Putin’s Murder of Alexey Navalny and Russians’ Hope of Being a “Normal Country”

About 14:30 Russian time on 16 February 2024, it was announced by the prison system that Alexey Navalny was dead. The details, if or when they emerge, are irrelevant. The Russian ruler, Vladimir Putin, having failed once already to murder Navalny, has now succeeded in murdering his most prominent domestic antagonist and the last serious Russian opposition leader in the country.

EARLY LIFE

Navalny was born in Moscow on 4 June 1976, when that city was still the cockpit of the Soviet Revolution, and largely raised in Obninsk, a town about sixty miles south-west of the capital. Of mixed Russian and Ukrainian parentage, Navalny spent significant time with grandparents down in Ukraine, then-a province of the Soviet Empire. Navalny worked as a lawyer in the 1990s and turned to politics around the turn of the millennium.

There are two separate words for “Russian” in Russian: “Rossiyanin”, the civic (or imperial) definition, referring to those who hold Russian citizenship, and “Russkiy”, ethnic Russians. Putin has always held to the former, a complication when it comes to the oft-heard accusation the Russian government is “fascist”.¹ Many of Putin’s most vociferous opponents in his first decade in power were Russkiy nationalists. The hard core among this set reject Putin’s nationalist claims, believing—as radical nationalists in Ukraine do—that Putin is a Jew and thus by definition a traitor. While the movement has been cut down to size by now, at that time it attracted people who were not fully signed-up to its ideology, but were looking for an effective way to oppose the regime.

In the 2000s, Navalny several times attended the “Russian March”, an annual protest event organised by some very unsavoury characters. While Navalny has no record of antisemitism, his most controversial statements from this era were about Muslims, particularly immigration from Central Asia. This was not an idiosyncratic fixation. Putin had come to power on the back of the Second Chechen War, which had been initiated after a horrific series of bombings of apartments in Moscow in September 1999.² Terrorism continued to be an issue within Russia, most notoriously with the Beslan school siege almost exactly five years later, and, of course, 9/11 had occurred in late 2001, kicking off an intense period of argumentation throughout Europe and the West about Islam and jihadism, where the subjects of immigration and integration were quite central.

Navalny’s association with the liberal Yabloko party, which went back to the 1990s, was terminated in 2007, for a combination of political reasons (Yabloko’s leadership was sincerely hostile to Navalny’s association with the ethno-nationalist marches) and personal reasons (Navalny was felt to be undermining the party’s founder, Grigory Yavlinsky). Navalny for the first time struck out on his own, founding a the National Russian Liberation Movement, known by its acronym, NAROD (“People”).

NAROD was clearly nationalist in the Russkiy sense and focused on issues one would expect from such an outfit, including domestic policies like reducing the intake of migrants, ensuring the assimilation of those already present, and making citizenship available to Russians in Europe, as well as some nationalist-historical claims, about Russia as the successor to the Kievan Rus and supporting “self-determination” for Russian-controlled enclaves in Georgia (Abkhazia and South Ossetia) and Moldova (Transnistria). NAROD also had more generic or “populist” policies, like ensuring democratic civilian control over the government, elections for the heads of the oblasts and republics, judicial independence, a fairer apportionment of enterprises parcelled out in the disastrous post-Soviet “privatisation”, tax breaks for small businesses, gun ownership rights, and fighting the war in Chechnya to the finish—objecting to the “peace” deal that handed over the republic to former insurgents under warlord-president Ramzan Kadyrov.

Navalny’s blog became very popular with Russians opposed to Putin, and Navalny produced a series of short videos mostly between 2007 and 2008, more like minute-long sketches, some of which have become the pillars of the case against him—sometimes made in good faith by Western and Russian liberals, and sometimes made in less good faith by the Kremlin and its allies.

One such video, probably the best-known “evidence” of Navalny’s “racism”, is a 2007 ad he filmed that was meant to promote gun rights. In the video, a classic mix of Navalny’s pop culture-laced humour and a slight surrealism, Navalny makes reference to threats from “cockroaches”, and uses the monster from the end of Men in Black as the visual when saying sometimes the cockroaches get too big. When this happens, says Navalny, after shooting the monster, “I recommend using a handgun”. During the video, Navalny shows an image of three Chechen terrorists, with Shamil Basayev in the centre, the implication being that these are the monsters Russians have a right to defend themselves from. By some very odd game of telephone, the use of that image, of the most infamous mass-murderer in Russia at the time, has become an accusation that Navalny used the word “cockroaches” to describe immigrants.

Another such video showed Navalny playing a dentist and talking about preventing fascism taking root in Russia by legally getting immigration under control—an argument that is not unique to him. Clips are shown of skinheads, whose violent street shenanigans were a feature of Russia at the time, and Asian migrants. “Our society  is corroding”, Navalny says. “The clinical picture is clear even to a non-specialist.” Navalny goes on, “There is no need to beat anyone”, an attack on the far-Right groups who had been doing just that, concluding that cavities and harmful elements should be “removed through deportation”.

NAROD’s platform of “national democracy” was in some ways as much an affront to the traditional ethno-nationalist groups as it was to the liberals. Firewalled from any association with violence, NAROD had its “ultra-nationalist” audience, but gained most traction by raising themes in embryo form—the abuse of civil rights, official corruption, the general incompetence and disorder of the government—that Navalny would develop in later years.

Navalny later regretted some of the terminology used in this period, and he repudiated and apologised for his position during Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia.³ In general, though, Navalny refused to take back the substance of what he said in the late 2000s, because in his telling he had been expressing War on Terror-type concerns about security: his intended target was Muslim militants, not Muslims, and restrictionist views on immigration are hardly intrinsically bigoted. In the Russian context, such views also clearly represent majority sentiment, so to that extent are democratic. Given Navalny’s political associations in 2007-08, and the ambiguities of some of his language, many did not believe this, and the accusations of racism and xenophobia would continue to follow him for the rest of his life. This is despite the fact the conclusion of those best-placed to judge, the people Navalny came into contact with at the “Russian March”, was the exact opposite: that Navalny was never one of their own; that he was part of the “liberal crowd” all along, and had only associated with the Russkiy nationalists under the constraints of the moment in trying to build a meaningful anti-Putin coalition.

NAVALNY EMERGES AS PUTIN’S MAIN OPPONENT

After the blatant rigging of the Russian legislative elections in early December 2011, Navalny was the crucial first mover, bringing thousands to the streets within hours. The protests thereafter swelled, at one point bringing 100,000 people into Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square, and large-scale anti-regime mobilisation lasted for several months. Where many oppositionists were wary of challenging the government per se, Navalny let stand the possibility that the crowds would “seize the Kremlin” from the “crooks and thieves” that occupied it. “The party of crooks and thieves” would become Navalny’s famous rallying cry against Putin’s United Russia Party. Navalny was thrown in jail for fifteen days with other opposition leaders under the law against unauthorised demonstrations.

In March 2012, Navalny was briefly arrested again after organising a protest in Pushkin Square in Moscow against the ridiculous presidential “election”, and on the day Putin was re-inaugurated in May 2012—taking over from his placeholder president, Dmitri Medvedev—Navalny led a small protest that landed him in jail for another fifteen days. One of Putin’s first acts upon formally retaking the presidency was to tighten the laws against protests.

By this point, Navalny was the most visible opponent of the Putin government. Navalny had already started the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) in September 2011, the vehicle through which he would carry out his investigations of State corruption and produce his famous YouTube videos explaining the findings to Russians. With NAROD having been basically dissolved at the end 2011, in December 2012 the People’s Alliance (later the Progress Party, now Russia of the Future) was founded, with Navalny as its de facto leader, though he did not officially join it to avoid the party getting into legal difficulties as the State went after him. At one level, Navalny’s decision not to accept formal membership of the party turned out to be a good call (see below), but the party was ultimately denied legal registration anyway in 2014.

The People’s Alliance platform was liberal, calling for a devolution of power, a possible constitutional change to make Russia a parliamentary democracy, securing independence for the judiciary, finally carrying out lustration (de-Communisation/Sovietisation) of the State apparatus, reducing the State’s control of the economy, and firmly orienting Russia to an alliance with the West, away from its support for post-Soviet despotisms in Central Asia and Belarus.

Putin’s response to the gathering momentum of the opposition in 2013 was to cast it as a Western project, hostile to Russianness in all senses. The symbol of this was the July 2013 law for “Protecting Children from Information Advocating a Denial of Traditional Family Values”, otherwise known as the law banning “gay propaganda”.⁴ This was not new. Back in 2011, Putin had said what he always does when facing protests: this was a CIA-orchestrated “colour revolution”. Perhaps more important, though, was the remark he made about the white ribbons the protesters were carrying: “When I looked at the television screen …, honestly, it’s indecent, but I decided that it was propaganda to fight AIDS—that they were wearing, pardon me, a condom”. This effort to lean into the culture wars—and not only in Russia—would become more pronounced over time, as would the use of “foreign agent” designations to suppress the opposition.

The embers of the 2011 protest movement continued into 2013 and the international attention brought various forms of pressure on the Russian government. One aspect of this was a May 2012 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR)—which Russia was only ejected from after the all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022—that the Republican Party of Russia (RPR, later the People’s Freedom Party or PARNAS) had been improperly deregistered in 2007 and must be restored. RPR’s most prominent leader was Boris Nemtsov, a liberal critic of Putin’s since the early days of 2000 and a ferocious campaigner against official corruption.

Nemtsov and the RPR-PARNAS invited Navalny to stand as their candidate for the 2013 Moscow Mayoral elections and in June 2013 Navalny announced he would do so. A month later, Navalny was sentenced to five years in prison on fabricated corruption charges (“the Kirovles case”). Navalny was granted bail to run in the September 2013 election—just as the charges being corruption rather than related to opposition activities were meant to make them seem more legitimate, the Kremlin needed the appearance of a competitive vote to legitimise Putin’s re-introduction of elected Mayoralty in the capital. Under conditions of across-the-board escalated political repression and targeted measures to debilitate Navalny’s campaign, Navalny put on an impressive showing, receiving 600,000 votes (27%), half as much as Putin’s anointed man and more than the combined total of the “systemic” opposition candidates combined.

Shortly after the Mayoral election, in October 2013, Navalny’s sentence was changed to a suspended sentence on appeal—only for another set of fake corruption charges to almost immediately be filed against him (“the Yves Rocher case”). This time, Navalny’s brother, Oleg, an apolitical former postal worker, was also included in the charges, a return to the sinister Soviet-era habit of blackmailing oppositionists into silence with threats to their family. Navalny refused to be quiet. On the contrary, throughout 2014, Navalny solidified his position as the Kremlin’s premier opponent. In December 2014, Alexey was convicted of fraud but spared prison, while Oleg was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison.

UKRAINE AND SYRIA

2014 was a crucial year in setting the course for where Russia—and by extension the rest of us—are now. On 21 February 2014, Ukraine’s Russian-aligned president, Viktor Yanukovych, signed a deal committing him to constitutional changes and early elections. This was after three months of protests against Yanukovych’s abrupt cancellation of an Association Agreement with the European Union. Later that day, however, the Russians pulled Yanukovych out, claimed there had been a “coup” in Kyiv, and on 27 February “little green men” began landing in Crimea—“deniable” forces that Putin admitted two months later were from the Russian military, a mix of various special forces units, including the Spetsnaz of Russian military intelligence (GRU).

A sham referendum was held in Crimea on 16 March 2014 and two days later Putin announced the annexation of the Peninsula. This was the first forcible change of borders in Europe since 1945, and the reaction in Russia was euphoric. Many Russians thought Putin should go further and he soon obliged. On 12 April, a detachment of troops led by Igor Girkin (“Igor Strelkov”), a “former” FSB officer, seized Sloviansk and soon occupied the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, setting up a regime of hideous cruelty and igniting a war that lasts to the present day. Despite Putin’s admission that he had orchestrated events in Crimea, the official Russian position was that it had nothing to do with the Donbas war, despite it being perfectly obvious from the start that the “separatists”—including the Bizzarro world cast of gangsters and Orthodox warriors that poured in from abroad—were under the tight, direct control of Russia’s intelligence services.

Russia’s “deniability” of control over events in Donetsk and Luhansk turned out to be politically important when GRU directed its “rebels” to shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on 17 July 2014, murdering 298 people, 193 of them Dutch, along with significant numbers of Malays, Australians, Indonesians, and Britons. Nobody seriously doubted Russia’s responsibility, but this was the time of President Barack Obama, when any fig-leaf to avoid action would be taken.

In Syria, Bashar al-Asad had run over Obama’s “red line” on chemical weapons of mass destruction in August 2013 and quick thinking from the Russians had given Obama a face-saving way to back down. It was in the aftermath of that disaster, Putin made his moves on Ukraine, and Obama refused to supply the Ukrainians with lethal weapons. The shredding of the post-Cold War order merited only one of Obama’s professorial commentaries on the situation, as if he had no power to influence it, that Ukraine “is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do”. Moscow was not surprised, and was well able to handle, the sanctions that were the sum-total of the punishment for downing MH17.

Obama finalised his nuclear deal with Iran in July 2015. What was presented as an arms control agreement was meant to recast regional politics in the Middle East, with a larger role for the Islamic Revolution that rules Iran and concomitant reduction in American-Iranian enmity as America stepped back, letting the Revolution handle some of America’s primary security concerns, notably Sunni jihadism, specifically its Islamic State variant. This quixotic scheme soon showed itself as wholly one-sided in Iran’s favour—and Russia’s.

One reason Obama had been so soft on Russia was to ensure Moscow’s cooperation on the nuclear deal. Given that the deal’s main impact was to empower Russia’s key strategic ally, there was never any doubt about the Russians supporting it, but Putin got concessions to help damage American interests anyway, and took full advantage. With the Iranian-run Asad regime on the ropes in the summer of 2015, once the nuclear deal was inked, a direct Russian intervention in Syria was planned and launched at the end of September, soon succeeding in destroying the mainstream nationalist rebels and leaving the conflict as the binary choice Asad had worked so hard to make it: him or the jihadists.

These successes for Putin’s aggressive foreign policy enhanced the ruler’s popularity significantly within Russia. As one Russian polling expert put it, Russians were “proud because they think this is how a superpower should act on the global stage”. This had always been the way. That said, these bumps often proved quite ephemeral. The reaction after the war in Georgia in 2008 was such a case. Ukraine has always been different. Many of us who have Russian friends and acquaintances, including on Western campuses, have had the experience of knowing people whose politics were generally quite far to the Left—of the kind we now call “woke”—who became unselfconscious Great Russian Imperialists when the subject turned to Ukraine. Putin’s approval rating jumped from 60% to over 80% after the theft of Crimea, and this “Crimea consensus” showed no signs of faltering until late 2017.

Two other events in the 2014-15 period heightened the power and prestige of Putin domestically. First, there was the Winter Olympics at Sochi in February 2014: often remembered in the West for the stories of polluted tap water and extravagant criminality from the oligarchs, it coincided with the onset of the Ukraine invasion and played into Putin’s image of a statesman on the world stage. Second, there was the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, shot down in the street within sight of the Kremlin hours after calling for a peace rally against the war on Ukraine. The attempt to hang this crime on a few random Chechens was pathetically unconvincing even before the evidence of the FSB hit team trailing Nemtsov for days became known. From the outside, this blatant act of official murder might be expected to provoke fury, but for Russians observing Putin the take-away was different: “They prostrate themselves willingly before his awesome power.”

It can be added that, in a similar vein, when many Russians heard about the Kremlin’s interference in the American Election in November 2016, and the notion that it was the Russians who swung it for Donald Trump, their reaction was pride: how powerful Putin must have made Russia if its special services were able to determine the fate of a superpower 8,000 miles away. (Many Russians, it should be said, did not believe Russia had interfered in the election, or not meaningfully, precisely because the premise relied on Russia’s government being a powerful, well-organised machine with an omniscient leader, and their experience was of a ramshackle edifice led by an increasingly erratic old man.)

It was this environment Navalny had to navigate. Navalny was the driving force behind the Progress Party’s 2 March 2014 statement condemning Putin’s seizure of Crimea as an outrage that violated the agreements Russia had signed guaranteeing Ukraine’s territorial integrity, a cruel assault on Ukrainians who had freed themselves from a tyrant based on flagrant lies about threats to Russian-speakers, and a disaster for Russia itself. Navalny in his own voice also immediately and forcefully denounced Putin’s theft of Crimea.

In an interview a few months later, where Navalny reiterated his condemnation of the annexation of Crimea as a “flagrant violation of all international norms”, he conceded that the reality was the Peninsula would remain part of Russia for the “foreseeable future”. Navalny’s remarks caused outrage in almost equal measure between the public, which was firmly convinced Crimea belonged to Russia, and the Russian liberals, who saw this as a craven surrender to the regime. In time, Navalny would stake out a position that he held to until the end: Crimea’s fate would be determined by a free referendum—observed by international monitors, not Russian occupation troops. Again, not everyone—least of all Ukrainians—were pleased by this, but it was a coherent vision and it offered the chance for Crimea to be restored to Ukraine peacefully.

The liberals’ criticism that Navalny was calibrating his Crimea position with public opinion in mind was both true and irrelevant. He was a politician—what else was he supposed to do? Politics is the art of the possible, as the cliché has it, and it was Navalny’s consistent superiority over his liberal partners-cum-rivals to have a “feel” for the Russian public that they never did, and never have. Navalny’s nationalist background that the liberals so despised was in this sense an advantage: he had met the Russians that liberals never had, and the “street cred” gained during that time meant patriotic Russians were willing to listen to him, since he could speak to them on their own terms. It was this that enabled Navalny to break out of the limitations that usually constrain a liberal politician in Russia.

Navalny said less over Syria, but he was forthright in condemning the Russian intervention—and shrewd in what he said about it, in a substantive analytical sense and politically. After the murder of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov—an extremely strange event in itself—in December 2016, just after Putin had helped the Iranian-led ground forces in Syria crush the last urban bastion of the rebellion in Aleppo, Navalny heaped the blame on the Kremlin. This was what came of intervening in Syria on the side of Iran and its terrorist armies like Hizballah to “try to save Asad”, said Navalny. Russia should have joined the international coalition against the Islamic State, Navalny contended, but had done the reverse, alluding to the fact that the Asad-Iran-Russia coalition was effectively aligned with the Islamic State in its war in Syria.

As this was in the run-up to the March 2018 presidential elections, and Navalny had announced his candidacy a week earlier, Navalny made sure to draw the connection to domestic security. Putin had presented the Syrian adventure in terms, to borrow a phrase, of “we … fight them over there so we do not have to face them [here]”, but this was exactly wrong, said Navalny: Putin had created immense anger among Russia’s (Sunni) Muslims by his limitless support for an atrocity-laden campaign by Shi’a sectarians against a Sunni population, starting a foreign fighter flow to the Levant that was bound to come home.

In the same interview, Navalny reiterated his opposition to the Russian war on Ukraine, demanding that Russian troops be withdrawn from the country and the Crimeans be allowed a free and fair referendum to decide what would happen with the Peninsula.

CHALLENGING THE REGIME

Navalny was able to declare his candidacy for the 2018 presidential election because he had been pursuing the best tactics of the Dissident movement in the Cold War, acting as if the laws as written meant what they said, and had won his case at the ECHR in February 2016 to have his 2013 conviction in the Kirovles case declared “arbitrary”. The Russian State was even mandated to pay damages. And Navalny had laid the political foundations for his presidential run by setting about uniting the fissiparous liberal opposition, entering into an effective coalition with Nemtsov’s PARNAS and its leading figures, like former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, and gaining support from the exiled opposition, notably Mikhail Khodorkovsky. This put Navalny in the Kremlin’s crosshairs as never before.

In February 2017, the Russian State retried Navalny for the Kirovles case conviction the ECHR had voided, and—unsurprisingly—overturned the ruling, giving Navalny five years’ probation and a fine. Navalny just joked that, while the verdict was a verbatim repetition of the last one, he liked the ending the judge had written this time around better. Navalny took the case to Russia’s Supreme Court and continued his presidential campaign. (The ECHR would rule similarly in October 2017 that the 2014 Yves Rocher case conviction was “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable”, but the Kremlin simply ignored this non-binding decision, something that became important later.)

During a visit to the Siberian city of Barnaul in late March 2017, Navalny was the victim of a zelyonka attack, staining his face with green dye. This was a few weeks after Navalny had produced a video showing the personal corruption of Medvedev, which sparked protests across Russia. Navalny was arrested during one of these demonstrations and given fifteen days in prison. On 27 April 2017, Navalny was subjected to a much more serious zelyonka attack outside the FBK’s Moscow office, using a corrosive substance, which nearly blinded Navalny in one eye. Unperturbed, in early June, Navalny was arrested at an opposition protest and put in prison for thirty days.

Navalny took part in a debate with Igor Girkin/Strelkov on 20 July 2017, moderated by Mikhail Zygar, the liberal Dozhd journalist who had then-recently published the excellent All the Kremlin’s Men and had to flee Russia in the first days of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The debate is fascinating, not for anything said, but as an artefact; a snapshot of where the country was and the trajectories of three important men in Putin’s Russia.

Navalny got a lot of criticism for even doing the debate, with many liberals seeing it as lending legitimacy to a war criminal, and Navalny’s hesitancy during the debate to call Girkin a war criminal—Navalny said this had not been tested in a court of law—only added fuel to that particular fire.⁵ But Navalny had the better read of the situation. Navalny once said the opposition has to “communicate with nationalists and educate them” about the value of law and democracy, and it was clearly the nationalist audience Navalny was trying to reach by talking to Girkin. Taking advantage of the limited space for free discussion then-available, Navalny explained on the nationalists’ own terms why it was wrong for Russia to be waging war in Ukraine and what needed to change at home.

Girkin, the leader of the initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and the supreme commander until he was removed in August 2014, is the truest of true believers in Russia’s Imperial mission. Girkin might have been loyal to the Kremlin, but he was not simply its servant. Girkin had begun complaining about how Putin was handling the Ukraine war weeks after he was dismissed from command of it, and his critique would ratchet up over the years, until he became the doomer-in-chief after the 2022 escalation. Nothing said by Ukraine’s friends could compare with the acid contempt Girkin expressed near-daily about the Russian handling of the war, albeit Girkin wanted this corrected so Ukraine could be eliminated. Putin put up with this for far longer than might have been expected, but Girkin was arrested in July 2023 and condemned to four years in prison in January 2024. It is a mark of where Russia is now that the three men involved in this debate are dead, in prison, and in exile. There is no space even for honest criticism from within the Putin regime, in pursuit of its own goals, any more.

Navalny spent another twenty days in prison in October 2017, and in December 2017 the Central Election Commission officially rejected Navalny’s candidacy for the presidency, a decision swiftly upheld by the Supreme Court. Navalny was arrested in January 2018 at protests calling for a boycott of the presidential elections and arrested again in May 2018 at a protest against Putin’s inauguration, receiving another thirty-day sentence.

Forced out of official politics, Navalny took to the road with an appeal to the population that was the simplest thing of all: Russia could be a “normal country” and they could help it get there, an attempt to undo the suffocating blanket Putin had put over the country, which relied on fostering the belief that safety lay in not getting involved in politics, that nothing could be changed, and only personal grief would come from trying.

Putin’s response was to theatrically act as if Navalny did not matter, refusing even to say his name, and perhaps to convince himself Navalny was no threat. But the actions of Putin’s government told a different story. In August 2018, Navalny released an investigative reporting video showing that Viktor Zolotov, the director of Russia’s National Guard and for a long time before that the head of Putin’s personal security, had stolen tens of millions of dollars from procurement contracts. Zolotov responded as all senior officers in rational States do in such circumstances, by challenging Navalny to a duel, a time-honoured tradition in which “scoundrels have had their faces smashed”, said Zolotov. Even the Russian State drew back from that. Days later, Navalny was yet again thrown in jail for thirty days, this time arrested outside his home, not at a protest, on charges of having organised an illegal demonstration in January 2018. Upon Navalny’s release on 25 September 2018, he was immediately re-arrested and sentenced to another twenty days in prison.

Navalny had been arrested ten times from 2011 to 2018 and spent a total of 192 days in “administrative detention”. This might seem an obvious marker of the scale of the State’s hostility to Navalny, but there were other perspectives. Throughout Navalny’s life there were intermittent whispers that he was really the regime’s man. It was suggested that information in Navalny’s investigations came from the State, if only as part of the faction fighting (it is even possible). Then there was the question of how someone could have this many brushes with the State and remain not only alive but out of prison. While that doubt is now fairly conclusively silenced, it was not completely mad. It is easy to sneer at Russians for being prone to conspiracy theories, but they have lived through seventy years of Bolshevism and thirty years of its afterlife, where the secret police really do manufacture oppositionists in order to destroy the actual opposition. There are circumstantial reasons to think the Kremlin played on this popular knowledge as part of a conscious strategy up to this point to neutralise Navalny by encouraging the belief that he was a State agent, though without another Vasili Mitrokhin to show us the FSB’s archives we will never know for sure. In either event, Putin was soon to sharply change course.

Navalny led protests in July 2019 after the State’s refusal to register most opposition candidates for the Duma (Parliament) elections, the largest show of public dissent since the 2011-13 wave. Inevitably arrested, Navalny seems to have been poisoned in jail, a terrible foreshadowing, as was the dubious behaviour of the medical staff who treated Navalny. After another month in prison, Navalny was free to help organise the sporadic demonstrations that took place up to the elections in September.

Putin announced in January 2020 that he intended to change the constitution to allow him to run again for two more six-year terms, and impose a raft of “conservative” reforms, including formally banning same-sex marriage and revamping the curriculum so it provided a “patriotic education”. The referendum to confirm these changes was set for 22 April, the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, but the COVID-19 pandemic set the date back two months, extra time that something of a relief one imagines given that Putin had not sent his Best to the committee responsible for designing the new laws. The “legal” basis for Putin to remain President for Life entered force on 1 July 2020.

ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT

Navalny obviously spent most of his life under close State surveillance, but this had become particularly intense after January 2017—hence the April 2017 acid (or whatever it was) attack and the July 2019 probable poisoning—and it was the day after the constitutional coup in July 2020 that an FSB squad was sent to tail Navalny and his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, on a trip to Kaliningrad “for a five-day romantic getaway at a spa hotel on the beach, the Schloss Yantarny Hotel.” During that trip, Yulia fell mysteriously ill. There was no specific area of pain and the symptoms were undefined. Yulia simply said: “I felt sicker than I had ever felt in my life”. She seemed to sleep it off, and it was only in retrospect she would realise the significance of what had happened.

Navalny had taken a trip with his FBK team to Tomsk, out in Siberia, and thirty minutes into his flight back to Moscow on 20 August 2020 fell into a coma. Navalny had been poisoned with Novichok, the same nerve agent GRU had used in March 2018 to try to kill Sergey Skripal, a former GRU officer recruited by SIS/MI6 in 1995 who was uncovered in 2004 and traded to the United Kingdom after the rollup of the Russian Illegals network in the United States in 2010.⁶

The plane was landed very quickly and atropine was administered to Navalny even before he had been taken to a hospital, which almost certainly saved his life. On 22 August, Russia allowed Navalny to be transferred to Germany, where he was in a coma until 7 September and was taken off the ventilator a week after that. Navalny posted a picture of himself in hospital to Instagram on 15 September, along with a message: “I still can’t do much, but yesterday I managed to breathe on my own for the entire day. Just on my own, no extra help … I liked it very much. It’s a remarkable process that is underestimated by many. Strongly recommended.” In response to questions about whether Navalny intended to return to Russia, his spokesman replied, with a slight annoyance, that he would: “I can confirm to everyone: no other options were ever considered”. Before that fateful step could be taken, there was one more thing to do.

The broad outline of what had happened was self-evident, and the invaluable sleuths at Bellingcat had filled in most of the gaps, documenting the names and activities of the long-term FSB surveillance team assigned to Navalny, and how they had moved in for the kill. Some details remained elusive, though. For instance, how had the Novichok been administered? It was Navalny who solved the mysteries of his own near-assassination.

On 14 December 2020, Navalny telephoned Konstantin Kudryavtsev, an FSB officer at the Institute of Forensic Science and a chemical weapons specialist, identified by Bellingcat as one of the operatives in the conspiracy to murder Navalny. Navalny introduced himself as “Maxim Ustinov”, an aide to Nikolai Patrushev, the Chairman of the Security Council and former FSB Director (r. 1999-2008) who coordinates Russia’s security policies. Navalny then questioned Kudryavtsev as if conducting an after-action report about what went wrong. In one of the most extraordinary moments in recent history, Kudryavtsev proceeded to explain in great detail how the operation had worked: how the Novichok had been administered to Navalny’s underwear by FSB officers who broke into Navalny’s hotel room; the steps that had been taken to cover-up the crime, many of them by Kudryavtsev personally, who flew to Siberia on 25 August to take Navalny’s clothes out of the local police evidence lock-up so he could wash them; how the rapid reaction of the plane staff and the medics had saved Navalny; and explicitly confirmed that the Kremlin had intended to murder Navalny, not injure or scare him.⁷

In the video Navalny published showing his call with Kudryavtsev, Navalny has a few minutes’ summing up where he skilfully directed Russians to understand the concern for them. The danger of a State that targets individual citizens for murder is obvious,⁸ but from the conversation with Kudryavtsev it becomes obvious how many people such a State implicates in its criminality, if only after the fact, including the doctors at the hospital in Omsk, who scrubbed Navalny’s body before releasing him to go to Berlin to ensure there was no trace of the toxin, and the local police force, who had to hand over Navalny’s clothes—twice—so they could be cleansed of evidence. The lies that have to be told—again, by so many people—to maintain the pretence that the State does not act in this way deforms the whole country: people charged with upholding the public interest are instead being roped in as accomplices to murder to sustain the power of a small coterie of people who are robbing Russia blind. And, not unrelatedly, there is the debilitating effect this has on the State that is supposed to protect Russians in terms of sheer competence: holding their places based on loyalty and loose morals, rather than merit, Russia’s intelligence and security services are reduced to a level where they not only cannot kill a single individual in a country where they control the whole environment; they confess their roles in assassination schemes, on open telephone lines no less, to people they have never heard of and cannot even recognise they are talking to the target of the assassination.

RETURN TO RUSSIA AND PRISON

Navalny went back to Russia on 17 January 2021 and was arrested upon landing at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow. The Russian State this time used the 2014 Yves Rocher embezzlement frame-up as the pretext: as part of the “probation” that had been arbitrarily extended in 2017, Navalny was supposed to check in with the State twice per month, which was obviously impossible after Navalny had to be taken abroad for four months to be treated for an attack with chemical WMD that was intended to be lethal by that very State.

On 19 January 2021, Navalny’s FBK published a video he had pre-recorded of an investigation into Putin’s personal corruption, showing among other things the vast palace worth $1 billion Putin had acquired on the Black Sea. The outrage generated by Navalny’s exposure of Putin’s looting of the public treasury—the video was viewed 60 million times in Russia in three days—surely helped swell the ranks of the protesters who turned out on 23 January 2021, despite clumsy attempts at official censorship, in nearly 200 Russian cities, including maybe 20,000 in Moscow, demanding Navalny’s release. Over 3,500 people were arrested.

A Russian court replaced Navalny’s suspended sentence with a nearly-three-year prison sentence in a penal colony on 2 February. The line of Navalny’s closing statement at this “trial” that garnered the most attention was his mocking reference to Russia having had great rulers, like “Alexander the Liberator and Yaroslav the Wise. Well, now we’ll have Vladimir the Underpants Poisoner.” As Navalny pointed out, it was demented as a matter of process—Russia, even under the 2020 constitution, nominally recognises ECHR decisions and the case Navalny was being prosecuted under had been dismissed by the ECHR—and it was utterly demented as a matter of fact. Navalny had investigated his own poisoning, proved it was the work of Putin using the FSB, and the court system was behaving as if this had not happened, “saying [instead]: let’s lock up Navalny because he showed up [to meet with his parole officers] on Mondays, not Thursdays.” Navalny said his refusal to “run and hide” was “driving this thieving little man in his bunker out of his mind”, and he was now hell-bent on locking up Navalny as a message to Russians: “They’re imprisoning one person to frighten millions”. “My life isn’t worth two cents”, Navalny concluded, noting he was “under the control of people who love to smear everything with chemical weapons”, “but I will do everything I can so that the law prevails”.

The protests were once again large, with 1,000 arrested. The ECHR’s call for Navalny’s release was contemptuously rejected by the Russian government. On 20 February, Navalny’s appeal was rejected and Navalny, after making a remarkable speech (see below) that called on Russians to retain hope, was packed off to the Pokrov “correctional colony” in the city of Vladimir in central European Russia.

Amnesty International has been in the news of late for its disgraceful conduct, along with many other “human rights” groups, towards Israel in its war with Iran/HAMAS to prevent a repeat of the 7 October pogrom, but the rot at Amnesty is far deeper than one subject and has been evident for far longer than the last four months. On 24 February 2021, after what Amnesty itself admitted was a well-organised campaign by Russia’s government and its agents of influence, Amnesty revoked Navalny’s status as a “prisoner of conscience”, citing “hate speech” in 2007-08. This played perfectly into the Kremlin’s secondary show trial of Navalny, for “defaming” a war hero, presented in State media and online as Navalny supporting the Nazis who invaded the Soviet Union.

Amnesty’s weaselly reversal of this decision in early May hardly mattered: by then, Putin’s government had what it wanted. In April 2021, the Russian government moved to ban the FBK as an “extremist” organisation—a process completed in June—and by extension to tar Navalny with the same label, and all most people would remember was that Amnesty had given a stamp of approval to these Kremlin lies. Under the cover of this assault on Navalny’s reputation by Putin and Amnesty, the level of concern and agitation about the fact Moscow was already mistreating Navalny in custody was somewhat diminished. Navalny was being deprived of sleep—something that would continue up to the end, sometimes by playing overtly antisemitic songs very loudly into his cell, incidentally—and prevented from accessing medical treatment for various problems caused by the manner of his imprisonment. It was at this time, when it seemed possible Navalny would die, the U.S. government declared there would be “consequences” if this happened. One suspects this is not a declaration the Biden administration will find convenient to honour.

Moving, as everyone knew Putin would, to ensure Navalny never got out of prison, Navalny was designated as a “terrorist” on 25 January 2022, and on 15 February another “trial” was opened on newly fabricated corruption charges, with a possible additional sentence of fifteen years, plus, for good measure, a contempt of court charge that could carry a six-month sentence. As we now know, this was on the eve of Putin initiating the attempt to eliminate Ukraine, and it does not seem likely to have been a coincidence. The Russian government spent the year leading up to the all-out invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 escalating its persecution of the opposition—removing potential sources of mobilisation against the war, shrinking the space in which citizens could organise any form of protest, and above all using Navalny as a dire advertisement of what happens to those who defy Putin.

ADDITIONAL SENTENCES, THE UKRAINE WAR, AND DEATH

In the event, neither the Russian people nor Navalny were cowed. Massive protests broke out in Russia within hours of the invasion of Ukraine beginning, and Navalny called for daily protests until the war was stopped, saying via Twitter on 2 March (messages were smuggled out of the prison, hence the delay): “Let’s not become a nation of frightened silent people, of cowards who pretend not to notice the aggressive war unleashed by our obviously insane Tsar against Ukraine.”

Navalny agitated, fiercely and persistently, against the all-out war on Ukraine from the very start, and did not duck the difficult questions. A week after calling for anti-war protests, Navalny noted that it was a “matter of utmost political importance” whether “the hideous war that Putin has waged against Ukraine” is his “bloody venture” alone, or if he has done this “with full approval from the Russian citizens”: “The answer to this question will largely define Russia’s place in the history of the 21st century.”

The inevitable “conviction” in Navalny’s in-prison corruption trial was handed down on 22 March 2022, sentencing him to nine more years in prison, after a process that was farcical even by the standards of Russian show trials. The judge was fairly openly taking breaks during proceedings to receive instructions on the telephone from Putin’s Presidential Administration. When Navalny’s appeal was rejected on 24 May, he used his closing statement to make a passionate case against the war on Ukraine, mocking the “crazy grandpa in a bunker” and his official justification of fighting “Nazis”, looking forward to the regime’s “historic defeat in this stupid war”, and letting it be known he saw all those upholding Putin’s system as “enemies of Russia” and “traitors” who would “burn in hell”.

Three weeks later, Navalny, as a “terrorist”, was transferred to a maximum security prison—still in Vladimir Oblast, for now. Before that transfer, the Kremlin had announced “extremism” charges against Navalny that could extend his sentence by another fifteen years.

The FBK was re-opened in July 2022, now being run as an international NGO, and the remnants of Navalny’s network inside Russia were reactivated in early October to fight the “partial” mobilisation of men into the Army for the war on Ukraine. The effect was not inconsiderable: knowing the dreadful costs, many Russians went to the streets again.

As part of Navalny’s anti-war efforts, he got an op-ed to The Washington Post in late September 2022 urging that the West broaden its horizons from ensuring Putin’s “criminal war” was defeated and that Ukraine was given whatever assistance it needed to “remain an independent democratic state capable of defending itself”. The plans for “strategic victory” have to encompass measures to tackle the “fundamental causes of the war”—to make sure Russia, “ the source of the problems, stops creating them”, Navalny wrote. Navalny implored Western leaders not to lose their resolve over Ukraine as they had every other time—over Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, and Syria—so they could see this war through to not only the demise of the “corrupt Soviet imperialists led by Putin”, but the creation of a new system in Russia. Navalny’s recommended was that the West demand structural changes in Russia, towards a parliamentary republic that would reduce the powers any one man had, and refuse to lift sanctions until such changes were made.

Critics at various points in the war have argued that Navalny was no different to Putin, and some even went as far as to say he would be worse for Ukraine. This nonsense was somewhat forgivable from Ukrainians—the distinctions within the population of an enemy State get lost in wartime—and much less so from journalists and analysts whose stock-in-trade is supposed to be a dispassionate search for truth. Navalny had not made it difficult to find out what he thought about the war: his commentary was voluminous, some of it set out above, and in February 2023 he drew together his vision for how to handle the war and the aftermath in a “political platform”. As far as Ukraine’s borders are concerned, “There’s nothing to discuss”, wrote Navalny: “Leave Ukraine alone … end the war and withdraw all Russian troops from the territory of Ukraine”. Navalny warned Westerners not to be deceived by Putin’s offers of “negotiations”: the war had to be won on the battlefield. After that, reparations had to be paid from Russia to Ukraine, and the war criminals responsible for this “unjust war of aggression against Ukraine” had to be brought to trial.

By October 2022, Navalny had been placed in a cramped solitary confinement cell multiple times for supposed petty offences against regulations in the prison, and these fifteen-day stints in solitary would continue being imposed on Navalny, sometimes without a day’s break in-between, which even the Soviets did not do.

Navalny’s ongoing “trial” was, once again, beyond farcical. Unwilling to risk another public trial, knowing Navalny would use it for anti-war activism—a dangerous prospect when the war had turned so badly against the Russian Army, and was about to get even worse—Navalny’s final “trial” was behind-closed-doors. At one point, the State had imposed opaque plastic separator walls between Navalny and his lawyer, so he could not read any of the documents presented in the case. Navalny laughed it off: “I can vaguely see the silhouette of a man. I can only guess that he is a lawyer by his voice. And now I keep wanting to say, ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned’.”

Navalny was charged with a raft of fabricated “terrorism” offences in January 2023 and his “trial”, which began in June, resulted in another nineteen years being added to his sentence in August 2023. In best Soviet tradition, the State then went after Navalny’s lawyers. On 11 December, Navalny’s legal team lost contact with him. Navalny was found two weeks later, on Christmas Day in the West: he had been moved to a “special regime” prison—the highest-grade and harshest in Russia—in Kharp, a town in the arctic region of western Siberia built by slaves in Stalin’s GULAG archipelago.

Navalny appeared in court by video link on 15 February 2024, appearing visibly weathered by his incarceration, but otherwise healthy and still making jokes and laughing—mostly at the judge. The next day, Navalny was dead, after over-1,120 days in prison, nearly 300 of them in freezing solitary punishment cells.⁹

To ensure the message was not missed, Putin yesterday promoted the Deputy Director of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), Valery Boyarinev, the man who personally oversaw the torment of Navalny in prison, to the rank of Colonel General.

LEGACY

At the close of the appeals ruling in February 2021, Navalny made a speech that captured his appeal: unpretentious, mordant, inspiring, and funny, memorably mixing together references to the Christian Gospels, Harry Potter, and Rick and Morty:

I don’t know what to talk about anymore, Your Honour. Should we talk about God and salvation? I’ll, so to speak, turn the pathos dial up to the maximum. The fact is I am a believer, which makes me a subject of constant ridicule at the Anti-Corruption Foundation because most of our people are atheists. I was like that myself once, quite militant. But now I am a believer, and this helps a lot with my activities. Everything becomes much, much easier. … [T]here are fewer dilemmas in my life because there is a book in which it is written, more or less clearly, what you need do in every situation. Of course, it’s not always easy to follow this book, but, in general, I try. And therefore, as I already said, it is easier for me than for many others to engage in politics in Russia. 

A person wrote to me recently: “Navalny, why is everyone writing to you ‘hold on’, ‘don’t give up’, ‘be patient’, ‘grit your teeth’? What do you have to endure? After all, you seemed to say in an interview that you believe in God, and it is said [in the Bible]: ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied’ [Matthew 5:6]. Well, that’s just perfect for you, then, isn’t it.” And I thought—wow! This person understands me so well! Because it’s not that I’m perfect, but I’ve always regarded that specific commandment as more or less an instruction for action. So, while I’m certainly not enjoying the position I am in, nevertheless I have no regrets about returning, or about what I am doing. I’m fine, because I did the right thing … At the difficult moment, I acted according to the instructions and did not betray the commandment. 

To modern people this whole passage … sounds very pompous and a little strange, to be honest. People who say such things are supposed to be, well, frankly speaking, crazy oddballs, sitting there with dishevelled hair in their cell and trying to cheer themselves up in any way they can, because they are lonely and unneeded by anyone. This is the most important thing that our government and the entire system are trying to tell such people: you are alone. … First, they intimidate, and then to prove that you are alone, that no normal person would think this way … By the way, a remarkable philosopher said something wise on this topic. You remember Luna Lovegood from “Harry Potter”? Speaking to Harry Potter at a difficult time, she told him: “It’s important not to feel lonely, because if I were Voldemort, I would really want you to feel lonely.” Of course, our Voldemort in his palace also wants this.

Your Honour, what is the most popular political phrase in Russia? … “Strength is in truth”. This is the phrase that everyone repeats … This is precisely the commandment of the Beatitude, only without the “for they hunger”. It’s just compressed to Twitter size. … Whoever holds to truth will prevail. This is very important. Even though our country is now built on injustice, injustice we constantly face … nevertheless we see that at the same time millions of people—tens of millions of people—want the truth, … and sooner or later they will achieve it …

[T]hink for yourself [addressing the judge] how good life would be without the constant lies … Think for yourself how great it would be to work as a judge without “telephone justice”. Nobody would call you [to instruct on a case’s outcome]. You would just be a great judge with a big salary … and [you’d be] a respected pillar of society. … [I]t’s unlikely, I think, that people entered the law faculty and became prosecutors so they could participate in fabricating criminal cases and forging signatures for someone. … And I don’t believe that people want to become police officers so they can say, “It’s great that we cracked that guy’s head open at the protest!” Or, “We escorted a guy [to court], knowing he was innocent …”.  Nobody wants this! … Same thing with the FSB officers. No one—not a single person in this world—sat as a bright-eyed schoolboy saying: “I’ll join the FSB when I grow up, and they will send me to wash the opposition leader’s underpants because someone has smeared them with poison.” There are no such people! Nobody wants to do this! Everyone wants to be normal and respectable; to catch terrorists, bandits, spies, to fight all of this.

And this is really important: just be not afraid of those seeking the truth; maybe even offer them support, directly or indirectly. But at least do not contribute to the lies … do not to make the world around you worse. There is, of course, a small risk in this, but, firstly, it is small, and secondly, as another outstanding philosopher of our time named Rick Sanchez said, “To live is to risk it all, otherwise you’re just an inert chunk of randomly assembled molecules drifting wherever the universe blows you.”

The last thing I want to say. I'm receiving a lot of letters now. And every other letter ends with the phrase, “Russia will be free.” This is a cool slogan. I also say it all the time—repeat it, write it back, chant it at rallies. But I constantly think: there’s something missing. I want Russia to be free, of course I do. This is necessary, but it is not sufficient. … I want Russia to be rich in a way that corresponds to its national resources. … I want … decent healthcare [and] for men to live to retirement age, because half of them don’t right now, and women are not much better off. I want education to be normal … I would like to see so many other things happen in our country. 

We need to fight not so much with the fact that Russia is unfree, but with the fact that it is unhappy. … Open Russian literature, the greats—and my God, it’s just descriptions of misfortune and suffering. We are a very unhappy country and we are stuck in a vicious circle … Therefore, I propose a change to our slogan to say that Russia should not only be free, but also happy: “Russia will be happy”.

Navalny’s return to Russia was a staggering act of bravery: he knew he would be imprisoned, never to be released while Putin remains in power, and he had to know there was every chance he would go the way of Benigno Aquino. He did it anyway. Why, is the obvious question, and in this speech before being sent into to Putin’s prison system, with its strikingly optimistic tone, is the answer: it was the only way to maintain hope in Russia—the hope that, as Navalny said so many times, despotism could give way to Russia becoming a “normal country”.

In a statement exactly three years after his return, Navalny spelled this out:

I have my country and my beliefs, and I don’t want to give up either … If your beliefs are worth something, you have to be prepared to stand up for them. And if necessary, make some sacrifices. … I took part in elections and applied [for you to grant me] leadership positions. The demand on me is different. I travelled all over the country and announced from the stage everywhere: “I promise that I will not let you down, I will not deceive you, and I will not abandon you.” When I returned, I fulfilled my promise to my voters. In the end, those who do not lie must be in Russia.

Navalny understood that exile was political death; the only way to keep the anti-Putin cause alive was to risk his own death. Russians live in a society where lies are commonplace. There is no trust and cynicism is the defence mechanism: when Putin changes course on a dime, people respond with a shrug; they knew all along he had not meant the prior thing. Navalny preached to Russians that there was another way, that they could individually contribute to it by simply refusing to lie, and having told them he would fight to the end to change Russia, in Russia, he did just that.

It was not all abstract with Navalny. He did the hard political work. That Navalny was nearly murdered the first time in Siberia is a striking fact. Russian oppositionists do not go to Siberia, certainly not the liberals.¹⁰ Navalny was unique on the current Russian scene in drawing together both liberals and patriots around a democratic platform, and unique in Russia’s history in creating a truly national political opposition infrastructure. It is the foundations Navalny put in place that his wife, team, and supporters hope to utilise to continue the struggle for democracy in Russia.

It will be an uphill struggle. “If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong”, Navalny said in the closing scene of Daniel Roher’s documentary, Navalny (2022). Many have said some version of the same thing in the last few days. It is a comforting idea, but it is not true.

Putin is ascendant and has every reason to expect things to continue to break his way. A month out from the Russian presidential “election”, Putin has cleared the board, liquidating Navalny and banning even the token anti-war candidate, so there can be no mistake the exercise is purely one in which Russians acknowledge their submission—and many will do so enthusiastically. The war has turned dangerously in Putin’s favour and a Russian offensive looms as Ukraine struggles for ammunition, a victim of the Western irresolution Navalny feared. The American Election in November threatens to return Donald Trump to office, which Putin has every reason to believe would vindicate his strategy of waiting out the West. Not twenty-four hours ago, Maksym Kuzminov, the Russian fighter pilot who defected rather than participate in Putin’s criminal war, was found shot dead in Spain. The most that Putin has had to suffer for this is some angry words from the White House.

If one wanted an encapsulation of Navalny’s legacy, it is that in these circumstances so many Russians opposed to Putin will carry on as if there is a hope of changing things. A sign of this could be seen in Russians braving the police to lay flowers in Navalny’s memory all across Russia. In the original Greek sense, Navalny was a hero, and he quite consciously played the part: his life was devoted to action and trying to get Russians to follow him, to will into existence the majority he always projected as existing that wanted a humane government; if that required the tragedy of his own death to give people a story that would move them to act, it was a price he willingly paid. “We don’t realise how strong we actually are”, Navalny said at the end of Roher’s movie. “So don’t be inactive.” The strength might not seem so illusory if there is action.

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NOTES

1. Since the all-out war on Ukraine began in February 2022, Putin has made some attempts to move Russia in a more fascistic direction, specifically by generating mass-mobilisation around the ruler’s religious and irredentist imperialism. It has fallen flat: for twenty years, the regime sought to depoliticise the country and it worked; it proved impossible to flip the switch overnight and have Russians get involved in politics in vast numbers.

2. The question of exactly what happened with the apartment bombings, and the broader question of who was doing what for whom in Chechnya, Dagestan, and elsewhere in the Caucasus, is immensely complicated, and the issue of distinct “oddities” in the Russian government’s handling of terrorism have continued ever-afterwards. But for most Russians in the 2000s, the story was a neat one of their State and society assailed by Islamic terrorism.

3. Navalny’s apology included a specific apology to then-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili (r. 2008-13) and, after Navalny’s murder, Saakashvili hailed Navalny, while acknowledging they “often disagreed”, as “the most talented, heroic opposition fighter for freedom” in Russia.

4. The worst official persecution of homosexuals in the Russian Federation occurred in Chechnya, beginning on a large scale in 2017, with mass arrests, torture, and even deaths. This has continued ever since, with intermittent visible spikes. Kadyrov’s Chechen realm was also where the anti-homosexual laws were used most frequently as a pretext to repress the opposition. Despite the changing atmospherics after 2013, as Putin began promoting his government as one that upheld “traditional values”, a significant amount of the emphasis was against the West—a sort of Orthodox campaign against “Westoxification”—rather than against homosexuals per se. There was a rise in random violence against homosexuals in Russia, which the authorities showed little interest in stopping, and politically active homosexuals faced legal trouble, but there was not a concerted, direct State effort to target individual homosexuals in European Russia, and spaces in the big cities—like bars and saunas—where homosexuals were known to congregate were generally left alone. As late as the spring of 2023, this situation more or less held. There was something of a turn later that year, after the 30 November court decision banning the “international LGBT social movement” as an “extremist” threat to Russia. Raids on homosexual nightclubs and saunas started after that under the pretence of searches for drugs.

5. The debate was not a complete bust on that front: if it had one “moment”, it was Girkin’s evasion of the MH17 question, done in such a way as to be a virtual admission of responsibility.

6. Sergey and his daughter, Yulia Skripal, who was also affected in the attempt on her father, survived, but it is often forgotten that three months later a homeless couple in Wiltshire were also poisoned and one died. Charlie Rowley found what he thought was a bottle of perfume in a park bin and gave it to his companion, Dawn Sturgess, who sprayed it on her wrists. Rowley lived; Ms. Sturgess did not. This kind of sloppy tradecraft is perhaps not so surprising given the GRU team that carried it out.

In September 2018, Russia’s English-language propaganda channel RT put out an excruciating 25-minute interview with the two men named by the British government as responsible for the attempted assassination of Skripal. (At that time they were known only by the cover names on their work passports, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. They turned out to be: GRU Col. Anatoliy Chepiga and Dr. Alexander Mishkin.) This darkly hilarious set-piece is best-remembered for the heavy implication that the duo were a homosexual couple who had visited the “wonderful” Salisbury after “our friends had been suggesting [it] for a long time”, as Petrov/Chepiga put it, and Boshirov/Mishkin’s parodically wooden claim that the main attraction they had wanted to see was Salisbury Cathedral, “famous not just in Europe, but in the whole world … for its 123-metre spire”.

7. A sidenote: it was very interesting to hear how impressed Kudryavtsev was with Navalny’s “meticulous” operational security, taking effective precautions against the FSB surveillance and never making “any unnecessary moves”, while simultaneously travelling far and wide throughout Russia.

8. Members of the FSB unit that tried to assassinate Navalny were subsequently discovered by Bellingcat to have been involved in the murders of three other Russians.

There was Timur Kuashev, a freelance journalist in Kabardino-Balkar, a Caucasian republic bordering Georgia to the south, and an active member of the liberal Yabloko party, was found dead in a forest on 1 August 2014. The coroner’s official ruling was heart failure, but there was an injection mark on Kuashev’s body, as well as clear signs of violence on his face (suggesting the FSB team had once again botched things). Additionally, Kuashev’s house keys were missing, along with a USB flash drive from his computer, making it likely someone stole Kuashev’s keys and entered his home after his death. Kuashev had been receiving death threats over his journalistic work—about which he had told friends and even the authorities—and he had been subjected to a lot of harassment by the FSB. Kuashev had been involved in organising protests, including against the theft of Crimea and the broader war on Ukraine; his journalistic work exposed inter alia torture by the local police and the absurdity of a show trial the Kremlin was trying to stage over a supposed terrorist attack by Islamists; he had made calls for Putin’s ouster; and a source who knew Kuashev told Bellingcat that at one point the FSB had coerced Kuashev into cooperating with them, only for him to later refuse to go any further. Any one of these could have landed Kuashev on an FSB kill list; which specific one(s) led to the Kremlin decision must remain a mystery without being able to see the Russian archives.

Ruslan Magomedragimov, an activist with Sadval, an irredentist organisation wanting to link up the Lezgin peoples in Dagestan and Azerbaijan, was found dead in Kaspiysk on 24 March 2015. The official verdict was that Magomedragimov died of a heart attack, but his body was found close to his car, with footprints not belonging to Magomedragimov in the vehicle, his dash cam and mobile telephones missing, and the family insist there were needle marks on Magomedragimov’s neck.

And then there was Nikita Isaev, who died from a “heart attack” on a train from Tambov back to his home in Moscow on 16 November 2019. Isaev is the oddest case, since he was a Kremlin loyalist associated with Sergey Mironov, the leader of the fake-opposition “A Just Russia” party. Bellingcat suggests the explanation lies in a Kremlin fear that Isaev was about to defect. Isaev, who travelled abroad quite a bit, had booked tickets for a family holiday in Miami, set to begin on 5 December 2019: travel to the U.S. by State agents will always attract attention from the special services, and Isaev had spoken “with contacts about moving his family out of Russia”.

9. Navalny had been sent to a punishment cell two days before his death. Had he lived through the fifteen days, he would have been at a total of 308 days in such cells.

10. The one slight exception that might be raised is the Decembrists, who, while certainly not liberals, did create an outpost in Siberia that fed into the terrorist-revolutionary movement, but this is the exception that proves the rule: the Decembrists were deported to Siberia after their failed revolt and attempted regicide.