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.
But that may not be giving Navalny enough credit. The opposition leader chose to return to Russia after nearly being murdered with Novichok, a nerve agent. Navalny, who tricked Russian security forces into admitting they’d placed the poison in his underpants, was under no illusions about Putin’s ruthlessness or the health risks of a Russian labor camp. He must have figured that should he die, opposition to Putin wouldn’t die with him—it might even prosper.
And that could have also been a fear haunting Putin. Having failed to kill his opponent once, the Russian leader seems not to have had the nerve to do it again so blatantly. Instead, he let it seem like Navalny was killed by his own weakened health—and prison walks in temperatures hovering around minus 18 degrees Fahrenheit.
Martyrdom has a bad reputation, but the goal isn’t death and oblivion; it’s using death to spark life back into a crushed resistance to oppression.
He must have figured that should he die, opposition to Putin wouldn’t die with him—it might even prosper.
When Navalny was arrested upon his return to Moscow in 2021, Russians came out into the streets by the hundreds of thousands to protest—despite brutal police violence and mass arrests. It took the invasion of Ukraine for Putin to completely suppress public opposition to his rule. And yet, when the first Russian troops swarmed across the border, Navalny somehow managed to protest the invasion from prison, via Twitter.
Soon after Navalny’s death was announced, one of our young writers in Moscow, Katya V., sent us this update: “It’s been just three hours, but, as the evening draws in, people in Moscow are already gathering for mourning. Police sirens are screaming, because some of the most desperate protesters want to meet in the streets. My friend is going there, I’m preparing to help her with necessary things if she’s detained. ”
Navalny was admired in the West, but uneasily, since he was a Russian nationalist who didn’t talk a lot about democracy or pluralism. Mostly he focused on the systemic corrosion inside the Russian government. And his speeches and video exposés made sense: Russians had already had an unsavory and disappointing experiment with democracy under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, but the criminality that flourished under the so-called free market only became more organized and entrenched under Putin’s reign of terror.
Corruption, and we are talking about all forms of it—taking building-inspection bribes, giving away state-owned industries to loyal oligarchs, arresting opponents on trumped-up charges, and assassinating enemies, including politicians and journalists—has kept Putin in power for a quarter of a century.
Fighting corruption—and a regime based on fear and favor—is what Navalny was willing to die for. He must have known that foreign sanctions, world opprobrium, and even a botched invasion of Ukraine wouldn’t be enough to topple Putin. He may have figured that real change would only come from within, and was willing to bet his life on it.
Alessandra Stanley is a Co-Editor at AIR MAIL and was a Moscow correspondent for The New York Times from 1994 to 1998