Editor’s note: the article was written on 18.02.2024.
On 16th of February Alexei Navalny, Russian opposition figure and political prisoner, was killed. Who was he and why was he important for the oppositional forces in Russia?
Alexey Navalny, 47, was a politician, opposition leader, and political prisoner. In 2013 he gained a quarter of the votes in the mayor’s elections in Moscow. He was the Founder of the Anti-Corruption Fund, which conducted a number of public investigations about the massive thefts by some of Putin’s friends. Especially famous was his documentary film about ex-president and ex-prime minister Dmintrii Medvedev ‘He is not Dimon to you’, which caused mass protests across the country with hundreds arrested. In 2020, there was an attempt to poison Navalny with ‘Novichok’, after which he had a hard time recovering in a German hospital. Yet still the Anti-Corruption Fund found and published the names of Navalny’s ‘killers’. After he recovered, he returned to Russia, where he was immediately arrested. And on 16th of February he was killed in a special regime colony; his sentence was 19 years for extremism.
In his last video from prison, Navalny was joking and looked healthy. Now the Russian propagandist news channels claim that he died because of ‘natural causes’. However, human right defenders think this explanation is an unlikely scenario. Before that, in early December Navalny had disappeared from the prison in the Vladimir region and nobody knew his location nor could get in touch with him for more than a week. Everyone can put two and two together.
When I learned the news about Navalny’s death, there was just white noise in my head. Neither me nor thousands of people across the world who went to the memorials and protests in honor of the politician the same evening knew him personally, and yet many people were grieving as if someone really close to them died. It might be hard to understand for somebody who is not really involved in the oppositional forces in Russia since the politician was already in jail for more than two years and did not participate in the political life of the country. In the last couple of days many people told me: ‘I am honestly surprised he was not killed earlier’. Therefore, I cannot pretend that the news I read this Friday was unexpected, and yet they were devastating. For me, it all started in 2017, when I was really young and just started getting interested in politics; right at that moment, everyone was discussing the first Navalny’s documentary movie ‘He is not Dimon to you’ about the ex-prime minister of Russia and his corrupt affairs. It caused mass protests across the country with hundreds of people arrested. For many people my age, it was the moment when they understood how deeply wrong things are in Russia.
Some of us definitely had disagreements with his opinions and with his approaches, and also did not want to close our eyes to his nationalistic past and questionable statements throughout his career, yet still Navalny was the voice of hope for many in the repressed civil society in Russia. To make matters even more daunting, the news of Navalny’s death came roughly at the same time as the news that Boris Nadezhdin would be denied his lawful right to run in the upcoming March elections. Nadezhdin, an anti-war presidential candidate, had given hope to thousands of people, who last February stood in long queues in – 20 degrees weather to sign the petition to allow him to participate in the elections.
I strongly believe that we should commemorate all the political prisoners of the oppressive regime. My good friend said after learning the news: ‘what I find most terrifying about Navalny’s death is not that he was killed in prison, or that nobody is going to be held accountable for it. What I find most terrifying is that he is but one of thousands suffering the similar fate’. I think I could not express it better. Just one example out of thousands in the past twenty years: famous Russian opposition politician and political prisoner, Vladimir Kara- Murza has been sentenced to 25 years in prison and his wife is afraid he might end up in a similar way.
The wife of Alexei Navalny, Yulia Navalnaya, has announced that she is going to continue the legacy of her late husband. Yulia has always been supporting the politician, and she is not a new political figure. She has already met with the European leaders, who expressed their condolences and support. Navalnaya claimed that Putin killed her husband and that the reason will be explained soon.
In the documentary film ‘Navalny’, the politician gave a message to the people in case he gets killed: ‘Do not give up. If this has happened (ed.note: the Russian government decided to kill Navalny), it means we are really powerful at that moment.’. Let’s hope he was right and his death will indeed help the opposition come together and oppose the regime with more strength than ever before and finally stop the terrible war.
Updates:
22.02.2024: The body of Alexei Navalny is not being returned to his mother and is being kept at the morgue of the colony in Salekhard.The investigator gave an ultimatum to the mother of Alexei Navalny: either she will agree to a secret funeral (without the publicity and without announcing the place of the ceremony), or Navalny will be buried right in the colony. Lyudmila Navalnaya demanded the opening of the case against the Investigative Committee under the article of abuse of the body of the deceased. Many Russian celebrities began recording appeals to the Russian authorities demanding the return of the body of Alexei Navalny to his family.
26.02.2024: The chairman of the international Anti-Corruption Foundation, Maria Pevchikh, announced that there was a plan to get Alexei Navalny out of prison and really soon: the politician was planned to be exchanged for the Russian citizen imprisoned in Germany- Vadim Krasikov. Krasikov is suspected to be an ex-FSS officer, convicted of murder in 2019 in Berlin; he killed a former Chechen field commander who later seeked asylum in Germany. Pevchikh claimed that the deal of prisoners’ exchange took around 2 years to plan and that on 15th of February, one day before the death of Navalny, there was a confirmation that the operation was at its final stages. The team of the Anti-Corruption Fund believes that Putin could not stand to see Navalny in freedom. Although not mentioning Navalny, Putin mentioned the possibility of Krasikov’s exchange in his recent interview with Carlson. However, we all know that Putin in general never refers to Navalny by his name: the politician has been called ‘this gentlemen’, ‘aforementioned citizen’, ‘alternative politician’ and so on, creating a joke about ‘those who shall not be named’ in Russian media space.
28.02.2024: It has been announced that the funeral of Navalny will be held 1st of March in Moscow. The director of Anti-Corruption Fund- Ivan Zhdanov said in an interview with an independent Russian media outlet that the authorities are still preventing the organization of the funeral and blackmailing Navalny’s relatives, demanding that they hold a quiet family ceremony without a large crowd of people. Yulia Navalnaya gave a speech in the European Parliament where she appealed to the deputies to fight against Putin and called him ‘the leader of a criminal organization’.
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