National Review Online
Friday, February 16, 2024
Alexei Navalny was one of the bravest men of our time. He stood up to one of the most evil men of our time: Vladimir Putin. Navalny has now died, a political prisoner, at 47.
He was widely known as “the leader of the opposition” — the Russian political opposition to Putin. Life expectancy is not terribly long in that job. The previous leader, Boris Nemtsov, was gunned down within sight of the Kremlin in 2015. Navalny and his allies have been particularly good at exposing Putin’s corruption. They have done this through their organization, the Anti-Corruption Foundation.
Navalny had remarkable sangfroid. In 2017, he was gearing up to make a presidential run. An assailant threw some mix of chemicals into his face. Navalny was mainly blinded in one eye. He said he hoped he would be cured but, if not, “Russia will have a president with a stylish, white eye.”
In 2020, agents of the FSB — formerly the KGB — almost killed him with poison. Navalny managed to survive, having been taken to Germany for medical treatment. Sometimes Putin’s critics survive, sometimes they don’t. FSB agents tried to kill Vladimir Kara-Murza with poison twice — once in 2015 and again in 2017. Kara-Murza had worked closely with Nemtsov. Today, he is in prison, held in isolation in Siberia.
Boris Nemtsov could have gone into exile. But he refused, reasoning that his place was on Russian soil, opposing the dictatorship alongside his fellow Russians. Kara-Murza, too, could have gone into exile. Some of his friends pleaded with him to do so. But, like Nemtsov, he refused, and for the same reason.
So it was with Alexei Navalny. Safe, or relatively safe, in Germany, he went back: knowing that he would be arrested, which he was at the airport; knowing that death — that murder — might well await him.
In an interview with National Review’s Jay Nordlinger last June, Natan Sharansky said of Navalny and Kara-Murza: “They knew they would be in prison for the rest of their lives — or until victory. There are things more important to them than their personal survival.”
As a prisoner of the Soviet Union, Sharansky spent nine years in the Gulag (1977 to 1986). He spent 405 of those days in a punishment cell — a record. “According to experts, you’re supposed to go crazy after 15 days,” he told Nordlinger. He also said that, on current pace, Navalny would break his record.
Which he has not lived to do.
The film director Daniel Roher made a documentary about Navalny. Last year, it won an Oscar. Onstage were Navalny’s wife, Yulia, and their children, Dasha and Zakhar — who live outside of Russia. Yulia said, “My husband is in prison just for telling the truth. My husband is in prison just for defending democracy. Alexei, I am dreaming of the day you will be free and our country will be free. Stay strong, my love.”
Navalny was not a conventional “liberal” opposition leader, which made him more of a threat. He was often characterized as a nationalist. He supported Russia’s invasion of Georgia. He campaigned against illegal immigration, and occasionally voiced anger about the dispossession of ethnic Russians in Russia. He questioned whether a Russian government could ever give back Crimea to Ukraine. But in more recent years, his politics were primarily animated by a desire to see the Russian state cleared of corruption. He understood the power of humor, and found creative ways to lampoon Russia’s ruling party as a clique of thieves and crooks. And so it was that Navalny, by the time of his last imprisonment, became the locus around which almost all opposition to Putin revolved.
In Putin’s Russia, a political opponent hardly has a chance. Last October, three of Navalny’s lawyers were arrested. A fourth was not — because she happened to be traveling abroad. Last month, the Russian state charged her in absentia. (The crime: “participating in an extremist community.”)
Two months ago, Navalny was transferred to a penal colony in the Arctic Circle — a colony known as “Polar Wolf,” one of the most hellish places on earth. It was founded as part of the Gulag in 1961. In a grueling 20-day journey to get there, Navalny grew out a beard. On arrival, he quipped that he was “in a good mood, as befits a Santa Claus.”
It is amazing that Navalny survived as long as he did. He survived the poisoning in 2020. And he has survived the prisons and camps until now.
Garry Kasparov, the Soviet-born chess champion and human-rights champion, put it well:
Putin tried and failed to murder Navalny quickly and secretly with poison, and now he has murdered him slowly and publicly in prison. He was killed for exposing Putin and his mafia as the crooks and thieves they are. My thoughts are with the brave man’s wife and children.
You often hear that Vladimir Putin, no matter what, loves his country. Yet he robs it blind. He immiserates it. True love of country was shown by Navalny — as it was by Nemtsov. As it is by Kara-Murza.
You often hear that Putin is popular among Russians. But does he act like it? Does he act like a leader confident of his own legitimacy? He has banned independent media. He has abolished civil society. He will not allow a political opposition. He imprisons, maims, or kills his critics.
Even when Navalny was a gaunt prisoner, Putin seemed afraid of him. When the Kremlin banned the Anti-Corruption Foundation in 2021, its director, Ivan Zhdanov, said, “They are screaming out with this move: We are afraid of your activities, we are afraid of your rallies.”
Characteristically, Navalny tried to buck up his fellow oppositionists. When Ilya Yashin was sentenced in December 2022, Navalny communicated this message to him: “Ilya Yashin, we are all proud of you. Russia will be free and so will you.”
In April 2021, Navalny was able to send a handwritten note from prison to a journalist friend, Yevgenia Albats. He said, “Everything will be all right. And even if it isn’t, we’ll have the consolation of having lived honest lives.”
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