 "Alexei Navalny dead at 47: Remembering Putin critic who remained defiant to the end")
Alexei Navalny is dead. The prison service of the Yamalo-Nenets region where the 47-year-old Russian Opposition leader was serving his sentence said he “felt unwell” after a walk “almost immediately lost consciousness.” The service said medical staff were not able to resuscitate Navalny and the cause of death was being determined. His spokesperson said that while the prison service was reporting Navalny’s death, they had not confirmed it independently. They said his lawyer was flying out and that any information would be reported as soon as possible. Shortly after Navalny’s death was reported, the Russian SOTA social media channel shared images of the opposition politician reportedly in court `day.
This video of Alexei Navalny is from yesterday.
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) February 16, 2024
He had a court appearance which he attended from the Arctic penal colony he was being held in. https://t.co/4QvJMWHZTw pic.twitter.com/3UdxZcDBfT
In the footage, Navalny is seen standing up and is laughing and joking with the judge via video link. But who was Navalny? How did he take on Putin? Let’s take a closer look: Early years Navalny was arguably Russia’s the most high-profile Opposition politician. According to BBC, Navalny was born on 4 June, 1976 in Butyn. The village is around 40 kilometers outside Moscow. He was raised in Obninsk, which is 100 kilometres south-west of Moscow. According to Time Magazine, his father was a Soviet officer and his mother was an economist. “We lived well,” she told a Russian magazine.
“That is, we were poor. Like everybody else.”
In 1998, Navalny received a law degree from People’s Friendship University. He then spent a student year in the US as a Yale World Fellow in 2010. He participated in Russian nationalist marches in the 2000s. According to T_ime Magazine_, Navalny first joined politics as part of the liberal Yabloko party. In 2007, calls for restrictions on immigration and criticism over what some viewed as his overly nationalist views prompted his expulsion from the party. Gaining fame According to CNN, Navalny first became famous in 2008 as a blogger. Navalny focussed on corruption in Russia’s murky mix of politicians and businesses; one of his early moves was to buy a stake in Russian oil and gas companies to become an activist shareholder and push for transparency. He lampooned President Vladimir Putin’s elite and exposed some of the opulence of the lifestyles of senior officials, using the internet and even drones to illustrate what he said was their vast holdings and luxury property. [caption id=“attachment_13736252” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Alexi Navalny developed a reputation as a firebrand speaker. AP[/caption] By 2011, he had emerged as one of the leaders of the massive protests that had broken out after allegations of fraud in parliamentary elections.
He also gained a reputation as a firebrand.
“Those who have gathered here can kick these thieved ass***** out of the Kremlin tomorrow,” Navalny said at protest that year, as per sa. “I’ll chew through the throats of those animals,” he said at another rally as per Time Magazine. By concentrating on corruption, Navalny’s work had a pocketbook appeal to Russians’ widespread sense of being cheated, and he carried stronger resonance than more abstract and philosophical concerns about democratic ideals and human rights. “Corruption is the foundation of contemporary Russia, it is the foundation of Mr Putin’s political power,” Navalny said in 2011. “Once the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy described the structure of power in Russia: ’the villains who robbed their own people got together, recruited soldiers and judges to guard their orgy, and now they’re having a feast’. This brilliant phrase precisely describes what is happing in our country,” Navalny said. Why should I be afraid?" he said in 2011 when asked about the dangers of challenging the Kremlin. When asked by Reuters about his ambition, he winced but his eyes twinkled: “I would like to be president, but there are no elections in Russia.” He was convicted in 2013 of embezzlement on what he called a politically motivated prosecution and was sentenced to five years in prison, but the prosecutor’s office later surprisingly demanded his release pending appeal. A higher court later gave him a suspended sentence. The day before the sentence, Navalny had registered as a candidate for Moscow mayor. The Opposition saw his release as the result of large protests in the capital of his sentence, but many observers attributed it to a desire by authorities to add a tinge of legitimacy to the mayoral election. Navalny finished second, an impressive performance against the incumbent who had the backing of Putin’s political machine and was popular for improving the capital’s infrastructure and aesthetics. Taking on Putin directly Navalny’s popularity increased after the leading charismatic politician, Boris Nemtsov, was shot and killed in 2015 on a bridge near the Kremlin. Whenever Putin spoke about Navalny, he made it a point to never mention the activist by name, referring to him as “that person” or similar wording, in an apparent effort to diminish his importance. Even in Opposition circles, Navalny was often viewed as having an overly nationalist streak for supporting the rights of ethnic Russians — he supported the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Moscow in 2014 although most nations viewed it as illegal — but he was able to mostly override those reservations with the power of investigations conducted by his Fund for Fighting Corruption. Although state-controlled TV channels ignored Navalny, his investigations resonated with younger Russians via YouTube videos and posts on his website and social media accounts. The strategy helped him reach into the hinterlands far from the political and cultural centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg and establish a strong network of regional offices. His work broadened from focusing on corruption to wholescale criticism of the political system under Putin, who has led Russia for over two decades. He was a central galvanising figure in protests of unprecedented size against dubious national election results and the exclusion of independent candidates. Navalny understood that he could get attention with a pithy phrase and potent image. His description of Putin’s power-base United Russia as “the party of crooks and thieves” gained instant popularity; a lengthy investigation into then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s lavish country getaway boiled down to the complex’s well-appointed duck house. [caption id=“attachment_13563222” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Russian President Vladimir Putin. AFP File[/caption] Soon, comical yellow duck toys became a popular way to mock the premier. According to Time Magazine, Navalny attempted to run for president in 2016 but was barred from the ballot by authorities. He often tweeted sarcastic remarks from police custody or courtrooms on the many occasions he was arrested. In 2017, after an assailant threw green-hued disinfectant in his face, seriously damaging one of his eyes, Navalny joked in a video blog that people were comparing him to the comic-book character The Hulk. Much worse was to come. While serving a jail sentence in 2019 for involvement in an election protest, he was taken to the hospital with an illness that authorities said was an allergic reaction, but some doctors said it appeared to be poisoning. A year later, on 20 August, 2020, he became severely ill on a flight to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk, where he was organising opposition candidates. He collapsed in the aisle while returning from the bathroom, and the plane made an emergency landing in the city of Omsk, where he spent two days in a hospital while supporters begged doctors to allow him to be taken to Germany for treatment. Once in Germany, doctors determined he had been poisoned with a strain of Novichok – similar to the nerve agent that nearly killed former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England in 2018 and resulted in the death of another woman.
Navalny was in a medically induced coma for about two weeks.
As per Time Magazine, he at first could not recognise his family. The poison had affected his nervous system. Navalny then laboured to recover speech and movement for several more weeks. His first communication while recovering showed his defiant wit — an Instagram post saying that breathing on one’s own is “a remarkable process that is underestimated by many. Strongly recommended.” A joint media investigation said it had identified a team of assassins from Russia’s FSB security service. Putin dismissed the investigation as a smear, saying: “If someone had wanted to poison him, they would have finished him off.” Though the Kremlin vehemently rejected it was behind the poisoning, Navalny challenged the denial with an audacious move — essentially a deadly serious prank phone call. [caption id=“attachment_13492622” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Workers remove a banner from a billboard, which shows the word “Russia”, the message “Happy New Year” and a QR code that is a gateway to a website of jailed Russian opposition politician and Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s supporters, on the roadside in Moscow, Russia. Reuters[/caption] He released the recording of a call he said he made to an alleged member of a group of officers of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, who purportedly carried out the poisoning and then tried to cover it up. According to Time Magazine, the purported assassin on the call said agents had crept into Navalny’s hotel room and placed the toxin on his underwear. The FSB dismissed the recording as fake. Russian authorities then raised the stakes, announcing that during his time in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of a suspended sentence in one of his embezzlement convictions and that he would be arrested if he returned home. Remaining abroad wasn’t in his nature. There were no discussions with my friends, no emotional talks with my wife,” Navalny told Time Magazine. From the moment I opened my eyes, I knew I had to return.” Navalny and his wife Yulia boarded a plane for Moscow on 17, January 2021. On arrival, he told waiting journalists that he was pleased to be back and walked to passport control and into custody. In just over two weeks, he was tried, convicted and sentenced to 2½ years in prison. “His main gripe with me is that he’ll go down in history as a poisoner,” Navalny said in court, according to BBC. “We had Alexander the Liberator, Yaroslav the Wise, and we will have Vladimir the Underpants Poisoner. The events sparked massive protests that reached to Russia’s farthest corners and saw more than 10,000 people detained by police. As part of a massive crackdown against the Opposition that followed, a Moscow court in 2021 outlawed Navalny’s Foundation for Fighting Corruption and about 40 regional offices as extremist, a verdict that exposed members of his team to prosecution. Opposition to Ukraine war When Putin sent troops to invade Ukraine on 24 February, 2022, Navalny strongly condemned the war in social media posts from prison and during his court appearances. “This is a stupid war which your Putin started,” Navalny told an appeal court in Moscow via video link from a corrective penal colony in 2022. “This war was built on lies.”
“One madman has got his claws into Ukraine and I do not know what he wants to do with it - this crazy thief.”
Impact Shorts
More ShortsAccording to BBC, Navalny also called for anti-war protests across the Russia as “the backbone of the movement against war and death.” He also penned a piece in the Washington Post accusing Russian elites of having a “bloodthirsty obsession with Ukraine.” Less than a month after the start of the war, he was sentenced to an additional nine-year term for embezzlement and contempt of court in a case he and his supporters rejected as fabricated. “Everything has a price, and now, in the spring of 2022, we must pay this price. There’s no one to do it for us. Let’s not ‘be against the war.’ Let’s fight against the war,” Time Magazine quoted Navalny as saying during the trial. The investigators immediately launched a new probe, and in August 2023 Navalny was convicted on charges of extremism and sentenced to 19 years in prison. Prior to the trial, Navalny predicted he would be given a “Stalinist” style sentence to frighten Putin critics, as per BBC. He nevertheless called on the common man to fight the “villains and thieves in the Kremlin”. After the trial, he remained sanguine about his situation. [caption id=“attachment_12761192” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Alexei Navalny was given a nine-year prison sentence for embezzlement and contempt of court. File image/AP[/caption] He said he understands that he’s “serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of life of this regime.” “If they decide to kill me then it means we are incredibly strong and we need to use that power and not give up,” he told CNN “We don’t realise how strong we actually are.”
The Kremlin had dismissed Navalny’s claims of vast corruption and Putin’s personal wealth. Russian officials claimed he was an extremist who is a puppet of the US’ CIA intelligence agency which they say is intent on trying to sow the seeds of revolution to weaken Russian and make it a client state of the West. Navalny was detained countless times for organising public rallies, and prosecuted repeatedly on charges including corruption, embezzlement and fraud. Navalny also expressed frustration with the West’s handling of Putin. Navalny told the BBC the West could help by tamping down on “dirty money”. “I want people involved in corruption and persecution of activists to be barred from entering these countries, to be denied visas.” “We’re all tired of rolling our eyes, watching the US impose sanctions on some colonels and generals, who don’t even have any money abroad,” he told Time Magazine. “You want to influence Putin, then influence his personal wealth. It’s right under your backside.” Goes missing, reappears Navalny in December 2023 went missing – prompting expressions of concern from his supporters and Western politicians.
Lawyers for Alexei @navalny say they've lost contact with him. He was was believed to be imprisoned in a penal colony, but his current whereabouts are unknown.
— Christiane Amanpour (@amanpour) December 11, 2023
In late 2020, I asked Navalny why he was about to return to Russia at great personal risk. Here's what he told me. pic.twitter.com/U4Q6UAE4cr
Then, on 26 December, 2023, he confirmed his arrival at what he described as a snow-swept prison above the Arctic Circle. His spokeswoman confirmed that he was at the IK-3 penal colony north of the Arctic Circle located in Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets region about 1,900 kilometres northeast of Moscow. “I am your new Father Frost,” Navalny wrote jokingly in his first post from his new prison, a reference to the harsh weather conditions there. “Well, I now have a sheepskin coat, an ushanka hat (a fur hat with ear-covering flaps), and soon I will get valenki (traditional Russian winter footwear). “The 20 days of the transfer were quite tiring, but I’m still in an excellent mood, as Father Frost should be.” The prison, known as “the Polar Wolf” colony, is considered to be one of the toughest prisons in Russia.
Most prisoners there have been convicted of grave crimes.
About 60 kilometre north of the Arctic Circle, the prison was founded in the 1960s as part of what was once the GULAG system of forced Soviet labour camps, according to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper. Kira Yarmysh, his spokeswoman, said she believes the decision to move him to such a remote and inhospitable location was designed to isolate him, make his life harder, and render it more difficult for his lawyers and allies to access him. [caption id=“attachment_13544472” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Navalny died at“the Polar Wolf” colony, considered to be one of the toughest prisons in Russia. Reuters.[/caption] In his social media post, he told supporters he was unfazed by what he was facing. “Anyway, don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I’m awfully glad I finally made it here,” said Navalny. It is here that Navalny died at age 47. ‘World has not forgotten your message’ A documentary called “Navalny” that detailed his career, his near-fatal poisoning and his return to Moscow won an Academy Award for best documentary in March 2023. “Alexei, the world has not forgotten your vital message to us all: We must not be afraid to oppose dictators and authoritarianism wherever it rears its head,” director David Roher said in accepting the Oscar. Navalny’s wife Yulia also spoke at the award ceremony, saying: “My husband is in prison just for telling the truth. My husband is in prison just for defending democracy. Alexei, I am dreaming of the day you will be free and our country will be free. Stay strong, my love.” Navalny and Yulia have a daughter, Darya, who is a student at Stanford University in the US, and a son, Zakhar, who is at school. With inputs from agencies
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