Alexei Navalny, whose death was announced this Friday by Russia’s prison service, was the fiercest internal opponent of Vladimir Putin, whom he accused of trying to kill him and keeping him imprisoned on false charges. He was 47 years old.
The Kremlin rejects the allegations and has branded Navalny a puppet of the West and a common criminal guilty of the charges on which he was convicted – fraud, contempt of court and extremism. The prison where he was held said it was investigating his death.
Considered a personal political prisoner of the Kremlin by many Western governments, supporters say the opposition politician has been systematically persecuted for defying Putin, Russia’s supreme leader for more than two decades.
A former lawyer, Navalny was barred from running for president in 2018, made detailed allegations of corruption against the Russian elite and accused President Putin and his allies of being autocrats who led Russia into a disastrous war in Ukraine.
The Kremlin suggested that Navalny was a CIA puppet and troublemaker who sought to overthrow authorities and turn Moscow into a vassal state of the United States. Putin never mentioned him by name.
Navalny and his followers – many of whom are under 30 – were outlawed as extremists after holding noisy anti-government protests that were forcefully dispersed and encouraging tactical voting to try to oust pro-Kremlin candidates.
In the West, many people saw him as a courageous and charismatic opposition politician, ready to risk everything for a country he said he believed could one day become free and happy.
In Russia, his movement numbered around 700,000 people, but state media did not mention him for many years and public opinion was divided.
He used YouTube to urge young voters to put their faith in what he called the “beautiful Russia of the future,” but found it harder to connect with people outside big cities.
Married with two children, Navalny survived what Western doctors said was an attempted nerve agent poisoning in 2020 aboard a plane in Siberia.
He later called one of the men who he said had tried to poison him by posing as someone else, and was told that state security agents had put poison in his underwear.
At the time, he said of Putin: “No matter how much he pretends to be a great geopolitician, he will go down in history as a poisoner. There was Alexander the Liberator, Yaroslav the Wise, and Putin the Underpants Poisoner.”
Putin denied that the Russian state tried to kill Navalny, saying he would have “finished the job” if it really wanted to eliminate him.
Navalny’s allies said he was planning to formulate a political platform and create a group of people ready to govern when the Putin era ends. He urged his followers to go to the polls to vote in Russia’s presidential election next month at noon to express their opposition to Putin, whose victory is widely expected.
He was physically attacked inside Russia by pro-Kremlin activists several times and was nearly blinded in one attack.
Before he was arrested in 2021, Navalny said he and his family were followed everywhere by Russia’s intelligence services. In an interview with Reuters in 2017, he ignored the risks.
“The security services are following us. They follow my children, my wife (Yulia) and me. Cars are always passing by. I don’t even pay attention to it anymore, but Yulia is really bothered.”
“Russia is my country”
The son of an army officer, Alexei Anatolievich Navalny was born on June 4, 1976, and grew up predominantly in Obninsk, about 100 km southwest of Moscow.
He graduated in law and finance and spent time in the United States on a scholarship to Yale, which was seized upon by pro-Kremlin critics to suggest he was a foreign agent, an accusation he and his allies rejected.
When protests erupted in Moscow following what critics said was a fraudulent election victory by the ruling United Russia party in December 2011, Navalny gained international prominence with his fiery speeches and was one of the first people arrested.
Internet-savvy and often dressed casually in jeans, he contrasts sharply with the conservative image of Putin, a former KGB officer, whom he accused of “sucking the blood of Russia.”
His description of the ruling party as “thieves” resonated with followers and he was detained several times in the following years. In 2013, he was sentenced to a five-year sentence on corruption charges before being released the next day.
Later that year, he ran for mayor of Moscow, losing to a Kremlin-backed candidate but obtaining 27% of the vote, a result his supporters considered impressive given the lack of state media coverage.
His group used drones to film the luxurious homes of officials whose wealth was being scrutinized. He was sued several times. A video claiming that Putin is the ultimate owner of an opulent palace, something the president denies, has been viewed more than 128 million times.
Navalny returned to Russia in 2021 after being treated in Germany for poisoning, knowing he faced certain arrest.
“It was never a question of whether to return or not. Simply because I never left. I ended up in Germany after arriving in intensive care for one reason: they tried to kill me,” Navalny wrote before his return.
“Russia is my country, Moscow is my city and I miss it.”
In August 2023, Navalny was sentenced to an additional 19 years in prison on top of the 11 and a half years he had already served in a criminal case that he said was designed to intimidate the Russian people into political submission.
The charges related to participation in his then-defunct movement inside Russia, which authorities accused of trying to foment a revolution.
“I understand perfectly well that, like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence,” he said at the time. “Where the life sentence is measured by the length of my life or the length of the life of this regime.”
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