crack down on opposition and public dissidence in Russia.

Despite this, Navalny’s following grew, even to the point where he had an astonishing 27% of the vote when he ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013, his opponent barely making the 50% needed to secure the position.

Over the following years, he was placed under house arrest and continually brought up for various charges by Russian authorities, but his following continued to grow throughout Russia.

Russian authorities barred him from running for president in the 2018 elections after a lightning year of campaigning across the country.

In 2020, while on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow, he was severely poisoned using the Soviet era nerve agent, Novichok. After receiving life saving treatment in Germany, he returned to Russia, even as his supporters warned of the consequences. He was arrested by Russian authorities at passport control as he reentered the country.

Image/Alexey Navalny Instagram Account

The last time journalists saw Navalny was in 2021 when he was put on trial for breaking his parole by going to Germany to receive treatment. He continually projected defiance and even good humor throughout the show proceedings that would pile years of imprisonment on him for various charges including fraud and contempt of court. Finally, the Moscow court sentenced him to 19 years in prison for funding an “extremist group,” a standard conviction for those who pose a threat to the Putin regime.

Russian authorities announced his death in the “Arctic Wolf” prison colony on February 16, an unsurprising but disheartening blow to the democratic opposition movement in Russia as it looks ahead to the 2024 Presidential elections. Navalny was 47.

Image/CNN

The Prime Minister of Great Britain, Rishi Sunak, said on Friday: “This is terrible news. As the fiercest advocate for Russian democracy, Alexei Navalny demonstrated incredible courage throughout his life. My thoughts are with his wife and the people of Russia, for whom this is a huge tragedy.”

“His death in a Russian prison, and the fixation and fear of one man, only underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system that Putin has built,” Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State said while in Munich.

Image/AP

Nataliya Vasilyeva, correspondent for the Telegraph wrote: “‘I’m not scared – and you shouldn’t, either,’ he [Navalny] scrawled on a piece of paper and showed it to the cameras standing inside his glass defendant’s cage in winter 2021. Even in the Arctic prison colony to which he was sent, he maintained the same defiance. That is what made him still dangerous to Putin. The only way to break his spirit, it appears, was to kill him.”

In one respect, it is the end of an era. Navalny, even while sometimes a controversial character, championed the hope of a Russia free from autocratic and despotic rule of the Kremlin regime. His vision of hope for a future democratic Russia inspired hundreds of thousands of Russians and even more around the world. When the Kremlin used fear, he used hope.

But Navalny was not alone in the fight for a free Russia. Others, like Vladimir Kara-Murza, have arisen to articulate and fight for the future of Russia. Kara-Murza is currently in prison with a 25 year sentence for “discrediting” the Russian army and a number of other politically motivated charges in a career of outspoken Kremlin denunciations.