Update: The Passing of Alexei Navalny — The Best Of Russia Is Gone

Feb 16, 2024

Alexey Navalny has finally found freedom from his Siberian cell, which has literally turned into his tomb.

The prominent anti-Putin activist has died. He was held on trumped-up charges in the world’s most extreme condition of isolation and discomfort.

Navalny made his name as a campaigner against corruption, gathering millions of views for his video investigations. Principles have been the driving force of Navalny’s life. He headed Russia’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, and become a pain for Putin through his street protests and exposés of government corruption.

To Putin his work had become dangerously effective. He helped unseat the president’s allies in local elections in several elections. In 2021, 200,000 Russians across 125 cities and towns — many with no history of protesting — openly defied Putin’s government.

**Russian protesters brave freezing weather in 2021 to call for Navalny’s release.**

Despite being excluded from the vote by Putin’s electoral police, Navalny’s party took one-third of the vote in Moscow in 2019.

All of Putin’s Moscow candidates had to rebrand themselves as independents in order to distance themselves from their own party’s unpopularity and thereby increase the odds of getting elected.

Putin’s effort to disqualify Navalny candidates triggered the largest protest movement in Russia since the “Snow Revolution” of 2011–13 — a time of sustained protests against election fraud by young urban professionals, the well-educated and the successful working class. An indicator of the public’s lack of support for Putin’s government is that the voter turn-out was 22%.

Then the Kremlin got serious, and reached in the drawer for its standard solution: poison. More than 50 Russian officials have been poisoned or — second best — jumped out of their apartment windows…

Just one day before he died, he appeared in a video-link with the court, joking and in good spirits.

He teased the judge during the video call: “Your Honor, I’m waiting — I will send you my personal account number, so that you can use your huge federal judge’s salary to fuel my personal account,” he laughed. “Because I am running out of money, and thanks to your decisions, it will run out even faster, please send me something. And you guys in the detention centers pitch in as well.”

Shortly thereafter the Russian prison announced his death. It said only that he had “felt unwell” after a walk and lost consciousness. It said that a medical team failed to resuscitate him. “Emergency doctors confirmed the death of the convict,” it added.

Navalny was 47.

This is not the first time that Putin’s murderers have poisoned the activist.

In 2020. Navalny was poisoned with novichok, a Soviet-made nerve agent. He collapsed after drinking a cup of tea at a Siberian airport. He was flown to Germany for treatment. After several days of analysis the involvement of a novichok agent was confirmed.

Novichok causes nausea, trouble breathing, and seizures; without medical intervention, victims can slip into a coma.

Detective work by the investigative group Bellingcat point to long-running Federal Security Service (FSB) shadowing of Navalny — despite the official denials. And Bellingcat named agents it suspected of poisoning him.

Novichok is a weapon of choice for the Russian dictator. It does not always go as planned, because the Russian FSD is as incompetent as the rest of the Russian bureaucracy. They tried to kill Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy, in the UK in 2018. The two Russian intelligence officers left a trail of evidence. Skripal’s daughter Yulia fell ill as well but they survived. Sadly, a bystander who later came across a perfume bottle containing the substance died.

Navalny was a pain to Putin because he accuses the dictator’s party of being full of “crooks and thieves”. He has accused the president of “sucking the blood out of Russia” through a “feudal state” concentrating power in the Kremlin. He described himself as a political prisoner, and his supporters cast him as a Russian version of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela who will one day be freed from jail to lead the country.

In a typically generous gesture, one of Navalny’s last social media post was a call-out for another prisoner; he asked the authorities in Georgia to release the former president Mikheil Saakashvili for medical treatment.

**The agents who poisoned Navalny in 2020 reported directly to Putin.**

Navalny was being held in the northern IK-3 penal colony in Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets region, about 1,900km (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow…i.e. Siberia. Its coalmines were part of the Soviet gulag camp system. The “Polar Wolf” colony where he is being kept is among the harshest in Russia’s prison system, located in a place with severe winters.

Navalny said the temperature of his prison yard walks had “never been colder” than -32 degrees Celsius (-25 degrees Fahrenheit), adding that “even at that temperature you can walk for more than half an hour, but only if you have time to grow a new nose, ears, and fingers”.

The especially severe punishment cells are called SCHIZO.

Navalny, who was serving combined sentences of 19 years for fraud and contempt of court, said via Twitter on Tuesday that he had been moved back into solitary confinement and forced to endure “extremely hellish” conditions. Putin had sentenced him to 19 years for “extremism;” Putin has no known sense of irony.

Navalny suffered similar stomach pains in January after being treated with antibiotics for a virus and had again lost a lot of weight.

Many of Putin’s enemies suffered weight loss…

His team recently launched a campaign to persuade Russians to vote for anyone but Putin in the upcoming elections as a means of resistance against his rule and the war in Ukraine.

Putin has no moral substance with which to push back. He has no contact with the hearts of his people. When Prigozhin drove north against Putin, there were no uprisings to stop him; on the contrary, citizens came out to be photographed with him.

If Putin had disappeared permanently that day, no one would have mourned. In fact, it would have been a day of celebration.

Navalny embodies everything that Putin lacks: courage, charisma and an understanding of the personal qualities that make up the fibre of a nation’s future.

Here is his view of Putin’s war: “[Russia is] floundering in a pool of either mud or blood, with broken bones, with a poor and robbed population, and around it lie tens of thousands of people killed in the most stupid and senseless war of the 21st century.”

Today, ironically, the number of Russian casualties hit a benchmark of 400,000. By the end of the year, that number will hit 500,000.

They did not die for Russia.

They died for Putin. Putin’s demented dreams.

Navalny is the Other Russia — the hero who reminds us that it is not the Russians who are evil, it is the one man who leads them.

What a world of difference we would have, if Navalny had survived.

That, of course, is why he had to die.

As he approaches within weeks of his “election”, Putin cannot tolerate a person of principle even remotely capable of offering resistance.

I have no faith in the state-sponsored polls about the attitudes of average Russians. They have demonstrated in their riots and protests where they want their country to go: to democracy and self-expression. If they could really vote, Putin’s name on the ballot would be a waste of ink.

Russian opposition figures have accused President Vladimir Putin of killing Alexei Navalny, saying that even if the politician died of natural causes as the authorities say, this is the direct result of his imprisonment and previous poisoning attack. The international community is calling for an investigation into his death.

One prominent Russian stated earlier that “if they fail to kill him in jail again, he will become the leader of Russia.”

And that was the problem. And we know how Putin deals with these problems.

Alexei Navalny’s wife was in the audience at a Munich security conference when she heard the news about her husband.

Yulia Navalnaya said she went to the conference because it’s what her husband would have done.

“And I would like to call upon all the international community, all the people in the world, we should come together and we should fight against this evil,” she said. “We should fight this horrific regime in Russia today.”

Navalnaya received a standing ovation.

As perhaps her husband will receive one day in Russia, when new statues are unveiled and new heroes celebrated.

He was a courageous man, cold in a cell in the Siberian winter.