Navalny, the opponent who returned to Russia despite the threat from the Kremlin

Alexei Navalny was, until the Kremlin managed to silence him, the most frank, loquacious and well-known critic of Vladimir Putin outside of Russia.

The opponent, who had survived several attacks on his life, the last a very serious poisoning in the summer of 2020 in Siberia by the Russian secret services, has died at the age of 47 in a remote penal colony in Russia, according to the authorities. penitentiaries.

He was a charismatic figure dedicated to the fight against corruption who uncovered dozens of turbulent cases of the Russian elite and the Kremlin's orbit, first on his blog and then on his internet channels.

He returned to Moscow after spending a few months in Germany, where he recovered from the poison attack, knowing that he would be arrested, prosecuted and, as it happened, sent away from the public eye in a country governed by the security apparatus, headed by an autocrat and former KGB spy obsessed with history, embarked on a war of aggression against Ukraine and who for years has struck down all dissent.

In Putin's Russia, opponents are in exile, in prison or dead, often in suspicious circumstances.

The Russian authorities had been harassing Navalny since he was imprisoned.

The objective was to bury the dissident.

Ilya Yashin, his friend from the time of the Yabloko party - one of the few non-systemic opposition formations - explained that he never had a doubt that he was going to return to Russia, knowing the condemnation that awaited him in a country whose Government was involved in his poisoning and even accused him of collaborating with the CIA.

“Navalni never sought fame in the West.

He wants to live in Russia, he wants the best for his country and he knows that the only way to fight for it to be

normal

is to be here,” he explained to EL PAÍS in 2021, after the dissident's arrest.

“What he can achieve for Russia, even while behind bars, is more than from exile.

Navalni is a man of conviction and determination.

And even the current situation opens up political perspectives.

His main task must now be to survive.

If he does it, he will be president,” he concluded.

Navalny is dead and Yashin is in prison, in a strict regime, sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for his criticism of the invasion of Ukraine launched by the Kremlin.

Married for more than two decades to Yulia Navalnaya, with whom he has two children, the dissident carefully cultivated the image of an

average Russian

.

Tall, with blue eyes and a very characteristic deep voice, the opponent became one of the most serious problems for the Kremlin, although the party he founded – persecuted and outlawed – never managed to accumulate great popular support, but it was important in several regions. far from Moscow, in a very decentralized country.

“They want to lock me up because I didn't die,” he declared in one of his most well-known and widespread interventions on social networks, where he has accumulated millions of followers and in which his team—in exile—and his lawyers have continued to post opposition material since prison.

Navalny coined one of the best-known definitions of United Russia, the government party, chanted during the anti-corruption demonstrations that were still possible, although dangerous, before the war: a “party of bandits and swindlers,” he said.

Navalny and his supporters spoke of the “beautiful Russia of the future”, a Russia without Putin.

That Russia that he will not be able to see.

Alexei Navalny studied Law and Finance.

He worked in the real estate sector.

But he became relevant when, in 2007, he began to buy small blocks of shares in the main hydrocarbon companies or banks and to throw sharp questions at the companies.

From those uncomfortable questions and inquiries, a blog emerged in which he narrated alleged cases of corruption and negligence in state corporations.

The lawyer, who spent his childhood and youth in several cities near Moscow, where his parents had a family basket factory, became one of the leaders of the massive protests against electoral fraud in the parliamentary elections in 2011 and 2012. These mobilizations represented the greatest challenge to the Kremlin and Putin in a long time.

And the Russian authorities learned their lesson.

Everything that surrounded those mobilizations, which began in Moscow and spread throughout the main cities of Russia, not only consolidated Navalny's role as an agitator, but also put his work at the head of the Anti-Corruption Fund on the map.

The organization, which he had just founded with a young team, began a series of investigations into the dark and corrupt businesses of the Russian political and economic elite that began to emerge thanks to the expansion of the Internet.

His publications caused certain waves in the circles of power.

A long list of enemies was made, among them Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as Putin's chef and who was also head of the Wagner paramilitary organization, eliminated in the crash of his plane last August, two months after an attempted coup. military.

With a video almost like a cinematographic production, Navalni also exposed in a 113-minute documentary part of the supposed empire that Putin accumulates and that his figureheads treasure and in which a luxurious palace on the shores of the Black Sea was shown, with golden toilets, “swimming pools, -disco”, a casino area, a hookah room with a stage, a

pole dancing

bar and a theater.

This footage was released when the opponent was already in prison.

The Russian authorities arrested him directly at the Moscow Vnukovo airport after landing with his wife from Berlin, and in the midst of hundreds of journalists awaiting his arrival.

There was a search warrant for him for having skipped one of the mandatory parole visits and not going to sign in a case in which he was convicted of fraud (in 2014) and that the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights defined as politically motivated.

He did not come because he was recovering in Germany from the poisoning that almost cost him his life.

Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny took part in a demonstration in Moscow's Pushkin Square on March 5, 2012. Konstantin Zavrazhin (Getty Images)

Alexei Navalny with his wife, Yulia, during a hearing at the Lublinsky Court in Moscow, on April 23, 2015. Tatyana Makeyeva (REUTERS)

Alexei Navalny, in Moscow moments before visiting the Russian Central Electoral Commission, on December 25, 2017. Anadolu (Getty Images)

Russian opponent Alexei Navalny, with his wife, Yulia, and their children, Daria and Zakhar, after voting in 2019. Andrew Lubimov (AP)

Navalny was detained by police in the center of Moscow during a protest, on March 26, 2017. Evgeny Feldman (AP)

Alexéi Navalni, moments before a hearing at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (France), on November 15, 2018. PATRICK SEEGER (EFE)

Alexei Navalny attends a demonstration in support of independent candidates who were not authorized to participate in the Duma elections, on July 20 in Moscow.

Anadolu (Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Alexei Navalny participated in a march in memory of the Russian politician Boris Nemtsov, on February 24, 2019. Anadolu (Getty Images)

Alexei Navalny cast his vote at a polling station during the elections to the Moscow City Parliament, on September 8, 2019. Tatyana Makeyeva (REUTERS)

Navalny, upon leaving a detention center after having been imprisoned for 30 days for calling an unauthorized protest in Moscow, on August 23, 2019. Evgenia Novozhenina (REUTERS)

Alexei Navalny posed with his family during his admission to the Charite hospital in Berlin (Germany), on September 15, 2020. SOCIAL MEDIA (via REUTERS)

Alexei Navalny left a police station in handcuffs on the outskirts of Moscow, on January 18, 2021. SERGEI ILNITSKY (EFE)

Alexei Navalny appeared by videoconference before a Moscow district court, from a prison in the Vladimir region, on April 26, 2023.YULIA MOROZOVA (REUTERS)

The return to Russia and the arrest in 2021 gave him an aura of heroism that the Kremlin has insisted on erasing by silencing him and putting him in prison.

For Putin it became personal.

So much so that for years he acted as if he were invisible.

Later, when it was impossible to ignore, he did not mention him by name, but as "that person", the "blogger" or after he had to be transferred to Germany to receive treatment for the very serious poisoning suffered in Siberia, "the patient." of Berlin".

On August 20, 2020, when Navalny was returning by plane to Moscow from Tomsk, Siberia, where he had met with members of his party, he began to feel sick.

He collapsed in the bathroom of the aircraft, which had to make an emergency landing in Omsk.

The dissident was hospitalized.

His family and allies suspected from the first minute that he had been the victim of poisoning.

After more than 24 hours trying to obtain permission to transfer him out of the country, the opponent was sent on a medical plane to Berlin, thanks to the mediation of then-Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Navalny was in a coma for 19 days.

Analysis by German military laboratories detected that he had been attacked with Novichok, the same military neurotoxin that was used in 2018 against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal on British soil, in an attack after which British intelligence identified members of military security. Russian.

Laboratories in France, Sweden and the Organization for Chemical Weapons Control confirmed the finding, which led to more sanctions for Russia from the European Union after the conclusion that the poisoning could not have been carried out without the Kremlin's knowledge.

The Russian secret services had been following the opponent for years.

The dissident recovered, although he said he had to learn to walk again.

He required care for months.

In December 2020, just a few days after an investigation led by the investigative media

Bellingcat

identified the alleged agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB) who had participated in his poisoning, Navalny released a video in which he called by phone one of them posing as a senior official and extracted the alleged details of the attack.

Among them, if the plane had not made an emergency landing, he would have died.

The spy said that the poison was sprayed on his underwear.

The entire story is from a movie and is told in a documentary directed by Canadian Daniel Roher, who won an Oscar in 2023.

Before that serious poisoning, he almost lost his sight due to another attack.

The dissident had spoken many times about the possibility of being assassinated.

“I try not to think about it.

If you start thinking about what kind of risks there are, you can't do anything,” he commented in an interview with CBS News in 2017.

With the war machine in full gear for its invasion of Ukraine and with the reaper against dissent activated, the Eurasian giant is now heading for a vote in which Putin is expected to be re-elected without a rival.

Putin's Russia does not tolerate dissent.

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