On February 16th, 2024, longtime political and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny died in a Russian prison located in a penal colony in the Arctic Circle. He is remembered as a great husband, father, anti-corruption activist, and a man who changed the face of Russia, and the world, by challenging the power of ruthless dictator Vladimir Putin.
Alexei Navalny was born on June 4th, 1976 just outside of Moscow, 25 years after his biggest opponent, Putin. His father was a Soviet officer, and his mother was an economist. He grew up going to his grandparents’ country home near Chernobyl, Ukraine. After the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion near his grandparents home, Navalny and his family watched as the Soviet government attempted to cover up the dire effects of the explosion and downplay the radiation and damage. After the Soviet Union fell, the Russian government formed, and the corruption remained constant.
Navalny received a law degree from the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia in 1998 and became a practicing lawyer. As a lawyer, Navalny discovered that Russia’s court systems weren’t able to function as they should unless the governmental structure changed completely.
In 2000, Navalny entered into politics when he joined the left-wing party, Yabloko, which advocated for a market economy and democracy. Years later though, in 2007, he was expelled from the party for what party officials deemed “nationalistic activities” such as attending far-right marches earlier on in his life. Navalny insisted that these claims weren’t true and that he was actually kicked out due to internal disputes with Yabloko party leader Grigory Yavlinsky.
In 2008, Navalny set foot into what would be a lifetime battle against corruption in Russia. He started a stakeholder activism campaign that attempted to target state-owned entities and expose their corruption. His strategy was to purchase small amounts of stock in a multitude of different companies. This way, he would be able to gain access to their individual shareholder meetings. In the shareholder meetings, Navalny would confront corporate officers about inconsistencies that he noticed in their financial reporting, management, and bookkeeping. Many of the executives that he confronted happened to be close allies with Putin, introducing Putin to who Navalny was. He also further developed his anti-corruption lens by focusing on exposing state-run corporations for their corruption, such as the Russian gas company Gazprom.
After his first attempts at exposing corruption, he began a blog and the Anti-Corruption Foundation to document his future efforts. His blog quickly gained popularity, and millions of Russians tuned in to see Navalny’s latest investigations into corruption. His blog was so popular that it forced former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to admit that each year, a trillion rubles were embezzled from the state procurement system. Navalny also used the internet to create a popular Youtube channel, which gained millions of subscribers. On his Youtube channel, he convinced Russian citizens that they deserved a better life and a better government. He believed they deserved a democracy where their rights wouldn’t be curtailed, rather than Putin’s authoritarian and corrupt regime. Navalny had hope and love for Russia, and wanted to change it for the better. As he once said, “I want to live in a normal country and refuse to accept any talk about Russia being doomed to be a bad, poor, or servile country. I want to live here, and I can’t tolerate the injustice that for many people has become routine.”
After seeing the success of his anti-corruption efforts, Navalny created the website RosPil, which was short for “Russian Saw”. The website functioned as a whistleblowing resource, where people could anonymously publish accounts of corruption and dubious government deals. Through this website, Navalny invented the term “party of crooks and thieves” to describe Putin’s United Russia party. This term was used at many political demonstrations attended by Navalny supporters.
As the parliamentary elections of 2011 approached, Navalny urged his supporters to vote for any political party except for the United Russia party. Even so, the United Russia Party gained the majority of parliamentary seats. In response, Navalny, as well as 25,000 others, participated in street demonstrations, and he received jail time of 15 days. This sentence would be the first of many that Navalny served.
In 2012, after four years of Medvedev’s rule, Putin returned as the president of Russia. He used his presidential powers to squash his enemies and potential threats. Navalny, as well as other prominent opposition leaders, were deemed threats and their homes were raided.
On July 17th, 2013, Navalny decided to officially enter politics and he declared himself a candidate for the Mayor of Moscow. One day later, on July 18th, the Kremlin found that Navalny was guilty of embezzlement. Many argued that the accusations were false, but that Putin wanted to incriminate Navalny to eliminate him as a political threat. Navalny knew from the start that he never stood a chance in his trial, as the presiding judge had never found anyone innocent before.
Navalny’s trial further exposed the corruption plaguing Russia, as it revealed that conviction rates in Russia are around 99%, meaning that basically everyone accused of a crime gets convicted. During the trial, he received a sentence of five years in prison. Upon hearing his sentence, his supporters became outraged and hit the streets in thousands to protest. Surprisingly, he was released from prison, pending the hearing of his appeal.
After he was released from prison, Navalny continued in the race for Mayor of Moscow. He adopted a style of campaign that was different from most other Russian politicians, who usually utilized the media and newspaper. Since many TV channels denied him, Navalny talked to voters on the streets, spread posters of him and his family, and used the internet to promote himself. Although he worked extremely hard, Navalny lost the mayoral election to an ally of Putin, Sergey Sobyanin.
After he lost the election, Russian courts officially convicted Navalny of embezzlement but stated that he wouldn’t serve a prison sentence. Even though Navalny wasn’t forced to serve a sentence, he was tarnished with a criminal record, one that would prevent him from ever personally entering into politics, marking the 2013 mayoral race as his first and last ever political race.
In 2014, Navalny faced another set of charges from the Kremlin, this time for fraud. He had to serve three and a half years in prison due to this alleged fraud. During this time, Putin began a process called “managed democracy,” where Russian elections would appear to be democratic, but internally, they would be secretly rigged. In the 2016 election, the United Russia party won, but some citizens observed strange activity by Russian officials, such as the stuffing of ballot boxes and even repeat voting. Putin continued to rig elections, and he won the 2018 election which he organized to take place on the fourth anniversary of his annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea.
In 2020, the political rivalry between Navalny and Putin turned fatal, as Navalny suddenly grew ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow, where he had been in Siberia campaigning for the upcoming elections. Passengers on the plane captured video footage of Navalny’s moans of pain and anguish. The plane was forced to make an emergency landing in Omsk, where Navalny received immediate medical attention. Doctors initially didn’t allow his family to see him and insisted that everything was fine. The Russian public suspected that the doctors were puppets of the Kremlin and weren’t treating him. Eventually, his family organized for him to be taken to Germany to receive medical treatment. In Germany, Navalny was placed into a medical coma for five months to allow him to heal. It was revealed that Navalny’s sudden illness was caused by being poisoned with a Soviet nerve agent called Novichok.
As he recovered from his poisoning, Navalny worked with German investigative journalist Christo Grozev to uncover the role that Russian authorities played in his poisoning, which they ultimately found out by having Navalny pose as a Kremlin official and call a Russian political figure, Konstantin Kudryavtsev. He pretended to ask for a report about his poisoning, and Kudryavstev revealed information about Navalny’s poisoning. This call was a breakthrough, as Navalny was able to hear key details about his poisoning and who exactly was involved. Navalny also figured out that without the plane’s emergency landing in Omsk, he likely would have died.
After five months of recovering in Germany, Navalny made the brave decision to return to Russia in January of 2021. Knowing that he would likely be imprisoned and arrested upon his arrival, his return held more of a symbolic meaning. As he said to a crowd of Russian supporters in a Moscow airport right before he was detained by Russian police, he was not afraid. He decided to face his threats fearlessly and continue to challenge the corruption of the Russian government by showing that he would not hide in exile. Instead, he would stand up to his opponents and face them eye to eye. Immediately upon touching down in Russia, Navalny was arrested by Russian authorities and sentenced to three and a half years in a penal colony. They arrested him based on his failure to report to Russian prison officials during his time in Germany, violating the terms of his 2014 conviction.
Even from behind bars, Navalny continued the fight against corruption. He organized strikes and protests through social media, urging his followers to protest on the streets. Seeing the influence that Navalny had over the people of Russia, the courts banned any political groups tied to Navalny and declared them extremist. The courts also banned Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, claiming it was extremist. In 2022, Navalny faced new charges of fraud and contempt of court. His sentence was extended to three decades and he was placed in a maximum security prison where most of his time was spent in solitary confinement. Navalny continued to urge his supporters to protest against the war in Ukraine. When they did, they were arrested and forced to report for military duty.
During his time in prison, Navalny exchanged letters with Natan Sharansky, who was a political prisoner during the Soviet Union. He stayed in the same gulag that Navalny did, and Navalny read his book, “Fear No Evil”, while in imprisonment. In his letters to Sharansky, Navalny wrote, “I understand that I am not the first, but I really want to become the last, or at least one of the last, who are forced to endure this.” Sharansky wrote back to him, “I wish to you- no matter how hard it may be physically- to maintain your inner freedom…By remaining a free person in prison, you, Aleksei, influence the souls of millions of people worldwide.”
In December 2023, after failing to contact him, Navalny’s lawyers learned that Russian authorities relocated him to a penal colony in the Arctic Circle. Two months later, he died, leaving behind his heartbroken family and a heartbroken Russia. Russian officials claimed that he died after losing consciousness after going on a walk, but many others, such as his family, believe that Putin murdered him. Russian authorities refuse to release his body despite the many requests from his family. Many believe that they are waiting for any remnants of poison to leave his body before handing it over to his family. Democratic leaders all over the world are deeply upset by his death, as he represented opposition to authoritarianism and corruption. His death, though, is not the death of his movement and his ideas. His wife and constant supporter Yulia Navalnaya has vowed to continue the fight for his movement, despite spending most of her life out of the spotlight. In a video message to the Russian public, she said, “The main thing we can do for Alexei and for ourselves is to continue to fight. I will continue the work of Alexei Navalny, continue to fight for our country, and I urge you to stand next to me…We all need to get together in one strong fist and strike that mad regime.”
