Andrei Sakharov died five weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn outlived the Soviet Union, and Nelson Mandela walked out of prison in plenty of time to drive a stake through apartheid. Alexei Navalny, 47, was supposed to do the same: miraculously stay alive in Penal Colony No. 3 long enough to watch Putin die or flee into exile in some place like North Yemen or Uganda.
So the announcement of Navalny’s death on Friday—the Russian official news agency, Tass, described Navalny as a “blogger”—felt like another leaden blow to hope and history, a sign that Putin’s hold on power is unshakable.
