The Martyrdom of Aleksei Navalny

The slow murder of Navalny, and the strangling of hope in Russia

It is a day that many of us who closely watch Russian politics dreaded was likely coming sooner or later, though that does nothing to lessen the shock and pain of seeing Russia’s preeminent political dissident dead at 47, slowly tortured to death by the Kremlin, eventually succumbing in a remote arctic penal colony for daring to defy Vladimir Putin. 

The demise of Aleksei Navalny, a lawyer turned pro-democracy and antiwar activist and the Kremlin’s longtime bête noire, comes only a month before Russia’s rubberstamp elections will presumably seal Putin into power until 2036, effectively for life, based on a recent law Russia passed. Thus, it’s a dark day for those of us who hope to see an end to Vladimir Putin’s regime, and of course his criminal war in Ukraine. 

However, in his efforts to smother his domestic opposition, and protect the fruits of his ravenous wartime kleptocracy, Putin may have turned his longtime nemesis into a political martyr, providing a lightning rod around which Russians opposed to aggressive war and totalitarianism can rally. Russian cities are already boiling, as the Russian people begin to digest the assassination of Aleksei Navalny, and the implications of his death for their troubled country. 

From Washington, President Biden was unequivocal about who was to blame: “Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death.” Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, made an impromptu appearance at the Munich Security Conference, shortly after receiving news from Russia’s prison authorities that her husband had collapsed after a walk, and never got back up. She promised that justice was coming for the criminals in the Kremlin, and her words were poignant:

“I want Putin and everyone around him, Putin’s friends, his government, to know that they will bear responsibility for what they have done to our country, to my family and to my husband. And this day will come very soon.” She called on the world to “come together to defeat this evil, defeat this horrible regime that is now in Russia.”

Meanwhile, Russia’s already witnessing the beginning of a severe new wave of political repression, as Russia’s security services crack down hard, arresting hundreds of protesters and brutally shutting down the vigils and memorials popping up around the country for the late Navalny. However, as in the past, he likely won’t be that easy to silence, nor will the ideas that he represents: freedom from tyranny, democracy, and peace. Those aspirations are universal. If nothing else, Navalny’s martyrdom should remind a country riven by pervasive apathy and moral rot that something better is not only possible, but worth fighting for. 

Certainly, that would have been his dying wish.

Slow-motion murder

Navalny’s death, reported Thursday by the Kremlin, was merely the end result of a long process that began in 2017 when an assailant threw a toxic green chemical into his face, causing him to lose 80% of his vision in one eye. After that, Navalny was tested like the biblical Job. He survived numerous arrests and imprisonments, and multiple poisonings, culminating in an elaborate effort by FSB agents on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow, where he was poisoned with a Soviet-era military-grade Novichok nerve agent placed into his underwear. 

Incredibly, he later convinced a particularly dimwitted FSB agent involved in the plot, over the phone, that he was a senior FSB official, and he got him to openly discuss the failed hit on a recorded line. 

In any case, he survived that assassination attempt. 

His flight was quickly diverted to a hospital, and after a global outcry, Navalny was allowed to decamp for care in Germany, where he improbably made something close to a full recovery. He was celebrated globally for challenging Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship at such enormous personal risk, releasing scathing videos on YouTube cataloguing the endemic corruption and graft at the heart of Putin’s system. Perhaps his most famous being the one about Putin’s billion-dollar Black Sea Palace, which has received more than 100 million views and counting.

After spending a brief period recovering in Germany, and participating in a widely hailed CNN documentary, Navalny chose to return to Russia, refusing to stay in exile, and issuing a direct challenge to the Kremlin. It was almost certain he would be arrested, and the move was seen as equal parts foolhardy and courageous. Immediately upon landing at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow, he was taken into custody. 

He never saw freedom again.

Trials and tribulations

In a courtroom saga widely derided as blatantly politically motivated and without any legal basis whatsoever, Navalny was pelted with an endless stream of indictments, for embezzlement, for “extremism,” for breaking the terms of his probation (this was for leaving the country after his poisoning). He received numerous sentences totaling decades, until it became clear he would never get out of prison while Vladimir Putin was in power in Russia.

Meanwhile, the conditions of his incarceration began horrifically, and became increasingly brutal over time. He was denied medical care, thrown arbitrarily into ShIzo solitary confinement for weeks at a time, and denied visits and phone calls with his family. It’s been suggested that he was perhaps slowly poisoned, something that would be entirely expected from the Kremlin. He complained of a raft of strange and progressively worsening health complaints, in a prison riven with tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. 

At one point, prison authorities placed a man with a severe respiratory illness into his small cell, and then gave Navalny massive doses of contraindicated antibiotics when he was infected. Authorities also placed a man with severe mental illness across from him, as a form of torment. 

He was subjected to constant sleep deprivation, injected with unknown drugs, abused by guards and inmates, and experienced every other horrific indignity on offer in the Russian penal system. Still, he managed to communicate regularly with the outside world, through his lawyers and by passing secret messages, and he also managed to keep his dark sense of humor about his own grim situation. He kept his popular social media accounts online and humming, to the chagrin of the Kremlin. His team continued to release videos documenting Russian corruption through his exiled political group, the Anti-Corruption Foundation now based in Vilnius, Lithuania.

In December, he suddenly vanished, and his lawyers were totally unable to find him in Russia’s sprawling prison system. Three weeks later, he was finally located in a grim and extremely remote facility even by the standards of the Russian carceral system, a foreboding Soviet-era “special regime” penal colony above the Arctic Circle called Kharp / Polar Wolf. 

This was to be his final prison. 

Ultimately, three years in Vladimir Putin’s most ominous and destructive dungeons cost the opposition leader his life. He spent his time being tormented, singled out by the regime for extraordinarily brutal treatment in what is already perhaps the world’s cruelest prison system. He spent a third of his time, 308 days, in cold, dark, and damp punishment cells. Very few could have survived his ordeal as long as he did, mentally or physically. 

As for Russia, Navalny’s death merely means the cage just got a little tougher, the walls a bit thicker, in the giant national prison Vladimir Putin has constructed atop the country. Residual hopes for democracy, and an eventual end to Russia’s murderous invasion of Ukraine have both died a little, too, then.

Still, hope is hard to kill, as Navalny amply demonstrated. As he himself once asked: “Why should I be afraid?”