In the courtroom, Yulia Navalnaya, expressionless and wearing a red sweatshirt, watched her husband, Alexei Navalny, enter “the aquarium”—a glass cage. Just as the sentencing hearing began, Navalny raised his voice and said to his wife, “On the TV they said you’ve been violating public order. You’re a bad girl. I’m proud of you.”
To think that the briskly organized trial of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny would have any outcome but a harsh prison sentence would be absurdly naïve. The government was already infuriated that Navalny had dared to return to Moscow after surviving an assassination attempt; his devastating video exposé of Putin’s plutocratic lifestyle stripped away any pretense or pantomime of due process.
In a matter of days, streets turned into battle zones, courts became harsh-sentence assembly lines, and those who objected to Putin’s flagrant disregard for the rule of law became enemies of the state. And in the center of it all was one woman: Yulia Navalnaya, “the opposition’s First Lady,” as she’s often called.
“On the TV they said you’ve been violating public order. You’re a bad girl. I’m proud of you.”
The institution of Russian First Ladies is virtually nonexistent. Soviet rulers had wives, but these women were rarely in the public eye. Raisa Gorbacheva, this country’s first Western-style First Lady, was wildly unpopular not just with those who opposed Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberal reforms but with supporters as well. The general sentiment was that Ms. Gorbachev “stood out too much.” In 2014, when Putin announced that he had gotten divorced, Russia barely noticed.
It’s as if Russia—a country with a predominately female population—didn’t want to see a woman even standing next to its national leader, much less becoming one.
Like her husband, who defied the convention of ignoring the corruption behind the gilded curtain of the Russian elite, Yulia broke the tradition of staying in the shadow of her husband as he rose to become the leader of the Russian opposition. The only difference is that now she’s not making a case for her husband’s candidacy; she’s busy making a case for his freedom.
She’s successful at it, too. Last summer, when her husband was poisoned and his survival depended on getting him out of Russia and into a European clinic, Yulia did what no one expected—she sent an open letter to Putin demanding that he let Alexei Navalny go to Germany for treatment. The man with a U.N. Security Council veto, the world’s largest collection of nuclear missiles, and his own chemical-weapons hit squad acquiesced to her demands. In a country where the voice of the people is less powerful than the voice of one man, she got the only vote that she needed. Navalny was saved, and Yulia Navalnaya became a force in Russian politics.
In a country where the voice of the people is less powerful than the voice of one man, she got the only vote that she needed.
“Yulia never made any statements simply for the sake of attention in the many years of being in the public eye,” says Nadya Tolokonnikova, of the anarchist feminist group Pussy Riot. “Her lack of vanity is a rare and excellent trait for a politician, and if she’ll decide that she wants to lead the opposition movement in Russia, she’ll do a great job.”
Yulia met her future husband in 1998 while staying at a Turkish resort. They were both 22 years old.
“She amazed me when we first met,” said Alexei Navalny of Yulia. “She was the beautiful blonde who knew every Cabinet minister’s name.”
They got married a couple of years later and soon had children. She said that she didn’t marry a lawyer or an opposition leader—she married a young man named Alexei Navalny.
“She amazed me when we first met,” said Alexei Navalny of Yulia. “She was the beautiful blonde who knew every Cabinet minister’s name.”
Yulia received her economics degree from the prestigious Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, in Moscow. She worked in a bank and then in an import-export company. Navalny’s rise to Russian political stardom—from lawyer to blogger, to anti-corruption activist, and now Putin’s No. 1 threat—made it impossible for Yulia to find work. Her husband was toxic, and she was toxic by association: no company would risk hiring her, and whatever business venture she tried to get into would inevitably be harassed by the state’s many regulatory bodies. So Yulia became, in her own words, the “head of child-raising and home affairs.”
In an interview with Nina Nazarova, in Afisha—a Moscow version of New York magazine—she said that she wanted to be the wife of a politician, but not a politician herself. However, opposing Putin’s regime became Yulia’s job, too. She helped Navalny with translations, and when he was in jail, it was Yulia who wrote his social-media posts. She rallied his supporters, fundraised, and tried to convince people that a better Russia was possible—even if the odds were against it.
Nazarova remembers Navalny’s sentencing hearing in 2014: “Alexei and Yulia seemed to be the only ones in the courtroom with a cheerful, almost invincible mood—looking at memes and funny YouTube videos on Alexei’s laptop—a stark contrast with the sepulchral atmosphere of the Russian judicial system.”
This time, tears rolled down Yulia’s cheeks as the judge declared Alexei’s prison sentence. Navalny drew a heart on the wall of his cage and said, “Don’t be sad, everything is going to be O.K.”
The next day, Russians posted pictures of themselves wearing red in solidarity with Yulia Navalnaya.
Whether or not she decides to lead the resistance is entirely up to her, and so far she hasn’t voiced any such plans. But Yulia Navalnaya did once say that, when she offers her vision for the country, “people often say that I’m just repeating my husband’s script”—a sad reminder of a woman’s place in Russian society. “Unfortunately no one mentions that it’s Alexei who’s quoting my views.”
Andrew Ryvkin is a Moscow-based Russian-American journalist and screenwriter