Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition activist who has been the most prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin’s regime for much of the past decade, has died in a remote Arctic penal colony aged 47, according to prison authorities.
A firebrand campaigner for what he called the “beautiful Russia of the future”, Navalny’s detailed investigations exposing state corruption alarmed the Kremlin as much as his ability to inspire hundreds of thousands of people to protest against it. His activism made him the leader of Russia’s true grassroots opposition to Putin’s more than two-decade-long rule, earning him ceaseless intimidation, threats and attacks from the regime and its supporters in retaliation, as well as more than a dozen jail sentences.
Behind bars since 2021 with little to no prospect of release, he remained one of the fiercest critics of Putin’s regime and repeatedly condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine even amid prison conditions that he said amounted to torture. Navalny was poisoned in August 2020 with the Soviet-developed nerve agent novichok while campaigning in Siberia, in what he and western governments said was an assassination attempt ordered by the Kremlin.
Treated in Germany, he later exposed a security services officer involved in the poisoning campaign when he published a recorded phone call in which the man unwittingly revealed the entire operation. He was jailed on his return to Russia five months later and ultimately sentenced to more than 20 years in prison, where he was kept at three of Russia’s most notoriously harsh prison colonies and died less than two months after being moved to a remote prison colony in the Arctic Circle.
A tireless activist whose acerbic wit and powerful speeches resonated strongly among a new generation of Russians who had only ever known one leader, Navalny became a lightning rod for public dissatisfaction with the Kremlin, official corruption and Putin himself.
During the 2011 and 2012 anti-government protests — the biggest uprising during Putin’s rule — Navalny became the most nationally recognised opposition figure. Navalny’s poisoning and draconian prison sentence ushered in a new and darker era of Putin’s reign, marking the delineation from strongman rule to autocracy, with an intolerance for dissent that has only increased with the war in Ukraine. Young and tech-savvy, Navalny shrewdly understood the vast potential of online media and social networks to bypass the Kremlin’s iron grip on television, radio and newspapers, and to drum up both funding and support for election campaigns and protest rallies. His hugely popular YouTube broadcasts of corruption investigations and evidence of official graft exposed what he said was the rotten core behind the facade of a social contract that exchanged democratic freedoms for a paternalistic strong state.
One of his most noteworthy investigations, published in January 2021 when he was already in prison, alleged that a coterie of oligarchs had funded a $1.3bn palace for Putin on the country’s southern coast. It was watched 100mn times within 10 days of being published. The Kremlin denied the claims. The broadcasts were among many ways in which Navalny influenced the anti-Putin opposition and remained a thorn in the Kremlin’s side, even from behind bars.
In his last message from jail, posted on social media by his team just two days ago, Navalny wrote a single scathing line about the conditions in his prison colony. The Arctic prison was “beating the record” of his previous jail, to “please their masters in Moscow”, he said. Prison authorities had just given him 14 days in solitary confinement. “That’s the fourth in less than two months that I’ve been there. They’re tough,” he said. Two days later he was dead.
People will remember him for his bravery and his decision to return to Russia following his poisoning. Many saw this as a defiant and courageous decision against the oppression of the Russian regime