Could David triumph over Goliath?
The face-to-face encounter was unequal.
The impetuous activist has long struggled with a president at the head of a machine obeying him at his fingertips.
Alexeï Navalny
probably ended up paying with his life.
The autopsies will say, or not, in what way.
By traveling to Russia in January 2021 after escaping a poisoning attempt, Navalny was heading into trouble.
The one who had become the first protester in Russia could not ignore this.
What motivated him?
Ambition, healthy anger, hatred?
To discover
TV tonight: our selection of the day
Three documentaries seek to answer this question.
Without quite unraveling its mystery, they trace the journey of a courageous and vehement activist struggling with a corrupt and authoritarian state apparatus.
That of Arte,
The Enemy of Putin
, had never been shown on screen.
Already visible on the channel's website, it will be broadcast on March 12 at 8:55 p.m. Its director, Igor Sadreev, a journalist now in exile, had been working on this portrait for years.
Read also Death of Navalny: the opponent's mother says she was able to see his body and accuses the Russian authorities of wanting to bury him "secretly"
Meetings and courts
This documentary gives voice to Navalny's companions or ex-companions in activism.
The voiceover describes their friend's childhood, between a believing mother and a military father.
Then the start of his engagement, in post-Soviet Russia.
In 1993, Boris Yeltsin began a standoff with Parliament, which refused his reforms.
Massive demonstrations are taking place in Moscow.
In the crowd, the young law student Navalny.
He will quickly be disabused by the appearance of democratic transformations.
His sense of protest and his dreams of freedom then come up against the rigidity of the new President Putin.
Driven by the desire to see a flawed system reformed, Alexeï Navalny is doing everything to get noticed.
He wants to hit hard.
The documentary avoids neither its xenophobic speeches nor its invectives against journalists.
The opponent will then go back and forth between the courts and meetings, until the campaign too many, in the eyes of the Kremlin: the 2018 presidential election.
“Foreign agent”
A political rise that is also effectively described in the French documentary
The Man Who Defies the Tsar
.
Available on the Public Senate website and produced in 2021, it multiplies the decryptions and questions the former correspondent of Libération or the diplomat and writer Vladimir Fédorovski.
We learn how Navalny is attached to his Orthodox faith.
An explanation of his strength of character?
This film also emphasizes the subversive effect of its multiple videos.
That of 2021 dedicated to the palace that Putin would own caused a wave of shock in the population.
“
The Russians are crazy about proof
,” notes Sergei Guriev, a Russian economist in exile.
Who adds:
“It is impossible to find a man in the president's entourage whom Navalny has not accused of corruption.
»
But in 2019, the opponent's foundation was described as a “foreign agent” by those in power, one of the multiple blows dealt to Navalny to silence him.
The hardest part, before his death, was the attempted poisoning of 2021. An episode recounted as closely as possible by
Navalny
, an Oscar-winning film available on the M6 platform for a subscription.
This film shot in the privacy of the activist shows how he fooled his killers by finding their names and calling them on their phone.
He then poses as an intelligence officer.
Trapped, one of the barbouzes gives details of the operation which almost proved fatal to Navalny.
History does not say what became of this interlocutor... Putin must have in any case moderately appreciated this hoax, close to humiliation.