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| Aleksy Navalny June1976-February 2024 |
Alexei Navalny was a Russian lawyer, anti-corruption campaigner and politicia whose activities led to his global recognition as one of, possibly chief among, the domestic critics of Vladimir Putin, Russian President [1999-2008; 2012- ] Navalny suffered a near-fatal poisoning in 2020, was jailed on several occasions and died while imprisoned in an Arctic penal colony. I am currently reading his autobiography which reveals the huge loss to Russia’s fledgling democratic urges and the terrifying nature of Russian politics.
Navalny’s father was a Soviet army officer, and his mother
was an economist, so Alexei grew up in a series of garrison towns in the Moscow
area. He spent summers with his paternal grandparents in the countryside near
Chernobyl, in Ukraine. After the infamous nuclear explosion at Chernobyl in
April 1986, his paternal relatives were officially and swiftly evacuated with
other residents from the area but not before they had witnessed the attempted
cover-up of the disaster by the Soviet authorities. All residents were forced
to go out immediately after the explosion into the radioactive fields and plant
potatoes as a demonstration of how safe the area was. The long-term results
were thousands of deaths and malformed births from close exposure to the radioactive
fields.
Alexei attended the People’s Friendship University of Russia
in Moscow, graduating with a law degree in 1998. He remained in Moscow,
practising law, continuing his studies and earning an economics degree from the
Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation. In 2000,
while still a student, Navalny joined Yabloko a political party promoting
liberal democracy in a market economy. In Putin’s early days in power, it had
seemed possible that opposition groups might be tolerated though with limited
power, in the State Duma, but the unification of pro-Putin parties under the
banner of United Russia in 2001 revealed Putin’s intentions to stifle dissent.
In 2007, Navalny was expelled from Yabloko after what Alexei claimed were
personality clashes with party leader Grigory Yavlinski. Meanwhile, Yabloko
asserted that Navalny had damaged the party with “nationalistic activities”
including attendance at a far-right march.
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| Putin meeting Grigory Yavlinski, party leader of Yabloko, originally Russia's only liberal party. |
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| Navalny family: Yulia, son Zahar and daughter Daria. |
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| United Russia Party Congress |
2011 when widespread irregularities were discernible triggering the largest popular demonstrations since the fall of the Soviet Union. Navalny had urged his followers to support any party other than United Russia and, despite ample evidence of vote-rigging, United Russia won less than half the vote. Meanwhile Navalny was jailed for 15 days for participating in an unofficial protest, but his efforts had been noted and when Putin predictably returned to power as President, he immediately moved to clamp down on dissent and Navalny’s home was raided by the police and a criminal investigation on suspicion of corruption was launched against him. Putin introduced harsh new penalties for individuals who participated in unauthorised rallies.
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| Unauthorised protest in Moscow |
Within a few months, Navalny declared his candidacy for Mayor of Moscow and the following day he was found guilty of embezzlement in a trial that was widely regarded as having been politically motivated. In response, thousands demonstrated filling the streets in Moscow and he was immediately freed pending the hearing of his appeal. He resumed his Mayoral bid and, denied access to the main television channels, running a Western-style campaign with glossy posters of him and his family posted in the streets and on the Internet. On September 8th, 2013, Putin’s nominee, Sergey Sobyanin won 51% of the vote and Navalny, a respectable 27.2%. After this, Navalny’s activism and attempts to participate in the Russian political system continued and his almost routine incarceration by the Putin administration, would become a recurring event. For instance, in December 2014 he, and his brother Oleg, both received a three year suspended sentence on fraud charges.2020, he became seriously ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow and, fearing for his safety in a Russian hospital, his family had him flown to Berlin where tests confirmed that he had been exposed to Novichok, a lethal complex nerve agent developed by the Soviets.
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| Recovering from Novichok |
He remained for months in a medically induced coma before recovering during which period, he worked with Bellingcat, the investigative journalism group, to try to uncover the specifics of the Novichok attack. The names of several of the FSB [Federal Security Service] agents were identified and Navalny called one of them, posing as a senior Russian security official. Their lengthy conversation about the attempted assassination was recorded and published with the agent, still assuming he was speaking to a security official, blaming the plane’s emergency landing in Omsk and the hasty intervention of emergency medical personnel for the failure of the plot. Soon after, on January 17, 2021, Navalny, perhaps recklessly, returned to Russia and was immediately arrested and quickly sentenced to three and a half years in a penal colony. His hunger strike there encouraged his followers to take to the streets in protest and as a result, in June 2021 a Moscow court ruled that any group tied to Navalny would be labelled extremist and denied access to any public office.
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| Persecuted by Putin |
In 2020, Navalny was campaigning in Siberia for regional elections scheduled for September that year and on August 20th he was sent to the notorious IK-6 maximum security prison and kept chiefly in solitary confinement. Meanwhile, government response to the many public protests reached draconian levels and any criticism of Russia’s war in Ukraine was criminalised. The list goes on! In March 2022, an emaciated Navalny was found guilty of fraud and contempt of court and sentenced to nine years in a “strict regime penal colony” and denied the right to speak in court. In December 2023, Navalny’s attorneys lost contact with him for three weeks before learning he was in a brutal penal colony in the Arctic Circle where he died two months later, almost certainly from poisoning.
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| Arrest! |
Postscript
I rarely become emotionally involved in any way in whatever I discuss in my blogs but Navalny’s story and particularly, the last months of his fearless and inspiring life pursued by a corrupt regime intent upon the destruction of the one voice it feared, is incredibly moving and sad. His autobiography, Patriot, referred to above, gives a detailed look at his thinking. Patriot is, in fact, part autobiography of his early years plus extracts from his secret prison diaries compiled after his death by his wife, Yulia.
In the Epilogue we discover why he felt the urgent need to return home to Russia when he had no illusions about the murderous intentions of the regime. " I knew from the outset that I would be imprisoned for life- either for the rest of my life or until the end of the life of this regime.” He considers his options and refers lovingly and thankfully to his wife, Yulia Navalnya (who organised the publication of Alexei’s Patriot chiefly from his secret prison diaries), and acknowledges the huge support he continues to receive as a believer, from his faith. “Faith makes life simpler.” He muses that since his return to Russia three years before when he was recovering from the Novichok poisoning, his life has been spent in jail. But “I have my country and my convictions. I don’t want to give up my country and betray it. If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary.”
Unbelievably, it is only slightly more than eighteen months since Navalny died but the Putin regime continues. As Navalny often mused, “Autocracies in the modern world are resilient.”
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| Last picture, in jail. |
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| Navalny at a court hearing in Moscow 2023 |
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