“They have to arrest dozens, beat hundreds, and raid organizations.” Alexei Navalny said it to reporters in August 2019, on the day he walked out of a Moscow jail after serving 30 days for encouraging protests. “This regime will come to seriously regret what it has done,” he added.
Navalny died in prison on February 16, 2024, at 47, the regional branch of Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service said. He had been sent in December to IK-3, the harsh prison known as Polar Wolf in the settlement of Kharp, north of the Arctic Circle. The service said he felt unwell after a walk and then lost consciousness; an ambulance came but could not save him. His family and close associates confirmed the death on February 17 and demanded his body.
A phrase that stuck
His national profile dates to 2011. Viral blog posts exposing graft fed public anger ahead of that year’s parliamentary elections, and Navalny urged voters to cast ballots against the “party of crooks and thieves”, his label for the ruling United Russia party. The phrase entered the opposition’s vocabulary and stayed there.
Protests grew when Putin decided to seek a third presidential term in 2012. Tens of thousands of people attended rallies between the December 2011 vote, which was marred by widespread evidence of fraud, and Putin’s inauguration the following May.
In 2017, his foundation’s probe into the wealth of then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev drew tens of millions of views. It set off mass rallies across Russia that March. State media all but ignored Navalny, and RFE/RL noted that for many years Putin was unable or unwilling to say his name aloud.
Courts, cages and campaign offices
The authorities answered with cases. In 2013 a fraud trial ended in a five-year sentence, widely viewed as retaliation, but after protests it was suspended and Navalny went free. Analysts and allies said the Kremlin feared making him a martyr. A second suspended sentence followed in 2014. His brother Oleg, who took no part in politics, was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison that time. Navalny said it made the fight personal.
He tried to challenge Putin in the 2018 presidential election and set up campaign offices across the country, but his criminal convictions kept him off the ballot. The campaign teams became regional branches of his anti-corruption group. When opposition candidates were shut out of the 2019 Moscow city assembly vote, weeks of protest brought a sweeping clampdown and raids on his regional offices. He answered with Smart Voting, which pushed supporters to back whichever rival was most likely to beat a United Russia candidate.
Then came August 2020. Navalny collapsed on a flight from Tomsk, and the plane was diverted to Omsk. After two days of pleading by his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and his aides, he was moved to Berlin, where German experts found a Novichok-type nerve agent. He spent almost five months recovering and working on an investigation into a $1.36 billion Black Sea palace that he alleged belonged to Putin. It came out on January 17, 2021, the day he flew back to Moscow and was arrested at Sheremetyevo airport.
Sentences piled up. Two years and eight months in February 2021 for breaking parole. Nine years in March 2022 for contempt of court and corruption. In August 2023, 19 years in a “special-regime” prison, which he called “Stalinist”. His foundation was banned as “extremist” in June 2021, and more of his associates fled the country.
RFE/RL did not skip the harder parts of his record. His early anti-immigrant remarks, including YouTube videos comparing Central Asian labor migrants to tooth cavities and North Caucasus residents to cockroaches, followed him throughout his career, and some opposition groups kept their distance.
He never stopped insisting he was not afraid. “They jail one person to scare millions,” he said from the defendant’s cage in February 2021.
