“The cause of death is being investigated,” Russia’s prison authorities announced after Alexei Navalny died in Penal Colony No. 3 just above the Arctic Circle on Friday.
But whichever way you look at it, it’s already clear what killed him: Vladimir Putin’s enmity.
For years, Navalny and the Russian president have been locked in a brutal battle royal that was unlikely to end without the death of one them.
That somewhat macabre prognosis turned into a commonplace adage among many Russians — even among Navalny’s own supporters.
And now it has finally happened. Only a day after he was filmed at a court hearing — cracking jokes and seemingly in high spirits — it was announced the 47-year-old collapsed suddenly on a walk in prison, and died after an attempt by an ambulance crew to revive him.
The death of this larger-than-life figure marks the end of an era in post-Soviet history and draws a definitive line under Russia’s short-lived experiment with democracy.
Much of Navalny’s appeal in Russia over past years lay with his ability to puncture the myth of Putin and his côterie as purists and idealists dedicated to building a strong nation. He specialized in exposés of the decadence and corruption of the élite — unearthing a gaudy world of nepotism, villas and private jets.
Even in prison, Navalny was a symbol that there was some kind of vestige of opposition to Putin’s one-man reign. Without him, Putin’s transition to total political invulnerability has been ensured, only a month before an election expected to consolidate his more than two-decade long rule.
Thorn in the Kremlin’s flank
Originally a lawyer turned anti-corruption blogger, Navalny’s transformation into the Kremlin’s most vocal opponent over more than a decade has mirrored Russia’s slide into authoritarianism.
He first shot to prominence for his role organizing protests in 2011 and 2012, seizing on frustrations over allegations of electoral fraud and over Putin’s return to the Kremlin for a third presidential term.
Those protests garnered mass support with some of the demonstrations in Moscow attracting crowds of tens of thousands. Navalny coined a phrase by describing the ruling United Russia party as the “party of thieves and crooks,” which then became a slogan for his supporters.
His potential to become a genuine threat to Putin first became clear in 2013, when he won more than a quarter of the Moscow mayoral vote against the Kremlin’s candidate.
Since then, he never ceased to be a thorn in the Kremlin’s flank.
Methods to silence Navalny evolved in lockstep with his rise in stature, with the authorities becoming ever more heavy-handed.
He was barred from state media and slapped with embezzlement charges, which resulted in a suspended sentence for him and jailtime for his brother, in what many saw as a blackmail attempt to sideline him from political life.
But Navalny displayed an unwavering ability to withstand pressure and turn events in his own favor.
He set up a sprawling network of campaign offices ahead of the 2018 presidential election unlike anything ever seen in Russia before, tapping into a new generation of mostly young and fearless Russians to help him.
Though barred from running in elections, he and his team continued to influence politics, by coming up with ways to use the Kremlin’s system against itself and thwart pro-Kremlin candidates in the voting booth.
In 2019, Navalny seemed buoyed by the stirrings of renewed anti-Kremlin protests, this time triggered by rigged Moscow City elections and the jailing of activists. Ever defiant and boundlessly determined, he insisted that 2019 would not be a repeat of 2011-2012.
Speaking in a huddle near a protest stage, he said: “More and more people are getting involved, many of whom were never interested in politics before. It is very important and we’re at the beginning. What we see now is totally different, in terms of the size and duration. Previous protests rapidly faded. Now new people are getting involved.”
But ultimately, the Kremlin increased its repression and cracked down even harder. The rallies stopped.
Exposing Putin’s people
Perhaps most importantly, he and his team mastered the digital age, combining political activism with entertainment in snappy YouTube videos, exposing Russia’s political elite as corrupt and degenerate and smashing the aura of inviolability around Putin and his cronies.
They inspired a number of memes and symbols of protest. There was the golden toilet brush in reference to a roughly $800 accessory identified in a lavish Black Sea residence allegedly owned by Putin.
There were sneakers and rubber ducks in a nod to former President Dmitry Medvedev’s penchant for ordering clothing online and a large duck house on his estate.
Corgis became a motif after former First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov’s undeclared business jet, which his wife used to fly her short-legged canines to dog shows across the world.
His team scored another widely tracked success with a prank call to the son of Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine pretending to be a military official telling him to report for duty the next day, to which Nikolai Peskov answered he would “obviously not” and said the question would be resolved “on a different level.”
Paint and poison
Over the years, the Russian authorities increasingly resorted to violence to suppress opposition. Street protests were met with police beatings and prison sentences for the participants.
Navalny was twice splashed with an antiseptic green dye, with the second incident outside his Moscow office in 2017 resulting in a severe burn to his right eye.
But the culmination came in the summer of 2020, when he fell unconscious on a plane to Moscow after a visit to Tomsk in Siberia ahead of regional elections.
For days he teetered on the verge of death, while his supporters tried to negotiate his release abroad for treatment and 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, he was eventually flown to the Charité hospital in Berlin, and it was established Navalny had been poisoned with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok, confirming widespread suspicions of Kremlin involvement.
Prior to the poisoning, Navalny wasn’t always a team player and often found himself at odds with other leaders in Russia’s fractious and fragmented opposition.
He also faced criticism over his tactics and past nationalist and xenophobic views, drawing the ire of Ukrainians and some Russians by remaining ambivalent on the future of Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014.
“Is Crimea some sort of sausage sandwich to be passed back and forth? I don’t think so,” he said.
But in Russian circles, the poison attack largely put that criticism on hold and consolidated his status as the country’s main opposition politician.
Back from the brink
Navalny miraculously survived the poisoning and came back with a vengeance.
In his first interview after regaining consciousness, he even ridiculed the government for the bungled assassination attempt, joking with journalist Yury Dud that “none of Putin’s projects are successful.”
In a video investigation together with the Bellingcat investigative site, he then exposed the plot to kill him and went as far as tricking one of the Russian agents involved into a phone confession.
It was yet another humiliation for the Kremlin, revealing Russia’s security services as incompetent and mocking their tactics. (The poison had apparently been smeared on his boxer shorts.)
Meanwhile, in keeping with a previous tradition, Putin refused to call Navalny by name, referring to him as “the Berlin patient.” (Even on Friday, Putin maintained his hallmark trait of not deigning to refer to his adversary despite ample opportunity to do so in a public appearance at a factory.)
In 2021, although he could have stayed in exile, Navalny made the daring — and ultimately fatal — decision to return to Russia.
“If your beliefs are worth something, you have to be willing to stand up for them. And if necessary, sacrifice something,” Navalny said on X last month, on the reason for his return.
He was immediately arrested upon landing for failing to report his whereabouts to the Russian authorities while undergoing treatment in Germany, thereby violating the terms of his parole.
While in jail, a Russian court declared his Anti-Corruption Foundation an “extremist” organization, forcing his employees and volunteers underground or into exile.
That, and military censorship laws, passed in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, quashed any remaining hope of coordinated protest against the Kremlin and its war.
His health was known to be deteriorating in detention. He has spent 295 days of the past three years in an isolation cell — the last time only several days before his death. In January, he looked gaunt in a video released from yet another conference court hearing, this time held at the so-called Polar Wolf maximum security prison 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle, where he’d been transferred after being handed a 19-year prison sentence.
After his death, fears are now likely to spread to the safety of Vladimir Kara-Murza, another prominent opponent of Putin, who languishes in prison.
‘We are unusually strong’
Putin, it seemed had won.
And yet Navalny didn’t think so. And as long as he didn’t, neither did a group of Russians.
Through his lawyers, he managed to keep an active presence on social media (for which they themselves are now facing persecution, with three lawyers in jail and two in exile) periodically sharing his two cents on current affairs and continuing to outline his view of the “wonderful Russia of the future.”
He used his endless court hearings as a political platform to call upon Russians not to lose hope and to crack jokes at the expense of Putin’s regime — at one point recounting a scene from “Harry Potter” in which a character tells the wizard not to feel lonely, because “that’s what Voldemort would have wanted.”
Navalny was the antithesis of everything Putin represented.
Not just politically but also in terms of his personal life. At rallies Navalny would be protective of his wife, Yulia, always ready to put an arm around her, shielding her from the press of crowds or from a pack of over-eager reporters and cameramen.
Navalny was always the canary in a coalmine, triggering the Kremlin to show its real face. And with his death, the mask is off.
While Russian state media and Putin have remained silent on Navalny’s death, the Kremlin’s propagandists have pointed a finger at the West.
Putin is striving for political immortality, and therefore Navalny had to die.
Not because, locked away in an isolation cell in the Arctic he really posed a viable threat to the Kremlin, but because as long as he remained alive, so did Russians’ hope that some form of opposition was possible.
Today, for many Russians, with the death of Navalny, the last glimmer of hope for democracy has been buried.
They won’t be allowed to show their sadness in public memorials without being arrested, but hidden away in many kitchens, tears will be shed.
For them, Navalny has a message from beyond the grave.
“Don’t give up,” he said in the Oscar-winning documentary on his life, in response to the interviewer’s question on what he would tell Russians in the event of his murder.
“If this happened it means that we are unusually strong since they’ve decided to kill me. So you should use this strength and not give up.”