Aleksey Navalny

Aleksey Navalny (born June 4, 1976, Butyn, Russia—died February 16, 2024, Yamalo-Nenets region, northwestern Siberia, Russia) was a Russian lawyer, anti-corruption activist, and politician who achieved international recognition as one of the most prominent domestic critics of Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin (1999–2008, 2012– ). Navalny, who suffered a near-fatal poisoning in 2020, was jailed on several occasions, and in February 2024 Russian officials reported that he had died while in an Arctic prison.

Early life and education

Navalny’s father was a Soviet army officer, and his mother was an economist. Navalny grew up at a variety of garrison towns in the Moscow area, but he spent summers with his paternal grandmother in the countryside near Chernobyl, Ukraine. After the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in April 1986, Navalny’s paternal relatives were evacuated from the area, but not before they had observed the attempted cover-up of the disaster by the Soviet government. Local residents were forced to plant potatoes in irradiated soil as part of an effort by Soviet authorities to minimize the apparent danger from radiation exposure.

Navalny attended the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia in Moscow, and he graduated with a law degree in 1998. He remained in Moscow to practice law and to continue his studies, and in 2001 he earned an economics degree from the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation. In 2000, while he was still a student, Navalny joined Yabloko, a political party that promoted liberal democracy and a market economy. In the early days of Putin’s reign, it seemed that opposition groups might hold some sway in the State Duma, but the unification of pro-Putin parties under the banner of United Russia in 2001 would stifle much dissent. Navalny rose to a position of local leadership in Yabloko, but he was expelled from the party in 2007. Representatives for Yabloko claimed that Navalny had damaged the party with “nationalistic activities,” including attendance of a far-right march, but Navalny asserted that he had been driven out over personality clashes with party leader Grigory Yavlinsky.

Activism and opposition to Putin

In 2008 Navalny began a stakeholder activism campaign that targeted publicly traded state-owned entities. By purchasing a small amount of stock in each company, Navalny gained entrée into shareholder meetings. Once there, he grilled corporate officers about inconsistencies in financial reporting and a lack of transparency in management and bookkeeping. As many of the executives were close political allies of Putin, these encounters provided an effective means of expressing dissent in a society where political dialog was becoming increasingly restricted. Navalny documented his efforts in a blog that became so popular that Russian Pres. Dmitry Medvedev (2008–12)—who took office as part of a power-sharing agreement with a term-limited Putin—was forced to acknowledge the scale of corruption. According to Medvedev himself, a trillion rubles (about $31 billion) was being embezzled annually from the state procurement system.

In December 2010 Navalny launched the whistleblowing website RosPil (a Russian abbreviation for “Russian Saw”—saw being slang for “to embezzle,” as in to saw off a piece of a contract). The site publicized cases in which state contracts appeared to have been awarded corruptly. Navalny invited visitors to anonymously post details of suspicious government deals and discuss the allegations online. Within six months the site was reportedly getting one million visits a month. When Navalny went on to coin the term party of crooks and thieves to describe Putin’s United Russia party, it quickly became the catchphrase of Russian protests.

Widespread irregularities in Russian parliamentary elections in December 2011 triggered the largest popular demonstrations since the fall of the Soviet Union. Navalny had exhorted his followers to support any party other than United Russia, and, in spite of ample evidence of vote rigging, Putin’s party won less than half the vote. Navalny was jailed for 15 days for participating in an unsanctioned protest; it would not be his last encounter with the Russian prison system. Navalny’s rise to prominence did not go unnoticed in the Kremlin, and, when Putin returned to the presidency in 2012, he immediately moved to clamp down on dissent. In June, barely a month after the end of the Medvedev interregnum, Navalny was one of several opposition figures whose homes were raided by law enforcement officers. Navalny was targeted with a criminal investigation on suspicion of corruption, and Putin enacted harsh new penalties for individuals who participated in unauthorized rallies.

On July 17, 2013, Navalny declared his candidacy in the Moscow mayoral race. The following day, he was found guilty of embezzlement in a trial that was widely regarded as having been politically motivated, and he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. Thousands of protesters promptly filled the streets of Moscow, and the following day he was unexpectedly freed pending the hearing of his appeal. His release enabled him to pursue his mayoral bid. Navalny ran a strong Western-style campaign, holding informal meetings with voters on the streets, promoting himself on the Internet, and posting glossy posters of himself with his family. In part, he was forced to canvass in this way because he was refused access to the main television channels, but the result was a legitimately grassroots campaign. On September 8, 2013, the incumbent, Putin ally Sergey Sobyanin, won reelection with slightly more than 51.3 percent of the votes, while Navalny finished second with an unexpectedly high 27.2 percent.

Although an appeals court in October of that year upheld Navalny’s conviction for embezzlement, in another surprise move the court suspended his prison sentence, allowing him to walk free. The criminal conviction barred him from running for elected office in the immediate future but did not prevent him from engaging in other political activities. In this respect the outcome fit the new policy, masterminded by Putin’s aide Vyacheslav Volodin, of “competition without change.” That is, the liberal opposition would be allowed limited access to the political system as long as they accepted the existing rules of the political game.

Navalny’s activism and his attempts to participate in the Russian political system would continue, and his incarceration by the Putin administration would become a recurring event. In December 2014 Navalny received a three-and-a-half-year suspended sentence on fraud charges; his brother, Oleg, was imprisoned for three and a half years for the same offense. Navalny’s unexpectedly strong performance in the 2013 Moscow mayoral election served as an impetus for Putin’s implementation of “managed democracy,” a system whereby the basic structures and procedures of democracy were maintained but the outcomes of elections were largely predetermined. In the November 2016 legislative election, United Russia claimed victory, but election observers again documented numerous irregularities, including instances of ballot stuffing and repeat voting. Navalny’s Progress Party was barred from contesting the election after the Russian justice ministry canceled its registration.

In an effort to stoke his domestic popularity, Putin scheduled the 2018 presidential election on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s illegal annexation of the Ukrainian autonomous republic of Crimea. Election officials had ruled that Navalny could not challenge Putin for the presidency due to his suspended prison sentence; Navalny responded by calling for a boycott of the election. Unsurprisingly, Putin claimed an overwhelming majority of the vote in an election that was characterized by independent monitoring agency Golos as being rife with irregularities.

Poisoning, imprisonment, and death

In 2020 Navalny was campaigning in Siberia ahead of regional elections that were scheduled for September of that year. On August 20, 2020, he became seriously ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow, and tests later confirmed that he had been exposed to a novichok, a complex nerve agent that was developed by the Soviets. Fearing for his safety in a Russian hospital, Navalny’s family had him flown to Berlin, where he remained in a medically induced coma to recover. The following month opposition candidates performed surprisingly well in local elections held in the area where Navalny had been campaigning. The Kremlin denied involvement in the poisoning, but such protestations had become increasingly implausible, as the attack on Navalny represented only one in a long series of assassination attempts against Putin’s critics. Putin, for his part, refused to say Navalny’s name in public.

While recovering in a German clinic, Navalny worked with Christo Grozev of the investigative journalism group Bellingcat to uncover the specifics of the novichok attack. Grozev and his team had unmasked several of the Federal Security Service (FSB) agents who were involved in the poisoning, and Navalny called one of the men whom Grozev had identified. Posing as the aide of a senior Russian security official, Navalny and the agent had a lengthy conversation about the details of the assassination attempt. The agent claimed that “it would have all gone differently” if not for the plane’s emergency landing in Omsk and the hasty intervention of emergency medical personnel. The publication of the call was an embarrassment for Putin, and the FSB claimed that it was fake.

On January 17, 2021, Navalny returned to Russia, and he was immediately arrested by security services. Within weeks, he was sentenced to three and a half years in a penal colony. Russian prison officials claimed that Navalny had failed to report to them during his hospitalization in Germany, and this constituted a violation of the terms of his 2014 suspended sentence. While in prison, on March 31, Navalny announced the beginning of a hunger strike that lasted three weeks. His followers took to the streets in a wave of protests, and Navalny maintained his robust social media presence from behind bars. With legislative elections scheduled for the fall, Russian authorities took additional steps to restrict Navalny’s political reach. In June 2021 a Moscow court ruled that any group tied to Navalny would be labeled an “extremist” organization and its members would be barred from seeking office. Just days before the September election, the Russian government forced Apple and Google to remove a “smart voting” app developed by Navalny’s allies from their online stores. Russian officials had threatened to imprison specific local employees of the two companies, and a Navalny aide called the decision a “shameful act of political censorship.”

In March 2022, one month into Russia’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine, Navalny was found guilty of new charges of fraud and contempt of court. He was sentenced to nine years in a “strict regime penal colony.” An emaciated Navalny was not allowed to speak in court, so he took to Twitter to reaffirm his mission to “bring the truth to the people of Russia.” Navalny was sent to the notorious IK-6 maximum-security prison in Melekhovo, roughly 150 miles (240 km) east of Moscow, where he spent much of his time in solitary confinement. He called upon his followers to demonstrate against Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, but the government response to protests reached draconian levels as the war ground on. Criticism of Russia’s performance in the war was criminalized, and some men arrested at protests were served with draft papers while in police custody. In December 2023 Navalny’s attorneys lost contact with him for nearly three weeks, before learning that Russian authorities had relocated him to a penal colony in the Arctic Circle. Less than two months later, he died while in custody there.

Navalny’s poisoning, his recovery, and Grozev and Bellingcat’s investigation were the subject of the documentary Navalny (2022). The film won an Academy Award and a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award for best documentary.