ANALYSIS | The Death of Alexei Navalny

Photo Credit: Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters via PBS

On Feb. 16, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was reported to have died in a remote penal colony in Siberia. He was 47 and had been imprisoned there since February 2021. According to the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service, Navalny felt sick after a walk and subsquently lost consciousness. Russian authorities attest that medical personnel arrived on the scene and “performed all the required resuscitation procedures,” to no effect. While the Kremlin has denied involvement in his death, Navalny’s supporters and various foreign governments have blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

Navalny was a former lawyer who became the face of the opposition effort in Russia against Putin. According to Britannica, his childhood was divided between living with his parents in garrison towns near Moscow and visiting his grandmother near Chernobyl in Ukraine. He spoke Russian, Ukrainian, and English. 

In 1998, after graduating from the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia in Moscow with a law degree, he began to practice in the Russian capital. Following the election of Putin in 2000, Navalny began to involve himself in political causes, joining the liberal party Yabloko. He was expelled from the party in 2007 due to his presence at a nationalist march attended by neo-Nazis along with rhetoric comparing Chechen insurgents to “cockroaches” and inciting violence against them, comments which he had not denounced at the time of his death. 

Navalny then began a stakeholder activism campaign to expose corruption in state-owned businesses. This theme would become a central tenet of his later campaigns as his term party of crooks and thieves became a popular refrain at protests against Putin’s United Russia party.

In the following years, Navalny worked to build a coalition of political forces opposing Putin’s regime. He ran for various public offices, including for mayor of Moscow in 2013, losing to the Putin-approved candidate. He was briefly jailed multiple times during the 2010s, but managed to evade permanent prison time. In 2017, an unknown person threw a green liquid into his face, nearly blinding him.

In 2020 he was exposed to a Soviet-developed Novichok nerve agent while on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow, and was moved to Berlin for medical treatment, which included an induced coma. Upon choosing to return to Russia in January 2021, he was immediately taken into custody by authorities. In the next few years he would be moved through a series of prisons, spending considerable time in solitary confinement. 

A harsh critic of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Navalny wrote in a post on Telegram on Nov. 23, 2022 that “we were plunged into this nightmare by a single crazy grandfather who lives in fantasies that he is a military leader, unusually popular in Ukraine.”

On Dec. 26, 2023, Navalny arrived in Penal Colony No. 3 (IK3) in Kharp, a town in the remote Yamalo-Nenets District of Siberia, north of the Arctic Circle. In an investigation by the New York Times on the conditions in the facility, one inmate, Konstantin, was quoted as describing the food as “awful, uneatable gruel,” while another said that the cells were intended “to break people morally, until you agree to all the conditions of the prison administration.” Konstantin concluded that the place was “complete and utter annihilation.”

In his limited communications from prison, Navalny kept up the wry sarcasm that characterized his political style. “Few things are as refreshing as a walk on Yamal at 6:30 a.m.,” he wrote in January about the conditions in Siberia, quipping that “you wouldn’t believe the lovely fresh wind that blows into the courtyard, despite the cement fence.” He likewise observed that “unfortunately, there are no reindeer, but there are huge fluffy and very beautiful shepherd dogs.”

Navalny spent most of his time in prison reading, according to the New York Times. In a letter to his acquaintance Ilia Krasilshchik, he wrote that he preferred to read 10 books at a time and “switch between them.” He complained about only being allowed one book while in solitary confinement.

After news of his death broke, condemnation from the international community was swift. “We don’t know exactly what happened, but there’s no doubt that the death of Navalny was the consequence of something that Putin and his thugs did,” said President Joe Biden on Feb. 16., later directly stating that “make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death.” 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted that “Putin doesn’t care who dies in order for him to hold onto his position.” Charles Michel, European Council President, wrote that “the EU holds the Russian regime solely responsible for this tragic death.” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz soberly noted that Navalny had “paid for his courage with his life.”

During a visit to Ukraine, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau labelled Putin a “coward”, stating that “to execute one’s political opponents, to quash dissent by using police and military, to make sure there is no opposition is the mark of a weakling, not a mark of someone who is confident in his own position.” Trudeau also said that Navalny’s death “has the entire world being reminded of exactly what a monster Putin is.” The Canadian government imposed additional sanctions against the Russian government in the wake of Navalny’s death.

Putin has not commented on Navalny’s death, though his spokesman Dmitri Peskov told reporters that he had been informed. The Russian state news agency TASS reported that Peskov considered the statements from Western officials on Navalny’s death “absolutely rabid” and “totally unacceptable.”

Navalny is not the only Putin opponent to have died under suspicious circumstances. Journalist and Putin critic Anna Politovskaya was killed in her home in 2006. She was known for her reporting on the wars in Chechnya, where she alleged torture and mass executions were taking place. In 2015, Boris Nemtsov, opposition leader and advocate of democratic reforms, was shot dead on a bridge in the Moscow city centre. While five men were convicted of the murder, Nemtsov’s family contends that those truly culpable go unpunished. Putin denounced the assassination. In August 2023, two months after leading an armed rebellion of his Wagner Group forces against the Kremlin which involved the capture of the Russian city Rostov-on-Don, Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a plane crash. The Kremlin denied any involvement.

Alexei Navalny is survived by his two children Darya and Zakhar, his brother Oleg, his father and mother Lyudmila and Anatoly, and his wife, Yulia Navalnaya. Like the rest of Navalny’s organization, she holds the Kremlin responsible. “I want Putin and everyone around Putin, Putin’s friends, his government to know that they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family and to my husband.” Navalnaya said, predicting that “this day will come very soon.”