Copyright © 2023 by David M.

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E3-20230830-JV-NF-ORI
 CONTENTS

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication

Introduction
1 Poisoning
2 Navalny vs. Putin
3 Revenge
4 Early Years
5 Making of a Politician
6 Anti-corruption Crusader
7 Blogger, Street Fighter, Politician
8 Prosecution, Persecution, Prison
9 Mayoral Candidate, Statesman
10 Prisoner
11 Last Word
Photos

Notes and Works Consulted

Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
 To my wife, partner, and best friend, Christina Pan
Marshall, whose own work internationally as a U.S.
lawyer specializing in compliance and ethics proves that
the fight against corruption is universal and, as Alexey
Navalny maintains, a core pillar of democracy. It is
thanks to Christina and our sons, Miles, Isaac, and Ellis
—to whom this book is also dedicated—that I was able to
live my dream as a foreign correspondent, and to witness
firsthand some of the key events described in these pages.

And to my parents, Jaime and Janet, and my teachers in

the New York City public schools—P.S. 32, I.S. 227, and
Townsend Harris High School—who made writing a joy
worthy of professional pursuit.
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

Tap here to learn more.

 INTRODUCTION

Alexey Navalny wouldn’t die. He wouldn’t stay away from Russia. And,
even more vexing for the Kremlin, he just wouldn’t shut up.
After Russian government assassins allegedly poisoned him with a
deadly nerve agent in late August 2020, Navalny, the foremost political
opponent of President Vladimir V. Putin, spent more than two weeks in a
coma in a German hospital. When he woke up, he declared that he would
return home to Moscow as soon as he recovered. He would not be cowed
into exile.
Barely three weeks after regaining consciousness, while still suffering
tremors and other aftereffects of the poisoning and the heavy medications
that saved him, Navalny sat for a long interview with Yury Dud, a popular
journalist and YouTuber, in which he accused Putin of presiding over the
impoverishment and degradation of Russia, and even mocked the
government for its incompetent assassination program.
At first, Dud and Navalny chuckled about the strange parallels with an
interview they did three years earlier. In 2017, Dud noted, Navalny had just
come out of detention after being arrested at a protest. In 2020, he had just
emerged from a coma. In 2017, Navalny noted, someone had splashed
antiseptic in his face, staining him bright green. In 2020, special service
operatives had splashed Novichok, a chemical nerve agent, on his
underwear.
Dud asked how Russia had changed since their conversation three years
earlier. Navalny answered like a candidate campaigning for office, which is
basically how he always speaks—as if his future hinges not on the whims of
a despot but on voters deciding if they are better off now than before the
last election.
“Russia has become impoverished,” Navalny said, citing failed projects,
including efforts to develop a Russian-built passenger jet that no one
wanted to buy, and to build a new space center for rocket launches that had
yet to materialize.
“None of Putin’s projects were successful.”
“Russia is degrading in every sense,” Navalny said, adding: “And by the
way, on the question of whether they poisoned or they didn’t poison [me],
the system cannot degrade everywhere and develop—excellently—in the
area of murders. In the area of murders, apparently, it is also degrading. But
that’s just lucky.”
After emerging from his coma, Navalny had to relearn how to walk, to
write, and perform other basic tasks. But in November 2021, while still
recuperating, Navalny testified by video link before the European
Parliament. He urged European Union governments to get tougher on
Putin’s regime, in part by sanctioning Kremlin-connected oligarchs who,
Navalny griped, were permitted to conduct business and own lavish assets
in the West, including luxury homes, megayachts, and even professional
sports teams.
Within a month after that, working with the investigative news outlets
Bellingcat and the Insider, he identified by name most of the Russian
government operatives who tried to poison him to death. Pretending to be
an aide to the head of Russia’s National Security Council, Navalny even
tricked one agent into admitting his role in the assassination plot and
subsequent cover-up. In a nearly hour-long phone conversation, the agent
blamed Navalny’s survival on bad luck, including paramedics who
administered emergency treatment.

Navalny just won’t stop. So, it was no surprise that upon returning to Russia
in January 2021, his plane was diverted to a different airport—thwarting
throngs of supporters who came out to greet him—and he was arrested
before he could cross passport control.
There are many ways to take a life. Poison had failed. Prison was now
the fallback.
Two weeks after his arrest, Navalny stood in a packed courtroom in
Moscow, defiant as ever, to address the Russian government’s latest absurd
accusation against him: he failed to check in with parole officers while in a
coma.
Navalny wore a dark blue hoodie and khaki green pants. His light brown
hair was combed perfectly in place, his angular jaw and dimpled chin
uncovered while nearly everyone else in court wore masks as protection
against coronavirus.
Watching him, jaunty and flashing ironic smiles from inside the locked
glass-enclosed dock that Russians call “the Aquarium,” it was hard to
believe that just five months earlier, he was nearly killed with an
internationally banned chemical weapon. The tricked FSB officer was right.
Navalny’s life was saved thanks to a combination of stupidly lucky events:
the bumbling of the security agents who tried to kill him; the quick
emergency landing by the pilots of the plane he was on; and the
professionalism of an ambulance crew and doctors in the Siberian city of
Omsk, who were never told that they were supposed to just let him die.
As he spoke, Navalny’s voice was firm, edged with his trademark tone
—a mix of supreme confidence and abject disbelief—that has come from
years of tangling with the inane illogic of the Russian judicial system. It is a
system that makes sense only when recognized as beholden to political
masters, delivering preordained outcomes disconnected from laws and
facts.
Navalny perfected that tone of voice and his bemused, friendly,
storytelling style, by narrating YouTube videos, viewed millions of times, in
which he revealed spectacular corruption by Russian government officials.
In one such video, he exposed his own would-be assassins—providing a
surreal dispassionate account of how they plotted his death.
In court, as was made obvious by his captivity in a glass box, Navalny
was the defendant, charged with parole violations that could—and would—
lead to a sentence of nearly three years in a notorious Russian penal colony.
But as he delivered his statement that subfreezing February afternoon,
Navalny turned the absurdity of the Russian court system to his advantage.
He transformed himself from accused into accuser, and his defendant’s
statement into a prosecutor’s closing argument, in which he leveled charges
against the one man he held responsible for his poisoning and
imprisonment: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Russia’s modern-day czar.
The judge, a last-minute replacement named Natalya Repnikova, the
prosecutor, Yekaterina Frolova, and a representative of the Federal
Penitentiary Service, Alexander Yarmolin, were secondary objects of
Navalny’s dismissive, derisive scorn. The case that he presented was
directed squarely at Putin, the ex-KGB chief who has served as Russia’s
supreme leader since Boris Yeltsin’s resignation on New Year’s Eve, 1999.
Dispensing quickly with the court’s accusations, Navalny pointed out
that he was charged with parole violations in a case that the European Court
of Human Rights had already found baseless, and for which the Russian
government had paid him compensation. On top of that, he noted that in
2014, he had been given a suspended sentence of three and a half years in
the case. “A little bit of mathematics,” Navalny said, flashing his trademark
acerbic irony. “It’s now 2021.”
“Nevertheless,” he continued, turning his attention to Putin, “someone
really wants, really wanted, that I not take a single step across the territory
of our country, returning as a free person. From the moment I crossed the
border, I was a prisoner. And we know who. We know why this happened.
The reason for all this is the hatred and fear of one person living in a
bunker. Because I inflicted a mortal offense against him by the fact that I
just survived after they tried to kill me on his orders.”
Frolova, the prosecutor, tried to interrupt, but Navalny barreled over her.
“I don’t need your remark,” he snapped. “The fact that the representative
of the prosecution is trying to interrupt me, to shut my mouth, also perfectly
characterizes everything that is happening… So, I will continue. I inflicted
a mortal offense by the fact that I survived. Thanks to good people—pilots
and doctors. Then, I offended him even more, by the fact that, having
survived, I did not hide, living somewhere under guard in some smaller
bunker that I could afford.”
Navalny was no longer addressing Judge Repnikova, whose decision to
sentence him to prison was already made, and who was merely a prop in a
long-running script. Navalny was playing to his own audience—millions of
followers—in Russia and around the world.
“Then something terrible happened,” he said. “Not only did I survive,
not only did I not get scared and hide, I also participated in the investigation
of my own poisoning. And we have shown and proved that it was Putin,
using the Federal Security Service, who carried out this assassination
attempt. And I was not the only one. And now everyone knows it, and they
will learn a lot more. And this is what drives this thieving little man in his
bunker crazy. It is precisely this fact—the fact that everything was revealed.
Do you understand?…
“It turned out that in order to cope with a political opponent who has
neither [access to] television nor a political party, merely requires trying to
kill him with chemical weapons,” Navalny continued. “And of course
[Putin] is just going crazy about it. Because everyone realized that he was
just a bureaucrat randomly appointed to the presidency. He never
participated in debates or elections, and this is the only way he knows how
to fight—to try to murder people. And no matter how much he pretends to
be a great geopolitician, some great world leader, his main resentment
towards me now is that he will go down in history precisely as a poisoner.”
In the most memorable, oft-quoted line from his speech that day,
Navalny reached across centuries to invoke two legendary Russian leaders.
One was Yaroslav I, who reigned as grand prince of Kievan Rus from 1019
to 1054 and implemented the first system of codified laws in what would
become the Russian Empire. The other was Czar Alexander II, who ruled
from 1855 to 1881 and was renowned as a reformer of the judicial system
who ended corporal punishment, and emancipated Russia’s serfs.
“You know, there was Alexander the Liberator, or Yaroslav the Wise,”
Navalny declared in a tone of scathing, unvarnished contempt. “And we
will have Vladimir, the Poisoner of Underpants.”

Alexey Anatolyevich Navalny doesn’t want to be known as a dissident.

He has been jailed repeatedly for his political views, survived several
state-sponsored assassination attempts, and undertaken a hunger strike to
protest conditions of his imprisonment. He has crusaded relentlessly against
public corruption and led an opposition movement against Russia’s
autocratic, warmongering government, resulting in the imprisonment of
many of his associates and supporters. That crusade has even led to the
targeting of some of their family members—including Navalny’s brother,
Oleg. Nonetheless, Navalny recoils from the term “dissident.”
Navalny is the archnemesis of Putin, the former KGB agent who has
ruled the country as president, prime minister, and president again for more
than twenty-three years, with an ever-tightening iron fist. To prolong his
hold on power, Putin has manipulated election results and rewritten the
country’s constitution. And Putin regards Navalny with such visceral
disdain that he refuses to say his name, referring to him instead with
euphemisms like “the Berlin clinic patient” or “the character you
mentioned.”
Coming from Putin, these weird, clumsy references are a badge of honor
—proof, as if any were needed, that Navalny has managed to get under the
skin of Russia’s all-powerful leader. But in post-Soviet Russia, the word
“dissident” is fraught with historical baggage that Navalny and his closest
associates don’t want to carry. In their view, Navalny—who at the time of
this writing is serving multiple sentences totaling thirty years in a high-
security penal colony—bears enough other burdens.
More than anything, Navalny wants to be known as a politician and the
undisputed leader of the Russian opposition.
During his nearly two-decade-long ascent to national prominence and
worldwide fame, he has happily claimed an array of other titles: lawyer,
blogger, grassroots political organizer, shareholder-rights activist, anti-
corruption crusader, protest leader, mayoral candidate, political party chief,
campaign and election strategist, presidential hopeful, enemy of crooks and
thieves.
There are also terms that his critics have tried to slap him with—like
“traitor,” “foreign agent,” “terrorist,” and “extremist.” These are absurd,
given Navalny’s obsessive, patriotic devotion to Russia, and would be
laughable if not for their grave criminal implications. Then, there are other
labels that Navalny has sought to finesse, or been forced to retreat from,
over the years—pro-gun, anti-immigrant, ultranationalist, Russian
imperialist—which were accurate or partly accurate until his views evolved.
“Dissident,” however, is one moniker that he or his supporters do not
embrace, even though they recognize it has international cachet.
“In Russian language, ‘dissident’ will have a connotation of those, like,
eight brave people on the Red Square in 1968, right?” said Leonid Volkov,
Navalny’s longtime chief of staff and manager of his 2013 campaign for
mayor of Moscow. “Those eight people in 1968, they were very brave. We
admire them. But it was very clear for everyone that they were actually a
minority among [an] enormous, vast, silent majority.
“These, like, great heroes of Soviet intelligentsia, those Shestidesyatniki,
of those dissidents, like Sakharov and Bonner, and Marchenko and
Gorbanevskaya and the rest, they were disconnected from the people,”
Volkov continued. “So, they played a very important historical role. We
admire them a lot. But there was a dramatic difference between them and
our movement because we don’t want to be a minority and we are not.”
Volkov, who was jailed himself numerous times and still faces serious
criminal charges in Moscow, was sitting in a café in the Lithuanian capital
of Vilnius, where he has lived in self-imposed exile since at least August
2019, and where, until stepping aside in 2023, he ran the Anti-corruption
Foundation that continues Navalny’s work.
In Lithuania, Volkov and the rest of Navalny’s team were beyond the
legal reach of the Russian government, which has cracked down mercilessly
on all political dissent. But they were not beyond the reach of the Kremlin’s
assassins, who have undertaken brazen hit jobs abroad, including in
Germany and Britain.
Like Navalny, Volkov is not known for pulling punches when he speaks.
But talking about the legendary and revered Shestidesyatniki—the Sixtiers
—he was being polite. What he really meant to say was that these brave
dissidents were losers. Not losers in the colloquial sense—his admiration
for their bravery and sacrifice is genuine—but losers in the very literal
sense that they did not win their fight against the Soviet regime.
The lucky dissidents survived the gulags. Some even escaped and lived
long enough to return to Russia and enjoy the early years of post-Soviet
exuberance. But in the minds of many Russian citizens, the brave dissidents
did not triumph over the repressive Communist regime—just as the United
States did not defeat the Soviet Union but simply claimed victory when the
USSR collapsed from its own, internal rotten mismanagement and
corruption.
By some measures, these dissidents—generally members of a self-
selecting intelligentsia—are also viewed as having suffered less than
ordinary Russians, thanks to their prominence or infamy. Some like Natalya
Gorbanevskaya were permitted by the Soviet authorities to emigrate, while
others like Natan Sharansky were freed in prisoner exchanges. They were
then welcomed as celebrities and moral authorities in the United States,
Israel, and Europe; and avoided years of deprivation in Russia, especially in
the early 1990s.
In a more global context, putting aside the sensitivity of the word for
Russians, Navalny now is arguably the world’s most recognizable dissident.
He is in jail solely for his political views, for his stubborn, compulsive
insistence on challenging Putin and the graft and criminality that surrounds
and sustains the modern czar.
Separated from his beloved wife, Yulia, his college-age daughter,
teenage son, and aging parents, Navalny communicates with the outside
world mainly through handwritten notes, often scrawled on graph paper—
known as millimetrovka in Russian—and ferried in and out of the penal
colony by his lawyers.
In March 2022, Navalny was convicted of fraud and embezzlement and,
in August 2023, of extremism. Those sentences total twenty-eight years,
condemning him to remain behind bars until 2051 and preventing him from
running in Russia’s next five presidential elections. Changes to the Russian
Constitution in 2021 allow Putin to run for two more six-year terms, in
2024 and 2030, potentially keeping him in power until 2036, when he will
be eighty-three years old.
This leaves Navalny on the cusp of joining the ranks of Nelson Mandela,
Lech Wałęsa, and other leaders, including Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi,
who have battled authoritarian regimes and are indisputably regarded as
dissidents. Some of them are also branded as revolutionaries, a label which
in Russia is far more unsettling than “dissident,” given the country’s
experiences of the early twentieth century.
For much of the world, especially the West, Navalny is the best hope for
a post-Putin era in which Russia stops its war on Ukraine and rejoins the
community of civilized nations. Other scenarios—the rise of another
criminal strongman like Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin; or
Russia’s breakup into a chaotic jumble of territories, some led by the likes
of Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov—are more frightening than Putin. From
that vantage point, an ideal outcome would be Navalny emerging from
prison in the spirit of a modern Mandela, as a dissident-turned-president, to
lead his nation through reconciliation and democratic reform.
Still, for all its moral authority, historical gravitas, and global cachet, the
“dissident” label doesn’t sit comfortably with Navalny or his most loyal
confidants, collaborators, and loved ones—which explains why they had
decidedly mixed emotions when the European Parliament announced in
October 2021 that Navalny had been awarded the annual Sakharov Prize for
Freedom of Thought—a prestigious honor but one named after Andrei
Sakharov, arguably the most prominent of the dissident Sixtiers.
The Sakharov prize, which comes with an award of €50,000, was
presented at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, in December
2021. Navalny’s daughter, Darya Navalnaya, a student at Stanford
University, flew in to accept it on his behalf.
Navalnaya, tall and blond like her mother, delivered a short but
devastating speech, in which she accused Western and European leaders,
including the members of Parliament, of being too timid in confronting
Putin and his authoritarianism. She branded them “pragmatists” as if it were
a slur and blamed them for not doing enough to free her dad and to end
what she called her family’s “nightmare.”
Navalnaya stepped to the lectern holding a framed photograph of her
father being arrested at a protest—the hands of police officers gripping at
his arms and torso.
“It’s a little frank and awkward,” Navalnaya warned the Parliament,
after initially charming them by saying how “terrified” she was about
messing up her speech. Then, in a sweet voice, she accused them of issuing
toothless statements, kowtowing to dictators, and inanely putting petty
economic interests ahead of democratic ideals.

You know, I’ve heard this many times, and I’m sure I will again,
maybe even in the corridors after this ceremony: “You know, Dasha,”
they’ll say to me, “I understand why you’re feeling this way, because
it concerns your family, and close ones, but in the real world,
however, we have to be more pragmatic.” And in those hallways, I’ll
nod my head and say, “Yes, of course.” What else can I say? I’m a
twenty-year-old college student, and I don’t feel very comfortable
arguing with experienced and responsible pragmatists.
However, here today, taking advantage of the fact that I have the
microphone… I would like to oppose that pragmatism. This is the
Sakharov Prize and Andrei Sakharov was probably one of the most
 nonpragmatic people on the planet. I don’t understand why those
who advocate for pragmatic relations with dictators can’t simply
open the history books. It would be a very pragmatic act and having
it done, it’s very easy to understand the inescapable political law: the
pacification of dictators and tyrants never works.

Indeed, pacification is not part of the Navalny playbook.

Navalny’s politics are not violent. The rallies and demonstrations he has
led have always been about messaging and mobilization, not destruction.
But instinctively he is a fighter. His rhetoric often gets overheated, and he
has ended up in more than his share of fistfights and brawls. He is driven by
outrage, and what he has described as “hate”—a personal, visceral animus
toward his opponents. He hates being lied to, hates feeling like he is being
ripped off, hates being taken for a fool.
“I know this about myself,” Navalny told Dud during their interview in
Germany. “One of my flaws is that I’m prone to using certain epithets, that
I should use less often or stay away from. I definitely get personal. It’s part
of my political strategy, if you will. Because I got into politics to criticize
specific people, among other things… I fight corruption not as a
phenomenon but as individual corrupt officials, crooks that I hate. I always
call them [out] by their names. It’s my principled stance. It obviously means
a lot of emotional and personal language. Maybe it’s a minus overall. I
admit it. But it’s a part of who I am.”
In Strasbourg that day, Darya Navalnaya rebuked the West for trying to
appease the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, for allowing
Putin’s special services to carry out assassinations with impunity, and for
abandoning brave dissidents like her father.
“No matter how many people try to deceive themselves, hoping that
another madman who clings to power will behave decently in response to
concessions and flirtations, it will never happen,” she said.
“The very essence of authoritarian power involves a constant increase in
bets, an increase in aggression, and the search for new enemies,” Navalnaya
continued. She added:

Another thing that pragmatists don’t want to do for some reason… is

 simply to pick up a calculator and see how much their pragmatism
costs, in particular to the European taxpayers.
Years of flirting with Putin made it clear to him that to increase his
ratings, he can start a war. How much will the war with Ukraine cost
to Europe?

The speech took on an even more personal tone as Navalnaya described

the murders and attempted murders of Russian opposition figures, including
several attempts to poison her father. One such attempt, in July 2022, left
her mother so ill that she could not stand up.
“One of the opposition leaders, Boris Nemtsov, is killed with shots in
the back right by the Kremlin,” Navalnaya told the Parliament. “And then
comes the pragmatist and says, ‘Well, we can’t do much about it. Let’s limit
ourselves to a tough statement, and then continue the conversation.’ And
then they’ll kill the second and the third, and the fourth will be killed in the
center of Berlin, and the fifth in the UK. Then they also blow up some
warehouses in Europe and then they start killing with chemical weapons.”
She added, “A real terrorist group has been created inside Putin’s special
services, killing citizens of my country without a hearing or trial—without
justice. They were close to killing my mother. They nearly killed my father.
And no one will guarantee that tomorrow, European politicians won’t start
falling dead by simply touching a doorknob.”
Members of Parliament loudly applauded her criticism of them—a
surreal scene reminiscent of Gogol’s The Government Inspector—the
cutting satirical masterpiece about Russian public corruption, which is a
favorite of Navalny’s.
At a climactic point in the play, the protagonist, a humiliated governor,
interrupts an absurd tirade at his underlings, turns to the audience, and
breaks the fourth wall: “What are you laughing about?” he demands. “You
are laughing about yourselves.”

Unlike the intellectual Soviet dissidents—Sakharov himself was a nuclear

physicist known as the father of Russia’s “hydrogen bomb”—Navalny and
his team see themselves as regular Russians, or at least as common
members of Russia’s modern, post-Soviet middle class.
“We are a political force that enjoys popular support in large cities and
small cities, among high income and low-income people among educated
and noneducated,” Volkov said in Vilnius. “Like we have 10 million
subscribers on social media. We have around 15 to 20 million subscribers,
supporters in the country. We are able to organize like protest policy in 180
cities simultaneously. So, by all means: We are known.”
Being a regular guy—and wanting to be known—have always been core
to Navalny’s persona, beginning as a kid, growing up on the outskirts of
Moscow as a military brat, with a poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the
Austrian-born bodybuilder, actor, and future governor of California, on his
bedroom wall.
Heroes like Schwarzenegger are a big part of Navalny’s life, fitting in
well with his conviction that the world is filled with good guys and villains.
Once, in 2010, long before he was assured of international fame, Navalny
celebrated the idea that Schwarzenegger, then governor, must have seen an
article about his anti-corruption efforts in the Los Angeles Times.
“Hooray. It’s done,” Navalny proclaimed on his blog. “Now he knows
about me. The one that looked at me from the walls of my room for many
years. Arnold Schwarzenegger… Should the governor of California read
the state newspaper? He must. So, you read about me.”
In his blog post, Navalny quoted a different line from Gogol’s The
Government Inspector in which one of the characters, Peter Bobchinsky
says his only hope is for nobles in St. Petersburg to know of his existence.
Navalny rewrote the line, crossing out Bobchinsky and inserting himself
into the role. “[Schwarzenegger] probably sits and thinks Peter Ivanovich
Bobchinsky lives in such and a such a city Alexey Anatolyevich Navalny
lives in the city of Moscow,” he wrote.
This hunger to be seen, to be known and acknowledged, drives many
politicians, especially those like Navalny, who crave to be celebrated for
helping people. But a craving for fame and attention is not Navalny’s
primary motivation, as some critics have asserted.
Navalny is also not particularly interested in getting rich. He has a
capitalist instinct, and like many others in his generation, has often scouted
out investment and business opportunities. His interest in money, however,
has focused more on slamming greedy and corrupt officials who are
obsessed with wealth and creature comforts—an obsession he never shared.
Understanding Navalny requires recognizing that he is instinctively a
political animal. It is also crucial to know that he is a deeply patriotic, even
nationalist Russian, that he harbors a visceral hate of liars and cheaters, and
that he is animated by a keen sense of justice and outrage that often morphs
into vigilantism. Perhaps most important, he views life as a series of
contests between the forces of good and evil.
It is this worldview that has led him to portray Putin as the devil and to
liken the Russian leader to the evil Voldemort of the Harry Potter series.
Some of Navalny’s close associates say that he even seems to think about
himself and his team as corruption-fighting superheroes.
“He told me many times… to be with a group of good guys, he dreamed
about it,” said Ivan Zhdanov, the executive director of Navalny’s Anti-
corruption Foundation. “He dreamed about, like, you know, maybe comics
—a comics group—and I don’t know, heroes.”
Zhdanov said that nothing angered or upset Navalny more than a sign of
dishonesty or unfairness within his own team, because it was a betrayal of
their noble mission. “It’s not about only honesty,” Zhdanov said. “It’s about
a group of people who, I don’t know, have some secret, some secret
between them about something and… they will save this world.”
At times, Navalny even seems to think he and his team are characters in
one of the animated TV shows he loves so much—the sitcom Rick and
Morty perhaps being his favorite—moving from caper to caper, battling evil
adversaries in one episode after another, despite the grave personal risks of
imprisonment or even death.
One day they are exposing the ill-gotten wealth of a hypocritical
politician; another day they are drawing attention to the shoddy
construction of publicly financed housing; and another day they are
tracking down the government assassins who tried to kill Navalny himself.
Day after day, they come back—same time, same channel—to do it all
again.
During another day of court proceedings in February 2021, a failed
effort to appeal his parole-violation conviction and a separate hearing on
absurd charges that he defamed an elderly military veteran, Navalny
delivered two long statements, at times rambling but poignant, that touched
on these themes of heroism and good vs. evil, and at the same time
hammered home his central anti-Putin message.
The statements revealed a man wrestling with loneliness in the early
weeks of a widely expected heavy prison sentence that somehow still
seemed to have come as a shock—as if he had grown so accustomed to his
cartoon-style cat-and-mouse hijinks with the Kremlin that he simply could
not believe Putin was no longer willing to play.
“Certainly, I’m not really enjoying the place where I am, nevertheless I
have no regrets about coming back, about what I’m doing,” he said.
“Because I did everything right. On the contrary, I feel, well, a kind of
satisfaction.”
Navalny insisted that he, and others like him, would not be broken by
the authorities’ attempts to isolate them.
“First it is important to intimidate, and then to prove that you are alone,”
he said, adding: “And this thing about being alone, it’s very important, it’s
very important as a goal of power. Speaking of which, one of the great
philosophers, Luna Lovegood, remember her in Harry Potter? And, talking
to Harry Potter during difficult times, she told him: ‘It’s important not to
feel lonely, because if I were Voldemort, I would really want you to feel
lonely.’ Certainly, our Voldemort in the Palace wants that, too.”
Navalny also mocked Putin and Putin’s cronies for trying to deny their
fabulous wealth while most Russians remain impoverished. “Despite the
fact that our country is now built on injustice… nevertheless we see that at
the same time millions of people, tens of millions of people, they want the
truth,” Navalny said. “They want to achieve the truth and sooner or later
they will achieve it.”
Navalny urged the public not to be afraid of those calling for change in
the country. “Because many people are afraid: ‘Oh my God, what will
happen, there will be a revolution, there will be nightmares and turmoil.’
But think about how good life would be without constant lies, without these
falsehoods,” he said.
He then turned to the judge, asking wouldn’t she prefer to work in an
honest system. “Think how great it would be… you are a respected pillar of
society and nobody can call you anywhere and give you directions on how
to decide cases and you go to your children and grandchildren and tell them
that yes, you’re really an independent judge.”
 To the prosecutor, he added, “I mean it would be cool, just great, to be a
prosecutor who actually acts in an adversarial system, runs an interesting
kind of legal game, defends somebody or convicts some real villains. It’s
unlikely, I think, that people went to law school and became prosecutors so
that they could then participate in fabricating criminal cases and forging
signatures for somebody.”
Then, he veered back to slamming his would-be assassins. “No one, not
one person in the world, was a schoolboy with glowing eyes who said, ‘I’ll
go to the FSB, and they’ll send me to wash an oppositionist’s underpants
because someone put poison on them,’” Navalny intoned. “There are no
such people! Nobody wants to do that! Everybody wants to be normal,
respectable people, catch terrorists, bandits, spies, fight them all.”
Navalny urged the public to join his cause, quoting the main character
from his favorite show, Rick and Morty.
“It’s very important to just not be afraid of the people who are pushing
for the truth, and maybe even support them in some way,” Navalny said.
“Directly, indirectly, or just maybe not even to support, but at least not to
contribute to this lie, not to make the world worse around us. There is a
small risk in this, of course, but first, it is small, and second, as another
prominent contemporary philosopher named Rick Sanchez said: ‘Life is a
risk. And if you don’t take risks, then you’re just an inert bunch of
randomly assembled molecules drifting wherever the universe blows you.’”
It was at this moment, as he delivered the defendant’s “last word,” the
closing statement to the court, that Alexey Navalny—activist, blogger,
corruption fighter, opposition politician—seemed to metamorphose in front
of everyone’s eyes into a twenty-first-century dissident, calling out from
captivity for Russians to overcome their authoritarian oppressors, and their
centuries of misery.
“One last thing,” Navalny said. “I’m getting a lot of letters right now.
And every other letter ends with the phrase ‘Russia will be free.’ It’s a great
slogan, and I constantly repeat it, write it back, and chant it at rallies. But I
keep thinking that there is something missing for me. That is, of course, I
want Russia to be free; it is necessary, but it is not enough. This cannot be a
goal in itself.
“I want Russia to be rich, which corresponds to its national wealth,” he
continued. “I want these national riches to be distributed more fairly, so that
everyone gets their share of the oil-and-gas pie. I want us to be not only
free, but also, you know, with decent health care. I want men to live to
retirement age, because now half the men in Russia are not able to do so,
and the women are not much better off. I want education to be good and for
people to be able to study normally.
“I wish a lot of other things would happen in our country,” he said. “We
need to struggle not so much with the fact that Russia is not free, but with
the fact that, on the whole, it is miserable on all fronts. We have everything,
but nevertheless we are a miserable country. Open Russian literature, great
Russian literature, my God, there are only descriptions of misery and
suffering. We are a very unhappy country, and we cannot escape from this
circle of unhappiness. But, of course, we want to. So, I propose we change
the slogan and say that Russia must be not only free, but also happy. Russia
will be happy.”

Happiness has never been a reliable, let alone essential, currency in Russia.
But Navalny’s supporters are convinced that he can deliver such a national
transformation—if he survives jail, if he is ever allowed to run for office, if
he wins.
Yevgenia Albats, the longtime editor of New Times magazine who has
served as a sort of political godmother to Navalny and other members of the
political opposition from his generation, said that Navalny’s imprisonment
could well be one more, crucial step toward his destiny as a future leader of
Russia.
“At least in my part of the world, you know, we are a country of
prisoners,” Albats said. “I wouldn’t want him to have this experience, but
that’s a very important experience… it’s also the experience of being
deprived of all your rights. And, you know, he keeps his resistance even
though in the penal colony.”
Albats, who is close to Navalny’s family and corresponds with him
regularly, said that he remained defiant during daily roll calls, where he was
expected to announce his presence by saying “Prisoner Navalny.” Instead,
according to Albats, he refers to himself as “the Illegally Imprisoned
Navalny.”
“In the Russian political culture, you know, all revolutionaries, they
went through jails, whether it’s Stalin or whether it’s, you know, somebody
better than that. Unfortunately, those who were educated but who chose not
to be jailed, they never did anything.”
For Albats, Navalny has proven to be nothing short of a revelation.
She has known him from the beginning, from when he was awkward,
not particularly well-spoken, and certainly without benefit of an elite
education, attending political salons on Tuesday evenings in her Moscow
apartment in the mid-2000s. And she has witnessed his evolution into the
charismatic leader of a national movement, able to command the rapt
attention of giant throngs of people on the streets of Moscow and other
cities—a politician who can relate to everyday citizens and speaks in
language they understand.
“What is very important about him, that he is part of us, he is not
above,” Albats said. “He is not from outside. He’s not somebody who’s
going to come from Switzerland, and you know, and teach Russians how to
become happy. He is part of this people. Of the nation. And, you know, he
is getting a very painful experience, as I said, you know, it’s better not to
have this experience. But I think it’s very important.”
Even by appearance, Navalny is “of the nation.”
He, his wife, Yulia, and their children, Darya and Zakhar, look like they
could be models in an advertisement depicting the stereotypical ideal of a
Slavic, Russian family. So while Navalny has faced harsh criticism for
some of his nationalist and anti-immigrant views and remarks, opponents
cannot easily portray him as an outsider like so many of the Jewish
dissidents, the refuseniks, were in Soviet times.
Volkov, Navalny’s longtime deputy and chief strategist now living in
exile in Vilnius, fits the old model: He is an observant Jew who adheres to
kosher dietary laws. Volkov’s successor as head of the Anti-corruption
Foundation, Maria Pevchikh, can be portrayed as an outsider in another
way: She has lived much of her life in Britain.
With Navalny in prison, and Putin presiding over a ferocious crackdown
on political dissent following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine,
Volkov, Pevchikh, and other lieutenants have shifted into survival mode,
using their base in Lithuania to try to keep attention on Navalny’s plight and
keep the remnants of their political machine whirring, ready for the moment
when he is free.
One of their goals has been to field as many candidates across the
country as possible, following a strategy called “Smart voting” by which
they aim to team up with anyone who is not part of Putin’s United Russia
party, which Navalny famously branded as the party of crooks and thieves.
And it is precisely because they still hope to appeal to mainstream voters,
Volkov said, that they want to be known as politicians, not dissidents.
“This means we actually, like, pretend to be the majority and, as we
managed to prove during the Moscow mayoral campaign and then later
during the presidential campaign, we are able to connect very different
layers of the Russian society,” Volkov said. “And in a fair and competitive
election, well, maybe we wouldn’t be the largest political force in the
country, but definitely the second.”
Albats, who is a generation older than Volkov and also an observant Jew,
has a clearer recollection of Soviet times. She is willing to call Navalny a
revolutionary but Navalny, she says, sees himself only as a politician.
“He’s a politician,” she said. “That’s him, that’s who he is. He’s born…
a political animal, and you know that’s what he loves.
“He is thinking about himself as a future president of the Russian
Federation,” Albats said. “That’s for sure. He is the future president of the
Russian Federation. The whole question: Is it going to happen? I have no
doubt. The guy—if he survives, if they fail to kill him in jail again—he will
become the leader of Russia.”
 1

POISONING

“As the night wore on, it was those in the gray suits who gave the
diagnosis.”
—Leonid Volkov, Berlin, August 21, 2020

Alexey Navalny was sweating heavily and completely disoriented, unsure

that he could walk the few steps from an airplane bathroom back to his seat.
And yet, in that moment, he also understood, with terrifying clarity, that he
was about to die.
“The closest analogy I found was the Dementors from Harry Potter,”
Navalny recalled about six weeks later, after waking up from a medically
induced coma. “[J. K.] Rowling’s description is a Dementor’s kiss doesn’t
hurt, it just sucks life out of you. It didn’t hurt at all, but the main
overwhelming feeling is: I am about to die.”
The forty-four-year-old political opposition leader was on an early-
morning flight home to Moscow from the city of Tomsk in Siberia, where
he campaigned for candidates in regional elections. After just a few minutes
in the air, he felt perilously ill.
As his brain fogged up, and an awful feeling of dread began to spread
through him, Navalny pleaded with his press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, who
was seated next to him, to talk. When she did, he could see her mouth
moving, but could not make sense of her words.
A flight attendant came by with bottles of water. At first, Navalny was
going to ask for a drink, but decided to go to the bathroom and splash water
on his face. He went in his socks, and after washing up, thought to sit there
for a second and rest. Suddenly, however, he realized that he’d better get
out of the locked bathroom while he still could. He had been inside for
about twenty minutes, and a queue of passengers had formed.
“I came out and saw a bunch of unhappy faces, I thought: ‘Maybe I’ve
been in there for, like, ten minutes.’” Navalny told the Russian YouTuber
and online journalist Yury Dud. “I realized that I should probably ask for
help, because I didn’t think I could walk back to my seat. To my own
surprise, I turned to this flight attendant and said, ‘I was poisoned. I am
about to die.’ And then I lay down in front of him.”
Navalny described these events about one month after emerging from a
medically induced coma, most of it spent at Charité Hospital in Berlin. And
despite his difficult recovery, which was far from complete, his trademark
humor had returned.
“The flight attendant looked at me with a little smirk like, ‘What a
nutjob!’ Maybe he thought I got food poisoning from the tomato juice or
macaroni,” Navalny said. “I think he was about to tell me that they couldn’t
have poisoned me on the plane. but I wasn’t listening, I had laid down on
the floor, determined to die there and then.”
In video posted online by passengers, Navalny could be heard wailing in
agony. He himself would have no recollection of that, or of the emergency
landing that saved him.
But Navalny’s description of what he felt in those moments matched the
experiences of others, including his own wife, Yulia, believed to have been
poisoned with the same type of military-grade chemical weapon, an
organophosphate acetylcholinesterase inhibitor from the Novichok family.
“It’s your entire body is telling you: ‘Alexey. It’s time to say goodbye.
You’ve done something to me that’s 100 percent incompatible with life.’”

Navalny and his colleagues—Yarmysh and a project manager for the Anti-
corruption Foundation, Ilya Pakhomov—had arrived at Bogashevo Airport
in Tomsk comfortably early for their flight, S7 Airlines 2616, to Moscow-
Domodedovo, the airport closest to Navalny’s home in the capital.
Navalny, wearing a gray flowered T-shirt, posed for snapshots on the
security line.
In the departure lounge, Navalny bought some candy for his two
children. Then, the trio stopped by the airport’s Vienna Café, where a
display of clocks showed the time in Tomsk, Moscow, Crimea (which
Russia had invaded and illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014) and
Surgut, a Siberian city to the northwest that is a major hub for energy
businesses.
Navalny had not eaten breakfast, either at his hotel or in the airport.
Airport surveillance cameras would show Pakhomov handing Navalny a
cup of black tea.
On the shuttle bus from the gate to the aircraft, a Boeing 737-800 with
S7’s light green detailing on the wingtips, Navalny posed for more fan
photos. He seemed perfectly fine. The plane departed at 8:06 a.m.
They were in the air for about ten minutes when he suddenly felt ill.
With Navalny lying on the floor in the crew area at the rear of the plane,
a flight attendant made an announcement seeking passengers with medical
expertise. One woman, a nurse, came forward. The flight attendants also
asked the pilots to make an emergency landing, and shortly after there was
an announcement that the flight was diverting to Omsk, where it landed at
9:01 local time, nearly two hours after takeoff.
In the roughly half hour between the emergency landing announcement
and touchdown in Omsk, passengers would recall the ill man—most did not
know his identity—wailing and screaming and, at one point, vomiting. The
airline, S7, said that its flight crew had worked to keep Navalny conscious.
An ambulance crew was waiting, but the paramedics who boarded the
plane quickly concluded that the case was too serious for them and called
for a critical care ambulance. Video posted by local news sites showed
Pakhomov standing near the back of the plane as the paramedics attached
an intravenous drip. Other videos showed Navalny, unconscious, on a
stretcher being loaded into an ambulance on the tarmac, and Pakhomov,
with a knapsack slung over each shoulder, talking to paramedics.
Navalny’s team suspected immediately that he was poisoned. It was not
the first time he had fallen mysteriously ill. They also knew that they would
soon be in an information war with the Kremlin, and that Navalny’s
survival could depend, in large part, on their ability to keep the world
informed about his condition.
 The events that morning would show the Navalny team fully activated in
crisis mode, working across five time zones to fight for their fallen leader.
Yarmysh, the press secretary, put out the first word: “This morning
Navalny was returning to Moscow from Tomsk,” she tweeted. “In flight, he
became ill. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk. Alexey has
toxic poisoning. Now we’re going to the hospital in an ambulance.” In a
follow-up tweet, she registered suspicion of the Russian government. “A
year ago, when Alexey was in a special detention center, he was poisoned,”
she wrote. “Apparently, they’ve done the same to him now.”
Then, speaking live to the Ekho Moskvy radio station, Yarmysh drew a
direct connection to the upcoming regional parliamentary elections and
Navalny’s political work in Siberia. “This is also connected with the
election campaign,” she said. “I think that the authorities proceed from
some of their own ideas about when it is necessary to neutralize Alexey.”

On that morning—August 20, 2020—Ivan Zhdanov, the director of

Navalny’s Anti-corruption Foundation, had just driven all night back to
Moscow from Vilnius, where he had celebrated his thirty-second birthday,
with his friend and boss, Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s top aide.
It had been a smooth drive from the Lithuanian capital for Zhdanov and
his wife, with their toddler daughter sleeping soundly in the back seat. They
were about ten minutes from their home in the north of Moscow, when
suddenly Zhdanov began getting urgent messages from Siberia.
“I see this message that he is in a coma, and that they stopped their flight
in Minsk,” Zhdanov recalled. He quickly reached out to Volkov in Vilnius
and said he had messages that something was wrong, but the gravity of the
situation wasn’t clear. He initially told Volkov, “we should observe the
situation and be in touch.” The messages, however, kept coming and
Zhdanov quickly called Vilnius again, telling Volkov: “I need a ticket to
Omsk.”
The only flight that day to Omsk was from Domodedovo Airport, a
nearly two-hour drive at the opposite end of the city. Zhdanov began
speeding there, blowing red lights. “I broke all the traffic rules,” he said. “I
really was out of any limits.”
Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, was rushing for the same flight,
though she lived much closer to the airport in the south of Moscow.
Yarmysh had called and said their flight had been diverted to Tomsk. She
did not provide details, but the emergency landing was enough to signal to
Navalnaya that she should get to Omsk. She threw an assortment of clothes
into a suitcase and left her apartment, not even waking up her children to
say goodbye.
Navalnaya asked her taxi driver to rush, noting that she had just two
hours to catch her flight. In fact, she had miscalculated and had an extra
hour. Another airport. Another café. Yarmysh sent another message: Alexey
is in a coma, on life support. “I got this message at the airport,” Navalnaya
told Yury Dud. “Now it was clear the situation was critical.”
Sitting in the café at Domodedovo, she messaged a friend and started
crying. The friend quickly texted back: “Do you have sunglasses with
you?” “I said: ‘What? Why? Sunglasses at the airport?’” Navalnaya
recalled. “She said: ‘Find a pair.’”
By chance, she had a pair of big sunglasses in her purse. She put them
on, ordered a glass of whisky, and bawled. It was 8 a.m.
Zhdanov arrived at the airport in time. “I caught this flight with Yulia
and she was really stressed,” he recalled. “It was really important to fly with
her because she was devastated absolutely.”
At boarding, they realized they would be cut off from updates about
Navalny’s condition for the duration of the roughly four-hour flight to
Siberia. The thought of being out of contact for that long, with her husband
on the edge of death, was unbearable.
“I was flying with Vanya Zhdanov,” Navalnaya would recall. “I can’t
say I’m a blabbermouth. But as I later learned, when asked about the flight
after we landed, he said: “It was fine. Yulia talked for four hours without
breaks. I told him about our kids, the one, the other, about our family and
what we’re up to as a family. I probably told him every secret. We haven’t
asked him yet about what I told him in those four hours. But I’m guessing
he heard a lot.
“I was just scared of being left alone with my thoughts even for a
second, so I had to talk to someone,” she continued. “Landing was also
scary. I said to Vanya: ‘Is it okay if you read and I look at your reactions?’
He was obviously nervous, too. He picked up the phone, scrolled through,
and put it back down. I noticed the uneasy look on his face when he was
scrolling. I even said to him then: ‘Vanya, if it’s really bad, tell me now.’ I
wanted to pull myself together on the plane to leave it composed. But he
wouldn’t tell me, and my guess was that he was afraid to tell me on the
plane and instead wanted to talk in the airport, because he’d be able to get
me a doctor in case I needed one. I kept saying: ‘Tell me the truth. Tell me
the truth.’”
Zhdanov remembers it differently. First, he was struggling to get a cell
phone signal. Then, when he did, Navalnaya didn’t believe him when he
said that nothing had changed.
“It was really, so hard for us,” Zhdanov said. “She really didn’t believe
me that everything is OK. When I tried to find a connection with the
internet, several times she told me, ‘You didn’t want to tell me the truth
yet.’”

As the ambulance raced to City Clinical Emergency Hospital No. 1 in

Omsk with Navalny already comatose in the back, and while Navalnaya
and Zhdanov were rushing to catch their flight in Moscow, the Navalny
team still in Tomsk also kicked into gear.
At the Xander Hotel, Vladlen Los, a lawyer for the Anti-corruption
Foundation, posted himself as a sentry outside Room 239, where Navalny
had spent his nights in the city. He knew that crucial evidence was still in
the room, and also that the Russian authorities would make no effort to
investigate.
Los had been having breakfast at the hotel with two other longtime
Navalny associates, Georgy Alburov and Maria Pevchikh. They had stayed
behind to finish up work on the campaign video that Navalny had filmed in
support of his party’s local political candidates. At breakfast Alburov
realized that Navalny’s flight had been diverted to Omsk, and then heard
from Yarmysh about the poisoning.
They pressed the hotel to let them into Room 239, which had not yet
been cleaned. A desk clerk initially refused. The hotel also refused to turn
over the video from the numerous surveillance cameras located on the
property, including in the hallway just outside Navalny’s room, which likely
would have shown who had entered and planted the poison. Those videos
later disappeared after being seized by the police, though the cameras had
apparently been deactivated.
Los, Alburov, and Pevchikh were joined by Anton Timofeyev, a former
detective in Tomsk who had become a lawyer and was working with the
Navalny political network’s local office.
Eventually, the hotel management relented and let them into Room 239,
which they searched wearing rubber gloves while recording everything on
video—footage that they would clip and put on social media and that would
also feature later in the Oscar-winning documentary about Navalny’s
poisoning.
Among the items they found and carefully removed were bottles of
Svyatoi Istochnik (Holy Spring) brand water—at least one of which would
be determined by investigators to bear traces of Novichok, the military-
grade chemical weapon developed in Russian laboratories. In hindsight, the
search was dangerous, since the gloves provided little protection against the
highly lethal nerve agent.
However, most of the poison, it would turn out, had been on Navalny’s
underwear.

Meanwhile, in Vilnius, Navalny’s top aide, Leonid Volkov, had launched

himself into figuring out medevac options that would get his stricken friend
to Europe and away from Russia, where Navalny was still very much under
the control of his would-be assassins.
The team of “good guys” that Navalny had dreamed of was now
engaged in a full-court, multinational push to save his life.
Even if Russian doctors could save him, which was unclear, they were
making no effort to figure out what—or, more important, who—had tried to
murder him.
The prospect of an evacuation was complicated further by travel
restrictions tied to the coronavirus pandemic. Volkov, nonetheless,
developed several options of hospitals that could potentially handle
Navalny’s case. One was in Strasbourg. Three others were in Germany,
including the Charité Hospital in Berlin, which two years earlier had treated
Pyotr Verzilov, a member of Pussy Riot, the anti-Putin art collective and
activist group, after what appeared to be a similar poisoning incident.
Verzilov, on Navalny’s behalf, reached out to Jaka Bizilj, the head of the
Cinema for Peace Foundation, which had helped arrange Verzilov’s medical
evacuation in 2018. Volkov was also in touch with Boris Zimin, a Russian-
born business tycoon, philanthropist, and race car driver who had long been
Navalny’s financial patron, employing him on salary nominally for legal
work. Zimin, whose father, Dmitry, founded the VimpleCom cell phone
company, was also a founding benefactor of the Anti-corruption
Foundation.
With no flights available to the German capital, Volkov set off in his car
on the nearly twelve-hour drive to Berlin, hoping Navalny would soon be
airlifted there.
In Russia, Navalny’s personal doctors quickly began demanding the
transfer.
“The doctors are not doing everything possible,” Yaroslav Ashikhmin, a
general practitioner and cardiologist who had treated Navalny, told the
Meduza news site. “Navalny, of course, needs to be evacuated to Europe…
There are very few institutions that can take a patient who is probably
poisoned by some kind of toxin.”
Ashikhmin stressed that treatment wasn’t the only reason to send
Navalny abroad.
“There is a second task: the search for a substance that may have caused
the poisoning,” he said. “It is in this particular situation that Western clinics
could potentially have more experience.”

In Omsk, the doctors resisted the idea of transferring Navalny. They also
refused to let his wife see him, initially telling Yulia that her passport was
not sufficient proof of marriage.
Navalnaya and Zhdanov arrived at City Clinical Emergency Hospital
No. 1 in Omsk that evening. Navalnaya wore a black dress, a black Covid
mask, and huge sunglasses. Zhdanov, wearing a white button-down and a
gray plaid blazer, looked exhausted.
They immediately faced hostility from hospital, law enforcement, and
security officials, who had gathered in surprising numbers, including local
police, transport police, the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the Russian
National Guard.
Another of Navalny’s personal doctors, Anastasia Vasilyeva, had also
rushed to Omsk but despite her medical credentials, she was flatly refused
access to her patient.
“This is some kind of real madness and is simply inhuman and
uncollegial,” Vasilyeva tweeted. “Doctors all together in such a situation
should forget about politics and do everything in the name of the patient’s
health. It is monstrous not to let me examine Alexey, not even listen to his
history.
“I do not ask for much—to look at the fundus of the eye, reflexes, tell
the anamnesis of past poisoning, show medical documentation to
communicate and consult with foreign colleagues,” she wrote. “No. They
do not give. Argument—no right. Although the right to life is above all.”
By late evening, Zhdanov posted an update, saying that Navalnaya had
been granted an audience with the hospital’s chief doctor but officials were
stonewalling a transfer. “Perhaps she will be given more information as a
wife,” he wrote. “But they refuse to give any documents. They say
transportation is not possible.”
After the life-saving decision by the S7 pilots to make a fast emergency
landing, the ambulance crew secured Navalny’s chance of survival by
administering atropine, a standard treatment in poisoning cases.
But at the hospital, the spinning and dissembling started almost
immediately. Doctors said there was no sign of any toxin and began
questioning Navalny’s prior health and what he had eaten before the flight.
“So far, there is no certainty that poisoning was the reason for Navalny’s
hospitalization,” Anatoly Kalinichenko, deputy chief physician, told
reporters. “It is considered as one of the versions, but there are others.”
Muddying the waters further, the chief doctor, Alexander Murakhovsky,
said that Navalny had not been poisoned but was diagnosed with a
metabolic disorder caused by low blood sugar.
 News outlets close to the Kremlin quickly began reporting suspicions
that Navalny had been drinking and suffered alcohol poisoning, despite
everyone close to Navalny knowing that he was a very light drinker.
Within days a more sinister theory was spun out, alleging that Pevchikh,
the Anti-corruption Foundation’s chief of investigations, had actually
poisoned Navalny and that she had been sleeping in his hotel room. This
was even more outlandish than the allegation of alcoholism.
Navalny is not an idiot, and he had long taken precautions against
getting ensnared in the sort of honey traps that pro-Putin forces ran against
several opposition figures. A series of incidents in 2010 involved the same
woman, Ekaterina Gerasimova, nicknamed Mumu, who tried to entrap her
targets by recording videos of sexual escapades and drug use.
When asked about Navalny’s situation, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry
Peskov, said the president’s office was aware he had fallen ill. Peskov said
the Kremlin was even willing to help facilitate his transfer abroad—a
seemingly magnanimous statement in Moscow, but one that did not quickly
turn gears in Omsk. (Like his boss, Peskov often made great efforts not to
utter Navalny’s name.)
“Many Russian citizens these days, although the borders are closed, go
abroad for treatment,” Peskov said. “And of course, we will be ready to
consider such appeals very promptly, if any.”
The international stakes of Navalny’s case also became apparent that
first afternoon. French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor
Angela Merkel weighed in, voicing concern for Navalny, offering to help
with his medical treatment, and demanding an investigation.
“As for Mr. Navalny, we are of course very concerned and deeply regret
his situation,” Macron said during a news conference with Merkel at Fort de
Brégançon, his official summer residence. “We fully support him, his
family and loved ones… We are of course ready to provide any necessary
support to Alexey Navalny and his family. This applies to the areas of
health policy, asylum and protection.
“The facts that led to this situation must be analyzed,” Macron said.
“The causes must be determined and there must be an investigation. I think
Mr. Navalny can be saved. We will also provide him with our support if
requested.”
Merkel, as usual, was more succinct but no less forceful. “As far as Mr.
Navalny is concerned, we were of course also very upset in Germany today
at the news that he is in hospital and, as we have heard, is in a very
worrying condition. I certainly hope and wish that he will recover as soon
as possible… What applies to France also applies to Germany, that of
course we will also give him all the medical help in German hospitals,” she
said. “Of course, that has to be desired from there. It is now very, very
important that it is urgently clarified how this situation came about. We will
insist. Because what we have heard so far are very unfavorable
circumstances. That has to be done very, very transparently.”

There would be no investigation in Russia, of course. But Navalnaya sent a

letter to Putin appealing directly to the Russian leader to allow her to take
her husband abroad for treatment.
“He’s not in a very good condition and we can’t trust this hospital,”
Navalnaya told reporters outside the hospital the next morning. “We
demand they release him to us so we can treat him in an independent
hospital with doctors whom we trust.”
Zhdanov told the journalists that a transport police official was
overheard telling Murakhovsky, the chief doctor in Omsk, that a “very
dangerous substance” had been found on Navalny, and that everybody
involved in Navalny’s case should be wearing protective gear. But Zhdanov
said the officer and the doctor refused to divulge the name of the substance,
and Murakhovsky insisted the information was not confirmed.
Vasilyeva, meanwhile, continued to rail against the local hospital
officials for refusing to release Navalny, even after the air ambulance had
been dispatched from Germany and was now waiting for him on the tarmac
—with the German doctors having declared him fit for transport.
“If the diagnosis is just a ‘metabolic disorder,’ then why isn’t Alexey
allowed to go to Berlin,” she tweeted scathingly, before answering her own
question: “Because they wait three days so that there are no traces of poison
in the body, and in Europe it would be impossible to establish this toxic
substance.”
Volkov, in Berlin, bluntly said politics were at play.
 “Let me put it this way: there was an external factor that very suddenly
put him in critical condition,” he told Der Spiegel. “Initially, the doctors
said unequivocally that it was poisoning. They did everything they could to
stabilize his condition, put him in an induced coma and ventilated him.
Suddenly, however, those in the white coats no longer had the floor. As the
night wore on, it was those in the gray suits who gave the diagnosis.”
Finally, later on Friday, after Putin’s intervention, the doctors relented
and discharged Navalny to the German transport team. “Hooray,” Vasilyeva
tweeted. “Everything has moved off the ground! I can’t even believe that in
some 2 hours Alexey will fly to Germany. And there they are most likely to
cure him… Terribly glad.”
Navalny was permitted to leave Siberia. Boris Zimin later confirmed
that he had paid €72,000, or about $85,000, for the air ambulance. Three
other Russian businessmen living outside of Russia—Yevgeny Chichvarkin;
Sergei Aleksashenko, a former deputy chairman of the Russian Central
Bank; and Roman Ivanov, an executive at Yandex, the internet company—
confirmed to Reuters that they had contributed thousands of dollars for
Navalny’s medical care.
But while Navalny was cleared for medical evacuation, the clothing he
was wearing on the day that he was poisoned was never returned to him.
And his family, close friends, and colleagues still did not know if he would
ever recover.

In Berlin, Navalny spent another fifteen days in a coma.

While he was unconscious and still connected to a ventilator,
toxicologists at a German military laboratory confirmed that Navalny had
been poisoned with a nerve agent banned under the international Chemical
Weapons Convention, of which Russia is a signatory.
Merkel personally announced the findings at a news conference,
underscoring the seriousness of the allegation. Only the Russian
government had access to such a weapon.
“The special laboratory of the German Armed Forces has delivered a
clear result,” Merkel said. “Alexey Navalny was the victim of an attack
with a chemical nerve agent from the Novichok group. This poison can be
detected without any doubt in the samples.
“Thus, it is certain that Alexey Navalny was the victim of a crime,”
Merkel continued. “It was intended to silence him, and I condemn this in
the strongest possible terms… Very serious questions now arise, which only
the Russian government can and must answer.”
In Russia, however, there were no answers, and there was no
investigation—only dissembling and denials, and accusations against the
West of an anti-Russian conspiracy.
When doctors finally brought Navalny out of his coma, he could not talk
or walk. His hands shook uncontrollably and he experienced terrible
hallucinations.
Some of these, he said, involved a Russian rap group called Krovostok.
In another, his wife and Volkov told him that he had been in a terrible
accident and that a Japanese professor would give him new legs and a new
back.
Navalnaya and Volkov each had their moments when they realized
Navalny was getting back to his old self. In Volkov’s case, it was when
Navalny, who otherwise seemed in a near-catatonic state, looked up at one
point and exclaimed: “What the fuck is going on here?” Volkov later told
him, “That’s when I knew you’d be OK.”
For Navalnaya, the moment came when her husband was still not quite
able to speak, but laughed when she showed him a report about Alexander
Lukashenko, the Belarusian leader. Lukashenko claimed his security
services had intercepted a phone call between a German intelligence agent,
Nick, and a Polish operative, Mike, in which they asserted that Navalny’s
poisoning was a fraud.
In the hospital, Navalny also got a visit from Merkel, which was perhaps
the highlight of his time in Berlin, though he sought to play it down.
Merkel started out by speaking to him in Russian, in which she is fluent.
“It was a private conversation,” Navalny told Yury Dud just days later.
“Without delving into any details, nothing of importance came up.
“I was surprised by how detailed her understanding of current events in
Russia was,” he said. “Normally, you meet a foreign politician and go, ‘Let
me tell you what’s really going on in Russia.’ Because they live in an ivory
tower. She knew current Russian events better than anyone, down to every
detail. About Khabarovsk, about Belarus… Down to every detail, with full
context, knows how things work, and in Russian, too!”
But pressed about whether there might be some political downside to the
meeting because he could be portrayed as a stooge of the West, Navalny
flashed a bit of the ego that has built over the years as his reputation has
grown. He noted that Putin, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and other
officials routinely meet Merkel.
“I don’t mean it like I’m the second politician in the country, but I’m
probably one of the key figures of the Russian political opposition,”
Navalny said. “So, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me meeting
with a foreign leader to discuss Russian or international affairs. I can
discuss them as well as Putin can. I don’t see a problem with that.”
 2

NAVALNY VS. PUTIN

“The United Russia party is the party of corruption. It’s the party of
crooks and thieves.”
—Alexey Navalny, Finam FM radio, February 2, 2011

Navalny might not have seen any problem with the attention he was
getting—not just from Merkel, of course, but from other world leaders, the
international media, and, especially, from regular Russian voters.
However, Vladimir Putin and many of the people benefitting from his
authoritarian leadership clearly did see a problem—enough of a problem
that Navalny would be worth targeting with a deadly nerve agent.
According to an investigation led by Bellingcat, Navalny was followed
to Siberia by a team of assassins from Russia’s FSB. They followed him on
and off for years, and this time planned to get rid of him for good.
The poisoning attack marked a threshold moment in a battle between
Navalny and Putin that had been escalating for twenty years, in which each
man underestimated the other.
Putin repeatedly failed to grasp Navalny’s single-minded tenacity when
it comes to his decades-long political aspirations. Navalny’s status as a
dissident—as a political prisoner now locked mostly in a solitary
confinement “punishment” cell—resulted in many ways by default because
Putin left him with no acceptable alternative in what remains, as Albats
described it, “a nation of prisoners.”
Navalny wants to live in a free and democratic Russia. He wants to be
president of a free and democratic Russia. And he has made clear, time and
again, that he is willing to risk his life and sacrifice his freedom in order to
achieve it. In Navalny’s view, Putin’s Russia is a prison for everyone who
lives there, not just those who are incarcerated.
Navalny, in turn, failed to grasp how far Putin was willing to go—not
just to eliminate his political adversaries but to realize his revanchist
Russian imperial fantasies. At rallies, Navalny and his supporters often
chanted, “Putin is a thief.” But Putin was, in fact, prepared to risk being
indicted as a war criminal.
Navalny’s close associates believe that the Kremlin has tried to kill him
at least three times. In many ways, it was fitting that they had come closest
in Tomsk, in the cold, frozen heart of middle Russia—where Navalny was
demonstrating that he could pose a real threat to Putin’s grip on power by
reaching voters beyond the elite intellectual circles of Moscow.

On August 13, 2020, Navalny traveled to Siberia to campaign on behalf of

candidates in local legislative elections scheduled to take place precisely a
month later.
His first stop was Novosibirsk, Russia’s third largest city, with just over
1.5 million people, about 1,750 miles from Moscow. Regarded as the
capital of Siberia, Novosibirsk held a special fascination for Navalny
because it embodied one of his core frustrations with Russia’s political
system and, especially, with the pervasive political apathy of many Russian
citizens.
On a video recorded during that trip, which was released after his
poisoning, Navalny framed the upcoming elections as the latest clash in a
two-decade-long struggle against the political forces of Putin.
“They have always defeated us—for twenty years in a row,” Navalny
said. “And even if they lost, they would still declare victory with the help of
deception and machinations. But we need to rise and go into battle again
because, until we win, our country is doomed to slowly degrade.”
Navalny understood that the Faustian bargain between Putin and the
Russian elite was a deal forged in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the
cosmopolitan centers of European Russia. Quality of life was always far
better in the big cities than everywhere else—especially compared to
smaller towns and villages, but even in comparison to large cities scattered
across Russia’s vast expanse, cities with good universities and educated
citizens, but where the burgeoning middle class had never demanded more
or better.
“I am now in the place where the most important political battle will
take place—here, it’s very hot in summer and very cold in winter,” Navalny
said on the video. “The number of people with higher education is
abnormally high here. It could have been one of the most successful cities
in the world, but instead became home to a Russian ghetto. Using the
example of the third city of the country we will analyze how you can defeat
this insatiable toad—the United Russia party.”
To Navalny, Novosibirsk and cities like Khabarovsk in the Far East,
where protests had broken out just a month earlier over Moscow’s arrest of
a popular governor, presented an opportunity—to awaken apathetic
Russians, and turn “regular” Russia against Putin.
When he began preparing a potential campaign for president in 2018—
an election in which he was technically barred from running because of a
trumped-up criminal conviction—the first regional office Navalny and his
team opened outside Moscow was in St. Petersburg. The second was in
Novosibirsk.
At the official opening ceremony of the office, on February 18, 2017,
Navalny explained why he had such hopes for Novosibirsk:

We want the regions, cities, to participate more actively in the

election campaign, because for twenty years now no city, except
Moscow, has decided anything at all. Everything is determined in
Moscow. We will fight this. We do not agree with this. We will
change the situation in which only Moscow and the Moscow elite
decide what the elections should look like. We are opening a
headquarters to show that they don’t think so in Novosibirsk, either.
Perhaps Novosibirsk is the best demonstration of how the system
of power in the country is now incorrectly arranged. Novosibirsk is
the best demonstration of how a wonderful city, very rich, with huge
potential, with a highly educated population, lives in quality much
 worse than it should. We will talk about this in this election
campaign, about everything, ending with problems of housing and
communal services.
When I see rallies on the housing and communal services problem
in Novosibirsk—in the cold, more than in Moscow, I understand—
this problem… cannot be solved in any way, except for the
presidential elections, except for the change of power in the country.

By August 2020, Navalny’s network had nearly three dozen candidates

running in the local elections in Novosibirsk, including the head of its own
office, Sergei Boiko.
“Our plan was that we would drive through the cities of Russia and
show you actual, real politics,” Yarmysh, Navalny’s press secretary, said
later, “to show you that politics is not only the Kremlin, not only Putin, the
State Duma, and famous ministers, but also dozens of regional parliaments,
on which the lives of millions of Russians, all of us, depend every day.
“The United Russia deputies who sit in these parliaments are the actual
backbone of Putin’s entire regime,” she said. “They are not cogs, but the
foundation on which the ruling party, which has prevented us from living
normally for twenty years, is built.”
Her description of the regional politicians was an exaggeration, but it
was in keeping with Navalny’s tendency to regard whatever he happens to
be working on at a particular moment—a mission, a political project, an
exposé—as the one upon which Russia’s entire future depends.
Navalny arrived in Novosibirsk on the evening of August 17, and spent
the next two days shooting videos for an exposé on local corruption and its
role in shoddy building construction. From there, he went to Tomsk.
Posting a photo of himself with supporters on Instagram, Navalny wrote:
“People with long arms don’t need selfie sticks. Tomsk is a great city, one
of the most beautiful in our country.
“More volunteers are needed to beat United Russia candidates,” he
added. “The party in power has a lot of money, but we can only count on
the help of good, honest people. If you live in Tomsk, then go to
tomsk2020.ru and sign up as a volunteer. The swindlers won’t kick
themselves out of the City Duma!”
 On September 13, while Navalny was recovering in Germany, Boiko,
the head of Navalny’s office in Novosibirsk, and Ksenia Fadeyeva, the head
of his Tomsk office, each won seats in the legislative elections. Stunningly,
Putin’s party, United Russia, was stripped of its majority in both cities, as
opposition candidates from other parties also won seats.
These were small victories, and with the repressions that were carried
out in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine, they would prove agonizingly
temporary. Boiko fled the country, and Fadeyeva was arrested and charged
with extremism. But at the time, it was precisely the kind of victory that
Navalny had been striving toward for two decades.

Seven years earlier, in 2013, an interviewer asked Yulia Navalnaya if she

could imagine her husband as president of the Russian Federation. “I
imagine him as president, because I want a person who has overcome so
much,” she said. “I think he deserves it. Sharing his convictions, I imagine
him as president.
“Myself I don’t really imagine as first lady,” she added. “I imagine
myself as his wife, no matter what he is.”
It was the kind of politically pitch-perfect answer that had even her
mother-in-law cheering. And Navalnaya, of course, was not the only one
who could imagine her husband as the president of Russia.
At 9 p.m. on February 2, 2011, Navalny appeared on the Finam FM
radio station, on a program called Dry Residue—a nightly talk show that
billed itself as analyzing politics, economics, and finance from the
perspective of the stock market. The station had recently rebranded to focus
on men aged twenty-five to forty-five with high discretionary income.
In other words, it was a perfect platform for Navalny, who had used his
education and interest in finances and the stock market to launch a political
career.
The plan was to talk about Navalny’s fight against corruption in
government procurement, which had set off shock waves throughout
Russia. But the host, Yury Pronko, first wanted to talk politics, noting that
numerous media outlets were reporting, “Well, it’s time for Navalny to go
to the presidential election.”
Pronko also teased Navalny, saying it would be unforgivable if he didn’t
pull some “sensational” comments out of him: “You already know what
journalists want.”
Navalny, chuckling, said, “A few sensational statements.” He sat in the
studio wearing a white T-shirt and tight-fitting black cardigan, looking
gangly and a bit geeky with his headset on.
Pronko dove in, noting that 97 percent of listeners said they supported
the idea of Navalny as a presidential candidate. “You can put your hand
over your heart, say honestly,” Pronko said. “Are you connected in this way
to politics? And do you have such far-reaching plans?”
Navalny began by thanking everyone for their support and confessing
that he felt a “big responsibility” because people ask questions and they
need to be answered.
But Navalny said he had a question of his own. “I would like to ask,
including those who voted for me, this thing called presidential elections,
what is this? We have in general in the country, a strange procedure in
which [Central Election Commission chairman Vladimir] Churov sits there
stroking his beard and fills in the blanks from his head, or [Kremlin adviser
Vladislav] Surkov’s head, or Putin’s, and gives everyone results. This is an
election. If there’s at least one person who really assumes that the result of
the presidential election is how people voted… I think there are very few
such people. So, the question here is whether it is necessary to participate in
the elections or is it necessary to participate in this strange procedure which
is called elections in Russia.”
Navalny’s outrage was justified. Elections had been rigged in Russia at
least since Boris Yeltsin ran for reelection in 1996. Putin was appointed as
president, then won his first election in 2000 over the same systemic
opponents, Gennady Zyuganov of the Communists and Vladimir
Zhirinovsky of the far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia.
In 2004, Putin effectively ran unopposed. Then in 2008, after running up
against constitutional term limits, he simply swapped jobs with Prime
Minister Dmitry Medvedev, leaving Putin very much in charge. And four
years later, Putin would orchestrate yet another switch, reclaiming the
presidency and confirming that Navalny and millions of other Russians had
every right to be jaded and cynical.
 Navalny told Pronko and the Finam listeners that he was content in his
role fighting corruption.
“Everyone should do their own thing,” he said. “I like what I am doing
right now and, apparently, I am not the only one who likes it, who thinks it
is quite effective and useful. So to do this and work in a direction where I
am useful rather than… dance and play a hamster running through a maze
and Churov is standing over laughing cheerfully at these hamsters.”
“How beautifully you ducked from answering,” Pronko said, tweaking
Navalny for not directly saying if he intended to run for president someday.
“I didn’t duck,” Navalny replied in a singsong.
“So, you don’t have presidential ambitions,” Pronko jabbed, still angling
to make news.
Navalny, of course, did not want to commit, but also would not deny it,
either. “My activity is without a doubt political,” he replied. “I am not going
to get nervous and say there’s no politics in this. Without a doubt,
corruption cases, which I am considering in general, are the country’s
biggest political issue.”
Pronko observed, as many others had, that Navalny was largely carrying
out the tasks of then president Dmitry Medvedev, who had professed to
undertake a campaign against corruption but in fact had done little to
impose any controls over Russia’s vast kleptocracy.
“I am fulfilling the tasks of the multinational people of the Russian
Federation, who have had enough of all this for a long time,” Navalny said.
“Therefore, my political activity, which I am engaged in, is important, much
more important again, than running in the labyrinth built by the Central
Election Commission and the crooks who run the Central Election
Commission.”
What Pronko didn’t realize was that, totally unwittingly, he was about to
get the sensational statement he had requested, one that would end up
reshaping the political discourse in Russia forever. And it sprung from the
simplest of questions: “So do you have your own political sympathies?” he
asked Navalny. “I don’t know how you feel about the United Russia party.”
United Russia, the party of Putin and Medvedev, had been thwarting
Navalny’s democratic aspirations for Russia, and his own personal political
ambitions, for a decade. And Navalny’s investigations—first into state-
owned companies as an activist shareholder, and later into public
procurement—had painted a portrait of United Russia as a giant
racketeering ring stretching across eleven time zones.
Navalny didn’t hesitate in answering, and he spoke as calmly as if he
was reporting what the weather was like outside the studio before he
walked in.
“I have a very bad attitude toward the United Russia party,” he said.
“The United Russia party is the party of corruption. It is the party of crooks
and thieves. And it is task of every patriot and citizen of our country to do
everything in order to—”
Pronko, not grasping the electricity of the moment, interrupted him:
“Are you a patriot?”
“Absolutely, I’m a patriot,” Navalny said. He returned to his point about
every patriot’s duty, “… to do everything to ensure that this party is
destroyed, not in the physical sense, I do not call for any extremism, but in
the sense of… legal methods. I propose to make sure that United Russia and
all similar formations, before it was Our Home Is Russia and so on, so they
do not exist. Because this is the main pillar of corruption, of the lawlessness
now happening in our country.”
Pronko joked about Navalny’s extremism disclaimer. “Yes, because after
today’s program there will be a headline: ‘Alexey Navalny Proposes to
Destroy United Russia.’”
In fact, after another decade of struggle against Putin and United Russia,
after surviving the poisoning attack, Navalny would be in jail and under
further prosecution, accused of running an extremist organization. His band
of like-minded heroes, which by then had expanded across the country,
would be smashed apart, the group itself and the individuals running it
similarly labeled as extremist.
But at that moment, in February 2011, Navalny had just given birth to a
phrase “the Party of Crooks and Thieves”—Zhulikov i Vorov in Russian—
that would become the galvanizing mantra of the Russian political
opposition. Something about it touched a nerve, spawning a meme that
would spread from the European West to the Pacific Far East, and penetrate
deep into the public consciousness. It was as if Russians had been searching
for years for words to describe the culprits responsible for a national feeling
of frustration and exasperation, and for the wall that the country had hit in
its political and economic development. Suddenly, they all knew. Or as
Pronko, the radio host, put it: “Alexey uttered a phrase that, in general, sunk
into the soul of many.”
Outraged members of United Russia professed to be deeply offended.
Some quickly filed lawsuits accusing Navalny of slander and character
defamation. Others went on radio and TV to proclaim their outrage, which
only broadcast Navalny’s message wider and wider.
Navalny could not have been more pleased with the way “Party of
Crooks and Thieves” went viral. Two days after the Finam FM appearance,
he posted the audio, video and the transcript on his blog, noting merrily:
“The passage from 4:10 is trending on Twitter. It’s about United Russia.”
A week and a half later he posted again on LiveJournal: “United Russia
is Suing Me.”
Shota Gorgadze, who fashioned himself as something of a celebrity
lawyer in Moscow, announced that he was suing the “famous blogger”
Navalny, claiming, “Ordinary citizens turned to me, not public, not well-
known and not officials, but members of the United Russia party with a
request to protect their honest name. They are ordinary people earning an
average salary, raising children, living in the country they love. And it is
unpleasant for them when all over their country, just because they joined the
United Russia party, they are accused on the air of a radio station, of being
thieves and crooks.”
Navalny, as usual, relished the idea of combat, and rather than waiting
for the lawsuit to proceed, he pressed forward on his blog.
“I decided to conduct a survey in order to find out the attitude, so to
speak, of the internet masses (also ordinary citizens, by the way),” he wrote.
“For good representation, we would like at least 10,000 people take part in
the survey.”
The question was simple: “Is United Russia a party of crooks and
thieves?”
In the end, 39,467 people responded. Of those, 96.6 percent—or 37,670
—answered, “Yes, it is” while 3.4 percent, or 1,313 people, answered, “No,
it is not.”
The verdict was in, but Putin loyalists continued trying to fight back,
mostly making themselves look silly.
One of those who tried to fight was Yevgeny Fyodorov, a United Russia
member of the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, and
chairman of its Committee on Economic Policy and Entrepreneurship.
Navalny had publicized Fyodorov’s financial disclosure statement,
available on the Duma website, showing that he owned five apartments and
other assets that would be difficult to afford on his public salary.
Fyodorov agreed to go on Pronko’s show and debate Navalny about
whether it was accurate and justified to call United Russia a party of crooks
and thieves.
Navalny quickly laid out a devastating case.
“My value judgment that the United Russia party is a party of crooks
and thieves was made on the basis of those observations regarding the
activities of the United Russia party, which I have been doing for many
years,” he said. “I study its work.” He noted the results of his blog poll, in
which 96 percent agreed with his assessment.
“All these people also consider the United Russia party to be a party of
crooks and thieves,” he said. “These people observe every day a situation in
which every corrupt official in our country seeks to find the best cover for
himself. At present, the United Russia party is the best refuge, which gives
a political ‘roof’ and the opportunity for any corrupt official to escape
punishment. And we see it every day.”
Navalny began by asking why there had been no prosecution of
Moscow’s mayor, Yury Luzhkov, a longtime senior member of United
Russia, whose wife, Yelena Baturina, had become a billionaire in
construction development.
“This man was a member of the Supreme Council of the United Russia
party, and he was absolutely unpunished. His wife earned billions,”
Navalny said. He also reminded listeners that Vladimir Resin, Luzhkov’s
longtime deputy in charge of construction, had been photographed wearing
a $1 million watch, far beyond the means of his public salary—“a United
Russia member with a million-dollar watch, a man who had never worked a
day in commerce anywhere in his life, and so on.”
Then, Navalny plucked out a list of current members of United Russia’s
Supreme Council—“Let’s name names,” he proclaimed—and he began
laying out a list of alleged corruption schemes starting with Boris Gryzlov,
the party leader and Duma chairman. Gryzlov had been pushing a plan for
Russia to spend billions on water filtration, insisting it was needed to
improve life expectancy. He was also co-owner of a patent for a water
filtration system.
“The wonderful Clean Water program, which not even I, but the
academicians of the Russian Academy of Sciences consider to be just a
scam,” Navalny said. “Here you have United Russia as a party of crooks
and thieves, academics confirm the word ‘crook.’”
Next, Navalny brought up Murtaza Rakhimov, the longtime head of
Russia’s Bashkortostan region. While Rakhimov, a United Russia member,
was in office, a giant stake in the Bashneft oil company was “sold” by the
region at cut-rate pricing to Rakhimov’s son, who made a fortune off of it.
“The chairman of the Accounts Chamber called the situation when Mr.
Rakhimov took the entire Bashkir fuel and energy complex, the Bashneft
company, into the ownership of his son, ‘the biggest theft in the history of
Russia,’” Navalny said. “Can I find out why this man, who was at the same
time the President of the Republic until the last moment, has not yet been
punished?”
Then there was Alexander Tkachov, governor of Krasnodar, whose
young niece, in her twenties, had pipe-building factories and a poultry farm
registered in her name; and Alexander Misharin, governor of Sverdlovsk,
whose eighteen-year-old daughter held numerous lucrative business
interests.
“Can you find out why the wonderful entrepreneurial talents of children
are manifested only in the children of members of United Russia?” Navalny
asked. “How does it work? What business school do they go to?”
Navalny said he was describing the tip of the iceberg.
“This is only the list of the Supreme Council of the United Russia
party,” he said. “These people join the party, all such higher councils, in
order to avoid responsibility for what they have done. And they want to
snatch, this is the only motivation at the moment for which people join
United Russia. They want to tear apart our country with impunity.”
Such accusations, by Navalny and others, predictably met with a raft of
denials. Baturina and Luzhkov had long denied that she received favorable
treatment as the mayor’s wife, but after Luzhkov was removed from office
in 2010, her construction business quickly dried up, and they left Russia to
live mostly in Vienna. Luzhkov died in 2019.
Gryzlov, the Duma speaker, insisted that the Clean Water Program had
nothing to do with the patent that he co-owned with an investor named
Viktor Petrik, and he lashed out at the experts who said he was just trying to
get rich. “A few individual scientists don’t have the right to claim that they
are the authorities on truth,” he told Gazeta.ru.
The Rakhimov ownership stake in Bashneft was a matter of public
record.
Fyodorov tried to wave it all away and said Navalny was just hurling
insults. “It is clear that the phrase… with which we started the conversation
is just abuse,” he said. “It can’t even be described in any other way. And
those alleged facts that have been voiced are, of course, not facts, but just
chatter. There is no point in discussing any of them.”
Instead, Fyodorov laid out a web of conspiracies, mainly describing
Russia as a victim of the United States and other Western powers.
The U.S., he said, had created Russia’s oligarchs, had nearly destroyed
Russia in the 1990s, and was leading an international campaign to harm the
country. “There is a gigantic and tangible open attack on Russia,” he said,
adding: “Here it is a cruel campaign aimed, of course, at destabilizing the
situation in the country. It goes along with terrorist attacks. This is a
campaign aimed at destroying the country.”
Pronko seemed taken aback by the comparison to terrorists, though such
outlandish allegations would become commonplace as Putin over the years
grew increasingly insular, isolated, and paranoid.
“Yevgeny,” the radio host said, “if I understand you correctly—I will
interrupt you—that you compared your counterpart, Mr. Navalny, with
terrorists.”
“Of course,” Fyodorov replied. “Do not forget that when United Russia
was created, generally speaking, after the liquidation of the USSR, Russia
was also almost liquidated. Don’t forget that when we came with Putin, and
that was ten years ago, Russia was at war in Chechnya.”
Pronko urged Fyodorov to answer Navalny on the facts but he refused.
“These facts do not exist,” Fyodorov said. “This is some nonsense!” He
insisted, unconvincingly, that if any member of United Russia did anything
wrong, they would be prosecuted.
Navalny pointed to the oligarch Roman Abramovich living in London
while also serving as the governor of Chukotka in Russia’s Far East. He
also mentioned Semyon Vainshtok, the former head of Transneft and a close
ally of Putin, who was then living in Israel, and whom Navalny had
implicated in an alleged $4 billion fraud tied to construction of an oil
pipeline. “He left for London, now he lives in Israel, and he invests in real
estate in the United States,” Navalny said. “This is all precisely United
Russia, which is the cover for all those who suck everything out of Russia.”
Navalny in the mid-2000s had created and then moderated a hugely
popular series of political debates in Moscow as part of a group called
Democratic Alternative, or DA! (the word “yes” in Russian). And it was
clear that he had learned a few things about rhetorical jousting. He thrashed
Fyodorov, using Fyodorov’s own words to point out that he and other Duma
members and United Russia politicians had far more connections and
business dealings in the West than Navalny.
“I just have to admit that my value judgment about United Russia has
changed a bit,” Navalny said, his sarcasm now coming to full force. “If
earlier I thought that United Russia was a party of crooks and thieves, now I
understand that United Russia is, apparently, a party of crooks, thieves, and
CIA agents. Because it is United Russia that is responsible for everything
Yevgeny tells us about.”
He continued, “Because all the famous Yeltsin crooks who ruined the
country, all of them, excuse me, migrated to United Russia. Who are the
governors who declared independence for their Republics while inside the
country?… All this Yeltsin gang. Without a doubt, there was a gang during
Yeltsin’s time. All this gang in its entirety is in United Russia. We have
your great leader, Mr. Putin, who was? He was [St. Petersburg mayor
Anatoly] Sobchak’s assistant! He was in the [former prime minister Viktor]
Chernomyrdin party.”
Sobchak, a mentor of Putin, and Chernomyrdin, an ally of Yeltsin, were
core members of United Russia’s predecessor party, Our Home Is Russia.
Navalny was indignant, which is how he spends much of his waking
hours.
“You tell me about some kind of geopolitics, terrorist attacks, about
financing, and so on. But everything was financed through some people
who now absolutely all remained in power,” he said. “You have had a
qualified majority in the State Duma for ten years. United Russia can push
through any issue, any one! And for some reason you are talking about
some entrepreneurs of foreign jurisdiction. So, what’s the problem? Well,
change these laws! For ten years you can do everything in the country: You
control the courts, you control the prosecutor’s office, you control the
central election commissions—you control everything in the world. TV,
radio—everything! Everything but the internet…”
Navalny took a moment to slam Fyodorov about his own personal
assets, but there was little point. The debate was done. Pronko’s listeners
were asked to call in and vote; 99 percent said Navalny won.

In a short amount of time, Navalny would no longer have to write out

United Russia in his blog posts. It would be recognized instantly merely as
Zh-V, the Russian initials for “Crooks and Thieves.”
The phrase had sticking power. Nine months later, Navalny appeared on
the cover of Russian Esquire magazine with the headline: “About Crooks
and Thieves.”
In the Esquire interview, Navalny explained how the phrase came out
inadvertently. “This is absolutely an accident,” he said. “No creativity. Tell
me come up with a slogan and I will never come up with it in my life.”
What was not an accident, or a random, impulsive utterance was his
dismay over the system being led by Putin.
“When he started, he was anti-Putin from the very beginning, that I
remember very well,” said Maria Gaidar, the daughter of former acting
Russian prime minister, Yegor Gaidar. She was a friend of Navalny’s and
was herself active in prodemocracy Russian political circles during the
2000s.
In those days, Navalny was part of the progressive liberal party Yabloko.
Gaidar was a prominent member of the Union of Right Forces, a small
liberal party associated with free market reforms, which was founded by her
father, by Boris Nemtsov, and by Anatoly Chubais, Russia’s privatization
guru, among others.
“Most people met Navalny—for them he started to exist in 2010, 2011,”
Gaidar said. “But he had a long political history before that, and he was
changing and maturing as a politician or finding his way, also in reaction to
what was going on, in the regime.
“In 1999, Navalny joined Yabloko because it was the only political party
that was against Putin,” Gaidar said. “For me, for example, it wasn’t
obvious that Putin was so bad. I didn’t belong to the generation of wise
people like, you know, Zhenia Albats and many other people who said,
‘OK, he’s KGB. You cannot trust him. It’s going to be bad.’”
In the Esquire interview, Navalny insisted that corruption was at the root
of Russia’s political stagnation. “Russia’s main problem is that the state has
turned into a mafia—in the very Italian sense of the word, when everyone is
tied to each other,” he said. “The only difference is that there is no place in
Moscow where they all gather at once.”
He complained that the country’s leadership was squandering the
opportunities afforded by soaring commodities prices that had improved
quality of life, especially by expanding the middle class in Moscow and St.
Petersburg.
“Right now, Russia is the richest in its history and the freest,” Navalny
said. “The huge amount of money that is currently pouring into the country
gives us a chance for grandiose changes, but this chance, apparently, will
not be used.”
He predicted that change would come. “Revolution is inevitable,” he
said. “Simply because most people understand that this system is wrong.
When you sit in a party of officials, most of the talk is about who stole
everything, why nothing works, and how terrible everything is.”
And Navalny insisted, “Everyone is ready to live honestly. Look at
Georgia. If twenty people—those who are at the very top—begin to follow
the rules and laws, they will force everyone else to follow the rules and
laws.”
The comments on Georgia were striking, given that not even three years
earlier Navalny had cheered the Russian war in Georgia, and even
suggested expelling all Georgians from Russia, calling Georgians “rodents.”
He later apologized for this. What Navalny had come to realize was that
Georgia—at least at that point in 2011—appeared to have broken free of its
Soviet past, thanks to aggressive reforms led by President Mikheil
Saakashvili, who had come to power in the Rose Revolution of 2003.
Saying that revolution is inevitable and threatening to actually lead a
revolution are two very different things, of course. But Putin, as an ex-KGB
officer, has never shown much patience for nuance on that subject.
Profiles and biographies of Russia’s supreme leader have often focused
on the night in Dresden, East Germany, in December 1989 when crowds
stormed the headquarters of the Stasi, the secret police, and threatened to
lay siege to the local KGB building across the street. Putin, then stationed
there, called for military help but was told that nothing could be done
without orders from Moscow. “And Moscow is silent,” Putin was told.
Putin has long made it clear that Moscow would not stay silent in the
face of a revolutionary threat if he has anything to say about it.
Navalny’s own theory is that Putin’s fear of public opinion intensified
after one of his first major crises as president—when an accident destroyed
the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, killing all 118 on board, on August
12, 2000. Putin realized how much was outside his control.
“The first changes in his character occurred in the wake of the Kursk
tragedy,” Navalny told the Polish historian Adam Michnik. “That’s when he
saw the power of public opinion and it frightened him. Everything seems to
be going OK, it’s all under control, but then some random accident happens,
there’s some black swan event, and suddenly it’s out of your hands. People
don’t like you anymore and ask questions you struggle to answer.”
Navalny believes Putin’s push to control the Russian media, notably
television, began then, culminating with the takeover by Gazprom of the
independent channel NTV in 2001. Putin was shaken again by Ukraine’s
Orange Revolution of 2003–2004, during which mass crowds rallied on
Maidan Nezalezhnosti—Independence Square—in Kyiv. Maidan was also
the site of Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity in 2013–2014, making its name
synonymous with popular uprising.
“Putin’s worst nightmare is a Maidan on Red Square,” Michnik told
Navalny in a conversation in 2015 that they turned into a book. Michnik
also noted Putin’s fury over the prosecution of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, and
especially over the killing of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Putin, in public
comments, confirmed this anger.
The first public signs that Navalny had come to Putin’s attention as a
political threat emerged in 2007, the same year that Navalny was expelled
from the progressive liberal political party Yabloko and became a cofounder
of a nationalist political group, the National Russian Liberation Movement.
Its Russian acronym spelled NAROD, or “People.”
Before that, the Kremlin seemed largely preoccupied by a potential
threat from Russia’s oligarchs, which was effectively dealt with when
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of the Yukos oil company, was arrested in
2003. Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst and operative, was widely
credited with having publicized the prospect of an oligarchic takeover of the
government with Khodorkovsky as ringleader.
The goal of NAROD was to be a supraparty network uniting politicians
from across the ideological spectrum, politicians who shared a Russian
nationalist streak that, at least in the minds of the chief organizers, would
not veer into extremism.
Navalny that year had auditioned for and won a job as host of a new
debate program on the TV Centre television channel, which was controlled
by the government. The program would have meant giant exposure for
Navalny, and the organizers were quickly ordered not to let him go on air.
Because he was instrumental to the project, Navalny was named editor in
chief of the program, an off-camera role.
But after two episodes, despite apparently successful ratings, the show
was cancelled.
Navalny and his close associates believed that Putin’s media adviser,
Vladislav Surkov, personally gave the order for the show to be shut down.
In any case, it was the beginning of a long crusade by Putin, his media
manipulators and political technologists to ban Navalny from the federal
channels.
Later in the fall of 2007, Sergei Markov, a political scientist tied to
United Russia who also worked as an adviser to Putin, unexpectedly backed
out of a plan to attend a public debate with Maria Gaidar, moderated by
Navalny. Instead, hooligans were sent to disrupt the event—a sign of the
Kremlin’s intent to ice out opposition voices before the December elections
to the State Duma.
Gaidar was running in those elections on the list of the Union of Right
Forces party. As part of that campaign, Navalny worked with her to produce
an anti-Putin video called “Devil.” The tongue-in-cheek attack ad used
horror movie narration, ominous music, images of Putin surrounded by
flames, and dubious numerology to suggest the president was evil. It noted
he became head of the KGB in 1998, which was 666 × 3, and that he was
appointed acting prime minister on August 9, 1999—here the video showed
three 9s on-screen, which then inverted to become another 666. The ad
accused Putin, among other things, of dismantling Russia’s last independent
federal television station. It ended by urging voters to the polls for the
December 2 parliamentary election. “Is this man the antichrist? Decide for
yourself,” the ad said. “Don’t make yourself an idol. Make the right choice.
December 2, 2007.”
Russian politics had never before experienced that form of attack
advertising, and the video caused a small sensation.
Over the years, while trying to deny Navalny any attention, Putin’s
forces in and outside government would bring numerous investigations and
prosecutions against him and would subject Navalny to repeated searches of
his apartment, arrests, lawsuits brought by proxies, and ultimately the
poisoning attempt. If Navalny got any attention on the most-watched
federal television channels, it was for smear campaigns, in which he was
accused of corruption schemes or of being an operative for Russia’s
enemies in the West.
Putin adopted the practice of never uttering Navalny’s name, referring to
him instead as: “The citizen.” “The defendant.” “This gentleman.” “This
person.” “The Berlin clinic patient.”
Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, said it was easy to come up with
labels for Navalny—“detention center inmate,” “convict,” “defendant for
insulting a veteran.” Asked why Putin was reluctant to utter his leading
critic’s name, Peskov said it was obvious.
“Apparently, this is due to the attitude towards this person, which the
president did not hide,” Peskov told Life News.
Putin is known to have said Navalny’s name in public only once, when
the American journalist Alec Luhn asked Putin at a reception in 2013 if
refusing to say Navalny’s name was intentional. “No, why?” Putin replied.
“Alexey Navalny is one of the leaders of the opposition movement.”
Navalny’s name has also rarely appeared in official Kremlin statements.
One notable exception was in a readout of a meeting between Putin and
Merkel in August 2021 in Moscow, the chancellor’s last visit to Russia
before her retirement from politics. During the meeting, she pressed for
Navalny’s release from prison.
 On that occasion and nearly all others, Putin avoided saying Navalny’s
name even while fielding direct questions about him at press conferences or
other events.
Perhaps the most revealing of these was his annual news conference in
December 2017, where Putin was confronted with a question by Ksenia
Sobchak, the daughter of Putin’s onetime mentor, the late St. Petersburg
mayor, Anatoly Sobchak.
Two months earlier, Sobchak, a TV presenter and onetime Russian “It
Girl,” had announced plans to run for president in 2018, mounting a
challenge that some, including Navalny, believed was a Kremlin-backed
scheme to split the opposition. Sobchak, in any case, used her question to
press Putin about the restrictions on the political opposition including
Navalny.
She opened her question by pointing out her own plans to run against
Putin, prompting him to suggest that she had deceived everyone and
attended the news conference as a candidate. “I didn’t deceive,” Sobchak
replied. “I came here as a journalist with TV channel Rain because
unfortunately, at the moment, it is the only opportunity to ask you a
question, since you are not participating in debates.”
“Please,” Putin invited her to continue.
Sobchak complained that Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, who
was sitting there on the dais, had said that Russia’s political opposition had
yet to mature. Sobchak disputed this, saying there were candidates who had
been preparing for a long time.
“For example, there is a candidate, Alexey Navalny,” she said, who was
already campaigning but had been blocked from participating by “fictitious
criminal cases created against him.” She noted that the European Court of
Human Rights had found the convictions to be politically motivated and
invalid. “As you know, the Russian Federation recognizes the European
court,” Sobchak told Putin. She complained that for her own campaign, no
one wanted to do business with her—making it difficult even to rent a
meeting hall.
“It’s all connected just with fear,” she said. “People understand that to be
in the opposition in Russia, this means that either you will be killed, or you
will be imprisoned or something else will happen. In this spirit my question
is: Why is this happening? Is the government afraid of honest competition?”
 Putin said he wanted to address the questions about the opposition and
about competition separately, and started by insisting that political
opponents have an obligation to put forward a positive agenda. He chastised
Sobchak for her own slogan. “You go under the slogan ‘Against all,’” Putin
rebuked her. “Is this a positive program?”
Then he turned his attention to Navalny, whom of course he would not
name, and made clear that Navalny, in his view, had no right to political
expression or activism because he was a potentially dangerous
revolutionary.
“About the characters named, we’ve already had questions about
Ukraine here. Do you want here dozens of these para—sorry, Sakaashvilis
running around the squares here?” The audience laughed at his near
reference to parasites.
Putin continued, “Those whom you have named, this is Saakashvili,
only the Russian version. And do you want that such a Saakashvili
destabilizes the situation in the country? Do you want us to worry about one
Maidan to another, so that we have attempted coups? We went through all
of this. Do you want to return to this? I’m sure that the vast majority of
Russian citizens don’t want it, and we won’t allow it.”
In a flat-out lie, Putin insisted that of course “there should be
competition and without doubt there will be.” But, he said, “the question is
radicalism.”
The Russian leader then turned to his favorite pastime of whataboutism
likening the squashing of Navalny to the disappearance of the Occupy Wall
Street movement in the United States. “Where are they now? They are
gone,” he said. “Is this democracy or not? Let’s ask ourselves.
“I assure you the authorities aren’t afraid and won’t be afraid of
anything,” Putin said. “But the authorities should not be like a man lazily
picking cabbage out of his beard, and watching as the state turns into a
muddy puddle from which the oligarchs can pick and catch golden fish for
themselves as in the 1990s.
“We do not want to be the second edition of today’s Ukraine,” Putin
said. “And we won’t allow it.”
At the same news conference three years later, Putin was confronted with a
different question about Navalny: Why had the Russian government not
opened an investigation into his poisoning?
Putin pivoted and laid out a conspiracy blaming the United States. He
dismissed an investigation by Bellingcat and other news outlets that
identified the FSB poisoning team, even though Clarissa Ward of CNN
visited the home of one of its alleged leaders, Oleg Tayakin, who slammed
the door in her face.
Referring to Navalny as “the Berlin clinic patient,” Putin said
Bellingcat’s report was based on “materials from the American special
services.” He insisted that Russian agents knew better than to get tracked
using their mobile phones.
“It means that this patient of the Berlin clinic is supported by the special
services of the United States,” Putin said. “And if this is correct, then it’s
interesting, then the special services, of course, should look after him. But
this does not mean at all that it is necessary to poison him.”
Putin noted that he had personally given the “command” allowing
Navalny to go to Germany for treatment, and he expressed annoyance at all
of the fuss over someone he considered an unworthy rival, part of a group
of opposition figures who had never proven their ability to lead anything.
“The trick is to attack the top officials, and in this way pull themselves
up to a certain level, and say… ‘I am the same caliber person,’” Putin said.
“In my opinion these are not tricks that should be used in order to achieve
respect and recognition from people. You need to prove your worth.”
Overall, Putin tried to portray Navalny as not worth the trouble, even
though the Russian government had taken extraordinary measures over the
years to block Navalny’s political aspirations and generally make him
miserable. Chillingly, he also insisted that if the Russian special services
wanted Navalny dead, he would be dead.
“Who needs him?” Putin asked the hall full of journalists, chuckling
aloud. “If they really wanted to, they probably would have finished it.”
 3

REVENGE

“I believe he deliberately decided to get arrested. He did what he

wanted to do. So, what is there to be discussed?”
—Russian President Vladimir Putin, Geneva, June 16, 2021

Hi, it’s Navalny. I know who wanted to kill me,” he says, sounding
chipper as he looks directly into the camera. “I know where they live. I
know where they work. I know their real names. I know their fake names. I
have their photos.”
In fact, the photos are in Navalny’s right hand as he introduces the first
of several blockbuster videos about investigations led by Bellingcat, the
forensic-investigative news site, and its partner organizations, including the
Insider, a Russian outlet.
Those investigations revealed the identities of the assassins who put a
nerve agent in Navalny’s underwear in Siberia, as well as the identities of
their bosses. They also exposed a Russian government hit squad and
provided evidence implicating the Federal Security Service, the FSB, in
several murders and attempted murders.
“This is a story about a secret group of murderers from the FSB that
includes doctors and chemists, about how they tried to murder me multiple
times and almost killed my wife,” Navalny says. “They definitely won’t tell
you that on TV, considering that this group receives orders directly from
Vladimir Putin.”
For many years, interviewers had asked Navalny why he wasn’t already
dead. After poking so many of Russia’s biggest bears—“with a sharp stick,”
as Navalny himself liked to say—how was it possible that no one had tried
to kill him? Navalny on many occasions complained that he was bored of
the question. “Why are you still alive?”
“I don’t know,” Navalny told the U.S. news program 60 Minutes for an
episode that aired in December 2017. Then, he was mounting a symbolic
campaign for president of Russia, even though he was technically barred
from appearing on the ballot because of his convictions in trumped-up
criminal cases.
“Maybe they missed the good timing for it, when I was less famous…
actually I am trying not to think about it a lot because if you start to think
what kind of risks I have, you cannot do anything,” he said.
Navalny at various points had tried to suggest that there were unspoken
rules, that assassinations were reserved for ex-spies like Alexander
Litvinenko, who was killed with radioactive polonium in his tea in 2006,
and Sergei Skripal, who was poisoned with Novichok in 2018.
In fact, there was no logical basis for Navalny’s assertion.
Boris Nemtsov, a longtime leader of the Russian political opposition,
was shot to death on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015. Verzilov, the Pussy
Riot member, had been poisoned. So had Vladimir Kara-Murza, an
opposition activist who, recognizing the danger, had his wife and children
living in the United States.
There were other cases of political violence that Navalny surely knew
about. In 1994, the college-age son of Grigory Yavlinsky, the leader of
Yabloko—Navalny’s first political party—was attacked at Moscow State
University. His son, Mikhail, was a piano player; the attackers mangled his
hands, and a note was stuffed in his pocket warning his father to get out of
politics. Yavlinsky rarely discussed the incident. A party spokeswoman,
confirming it, told the Moscow Times, “Luckily they were able to sew his
fingers back on.” Mikhail Yavlinsky, and a younger son, Alexey, then a
teenager, were sent to live in Britain.
And in 2004, Ivan Rybkin, a former chairman of the State Duma who
was running for president against Vladimir Putin, mysteriously disappeared
for four days. Later he said he was kidnapped and drugged, and that his
attackers had made a compromising video of him that they threatened to
release if he continued his campaign.
Rybkin was running as the nominee of the Liberal Party, backed by the
oligarch Boris Berezovsky, a rival of Putin. In the campaign, Rybkin had
leveled many of the same allegations that Navalny makes today, including
that Putin was involved in shady business dealings. In a full-page ad
published in the Kommersant newspaper, which Berezovsky owned, Rybkin
accused Putin of being “the main oligarch in Russia.”
“Power and money go hand in hand in dictatorial regimes,” the ad
stated. “Putin is no exception.” Before his poisoning death, Alexander
Litvinenko said that when he was working in the FSB, he and other officers
had been ordered to assassinate Berezovsky.
For Navalny to think that he was too famous to be targeted was sheer
hubris. The FSB killers were often sloppy, as the investigations revealed,
but they acted on orders, and those giving the orders had long stopped
caring about the rest of the world’s opinion.
Under murky circumstances, the Russian public would likely accept
Navalny’s death as the inevitable fate of a guy who had pushed the
envelope for far too long in a country where there has never been much
tolerance for dissent. And the rest of the world, at least the Western world,
already thought the worst of Russia.

Contrary to Navalny’s hypothesis, the FSB killers had not missed their
chance. They were waiting for the order, and sometime in the first half of
2020, with the regional elections approaching in the fall, the order was
apparently given.
Indeed, for much of that year, according to the investigation by
Bellingcat, Navalny was tailed by a team of agents who were experts in
working with poisonous substances.
That crew included two medical doctors, Alexey Alexandrov and Ivan
Osipov, and a third man, Vladimir Panyaev. They are believed to be the
would-be assassins who followed Navalny to Tomsk, snuck into his hotel
room while he was out for a swim, and deployed the nerve agent in his
underwear.
Christo Grozev, Bellingcat’s lead Russia investigator, who had
previously identified the FSB officers who attacked Skripal, had decided to
figure out who tried to kill Navalny. He had reached out previously to
Navalny to say he thought he had identified the assassins. As the
investigation neared its conclusion, Grozev traveled to the rural town of
Ibach—in the Black Forest of southeast Germany, near the borders of
France and Switzerland—where Navalny was recovering, to work directly
with him and Maria Pevchikh, the Anti-corruption Foundation’s chief of
investigations.
As in the Skripal case, Grozev used vast stores of cell phone metadata
and airline passenger information purchased on the black market in Russia,
then crosschecked that information with the locations of different FSB
offices, including its criminalistics unit, as well as with Navalny’s own
travel in recent years. After hitting on remarkable matches, Grozev and his
collaborators said they had identified the kill team.
The core seven members of the FSB unit were all born between 1976
and 1981, making them part of Navalny’s own generation that came of age
as the Soviet Union was falling apart. They had been tracking Navalny at
least since 2017, following him on nearly all of his trips outside of Moscow.
One of the investigation’s most chilling conclusions was that the
poisoning in Omsk wasn’t their first try. More than a month before the
Siberia trip, in July 2020, Navalny and his wife had gone for a few days of
vacation in Kaliningrad, the seaside Russian exclave, north of Poland.
On July 6, the fourth morning of their trip, after taking a walk on the
beach, Navalnaya suddenly felt terribly ill. She and Navalny went to a café
planning to have lunch but she felt so sick she did not order any food. She
struggled to get back to her hotel room, stopping to rest on benches, even
though it was a short walk. She had trouble describing what was wrong.
After a while she fell asleep until the next day, when suddenly, as
mysteriously as she had fallen ill, she felt better.
Two of the three FSB agents who later went to Siberia had followed the
Navalnys to Kaliningrad—Alexandrov, traveling under the alias Frolov, and
Panyaev, along with a third officer, Mikhail Shvets. “What a coincidence,”
Navalny said, describing the overlapping journeys for the video. “What
does this mean? Are these men not just secret agents but secret members of
my family?”
The video, Who Poisoned Alexey Navalny?, which Navalny proclaimed
a real-life “Hollywood thriller,” first aired in mid-December 2020. It was
quickly viewed more than 20 million times.
Never missing an opportunity to tweak United Russia, Navalny started
his introduction to the video by first thanking Grozev and Bellingcat. Then
he thanked Irina Yarovaya, the deputy chairwoman of the State Duma. In
2016, she pushed through legislation vastly expanding the Russian
government’s surveillance capabilities. The law required mobile telephone
companies to store the contents of voice and data calls and messages for six
months, and cell phone metadata for three years. It also obligated them to
make such information available to the authorities upon request.
Yarovaya’s law, Navalny pointed out, had created an expansive black
market for data, in which corrupt Russian officers profited by selling such
information to anybody willing to pay. This made it possible, he said, to
identify his attackers.
On the video, Navalnaya recounted not being able to describe what ailed
her in Kaliningrad. And Navalny said that after his own brush with death,
he understood.
“Just imagine,” he said. “Someone tells you that he feels really sick and
can’t take it anymore. You ask them: ‘Where does it hurt? Is it a heart
attack? Should I call an ambulance?’ But they tell you that there’s no pain.
Now that I’ve gone through it myself, I understand how bad it can feel and
how impossible it is to explain what’s going on.”
The initial investigation used the phone data to reveal that the men
following Navalny were part of a unit from the FSB’s Institute of
Criminalistics, reporting to Col. Stanislav Makshakov, and that from 2017
to 2020 Navalny took at least thirty-six trips in which members of the team
were trailing him. Navalny also recalled briefly feeling symptoms similar to
his poisoning while on a flight in the summer of 2019, suggesting that the
FSB agents had tried to poison him at least three times.
More explosive revelations came in subsequent videos. Armed with the
identities of his would-be killers, Navalny and Grozev launched a sting
operation, phoning the FSB officers to get them to talk about the case. Most
refused and hung up quickly, but one agent, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, a
chemical specialist, took the bait.
The team disguised the caller ID of the phone Navalny was using, to
make it seem as if he was calling from a main FSB line. When Kudryavtsev
picked up, Navalny identified himself as an aide to Nikolay Patrushev, the
head of Russia’s national security council. Kudryavtsev said he was home
in Covid quarantine, but it was not clear if he was ill.
During the forty-nine-minute recorded phone call, Kudryavtsev
described the attempted assassination. He said he had treated Navalny’s
clothing, particularly his underwear, to remove traces of the poison.
The call took place early on the morning of December 14, 2020, the
same day that Bellingcat and Navalny planned to publish the results of their
initial investigation.
But Kudryavtsev’s confession was so electric that they decided to delay
revealing it so they could verify the details and consider its full
ramifications. They also debated the ethics of Navalny lying and posing as a
high-ranking security official but ultimately concluded that it was justified.
“Navalny was not working on behalf of any police or security service,
nor was he conducting a traditional journalistic investigation—rather, he
was in the unique position of investigating his own assassination attempt at
a time when no law enforcement agency is willing to do so,” Bellingcat said
when the bombshell disclosure was published a week later. “To our
knowledge, it is without precedent that a target of a political assassination is
able to chat for nearly an hour with one of the men on the team that tried to
kill him and later cover up the evidence.” The news outlet added: “The
information provided by Kudryavtsev is credible and has led to new
investigative leads we had not previously discovered.”
During the phone call, Kudryavtsev blamed the failure of the
assassination on the swift emergency landing by the S7 pilots.
“Well, they landed, and the situation developed in a way that… not in
our favor, I think,” Kudryavtsev said. “If it had been a little longer, I think
the situation could have gone differently.”
Navalny pushed to make sure he understood. “A little longer what,
Konstantin Borisovich?”
“Flying,” the FSB officer said.
“If he had flown longer?”
“Well, possibly, yes, if he had flown a little longer and they hadn’t
landed it so quickly, it all could have gone differently. That is, if it hadn’t
been for the prompt work of the medics, the paramedics on the landing
strip, and so on.”
Navalny suggested that maybe the officers had failed to apply the proper
dose of poison: “You can’t say the plane landed instantly. You
miscalculated the dose, or probabilities. Why?”
Kudryavtsev then got defensive. “Well, that I can’t say why. How to say
this? My understanding is that we added a bit extra.”
Video footage of the call, which later appears in the Oscar-winning
documentary Navalny, shows Grozev pumping his fists in the air with a
thumbs-up as Kudryavtsev admits having traveled to Omsk for the cleanup.
“We applied a solution… so no traces could be found.” Pevchikh, stunned,
puts her hands over her mouth.
Navalny asks Kudryavtsev to sum up, saying, “According to your
opinion, the subject survived because the plane landed too soon?”
“Yes, it seems to me yes… everything could have ended differently.”
The second factor, Kudryavtsev said, was the quick action of
paramedics. “They gave him first aid, looked at his condition, gave him
some sort of antidote.” He also went over the details of the cleanup,
describing the blue color of Navalny’s underpants and how he had focused
on the seams of the “fly area.”
Navalny’s own assessment of his survival was quite similar to that of
Kudryavtsev.
“The beauty of the situation is that they did their jobs perfectly
according to protocol,” Navalny told Yury Dud. “The pilots were told that a
passenger was about to kick the bucket, they instantly landed the plane. The
paramedics were told the guy’s out, they confirmed it and injected
atropine… They did everything the protocol required perfectly. But you
know how Russia is. When everything goes according to protocol, it is a
series of lucky accidents. Sadly.”
At the end of the remarkable video of his call with Kudryavtsev,
Navalny described his own near-death experience as further evidence of the
Russian regime’s criminality.
“As you can see, everything that I said… about the complete
degradation of the law enforcement system is confirmed,” he said. “They’re
acting like bandits, not government agents. Look how many people are
already involved: from doctors and police officers to the local FSB.”
Remarkably for someone who often seethes with fury at his adversaries,
Navalny expressed little public anger at the FSB assassination team—as if
the reality and gravity of the situation had not fully sunk in. Or as if this
was all just another episode of the animated adventure cartoon in which he
is crusading against the evil forces of Vladimir Putin.
In an interview on Ekho Moskvy radio after his attackers had been
unmasked, Navalny was asked how he felt when he saw their faces.
“This is an excellent question. Everyone asked me about it. Nothing,” he
said. “I myself tried to understand. You look into the face of the person who
tried to kill you—do you feel something or do you not feel it? Actually,
nothing.”
However, he clearly had pondered the question and had made up his
mind about what happened even if there would be no formal investigation,
prosecution, or trial.
“Alexandrov, this dude with a mustache—this can be considered a direct
killer, along with Osipov, who was there,” Navalny said. “It is clear they are
all a group of murderers, but this mustachioed comrade with glasses, he is
literally the one whose face you need to peer into… I don’t feel anything.”

After Navalny’s arrest, his team and Bellingcat continued to investigate the
poisoning attack, the FSB unit, and the government cover-up. Six months
later, Navalny’s team posted a new video, narrated by Pevchikh, in which
she described how Navalny’s medical records had been falsified in an
attempt to hide blood test results that offered near-certain proof that he was
attacked with an organophosphate poison.
For months, Navalny’s lawyers had demanded the return of the clothing
he was wearing on the day he fell ill, and his full medical records from the
hospital in Omsk. Their demands were refused.
Finally in November, Zhdanov, the director of the Anti-corruption
Foundation, and another Navalny lawyer, Vyacheslav Gimadi, went to the
hospital in Omsk to request the records in person. They took a selfie outside
the hospital, and talked to the management, which sought to stall, saying
they would need to wait a week for the records to be retrieved from the
hospital archive.
“The effect of surprise was supplemented by the famous effect of
bungling and carelessness,” Pevchikh explained on the video.
 The two lawyers then simply went to the hospital archive office and
requested the records, saying everything had been agreed with the
management. “Thanks to that magic phrase,” Pevchikh said, “they were
allowed to photocopy everything that was in the archives that day.”
A month later, they received the reply to their official request for the
records, but the two sets of documents turned out to have key differences.
Most important, according to Pevchikh, one key record was missing—the
biochemical blood test of Navalny from the N. V. Sklifosovsky Research
Institute for Emergency Medicine in Moscow.
“Crooks simply threw it out, hid it from us, as if it had never existed,”
Pevchikh said. “But it did. And it recorded a critical decrease in the level of
cholinesterase. That, together with other symptoms described in the medical
card, confirms the diagnosis of poisoning with cholinesterase inhibitors in
100 percent of cases. Here is this document. The test date is August 25,
2020. That is, after Alexey was discharged and the next day after the
Charité clinic announced that Navalny had been poisoned, Russian
specialists conducted exactly the same study–and they found the same
things.”
On the video, Pevchikh disclosed that Grozev had identified an
additional key suspect—an agent who had trailed Navalny more than any
other, Valery Sukharev. In the weeks before the poisoning, Sukharev spoke
on the phone constantly with members of the alleged kill team. Grozev
discovered that Sukharev, under the pseudonym Gorokhov, traveled with
Navalny fifteen times in 2007. Grozev also noted that the original
Bellingcat investigation had not fully deciphered how the FSB operations
were organized.
One part of the team, it turned out, was from the Institute of
Criminalistics, including scientists and doctors—“people who can poison
and hide their tracks,” Grozev said. The others, including Sukharev, he
explained, were from the FSB’s Second Service, which includes a
Department for the Protection of the Constitutional Structure. This
department is dedicated to fighting terrorists, extremists, and radicals who
pose a threat to the Russian state.
Pevchikh, however, alleged, “They are fighting threats not for Russia but
for Putin personally and his regime.”
In the video, Grozev said, “These are the people who actually follow
those who are deemed undesirable by the president himself, and there is no
other logic that would somehow connect this with ideology or the terrorist
threat. They simply prepare lists of people who aren’t allowed to exist.”
The Second Service, Grozev explained, were the bosses, following
political targets, and deciding when to strike them and how. “People from
the Second Service are always present, on every trip, where they monitor
the object of future poisoning, and sometimes ‘contractors’ from the
Institute of Criminalistics join them,” Grozev said.
But he added, “You need to understand this is not the only tool in their
arsenal… they always travel, and sometimes they don’t involve these
poisoners at all. They involve others. For example, assassins with nothing
but a pistol. This also happens.”
Grozev said he had managed to link the same FSB assassins to other
cases, including Kara-Murza, who was apparently poisoned twice, in 2015
and 2017, and fell into a coma each time. Kara-Murza survived those
attacks but after the invasion of Ukraine was jailed and sentenced to
twenty-five years in prison for treason. According to Bellingcat’s
investigation, the same FSB officers, including Alexandrov, Osipov and
Kudryavtsev were involved in both attacks on Kara-Murza.
Grozev also connected the unit to Nikita Isaev, another political
opposition figure who died of a heart attack in 2019 just days after his
forty-first birthday. “Our friends from the Second Service followed him
seven times,” Grozev said.
The investigation linked the same group of FSB chemical weapons
specialists to a Russian poet, Dmitry Bykov, who mysteriously fell gravely
ill in April 2019 on a flight to the Russian city of Ufa.
In the video, Pevchikh brought everything back to their central question:
“Who tried to kill Navalny?”
Grozev said there could be no doubt. “This is a government institution,
which must demand consent or receive instructions from a higher person for
every such attempt.” Even Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB,
Grozev said, could not make such decisions on his own. “I am personally
convinced as an analyst,” Grozev said, “that all these decisions were made
at the level of Putin himself.”
Putin has literally laughed off such accusations, and during an interview
with the NBC television network ahead of a summit meeting with President
Joe Biden in Geneva in June 2021, he flatly denied the allegations.
“Did you order Alexey Navalny’s assassination?” Keir Simmons, NBC’s
senior international correspondent, asked.
“Of course not,” Putin replied. “We don’t have this kind of habit of
assassinating anybody, that’s first.”
Putin then tried to turn the tables by demanding explanations for the
response by American authorities to the January 6 storming of the U.S.
Capitol. “I want to ask you: Did you order the assassination of the woman
who walked into the Congress and who was shot and killed by a
policeman?” the Russian leader said to Simmons. “Do you know that 450
individuals were arrested after entering the Congress and they didn’t go
there to steal a laptop? They came with political demands.”
Simmons is British, not American, but no matter.
Putin over the years has often made clear that he makes all key decisions
in Russia, despite his press secretary, Peskov, constantly deflecting by
saying that various matters are not the president’s purview or concern.
Verdicts in the legal cases brought against Navalny are a matter for
prosecutors and the courts, according to Peskov, even though it is widely
known that the Russian judicial system is highly politicized. Navalny’s
treatment in prison is the responsibility of the Federal Penitentiary Service.
And yet, when the imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was
released from prison in 2013, Putin, announced to a cluster of journalists
after his annual news conference that he had granted a pardon. And Putin
similarly took personal credit for the “command” that allowed Navalny to
leave Russia for treatment in Berlin.
The meeting between Putin and Biden in June 2021 occurred at a tense
moment. Russia had massed some one hundred thousand troops on
Ukraine’s borders, setting off a wave of anxiety in the West. Relations
between Moscow and Washington were abysmal. Despite Putin’s success in
manipulating Donald Trump—notably at a joint press conference in
Helsinki where Trump said he trusted Putin over the U.S. intelligence
services—the Trump presidency had not improved relations with Russia.
On the contrary, allegations of Russia’s meddling in the U.S. elections and
continuing fallout from Russia’s Olympic doping scandal only worsened
perceptions of Russia in the United States.
Meanwhile, the 2018 poisoning attack on Skripal in Salisbury, England,
and the brazen murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a former Chechen
platoon commander shot to death by an FSB operative in Berlin’s Kleiner
Tiergarten park, infuriated London and Berlin.
The Geneva meeting yielded virtually no tangible results, but at a news
conference afterward, Putin was asked about Navalny. He said that in his
view, Navalny had willingly chosen to go to jail. Of course, he did not utter
Navalny’s name.
“With regard to our nonsystemic opposition and the citizen you
mentioned,” Putin said, “first, this person knew that he was breaking
applicable Russian law. He needed to check in with the authorities as
someone who was twice sentenced to a suspended prison term.
“Fully cognizant of what he was doing, I want to emphasize this, and
disregarding this legal requirement, this gentleman went abroad for medical
treatment and the authorities did not ask him to check in while he was in
treatment,” Putin continued. “As soon as he left the hospital and posted his
videos online, the requirements were reinstated. He did not appear. He
disregarded the law—and was put on the wanted list. He knew that going
back to Russia. I believe he deliberately decided to get arrested. He did
what he wanted to do. So, what is there to be discussed?”
Putin also used the question to gripe about the U.S. meddling in Russia’s
affairs, complaining that “the United States declared Russia an enemy and
an adversary.”
“Now let’s ask a question,” Putin continued. “If Russia is an enemy,
what kind of organizations will the United States support in Russia? I think
not the ones that make the Russian Federation stronger but the ones that
hold it back, since this is the goal of the United States.
“How should we feel about this?” he added. “I think we should be
wary.”
For more than a decade, Putin and his subordinates had tried to paint a
picture of Navalny as an agent of the United States, but it was a far-fetched
claim. It was obvious to Russians that Navalny was not only a patriot but
also that he had a Russian nationalist streak. As Navalny said on the radio
in 2011: “I am absolutely a patriot.”
What Navalny absolutely refused to do was get in line and accept the
Russian state’s corruption. He had undertaken shareholder activism in 2007,
around the same time that the Russian political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky
told the German newspaper Die Welt and other outlets that Putin controlled
a vast fortune, including major stakes in Surgutneftegas, Gazprom, and the
giant oil transport firm Gunvor. Navalny immediately targeted these
companies, seeking to uncover information about their ownership and
operations. At the time, Belkovsky, in an interview with the Guardian’s
Luke Harding, suggested that Putin was worth at least $40 billion. Harding
would later be expelled from Russia, the first British journalist to be
banished since the Cold War.

Over the years, Navalny’s investigations largely avoided going after Putin
directly. He focused instead on the breathtaking corruption committed by
those getting rich off of Putin’s rule, with the clear implication that Putin
was the ultimate beneficiary. Whatever they were stealing, Putin no doubt
was stealing more—probably much more.
But two days after Navalny’s arrest, his team responded with a full-scale
frontal attack on the Russian leader: a nearly two-hour documentary
alleging vast corruption by Putin, beginning from his earliest days serving
as a KGB officer in Germany, that would ultimately make him, according to
Navalny, “probably the richest man in the world.”
Called A Palace for Putin: History of the World’s Largest Bribe, the film
pulled together an array of long-known information about how Putin
enriched himself and his family, friends, and cronies primarily at the
expense of Russian citizens, while adding an array of salacious new details
about the huge residence that was allegedly built for Putin on the Black Sea.
“Hi, it’s Navalny,” he began with his signature chipper opening. “We
came up with this investigation when I was in intensive care, but we
immediately agreed that we would release it when I returned home to
Russia, to Moscow, because we do not want the main character of this film
to think that we are afraid of him and that I will tell about his worst secret
while abroad.
“This is not only an investigation,” Navalny continued, “but also in a
sense a psychological portrait. I really want to understand how an ordinary
Soviet officer turned into a madman who’s obsessed with money and luxury
and literally ready to destroy the country and kill for the sake of his chests
of gold.”
The documentary was also, in its purest form, revenge. Revenge for
trying to murder Navalny with a chemical weapon; revenge for nearly
killing his wife in a botched earlier poisoning attempt; revenge for
thwarting Navalny’s political ambitions; revenge for more than a decade of
harassment, jailings, and legal prosecutions, including a three-year
imprisonment of Navalny’s younger brother, Oleg.
Most of all, it was revenge on behalf of the Russian people—the
generation of Navalny’s parents, his own generation, and his children’s—
who had been denied democratic freedom and prosperity in a country with
vast natural resources and energy wealth.
The Kremlin has denied that Putin is the owner of the extravagant
property in Gelendzhik, a beautiful resort town on the Black Sea with a
famous safari park. But Navalny assured his viewers that his investigation
had debunked these denials.
“The only real owner of this famous place from the very beginning to
the present day was Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and… looking inside
you will understand that the president of Russia is mentally ill,” Navalny
said, seated at a wooden table, his fingers knit together, with a glass of
water nearby. “He’s obsessed with wealth and luxury.”
The existence of the palace and the vast corruption scheme that financed
it were actually revealed more than a decade earlier by Sergei Kolesnikov, a
close business associate of Putin’s and a partner of Nikolai Shamalov, one
of Putin’s closest friends.
In December 2010, in an open letter to President Dmitry Medvedev,
Kolesnikov wrote: “Dear Mr. President, A palace is being built on the Black
Sea for the personal use of the Prime Minister of Russia. To date this palace
costs over $1 billion U.S. mainly through a combination of corruption,
bribery and theft. This unpleasant tale of illegal payments, with threats, and
with rampant corruption portends poorly for our beloved nation as we
struggle to improve the lives of all Russians and be a full partner in the
global community of nations that ascribes to the rule of law.”
At the time, Navalny wrote about Putin’s Palace on his LiveJournal blog
under the heading “Mikhail Ivanovich,” and he pointed to an article written
by Yevgenia Albats, Navalny’s political mentor, for New Times magazine.
In the article, Kolesnikov described how he, Shamalov, and others secretly
managing Putin’s personal money had taken to calling Putin “Mikhail
Ivanovich.”
It appeared to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to dialogue in a famous
Soviet movie, The Diamond Arm, in which a character says, “I need to
speak to the chief, to the boss… to Mikhail Ivanovich.”
In his blog post, Navalny offered only a brief comment. “And so it is
known that those in power in the country, by chance, turned out to be
ordinary, mid-tier St. Petersburg swindler-schemers,” he wrote. “But the
documentary evidence is amazing every time. Read and pass on to others.”
Kolesnikov, in his open letter, expressed a hope that Medvedev was
sincerely committed to fighting corruption, as he had professed during his
campaign for president: “I address you openly, rather than privately,
because I have been inspired by your public speeches highlighting
corruption as a main cause of crisis in our country.”

Kolesnikov’s hopes, of course, were terribly misplaced—as were the hopes

of President Barack Obama, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and an
array of other U.S. officials who made a terribly false bet on carrying out a
“reset” with Russia during Medvedev’s presidency.
Not only would Medvedev do nothing to put a stop to Putin’s vast
corruption schemes but he would follow in Putin’s footsteps. According to
Navalny, Medvedev allegedly set up his own fraudulent graft through
dummy charities to accumulate his own extravagant portfolio of real estate
and other assets both in Russia and abroad.
And instead of the president of Russia mustering a charge against
corruption, that fight would be led instead by Navalny.
In March 2017, Navalny and his team published the results of an
investigation into Medvedev. After swapping roles from 2008 to 2012 to
keep Putin in place as the country’s supreme leader—an arrangement
known as “the tandem”—Medvedev was back in his old job as Russian
prime minister.
Navalny alternated over the years between ridiculing Medvedev for his
ineffectiveness and applauding whenever Medvedev rolled out some change
in legislation or regulation that, at least in theory, might help fight
corruption. But in the end, it was clear that Medvedev was little more than a
Putin puppet, and not a particularly effective one at that.
Medvedev was often teased in the Russian press for being a bit of a
geek. In a land of hockey and soccer fanatics, Medvedev was shown on a
leaked video playing badminton. It was a stark contrast from Putin, who
was shown bare-chested on horseback and in other macho wildlife settings.
Since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, however, Medvedev has become
better known for threatening nuclear strikes against Russia’s enemies—a
transformation from lapdog to attack dog, but subservient to Putin
nonetheless.
The 2017 Anti-corruption Foundation investigation of Medvedev was
actually a follow-up to an earlier look at just one of the luxury properties
allegedly used by Medvedev—a huge vacation home sitting on two hundred
acres and surrounded by a twenty-foot-tall fence in the town of Plyos, about
a four-hour drive north of Moscow.
Medvedev’s connection to the estate was quite well-known. In 2011,
after Kolesnikov’s disclosure about Putin’s palace on the Black Sea, Roman
Anin, an investigative journalist then working for the Novaya Gazeta
newspaper, wrote about Medvedev’s luxury properties.
But Navalny’s team revived the outrage with a slick video, including
aerial footage, which allowed viewers to peek behind the giant fence.
Among the revelations was a pond with a small structure in the middle that
Navalny identified as a “duck house.” Rubber ducks quickly became an
internet meme among Navalny supporters.
Navalny estimated the value of the property in Plyos at $300 million to
$400 million. “The chic residence for the leader of the United Russia was
paid for by gas magnates from the Novatek company, transferring this
money as ‘charity,’” he said.
The new video, titled Don’t Call Him Dimon, demonstrated the Navalny
team’s flare for focusing on viewer-friendly, human details—in this case,
Medvedev’s love of designer sneakers. This detail was used to confirm that
a stash of hacked emails released by the group Anonymous International
contained genuine messages from Medvedev’s account.
Navalny’s team matched the internet orders of distinctive, colorful pairs
of Nike footwear and some shirts, to photos of the prime minister. Then,
they looked more closely at the orders, and the name and address on the
shipments.
The information led to a web of corporate entities and charitable
organizations, one named Sotsgosproekt, which stands for the Fund for
Socially Significant State Projects, and another called the Dar Foundation,
headed by a friend and university classmate of Medvedev’s named Ilya
Yeliseev. These organizations owned giant estates and other assets that,
according to Navalny, actually belonged to Medvedev.
“You would never take this man for some kind of a villain or an
underground billionaire,” Navalny says at the start of the fifty-minute video.
“He’s a smartphone and gadget enthusiast, a ridiculous simpleton, who falls
asleep during important events. The internet calls him Dimon.”
The film then cuts to a clip of Medvedev’s longtime press secretary
chastising a Russian journalist for referring to him by that nickname: “He is
not Dimon to you.”
“Dmitry Medvedev, prime minister and former president of Russia, is
crazy about money and elite real estate,” Navalny says, picking up the story.
Shot with a drone—one of the Navalny team’s favorite tools for
surveying the ill-gotten wealth of Russian officials—the video shows a
thirty-thousand-square-foot house, with a swimming pool, a giant pond, and
numerous outbuildings, including a guesthouse and several gazebos. The
property is located in an area close to Moscow favored by senior
government officials and wealthy business executives.
Navalny estimated the value of the property at about $85.5 million, and
in the video wondered aloud how the Sotsgosproekt had that kind of money
to buy such property. “Here’s the answer,” Navalny says. “It didn’t buy the
estate. It received it as a gift. And here we come to the description of the
felony. Because you know who made this gift? Here’s who: Russia’s richest
oligarch, Alisher Usmanov. The owner of a giant fortune built on the
remains of the Soviet mining industry. A tax resident of Switzerland. He
simply gave an estate, worth $85.5 million, as a gift to the foundation with
very close ties to the prime minister.”
“What is that called?” Navalny asks. “That’s right—a bribe. A real
bribe. A classic one. And both Usmanov and Medvedev understand this,
which is why the gift was registered to the foundation, which is managed by
one of Medvedev’s classmates, and chaired by another.” Medvedev and
Usmanov vociferously denied Navalny’s claims, as did the foundations and
Medvedev’s friends who managed them.
On Sunday March 26, 2017, three weeks after the release of the video,
thousands of people in cities across Russia answered Navalny’s call for a
day of anti-corruption protests. Despite stern warnings from the police that
demonstrators would be arrested, sizable actions took place from St.
Petersburg in the West to Vladivostok in the Far East. Hundreds were
arrested across the country—including Navalny, who was detained in
Moscow. He was sentenced to fifteen days in prison and fined about $350.
A few days later Usmanov sued Navalny for defamation, and the
following month the oligarch attempted to hit back using Navalny’s own
methods. Usmanov released two videos, in which he lambasted Navalny.
The first one ended with Usmanov saying, “I spit on you.”
“Out of the two of us, you’re the criminal,” Usmanov said, referring to
Navalny’s conviction in an embezzlement case, in which the charges were
widely viewed as trumped-up for political retribution.
In May 2017, Usmanov won his defamation lawsuit, and the court
ordered Navalny to delete sections of the video accusing Usmanov of
bribing Medvedev. That September, Sotsgosproekt won a similar
defamation lawsuit against the Anti-corruption Foundation. Navalny
refused to comply with the court orders to edit the videos and publicly
recant the bribery allegations.
Usmanov was hardly the only Russian business executive to sue
Navalny. He has been targeted repeatedly. Others who have taken Navalny
to court include Roman Abramovich, Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg,
Kirill Shamalov, Gennady Timchenko, Arkady Rotenberg, Yury Kovalchuk,
and Yevgeny Prigozhin.
At one point, in 2013, Navalny took aim at Vladimir Yakunin, the
longtime head of Russian Railways, and launched a website headlined “The
Adventures of Piglet Yakunin.” Presented in the form of a graphic novel,
the site documented extensive real estate holdings abroad and a chain of
hotels connecting to rail stations, which allegedly helped the railway chief
accumulate vast wealth. “Over the course of 10 years, the head of Russian
Railways and old friend of Putin’s has achieved consistently high ticket
prices, amassed hundreds of millions of dollars and sent his children to live
abroad,” the site declared.
In 2018, an exposé by Navalny about corruption in the Russian National
Guard found that the government was vastly overpaying for food served to
guard troops. That led the head of the National Guard, Viktor Zolotov, who
was Putin’s former head of security, to deny the accusations and challenge
Navalny to a duel.
“You have made me the subject of insulting, defamatory remarks. It is
not customary among officers simply to forgive,” Zolotov said. “From time
immemorial, scoundrels have had their faces smashed and been called to
duels.” He added, “I simply challenge you to a duel—in the ring, on the
judo mat, wherever, and I promise to make good, juicy steak of you.”
A 2019 investigation accused Medvedev of appropriating a private jet
controlled by a subsidiary of VTB, the government-controlled bank, for his
wife’s personal use. In the same investigation, Navalny accused Andrei
Kostin, the head of VTB, of similarly making a company-connected plane
available for the use of his lover, the television journalist Nailya Asker-
Zade. VTB denied the allegations and said the airplanes had been sold.
But an investigation by the Russian news outlet, the Bell, confirmed that
the planes were owned by VTB subsidiaries before being transferred to
another company called Skyline Aviation SRL, registered in San Marino,
and that another Skyline plane was used by Patriarch Kirill, the head of the
Russian Orthodox Church. Navalny’s investigation showed that Kostin’s
chief of staff at VTB had connections to companies that operated the planes
before and after the sales. “They steal, hide and lie,” Navalny said in a
video laying out the details. “They constantly lie in our faces.” One of
Navalny’s strangest investigations was set off after a group of scantily clad
women burst into the Anti-corruption Foundation’s offices, followed by a
crew from the Kremlin-connected Life News television channel, which
filmed the women. The group turned out to have staged a protest, naked,
outside the U.S. embassy in Moscow in support of the disgraced American
film producer Harvey Weinstein.
 Another woman connected to the group posted a video in which she
personally threatened Navalny, vowing that one of them would have sex
with him and release a video of it. Randomly, she added: “Because of you
and those like you, people keep fighting wars now.”
That threat prompted further investigation. Navalny’s team found that
the woman called herself Nastya Rybka, but her real name was Anastasia
Vashukevich. She was a Belarusian-born escort who had traveled with the
oligarch Deripaska on his yacht and written a how-to book about seducing
billionaires.
Video of Rybka and Deripaska on the boat, posted by Rybka on
Instagram, showed another man on board with them: Deputy Prime
Minister Sergei Prikhodko, a former senior aide to Putin, allegedly in the
company of prostitutes. At one point on the video, Deripaska can be heard
discussing relations between Russia and the United States and referring,
perhaps sarcastically, to Victoria Nuland, a high-level State Department
official, as Prikhodko’s “friend.”
Navalny compiled all of his investigative findings into a video, released
in February 2018, in which he repeatedly expressed disbelief at how Rybka
had laid out so many details, which Navalny’s team easily confirmed by
tracking the movements of Deripaska’s yacht, Elden. Navalny alleged that
Prikhodko’s trip on the yacht, as well as the services of the women on
board, amounted to bribes paid to the deputy prime minister by Deripaska.
“I never in my life thought I would say such words, let alone in front of
an audience of a million viewers, but there is no choice,” Navalny said.
“The deputy prime minister, head of Medvedev’s office, spends his vacation
on an oligarch’s yacht, in the company of this oligarch, excuse me, and
several prostitutes. Yes, there were several.”
But the investigation didn’t stop with these salacious details. Navalny
pressed on, using widely reported business connections between Deripaska
and Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s disgraced campaign manager, to
declare that the Anti-corruption Foundation had essentially cracked the case
of Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Navalny, claiming to have put all the puzzle pieces together, accused
Manafort of trying to pay off his financial debts to Deripaska by giving
briefings on U.S. politics to the oligarch who, in turn, passed the
information to Prikhodko, for the benefit of Putin and the Russian
government. The video did not remotely offer conclusive proof of election
meddling, which Russia has denied repeatedly, if not quite convincingly.
Rybka ended up arrested on solicitation charges in Thailand, where she
and some associates were conducting “sex workshops.” From prison, she
made an unsuccessful pitch for political asylum by offering the U.S. consul
information about Trump and Russia.
Deripaska issued a statement denying the allegations, and successfully
sued Rybka for invasion of privacy. Prikhodko also denied the allegations.
In a statement to Russia’s RBC newspaper, Prikhodko called Navalny a
“political loser” who “once again tried to arrange a provocation…
chaotically mixing everything possible and impossible.”
Prikhodko acknowledged that Deripaska was a friend but denied
knowing Manafort. But in a cabinet reshuffle following the Russian
presidential election later that year, Prikhodko was left without a post. He
died in 2021.
In one head-spinning investigation in 2015, Navalny linked the sons of
Russia’s general prosecutor, Yuri Chaika, to a vast business empire,
including a luxury hotel in Greece co-owned by one of the sons, Artem
Chaika, and Olga Lopatina, the former wife of Gennady Lopatin, Russia’s
deputy prosecutor general. The investigation alleged business ties to one of
Russia’s most notorious criminal gangs and documented an array of raids
carried out on businesses around the country with the help of prosecutors
abusing the power of their office. The raided businesses ended up controlled
by the Chaika family, according to registration documents.
In any other country, the allegations would be jaw-dropping. According
to Navalny and his team, Russia’s justice system was a racketeering
operation, and the chief prosecutor was a mafia don.
Chaika forcefully denied Navalny’s allegations and alleged that
someone else had paid Navalny to publish the false accusations. “The
information presented is deliberately false and has no basis,” Chaika told
the Interfax news agency.
Lopatina, the ex-wife of Chaika’s deputy, also denied Navalny’s charges
and threatened a lawsuit, insisting she had no connection to the Tsapkov
criminal gang. However, Vedomosti, Russia’s leading business daily,
reported that business ownership records confirmed connections.
It’s no wonder then that Navalny for years was asked why he was still
alive. Navalny insisted on provoking the most powerful people in the
country, people who considered themselves untouchable. Chaika did not
need to feel above the law; he was the law. Russia’s criminal justice system,
according to Navalny, was a tool not for justice but for the enrichment of
Chaika and his family.
This was part of Navalny’s point. Russia, he believed, was run by a
bunch of greedy, murderous gangsters. They were bandits, no different from
the corrupt and greedy Communist Party bosses who exploited the Soviet
system and led it to ruin.
Through his investigations, Navalny was effectively building a wide-
ranging case against Putin and Putin’s entire system of government. This
case almost certainly would never reach a courtroom, but Navalny held out
hope that it could win in the court of public opinion, that he could persuade
voters that for Russia to develop, Putin had to go. It wasn’t just the
prosecutor’s office. The entire system was rotten.
When Navalny first started digging into Gazprom as an activist
shareholder, he was warned that people get killed for digging up this kind of
dirt. But his hunch was that the criminals robbing Gazprom shareholders of
dividends and asset value were the same criminals robbing Russian citizens
of their tax money, and robbing Russia of its future as a normal European
country.
Navalny felt personally affronted by it all. They were robbing him,
robbing his parents. Navalny believed that someone needed to bring these
crooks and thieves to justice. And for reasons that even he and his family
would struggle to explain, Navalny, a military brat who grew up with a
poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger on his bedroom wall, decided he would
be the one to mete out justice and extract revenge.
He also refused to be afraid. By nature or nurture, he was incapable of
backing down from a fight, and repeatedly urged his followers to show the
same fearlessness. “We are the power,” he would tell them from the stage of
mass protests, a statement that Putin and his riot police would prove false
again and again by repeatedly tossing Navalny into prison.
And yet, Navalny refused to bend a knee to the regime, generating
fascination and consternation in Russia. Who was this Navalny who insisted
on taunting the Kremlin and baiting fate? Where did he come from? Who or
what made him like this?
 4

EARLY YEARS

“My main hero was, and still is, Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

—Alexey Navalny, Esquire, December 2011

Even as a child, Navalny was indignant, righteous, dubious of authority,

and unbending in his principles.
“His character manifested itself very quickly,” his mother, Lyudmila
Navalnaya, told an interviewer. “To parent him was impossible; it was
impossible to say ‘no’ to him. I remember he was once scolded for
something by a teacher, so he refused to go to school the next day [saying]:
‘I don’t want to be forced to study.’ Nothing can be forced upon him.”
But if righteous indignation and stubborn relentlessness are among
Navalny’s defining character traits, what has always made him especially
confounding to his opponents, and so infuriating and threatening to Putin, is
his ordinary, Slavic Russianness.
Russia, historically, is hypersensitive to ethnic distinctions. The word for
a Russian citizen—Rossiyanin—is different than the word for an ethnic
Russian—Russkiy. Being a Jew or a Georgian or a Tatar, or any of Russia’s
more than one hundred other ethnicities, signals minority status. And
despite Communism’s aspiration to maintain an egalitarian society, acute
differences were also noted between those in the party nomenklatura, the
Chekhists in the security services, the intelligentsia, and the creative
classes.
Navalny—with Russian and Ukrainian ancestry, a military family,
classic good looks—does not stand out in any way that could be criticized
as subversive or dangerous to Russia and Russianness. His family history,
childhood upbringing, education, love life, and early career are so utterly
mainstream, majoritarian, and normal—initially so Soviet, then so Russian,
and all along, so Slavic—as to make it ridiculous, if not impossible, to try to
paint him with “otherness.” He is a guy who spent a half year on a
fellowship at Yale University and later said he realized he could not live in
America because he missed black bread.
Of course, in a country with a long tradition of real and imagined
conspiracy theories, suspicions, and betrayals, that has hardly stopped
critics and opponents from trying to portray him as an outsider and a threat,
to brand him as an “extremist” and a “foreign agent.” Yet, Navalny’s
personal biography at its core is a Slavic-Russian one.
“He considers himself a simple, common, even mediocre Russian guy,”
Konstantin Voronkov, a friend, colleague and supporter of Navalny’s, wrote
in a 2011 authorized biography, Threat to Crooks and Thieves.
For some of Navalny’s supporters, the more crucially important point is
what he is not—not a Jew; not an oligarch; not from the intelligentsia, or
the Soviet nomenklatura. Rather, he comes from an Orthodox Christian
military family, whose ancestors fought for the Red Army in World War II,
which the Russians call the Great Patriotic War.
“Finally,” one of Navalny’s closest supporters said, voice dropping to a
whisper. “Finally, we have a Russian guy.”
To call him Russian, however, is not entirely precise, at least not in the
Russian way of thinking about ethnicity. Navalny’s mother is Russian. His
father was born in Ukraine, in a village, Zalissia, just fifteen miles from the
future site of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The town was abandoned
after the nuclear disaster in 1986, and all its residents, including Navalny’s
grandparents, uncles, and other relatives, were eventually forced to
evacuate and relocate.
As Navalny once told the novelist Boris Akunin, swatting back an
assertion that he harbored ethnic prejudices: “I myself am half Russian, half
Ukrainian. And I do not want to feel a bit like a second-class person.”
In fact, Navalny’s Ukrainian background served only to bolster his street
cred as a man of modern Russia. His own family history is tied up not only
in the Chernobyl catastrophe but also in Russia’s more recent aggressions
against Ukraine, in Crimea and Donbas in 2014, and, ultimately, the full-
scale war that began in February 2022.
Navalny’s Russian nationalism and his initially ambiguous public
statements about the annexation of Crimea in 2014 have made him suspect,
or even hated, by many Ukrainians, some of whom are unaware of his
Ukrainian roots and regard him as a Russian imperialist.
But in Russia, Navalny’s personal narrative is so unremarkable as to be
inherently patriotic. His physical appearance, and that of his blond, blue-
eyed wife and children, is so classically Russian that this alone often seems
to undermine, if not neutralize, efforts by Putin and other critics to portray
him as a treacherous Western agent.
In 2018, on Victory Day, which Russians observe on May 9 with far
more reverence than Americans mark Memorial Day or Veterans Day,
Navalny posted photos of his grandparents’ military medals on Facebook
and noted that while he had never met his grandfather, he had grown up
asking his grandmother: “How many fascists did you kill?” Like so many
who served, he said, she preferred not to talk about the war.
And once, thwacking a critic on Twitter, Navalny compared his family’s
military service to that of the country’s senior political leaders, and some of
Russian television’s most famous commentator-propagandists. He singled
out Putin; longtime defense minister Sergei Shoigu; Medvedev; the editor in
chief of the propagandist RT channel, Maria Simonyan; and the bombastic
talk show host Vladimir Solovyov.
“I’m alive thanks to my parents,” Navalny tweeted. “And they’re alive
thanks to my grandparents. Grandfather fought and was wounded.
Grandmother ended the war in Berlin. But neither Putin, nor Shoigu, nor
Medvedev, nor Simonyan and Solovyov, nor the crazy propagandists with
ribbons have anything to do with this.”
Indeed, the police officers and security agents sent to search Navalny’s
home and office, to stalk him, or guard him under house arrest, have often
privately conceded feeling at least some solidarity with Navalny and his
close associates, sometimes even warning them of raids in advance, at other
times quietly telling them: “We know you are good guys.”
Butyn, a tiny, former military outpost in the southwest of Moscow region,
where Navalny lived until he was six years old, is often cited as Navalny’s
birthplace. But in fact, Alexey Anatolyevich Navalny entered the world on
June 4, 1976, at a hospital in Solnechnogorsk, a town on the northwest
fringe of the capital region.
Solnechnogorsk is located on the road from Moscow to St. Petersburg,
just outside of the fabled Golden Ring comprised of some of Russia’s most
picturesque and historic cities, and a bit more than a half-hour drive
northwest of Zelenograd, where a pregnant Lyudmila Navalnaya was living
with her own mother.
Her husband, Anatoly Ivanovich Navalny, was an officer in the missile
forces stationed at a garrison in Butyn. Though they had married the year
prior, in 1975, the couple lived apart during the week. Lyudmila Navalnaya
worked in a lab at the Soviet Center for Microelectronics during the day,
and in the evenings she took classes in economics at the Moscow Institute
of Management, which today is Russia’s premier business school, the State
University of Management. In 1975, however, it was named, ironically
enough, after Sergo Ordzhonikidze, a Bolshevik revolutionary who later
served as a senior Politburo official and was a close confidante of Stalin,
whom he first met when they shared a prison cell in Baku in 1907.
On the morning that Lyudmila Navalnaya went into labor, the hospital in
Zelenograd was closed for reconstruction.
Navalnaya and her mother hitched a ride on a truck heading north, and
Navalny was born in Solnechnogorsk in the early afternoon. According to
his mother, he weighed about eight pounds, two and a half ounces, and he
was twenty-four inches long. That put him in the 99.9 percentile for height,
in what would turn out to be an accurate predictor of his lanky, six-foot-
two-inch frame as an adult.
The year of Navalny’s birth, 1976, was a generally uneventful one in the
Soviet Union. Elsewhere, exciting things were happening. In Poland, that
same month, a plan to raise prices for many basic commodities set off
violent protests that ultimately led to the dismissal of Prime Minister Piotr
Jaroszewicz.
In Montreal, the following month, a fourteen-year-old Romanian
gymnast, Nadia Comăneci, was awarded the first-ever perfect score of 10.0
in gymnastics at the Summer Olympic Games; she would go on to win three
gold medals. And in the United States, President Gerald Ford stumbled
during a campaign debate by insisting that there was no Soviet domination
in eastern Europe, one of numerous missteps that led to his defeat by the
Democratic governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter.
In the Soviet Union, however, it was literally the same-old, same-old as
the aging Communist Party elite sought to maintain stability and their own
grip on power.
Leonid Brezhnev, already the Soviet leader for a dozen years, was
reappointed in March 1976 as general secretary of the Communist Party,
insuring a continuation of his policy of détente with the West. The one
surprise at the Party Congress was the ouster of the agriculture minister,
Dmitry Polyansky, as punishment for the failure of the 1975 grain harvest—
a foreshadow of the far more severe food shortages and logistical
breakdowns that would contribute to the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Navalny was born into a relatively nondescript period of stasis, in which
some aspects of the Soviet project were calcifying and others beginning to
rot. It was virtually the midpoint between the apex of Soviet glory—Yuri
Gagarin becoming the first human to journey into space in 1961—and the
Communist superpower’s dissolution and demise in 1991.
This meant some inherent contradictions. As a boy, he felt innocent
patriotism.
“I am a guy from the Soviet Union,” he told an American interviewer. “I
was very proud that my father is guarding Mother Russia from evil
Americans with their bombs and missiles.”
But some of Navalny’s earliest memories were also of the Soviet Union
entering a pitiable state, and by the time he was a teenager, momentous
events were beginning to unfold.
It was in his Soviet childhood that Navalny also developed an early and
enduring disdain for government dysfunction, ineptitude, and the
corruption, whether petty or on a grand scale, that pervades Russian life.
When chatting about his upbringing, Navalny has said that one of his
defining childhood recollections is of standing in line, to get milk for his
brother, Oleg—a seemingly endless queue each day after school.
“Main childhood memory—I stand in line for milk,” he told his friend,
Voronkov. “All the time I stand in line for milk. When I was seven years
old, my brother was born. And when he was little, he needed a lot of milk.
And for him, all the time I went to stand in line. It was necessary to arrive at
two p.m., when this milk was delivered, and every time I would return from
school, and stand.”
Navalny’s other childhood chore was returning glass bottles on which
Soviet consumers paid a relatively steep deposit of twenty kopecks. But
when the young Navalny arrived at the collection point, he and others were
invariably told that the bottles could not be accepted because there were no
storage containers available—a maddening and absurd process that was
designed to get people to toss the bottles in frustration, or to accept
reimbursement at cut rates.
“This nonsense was a truly nationwide problem,” Navalny told
Voronkov. “And the realization of the meaninglessness of the economic
order, uselessness and chaos happened through this.”

The absurdity of the bottle redemption process, and the unhappy memories
of the queues for milk, and of his parents lining up before dawn to buy
meat, were just two factors that shaped Navalny’s clear-eyed, unromantic,
and scathing opinion of Soviet Russia.
Like others in his generation, he viewed Gagarin as a national hero, but
he never bought into the Soviet myths, and he recognized the ineptitude of
Soviet officials as a national embarrassment.
“When now some people, especially young people who didn’t
experience the Soviet Union, begin to tell me stories about how wonderful
it was there, I don’t need them to tell me this,” Navalny said. “I stood [in
line] for this milk. My mother and father still remember how at five in the
morning they had to go to get in line for meat. And this was in a military
town, where there was a good supply. I do not think that the Soviet Union
should be cursed in some indiscriminate way, but now we definitely live
better than then, and I have no nostalgia for it. And there was nothing to eat
in the Soviet Union. We brought buckwheat from Moscow to Ukraine,
where this buckwheat is grown.”
Carrying packages of buckwheat, among the most basic staples of a
Russian diet, on visits to your grandparents’ village, is the sort of detail that
becomes imprinted in a child’s mind. And it wasn’t just buckwheat.
Navalny’s aunt and uncle would recall their Moscow relatives also bringing
sugar, oranges, and other basic goods during times of deprivation. In
exchange, they would send them home with local fish and mushrooms.
Navalny’s childhood trips to Ukraine, where he spent virtually every
summer with his paternal grandmother until he was eight years old, were a
journey into a natural paradise.
He would live during those months in his grandparents’ white cement
house, with green-and-white wooden shutters, on October Street—
surrounded by other children, swimming in the Uzh River, fishing, picking
cherries, eating poppy-seed pies and the Ukrainian crescent-shaped
dumplings called vareniky.
“My most vivid childhood memory is the Uzh River, which flows into
the Pripyat—a high precipice and swallows’ nests,” Navalny once told
Russian Esquire magazine. “I keep trying to get this swallow, I stick my
hand in there, but I can’t get it.”
It was also in Ukraine that Navalny’s grandmother took him, secretly at
age three, to be baptized in the Orthodox Church. “When I was three years
old my grandmother took me to be baptized among relatives in Ukraine,
secretly from my father, because he was a Communist. They were afraid
that he would be expelled from the Communist Party,” Navalny told the
Polish historian and public intellectual Adam Michnik.
Relatives recalled the young Alexey as a friendly, well-behaved,
outgoing kid, who didn’t complain, and notably didn’t cry or whine, who
blended in easily and, by the end of each summer, could converse
comfortably in the local Ukrainian dialect, which has a bit of Belarusian
mixed in.
Navalny’s father, Anatoly, was the second of three sons of Ivan
Tarasovich Navalny, and Tatyana Danilovna Navalnaya, both of whom
worked on the local kolkhoz, or collective farm. Ivan Tarasovich was also a
carpenter. A monument to fallen soldiers listed a half-dozen with the
surname of Navalny who died in World War II.
Today, Zalissia is a ghost town, the abandoned houses and other
buildings crumbling back into nature, as is the case throughout the
Chernobyl exclusion zone. A sign at the entrance of the village notes that
Zalissia had “2849 inhabitants before the Chernobyl disaster” and notes the
evacuation date: May 4, 1986—eight days after the explosion and
meltdown in the power plant’s reactor No. 4.
For Navalny and his family, the disaster was deeply personal. Navalny
has frequently remarked that if the reactor explosion had happened just a
few weeks later in June, after the start of school holidays, he would have
been there. And in the years since, he has visited the exclusion zone
countless times.
Most crucially, though, the tragedy of Chernobyl impressed on Navalny
at a young age the very real life-and-death consequences of government
lies, disinformation, and incompetence. In tones of fury, he has described
how the Soviet government delayed evacuations of families, while trying to
hide the magnitude of the disaster.
“In order not to raise panic, the collective farmers—and our relatives too
—were sent to [plant] potatoes, digging in the radioactive dust,” he said. “It
was a real universal catastrophe, in which my family and I were victims.”
After HBO released its hugely popular Chernobyl miniseries in 2019,
Navalny took to YouTube to angrily denounce Russian television
commentators who criticized the show as inaccurate and alleged purposeful
misrepresentations of history by its Western creators.
“What happened in Chernobyl was really a monstruous catastrophe, in
which guilt lay precisely with the constant lie, the disgusting, ugly lie told
by these people, all these Soviet bosses sitting in Moscow and Kyiv,”
Navalny said. “I am a bit emotional speaking about this because in a sense
this is the story of my family. All the relatives from my father’s side are
from Chernobyl.
“I know perfectly well from my relatives about this whole story of
endless lies,” he added. “The power station blew up, but nevertheless they
were silent, and drove them out there to plant… potatoes for the collective
farm. Here they were digging with their own hands, with the radioactive
dust falling and receiving a huge dose of radiation.”
As an adult, Navalny has returned to the area numerous times, generally
in May when permits are issued allowing family visits on Victory Day and
on the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster itself later in May. He has
described seeing a coat on the floor of his grandmother’s abandoned house
that he had worn during his summer visits.
Navalny’s connections to Ukraine and to the Chernobyl disaster are not
merely a matter of boyhood memories and old ancestral ties. They also
cemented some of his defining personal and political beliefs. One of those
convictions was that the Soviet Union was a debacle. Its leaders and
authorities were alternatively cruel and inept and—even more infuriating to
Navalny—a bunch of greedy, hypocritical liars.
Another of those core beliefs was an inherently racist one, though
Navalny himself would describe it as realism, not racism: that Russians,
Ukrainians, and Belarusians formed “brother” nations, bound together by
their white, Slavic ethnicity and by Russian culture. This perspective was
part of a larger equation in which Navalny would insist that there were core
cultural differences between these “Russian” people and people from the
North or South Caucasus (even those in Russia), or from Central Asia.
“Of course, it would be great if now we lived in one country with
Ukraine and Belarus, but I think that sooner or later it will happen anyway,”
Navalny told Voronkov. “The common cultural and linguistic space has
been preserved, and it will exist for the foreseeable future. Russian culture
is the only thing that truly united that country and continues to unite the
Russian Federation. Why is the talk now that the Caucasus may secede so
real? Because there are no Russians there.”
Navalny’s view about the brother nations would be shattered, at least as
far as millions of Ukrainians were concerned, by Putin’s full-scale invasion
of Ukraine in February 2022. But during his two decades in public activism
and politics this Russian-centric outlook—which critics would brand as
chauvinism or worse—would fuel a flirtation with nationalist ideologies
and political forces. This put him at odds with some of his allies in liberal
political circles and would end up staining his reputation at home and
abroad. It would also create an agonizing tension between Navalny’s
aspiration to be a “good guy” and his desire to be populist enough to have a
chance at winning elective office.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, as the Soviet Union moved
toward its inevitable collapse, and Russia experienced seismic political and
cultural shifts, the teenage Navalny’s outlook was defined by his childhood
experiences, by the visits with his grandparents and relatives in Ukraine, by
conversations about politics around the kitchen table with his parents, and
by his firsthand observations of other military families he lived with on the
outskirts of Moscow.
 Growing up with military brats meant more than a few fistfights for
Navalny. Kids in those military towns would also take leftover ammunition
cartridges from firing ranges and fashion fireworks out of them, sometimes
with disastrous, disfiguring results.
In 1988, the year that Navalny turned twelve, the Austrian-American
bodybuilder and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger visited Moscow for four
days of filming for the movie Red Heat, in which Schwarzenegger plays a
Soviet policeman, Ivan Danko. Schwarzenegger, as a champion weightlifter
and star of the 1984 hit The Terminator, was already a giant celebrity in
Russia. The trip to Moscow would only the fuel the adoration. In addition to
filming some takes in Red Square for the movie (which was mostly shot in
Hungary) Schwarzenegger insisted on meeting his own childhood idol, the
champion Soviet bodybuilder Yury Vlasov.
Under these circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that a poster of
Schwarzenegger would end up on the wall of Navalny’s childhood
bedroom. But while Navalny is no muscleman, it turned out that his idol
and his idol’s idol were also captivated by politics. Vlasov was elected to
the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989, at the tail end of the Soviet
Union, and to the State Duma of the Russian Federation in 1993. Initially,
he was a supporter of democratic reforms and was part of the interregional
group of deputies that included Andrei Sakharov, Anatoly Sobchak, the
future mayor of St. Petersburg, and Boris Yeltsin. Vlasov would even go on
to run for president as an independent candidate in 1996.
Schwarzenegger, of course, would later be elected governor of
California. Navalny would continue to follow his career with childlike
admiration, telling Russian Esquire magazine in 2011: “My main hero was,
and still is, Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
As a teenager, Navalny’s passions were politics and music, and they
came together on a television show Vzglyad, or “Outlook,” which was a
current events talk show that also featured foreign music videos. He would
watch it with his mother. “At first everything was about politics, and then
about music,” Lyudmila Navalnaya told New Times in an interview. “Here
Alyosha watched with me,” she said, using the diminutive nickname for
Alexey. “He was waiting for music.”
Navalny was also a big newspaper reader as a teenager. One day,
browsing through the large-circulation daily Moskovsky Komsomolets when
he was in the eighth grade, he learned about a high school that trained
young economists called the Plekhanov Institute. He passed the six-hour
entrance examination, and for two years commuted into the center of
Moscow to study there.

Navalny has spoken often about the special nature of his particular mixed-
breed generation—those born between 1976 and 1982. That six-year
bracket was not Navalny’s invention but was actually an online community
of LiveJournal, the hugely popular blogging platform where Navalny
himself rose to internet fame.
“This is the Moscow baby boom and it has come of age,” Navalny said
in an interview with Time magazine published in January 2012. “The name
76-82 comes from an insanely popular community on LiveJournal, called
76-82, where people write short memories that they share with people from
this generation. Things like, I don’t know, chewing gum, movies, a very
specific type of Communist youth camp from the end of the Soviet Union,
in the late ’70s and ’80s.”
Like other generations defined by a unique moment in history, the 76-82
Russians shared experiences and jokes that resonated deeply only within
their cohort. They had been Communist Young Pioneers as kids, wearing
red ties and forced to march and sing patriotic songs, but they changed the
lyrics to insert crude vulgarities. They listened to a mix of Soviet and
Western rock music.
Voronkov summed up Navalny’s view of his in-between generation as
follows: “We got a full dose of radiation from the Soviet Union, but
adulthood began in another country… the new world was built by those
who were slightly older, and those who were slightly younger fit into this
world perfectly because they did not know otherwise. We, on the other
hand, were left standing on our backs, witnessing interesting times but
gaining nothing from them and not knowing how to apply ourselves.”
Navalny put it in harsher terms. He would later describe himself as
disgusted by the lies and hypocrisy of the Soviet state, and he would try to
define himself as the antithesis of a Sovok—the pejorative label for a person
with a conformist, Soviet mentality.
“It was clear that this whole shitty system was built on deception, and all
these agitators and propagandists, who lived here and told the tale of their
Party, dreamed only of getting a trip to Bulgaria, buying a watch here,
exchanging it there for some perfume and two tape recorders,” Navalny told
Voronkov. “Everybody wanted to go abroad. And the only people who went
abroad were those who told us how wonderful the Soviet Union and the
Soviet system was. The realization of this, plus the Vzglyad program and
rock music, made me a fierce, infernal democrat and liberal.
“You had to be a child to feel all the abnormality of the reality around us
—Soviet hypocrisy reigned, which adults hardly noticed any more. It is
hard to say whether we managed to free ourselves from it,” he continued.
“But the outward manifestations of ‘Sovokism’ are definitely still alive.”
Navalny admits that as the Soviet Union collapsed, he joined in the
national denigration of Mikhail Gorbachev and was a huge supporter of
Boris Yeltsin and of his team of reformers, including the main proponent of
privatization, Anatoly Chubais. Navalny would later say this position was
naïve and mistaken.
“I have to admit over the past few years I’ve reevaluated the events of
the late ’80s and early ’90s,” Navalny told Michnik, the Polish historian, in
2015. “Back then I was a massive fan of Yeltsin’s, but Gorbachev seems a
far more appealing figure to me now. I understand what scenarios he could
have put into effect—anything from bloodshed to stratospheric personal
enrichment. He could have done everything Putin’s doing now but didn’t.
He was detested by the whole country then, Communists and liberals alike.”
But Navalny in his exuberant youth was a strident democrat, influenced
in large part by his anti-Communist parents but also driven by his own
fierce indignation.
In 1993, he enrolled in the law faculty at People’s Friendship University
in Moscow, a second-tier school, having missed admission to the more
prestigious Moscow State University by a single point. That same year, he
helped his parents start a wicker and basket-weaving business in the town
of Kobyakovo, southwest of Moscow, where his father was last stationed in
the military. Navalny, his brother, Oleg, and their parents each owned 25
percent of the company.
Navalny began working even as he was still in school, initially taking a
position at Aeroflot Bank. But in January 1997, the Central Bank revoked
its license. Shortly after, Navalny took a job in the legal department of ST
Group, a Moscow real estate development company owned by two brothers,
Shalva and Alexander Chigirinsky.
Years later, appearing on a talk show with Ksenia Sobchak on TV Rain,
Alexander Chigirinsky would admit that he had no idea Navalny had been
his employee. “I just didn’t even know that he worked for us,” Chigirinsky
said, laughing.
Sobchak, the daughter of the former St. Petersburg governor, pressed
him for details: What was he like? Was he a good worker?
Chigirinsky had zero to offer. “And when the press reported it,” he said,
“the most interesting thing is this, that it seemed to me that the press was
lying, that it wasn’t true.”
He said that he called one of his managers, to confirm: “Is it true,
Navalny worked for us?” he asked. “Navalny came in 1998 on the basis of
an advertisement,” Gennady Melkumyan, who headed the company’s legal
department, told Vedomosti. “We considered several candidates, settled on
him: He is smart, catches on quickly.”
While working at ST Group, Navalny learned how to process property
deal approvals through the Federal Anti-monopoly Service and realized he
could make good money this way on his own.
In those years, Navalny registered several businesses. One, created in
1997, was called Allekt, which he would later use as a vehicle for political
consulting work among other ventures.
Another, called Nesna, was to be dedicated to hairdressing, according to
the corporate filings. Later, he established N.N. Securities with a school
friend, Ivan Nesterenko, as a vehicle for trading on the stock market.
Another was called Eurasian Transport Systems. The flurry of
entrepreneurialism reflected Navalny’s effort, common among many in his
generation, to catch a bit of the capitalist wave after having missed out on
the privatization frenzy that followed the Soviet collapse.

While on vacation in Turkey during the summer of 1998, Navalny met his
match. Yulia Abrosimova, tall and blond, was not only a member of the 76-
82 club, she was born in Moscow just seven weeks after he was, on July 24,
1976.
Fate? Destiny? Inevitability? Navalny has never hidden his disdain for
people who are dumb or, even worse, disengaged and indifferent. “When a
person tells me they are not interested in politics, I just think they are
stupid,” he told Voronkov. “Or it’s an excuse to swim with the current, to
explain his laziness or meanness.”
Yulia, strikingly pretty, might have caught Navalny’s eye anyway. But
he was immediately smitten for other reasons. She had a degree in
economics. She was a democrat and, like Navalny, a member of Yabloko,
the center-left, liberal-minded political party founded by the free-market
economist Grigory Yavlinsky. She was up on current affairs, for instance,
and could name all of Russia’s governmental ministers.
For Russians of their generation and demographic, holiday romance at a
Turkish resort was almost comically typical. In fact, the Russian press,
which would become obsessed with the country’s best-known blogger and
the “first lady of the Russian opposition,” later noted that what was atypical
was that they managed to sustain the offshore summer romance back home
in Moscow.
But looking at any photograph of them together—on vacation, with their
children, in endless courtrooms—there is no doubt that this is a handsome,
Russian, and specifically modern, middle-class Muscovite couple. Navalny
—tall, often joking and smiling, and posting openly on social media about
his family—offered a stark contrast to Putin, who exudes the paranoia of an
ex-spy, refusing to ever speak about his family (or families) and even
having his two acknowledged daughters use different surnames. This was—
and still is—a core pillar of Navalny’s political appeal and helps explain
why he has always posed a very different sort of threat to Putin than the so-
called systemic opposition.
Where Yavlinsky, born to Jewish parents in Lviv in Western Ukraine,
represented the tweedy intelligentsia that historically had never gained any
political traction in Russia, and Gennady Zyuganov, the general secretary of
Russia’s Communist Party since 1993, represented the failed apparatchiks
of yore, Navalny offered something new and different—a modern, telegenic
family man.
 Convincing mainstream Russia to endorse that new, different profile
would become Navalny’s personal and professional challenge for the next
decades. Moscow is not Russia, just as New York is not the United States.
Most of Russia is not middle class but abjectly poor, and the overwhelming
majority of Russian voters are not part of the modern, urban professionals,
hipsters, or creatives found in the capital or St. Petersburg, the country’s
second city.
Alexey and Yulia were married in August 2000 and, in keeping with
their typical profile, followed in the path of other typical Russian
newlyweds in their early twenties: They began making babies. A daughter,
Darya—Dasha—was born in 2001. A son, Zakhar, was born in 2008,
matching the seven-year difference between Navalny and his brother, Oleg.
Navalnaya has always maintained a protective shell around herself and
her children, stressing that Navalny is the politician. Nonetheless, she is
unquestionably a driving force behind him and everything he does. In her
first TV interview, in 2013, Yulia Navalnaya told Leonid Parfenov on TV
Rain: “I didn’t marry a promising lawyer, and I didn’t marry an opposition
leader. I married a young man named Alexey. I married a man with whom it
was clear from the very beginning that sharp turns were possible, so nothing
unexpected happened to me.”
Parfenov, intrigued, pressed the point about sharp turns. “He has always
been very active,” Navalnaya said of her husband, “with a very active
citizenship.”
Yevgenia Albats, Navalny’s political godmother, has frequently said that
she believes Navalny will spend his life striving to prove that he is worthy
of such a smart, beautiful partner.
Albats interviewed Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila, for New Times
magazine, and asked her what the Navalnys thought of their daughter-in-
law.
“We have always liked her very much—a rare combination of
intelligence and beauty,” Lyudmila Navalnaya replied.
“Didn’t you fear that Yulia is so beautiful that Alyosha will have to
conquer her all his life, to prove that he is worth it?” Albats asked.
“What,” Lyudmila shot back, “my son is ugly?”
 5

MAKING OF A POLITICIAN

“He’s totally a political person, totally, as people say, a political

animal.”
—Maria Gaidar, August 2021

When Navalny was a boy, his father used to rail against the Soviet
Communists so loudly that his mother, Lyudmila, said she would shut the
windows for fear that neighbors living nearby would hear him and it would
cause her husband, a career military man, problems at work.
Beginning with the Russian legislative elections of 1993, Navalny’s
parents had always supported the democratic alliance of Grigory Yavlinsky,
Yury Boldyrev, and Vladimir Lukin, which would later become the center-
left political party Yabloko, whose name means “Apple.”
Ideologically, Navalny was also a supporter of the social-minded
democrats. But in 1996, Boris Yeltsin, then sixty-five years old and in ill
health after a series of heart attacks, was suddenly locked in a tight race
against a Communist, Gennady Zyuganov.
Navalny, like many in his generation, had been caught up in the
euphoria of the Soviet collapse. Fearing a slide back toward Communist
misery, Navalny—with the exuberant self-assuredness of having turned
twenty years old just two weeks before the election—told his parents to
vote for Yeltsin.
“In 1996, his dad and I timidly said that Yeltsin was not very good for
us,” Lyudmila Navalnaya recalled in an interview with New Times
magazine. “But Alyosha told us to go and vote for Yeltsin. There was a
choice—either for him or for Zyuganov.”
Yeltsin won, in an election largely perceived as marred by fraud. But he
would end up resigning before the end of his term and handpicking a
successor; Vladimir Putin, the prime minister and former head of the KGB.
Putin’s selection was part of a deal that would shield Yeltsin and his family
from vengeful prosecution.
Navalny eventually concluded that he was wrong about Yeltsin, and that
he had failed to recognize the threats to democracy posed by the disrespect
for rule of law, and the circumventing of constitutional controls that
eventually brought Putin to power.
A first inkling of those misgivings emerged when talk began in Russian
government circles about plans to raise the so-called “percentage barrier”—
the threshold for parties to enter as a faction into the lower house of
parliament, the State Duma.
Democracy advocates often recommend a threshold of 3.5 percent.
Russia in its parliamentary elections of 1993, 1995, and 1999 had a
threshold of 5 percent. But chatter soon started about raising the threshold
to 7 percent, or even 12.5 percent. This would have killed the chances of
minority parties, which were still developing in Russia’s young, rough-and-
tumble democracy, and were in fact struggling to gain any footing against
the governing coalition, given the country’s strong presidential system.
Yabloko had worked in coalition with Yeltsin, mainly to counter the
Communists, and Yavlinsky, the Yabloko party chairman, had even voted in
the State Duma to confirm Putin when Yeltsin named him as prime minister
in 1999. But Yavlinsky was in the minority and had even asked his party’s
governing board for permission to cast his vote for Putin—knowing it
would be controversial. Most of the party’s Duma members voted against
Putin.
Navalny was among a new generation that was drawn to Yabloko
because it was the one decidedly anti-Kremlin party. Another Yabloko
member of that generation was Ilya Yashin, who joined shortly after
Navalny and became a longtime ally. “When we went to Yabloko, we all
had the same motivation,” Yashin told Afisha magazine. “We have seen
threats to the democratic structure of our country.”
Navalny said he was motivated to prevent the raising of the electoral
threshold and to preserve the possibility for opposition movements in
Russia to win seats in government. But when he first walked into Yabloko’s
offices on Moscow’s New Arbat Avenue, he hardly seemed like a guy who
would attract much notice.
Navalny, with a young career and a serious girlfriend who shared his
political leanings, was drawn to the progressive party and eager to get
involved, but he was also a bit reticent, and in those days seemed a bit shy.
He gamely took a back seat to others who had taken on more proactive
roles in Yabloko, including Daniel Meshcheryakov, a veteran human rights
activist who was a director of the Moscow Helsinki Group, and Timofei
Nizhegorodtsev, who had headed a firm called the People’s Opinion
Agency for Economic and Political Consulting. Nizhegorodtsev, who was
from the Siberian city of Irkutsk, was just three years older than Navalny,
yet Navalny considered him a political mentor.
“First of all, he wasn’t famous,” Maria Gaidar said. “Second, he wasn’t
leader of anything. Third of all, he would, like, happily and effectively work
in second positions, or third positions. He would help for example, [Sergei]
Mitrokhin, who was in Yabloko. He was helping me. He was helping Ilya
Yashin. And so, he was helping.”

Navalny’s work in Yabloko, initially as an unpaid lawyer, was less than

scintillating. And what he discovered when he first got a look inside the
party’s operations left him less than impressed. “I came, looked around and
realized that no one was doing anything,” he told New Times magazine in
2010. “It was a hellish mess, and it was clear that Yabloko would not get
even 5 percent.”
It actually was not clear, or not clear enough. And what Navalny did not
fully grasp then, in 2000, was that Yabloko, and in fact democracy in the
Russian Federation, had already peaked, at least in terms of party politics
and representation in the State Duma.
In 1993, in the first Duma elections after the Soviet collapse, the
Yavlinsky-Boldyrev-Lukin, which would become Yabloko, won more than
4.2 million votes, notching 7.86 percent and winning 20 of the 225 seats
allotted by party list. It won seven more seats in voting for individual
constituencies, for a total of 27 out of 450 seats in the chamber.
In 1995, Yabloko won nearly 4.8 million votes, or 7.02 percent, to snag
31 of the 225 seats awarded proportionally, and another 14 individual
district seats, for a total of 45 seats, a gain of 18 seats. That left the party
holding 10 percent of Duma seats overall.
But in 1999, the party won 3.9 million votes, or 6.05 percent, and while
it met the threshold to have a faction in parliament, it lost more than half of
its seats, emerging with 16 from the party list and 4 from individual
constituencies. And in 2003, the first elections in which Navalny helped on
the party’s campaign, Yabloko won just 2.6 million votes for its party list.
At 4.37 percent, it failed to meet the 5 percent threshold—the party with the
most votes to fall short of the barrier.
For that election, Putin’s forces had coalesced into the United Russia
party, which finished first with more than 38 percent of the party list votes,
and a total of 223 seats, just short of the 226 needed for an outright
majority. That year marked the end of free, democratic parliamentary
politics in Russia. At Yabloko, Navalny had joined a dying organization.
In 2010, a decade after he officially joined the party and three years after
being expelled from it, he would claim to have known this all along. But in
fact Navalny, when he started at Yabloko, knew almost nothing about
politics.
He instinctively did not like Putin, and he was drawn to the idea of being
active and involved, but his own ideological views were not formed.
Friends and supporters would later say that he was always a “political
animal,” but if so, in those days he was more a political neophyte.
Navalny’s years in Yabloko might be described as one long journey of
self-education on political organizing, electoral campaigning, and
community activism.
“When I met him for the first time in 2004, you know, he was one of
those guys, young guys, who were playing politics, with very little
knowledge about grassroot politics,” Albats said. At that time, she had
recently returned to Moscow from getting a graduate degree at Harvard
University and was hosting a group of politically active young people at her
apartment every Tuesday evening.
“My whole idea was to try not to teach but to learn with these young
kids how to do this grassroot politics without big money,” she said. “Let’s
try and learn how to knock the doors, how to speak to people, how to do
everything out of our own pocket—no oligarchs, no huge expensive
rallies.”
Navalny’s time in Yabloko was a depressing and frustrating education in
losing. But, by all accounts including his own, he had a lot of fun.
His greatest satisfaction in those early years came from the creation of
an organization called the Committee to Protect Muscovites, technically a
project outside of Yabloko, but one that the party helped coordinate.
The Russian capital was experiencing an extraordinary construction
boom—and it was rife with abuses. Residents were often furious, and
sporadic protests would erupt. Yelena Baturina, whose husband, Yury
Luzhkov, was Moscow’s mayor from 1992 to 2010, became Russia’s first
woman billionaire by working as a construction developer.
So in June 2004, with Putin tightening control over national politics, the
democratic opposition forces focused locally. The purpose of the new
Committee to Protect Muscovites, according to a Yabloko press release,
was “to unite scattered groups, which currently number more than 200…
into a single powerful organization that defends the interests of Muscovites
in the field of urban planning.”
Sergei Mitrokhin, the head of Yabloko’s Moscow branch and Navalny’s
boss in the party, was named chairman of the group. Navalny became the
executive secretary and did most of the work. “Don’t think that we are
helpless! We have different ways of putting pressure on the government,”
Mitrokhin said.
The stated goals of the new group also bore a hallmark of Navalny’s
acute sense of justice, which has always entailed a keen desire to cast blame
and level punishment. “The Committee plans to seek the resignation of
officials who make illegal urban planning decisions and who are guilty of
red tape when considering complaints from citizens,” the press release said.
Within the committee, its organizers created a “Conflict Commission,”
intended to resolve any disputes between residents, developers, and city
officials. Navalny was named the coordinator of that commission. “All
meetings of the Conflict Commission will be held as publicly as possible,
with the involvement of representatives of the public and the media,”
Navalny said in the press release.
In an interview with the newspaper Izvestia, Navalny said his goal was
to start a conversation between residents, city officials and developers
before anyone put a shovel in the ground. “Let’s reserve a place in these
newspapers and websites where we will publish projects and discussions of
these projects—moreover, at the stage of pre-project study,” he said. “When
a bulldozer drives into the yard, it’s too late to talk to people.”
The Committee to Protect Muscovites jumped into the fray and began
opposing some of the most high-profile construction and development
projects underway in Moscow.
These included a plan by the television personality Vladimir Pozner to
construct a media studies school over a landmark-protected building on
Malaya Dmitrovka Street, a proposal to replace the demolished historic
Hotel Moskva overlooking the Kremlin, and a plan for a giant highway and
tunnel in the capital’s Krylatskoye District, connecting the Ring Road with
the city center.
Another major target was the Don-Stroy development company, whose
projects in residential neighborhoods had set off a chorus of public outcry in
the city. There were repeated complaints that the company was putting up
buildings with more floors, or more overall square footage, than were
approved.
Initially, the committee boasted some quick successes. The Federal Anti-
monopoly Service temporarily blocked the highway project, and Don-Stroy
agreed during a mediation meeting to help finance a citizen information
center and to conduct briefings for local residents about its projects.
In 2006, Navalny expressed special outrage over a project that involved
the expansion of a car dealership, taking over part of a public space and
playground. “I am used to hearing about the ‘construction pranks’ of our
authorities,” Navalny wrote on LiveJournal, “but still I sat and listened and
lost my mind.”
After the car dealership twice tried to get permission and was refused to
take over the public space, suddenly “dudes” from a government-controlled
agency showed up and declared that there was radioactive contamination.
The area was fenced off, trees began to be cut down.
According to Navalny, the Ministry of Emergency Situations said there
was no radiation detected and the fence was deemed illegal. Residents
wanted to tear it down but were being blocked by private security guards
stationed by the developer.
 These were the sorts of fights that Navalny took on, arming himself with
the details of building regulations, environmental statutes, and rules on
competitive bidding and tenders. It was the start of what would become his
seemingly never-ending crusade against Russian corruption in all forms.
At this point, it was anchored in his political work, trying to channel
citizen anger into support at the polls—and the results, if any, were difficult
to quantify.
Navalny, however, later boasted to Voronkov that it was a major success,
bringing media attention to Yabloko even as party officials were denied
access to state-controlled TV channels. “We felt that we were feared; we
were really creating problems for this corrupt Luzhkov government,”
Navalny said. “It was a real political activity. But, again, it was very hard,
both physically and organizationally.”
Critics, though, accused Navalny and Yabloko of opportunism and of
failing to follow through with their initial efforts to block projects. The real
goal, the critics said, was to use the Committee to Protect Muscovites as a
publicity and vote-manufacturing machine for Yabloko, in particular with a
bid to get Mitrokhin reelected to the State Duma from a district in Moscow
where there was a special election to fill a vacancy.
If that was the goal, however, it did not work. Putin’s United Russia had
more effective dirty tricks than helping constituents with their complaints.
By running a candidate with the identical name of the Duma member who
had resigned, they made sure no candidate met the necessary threshold to
win and the special election was declared invalid, allowing a replacement to
be appointed.
Navalny, in any case, defended the overall approach and said that if
there were political benefits to Yabloko’s activism, it was a good thing.
“We did not take these votes from scratch,” he told Izvestia. “We really
helped people… Yes, we also received political dividends, but what’s
wrong with that? Let other parties conduct their policies this way. We
cannot make this topic exclusive. Recently, the Motherland Party held a
protest action to stop the construction of a concrete plant in
Novoperedelkino. And it’s wonderful.”
The Committee to Protect Muscovites was not Navalny’s only side project.
In 2005, Navalny teamed up with Maria Gaidar to create the Democratic
Alternative movement, abbreviated as DA! (which means “Yes!” in
Russian). DA!’s other cofounders were Natalia Morar, an investigative
journalist with New Times magazine, and Oleg Kozyrev, a blogger, activist,
and man of letters.
The goal was to bring together like-minded young political activists,
including from different parties, under a single umbrella. “The Democratic
Alternative Movement is part of civil society. We don’t fight enemies. We
want to solve specific problems that concern us in our country,” the group
posted on its website. “Our task is to show citizens that they have enough
means in their hands to participate in determining the path of development
of their country.”
They described DA! as a “nonpartisan youth organization,” adding: “We
focus on thinking young people, on those who believe in the possibility of
changing something in Russia.”
“We believe that people with active citizenship can really change lives
for the better through legal and nonviolent means,” it said on the website.
“Nobody will do it for them. This is our alternative to extremism, idleness,
whining, and complaints.”
DA! was designed with a horizontal structure and, therefore, no leader.
“Each is responsible for [his or her] own part of the project, voluntarily
undertaken to lead. Anyone can become a coordinator of their own project,
which is consistent with the main principles of DA!”
The group added, “Members of DA! are good, active and purposeful
people. We are not fanatics and not city madmen, we study and work. We
are not building a revolutionary group and do not want to overthrow
anyone. We just want to live in a free and democratic country and force the
government to do what it is instructed to do.”
It was a sign of the political climate in Moscow in those days, that the
fledgling group also felt compelled to deny—repeatedly—any revolutionary
tendencies. On the “About” page of its website, the group’s founders
included a question they had been asked on Ekho Moskvy radio: “Do you
import Ukrainian revolution? Is it true that you are being helped by political
technologists who made the Orange Revolution?” They replied:
 The Ukrainian revolution was “made” by ordinary Ukrainians, not by
technologists. Anyone who was in Kyiv in those days, and did not
watch what was happening on Russian TV channels, understands
perfectly well that without conscious citizens, political technologies
would have turned into a farce (as happened with the Kremlin PR
people).
The government understands that the main threat to it is active
citizens who are not silent when they see corruption, incompetence,
gagging of independent journalists, and arbitrariness. Therefore, it is
interested in our passivity, and imposes on the Russians a cynical
attitude towards manifestations of civic activity.
No, we are not revolutionaries, and we are not going to overthrow
anyone. We are holding and will continue to hold peaceful civic
actions. The safety of our supporters is very important to us, so we
will do everything to avoid clashes with the police. We just want the
authorities to respect our right. All we demand is the implementation
of the Constitution, which was adopted by the Russians themselves.

Over time, DA! undertook four core projects: a volunteerism initiative

focused on helping the neediest in society, led by Kozyrev; a media
freedom program led by Gaidar; a police watchdog component led by
Navalny; and an anti-corruption-in-universities campaign led by Morar.
The movement ended up with branches in at least eight cities, including
St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, and Perm. But DA! became most famous for a
series of live political debates, with Navalny acting as the emcee. The first
took place on February 28, 2006, in a packed club, and featured Nikita
Belykh, leader of the Union of Right Forces political party, and Maxim
Kononenko, a well-known online journalist, on the topic of fascism.
Among a certain slice of Moscow’s hip, young, political elite, the
debates were a sensation, and seemed to fill a vacuum for genuine, public
discourse, and engagement. In the Soviet Union, such open debate wasn’t
allowed. By the 2000s there was debate, but it was all in the virtual reality
of the internet.
At the time, the LiveJournal blogging platform was the hub of political
conversation in Moscow, and for the members of the audience who
crowded into the Apshu Klub that night it was almost an out-of-body
experience to see everyone in person.
“LiveJournal has entered the real world,” Rimma Polyak wrote for
“Russian Nights”—the nightlife section of the Russian Journal online
magazine. “An impressive part of Moscow’s LiveJournal users gathered at
the Apshu Klub for a debate on one of the key issues of our day: Where are
the fascists?
“The hall, filled with faces familiar from user-pics, seemed like family,
welcoming remarks poured in from everywhere, shining with smiles of
recognition,” Polyak wrote. “Everyone clearly felt good, almost like at
home in front of their favorite computer with a user-feed on the monitor.”
She added, “The smartest users managed to catch a waitress on the way
and order beer or branded mint tea. Stronger drinks have not yet been
successful.”
Navalny was a presence on LiveJournal at the time but not yet a
celebrity.
A panel of judges scoring the debate voted narrowly in favor of Belykh,
the crowd for Kononenko. The specific arguments, in hindsight, were less
important than the mere fact that a public conversation was underway. The
second debate featured a face-off between leaders of the pro-Putin Nashi
(“Our”) youth movement, and the youth wing of Yabloko. For the third one,
the writer Viktor Shenderovich and journalist Oleg Kashin, centered on the
question: “Where are the honest journalists?”
With each appearance, Navalny grew more comfortable in his role as
master of ceremonies, referee, and sportscaster. In a rave review after the
third debate, Polyak wrote: “Navalny is certainly a talented showman (even
if, God forbid, something happens to Yabloko, he will definitely not be left
without work now).”
“Respect to Navalny,” another viewer posted on LiveJournal after the
third event. “He leads the debates better and better.”
One debate even had the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, who years
later was shot to death outside the Kremlin, square off against Dmitry
Rogozin, a right-wing, pro-Putin member of parliament who would go on to
become Russia’s ambassador to NATO and a deputy prime minister known
for issuing blustery threats against the West.
But in those days, Gaidar recalled, neither she nor Navalny nor others in
the DA! movement or in opposition circles had given up entirely on
engaging with the government.
Rather, she said, Navalny was working out his own politics and looking
for openings to push Russia in a different, democratic direction. “He was
trying to find [his] place when he was a young man… active with a lot of
ideas with a lot of energy,” she said. “He was trying to find different
ways… to put his political passion into work.”
The first debate of the 2007 political season, on October 30, at Gogol, a
bar in the center of Moscow, promised the most provocative topic yet:
“Putin’s Plan or Putin’s Clan?” And it was supposed to feature Gaidar
crossing rhetorical swords with Sergei Markov, a political scientist and
adviser to Putin, who was also a United Russia candidate in the upcoming
Duma elections, which were scheduled for early December.
That evening, however, things quickly went sideways. Barely an hour
before start time, Markov’s assistant called and said he had to leave on an
urgent business trip. The organizers scrambled and persuaded Eduard
Bagirov, a writer who had published a popular novel, Guest Worker, to
stand in. Bagirov was not a member of United Russia, but he generally
supported Putin’s policies and agreed to argue the position.
Replacing Markov, however, was only the start of the problems that
night. A group of rowdy hooligans arrived early, took seats toward the
front, and from the outset began disrupting things.
One guy approached the stage with flowers, which he handed to Gaidar
while bestowing loud and solicitous compliments. “I want to congratulate
all those present on the upcoming New Year, 2008,” he said, “you, Maria
Gaidar on your victory in the presidential elections, or whichever ones you
are planning. I don’t remember.”
Navalny tried to shoo the man away, but he persisted. “Your hairstyle is
charming; your blouse, too,” the heckler told Gaidar. “Everyone goodbye!
Vote for United Russia!”
Bagirov, who had argued “I am not for Putin, I am for Putin’s course,”
won the debate, according to the jury, although two of five judges
abstained. But within moments a brawl broke out. A bottle was thrown and
cracked over someone’s head.
Yashin recounted the events on LiveJournal, where he described the
rabble-rousers as gopniks, a derogatory Russian term for low-class
hoodlums. “The dudes took turns shouting insults at Navalny and Gaidar
and tried to snatch the microphone,” Yashin wrote. “In fact, the entire
discussion took place against the backdrop of the drunken yelling of these
gopniks. In the end, they grappled with the audience, during the scuffle they
broke a bottle on someone’s head. In addition, the club’s security guard was
injured. Finally, the guards led the provocateurs out into the street.”
Navalny was enraged.
“I stood next to the stage,” Yashin recalled. “Navalny came down with
furious eyes.” Navalny followed the men onto the street. Yashin followed
Navalny, trying to enlist other supporters in case of a fight. Outside the
club, Yashin suddenly noticed the grip of a handgun sticking out of
Navalny’s pocket.
The hooligans saw it, too, backed away, and scurried off. One heckler,
though, had been held inside. The man, Timur Teziev, a twenty-three-year-
old car mechanic, now emerged and made a charge at Navalny. They
fought. Navalny, stepping back, pulled out the pistol, an air gun, and fired
several shots. The police soon arrived, and Navalny was arrested.
At the police station, Teziev lodged a complaint against Navalny,
accusing him of causing bodily harm. He later dropped the allegation,
Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported, “in view of the awareness of the
provocative nature of his behavior.”
Yashin and others, including Nikita Belykh, the head of the Union of
Right Forces party, provided witness statements, and there was ample video
evidence. The case, however, provided a convenient way to hassle Navalny,
and it dragged on for six months before it was finally closed without any
charges against him.
Many years later, Kremlin propaganda outlets would continue to revisit
the incident. In 2013, the RT television network reported: “A fight outside a
nightclub in the center of Moscow, shooting at point-blank range and the
bloody face of a victim offended over his nationality: RT publishes unique
materials about how Alexey Navalny managed to avoid trial for
hooliganism with a weapon in 2007.”
That was the end of the DA! debate series, as it was clear they would
face continuing harassment. “We realized that we could not guarantee
security,” Navalny recounted later. “We didn’t have money for security, but
what if next time they send someone to stab or break a head?”
 Yashin said it was obvious that the hooligans were part of a
premeditated assault on the political opposition.
“What we do know for sure is that these guys are connected to one of
the pro-Kremlin youth organizations and have cover in the presidential
administration,” he wrote on LiveJournal. “There is no doubt that the
provocation was invented by the Kremlin specialists in the fight against the
‘orange infection’… In addition, there is every reason to believe that United
Russia’s Sergei Markov knew in advance about the impending provocation,
and that is why he refused to participate at the last moment.”
What Gaidar recalls most vividly about those days is Navalny’s passion
for politics.
“He just loved politics. He wanted to do politics, no matter what, no
matter what his position was,” she said. “So, he’s totally a political person,
totally, as people say, a political animal.” Later, after he achieved some
fame, Navalny developed a reputation for demanding to be front and center.
But in those days, Gaidar said she never experienced that. “I only know that
for him, he always wanted to do politics and be in politics. And I remember
times when he wasn’t successful in politics, and it wasn’t giving much
reward to him in any way.”

In the fall of 2006, Navalny was furious to learn that the Moscow
authorities had cooked up a plan to demolish seven buildings in the city
center that had served as vocational schools and turn the lots over to a
private developer, called Stalitsa-Zapad, which of course had won the deal
without any competition.
The schools were to be replaced by a big new vocational campus on the
far southwestern edge of the capital—far beyond a reasonable commute for
most families.
The Committee to Protect Muscovites quickly took up the cause and
began organizing protests.
“By order of the Moscow government… seven Moscow vocational
schools located in the sweetest places for investors in the city… will be
destroyed,” Navalny wrote on LiveJournal. “And in their place (how
unoriginal) office buildings will be built. As ‘compensation’ one hefty
vocational school will be built. But in South Butovo… where to get to, as
you know, is two hours one way from any place in Moscow, except for the
far South-West.”
Flashing his outrage, Navalny wrote: “It is clear that many consider
students of technical schools and vocational schools worthless cattle.”
But there was another aspect of Navalny’s response that hinted at a very
different part of his continuing political evolution: his own instinctive
Russian nationalist streak, and his flirtation with far right and xenophobic
political movements to see if there was any ground on which they might be
able to build common cause.
“Vocational schools are needed; not everyone is able to go to college.
The country is in direct need of skilled workers,” Navalny wrote on his
blog, adding in bold for emphasis: “Migrants, by the way, are attracted for
this.”
Navalny, by all indication, has always harbored anti-immigrant views.
He seemed to regard some degree of xenophobia or racism to be normal,
and mainstream. And, in his own statements, he has admitted viewing
certain people—those from the Caucasus, for instance—as different from
Slavic Russians like himself. Like many xenophobes, Navalny at times has
tried to couch his views as mainly an economic position. In pushing for visa
regimes that would limit immigration to Russia, Navalny has professed
concern for the well-being of migrant workers, who inevitably face harsher
discrimination and mistreatment when they are undocumented, and are
therefore vulnerable to extortionary abuse.
In any case, Navalny recognized the political potency of anti-immigrant
sentiment and, in search of a political formula that would offer a viable
alternative to Putin, he began entertaining the possibility of reaching out to
nationalist and right-wing forces despite the deeply unsavory elements. In
this regard, he had the encouragement of Albats, his mentor, who is Jewish
and keeps a kosher home.
Together with Albats, Navalny had begun attending the Russian March,
an annual gathering of nationalist and right-wing groups that included the
most extreme elements of Russian nationalism, including neo-Nazis and
fascists. Albats likes to point out that she walked with Navalny at these
marches wearing a large Star of David.
 In 2007, Navalny became a cofounder of a new political project, called
the National Russian Liberation Movement. Its acronym in Russian is
spelled NAROD, which means “People.”
Where DA! was designed as a civic movement, independent of political
parties, NAROD was created as a supraparty coalition, a movement of like-
minded thinkers who could potentially bring together groups with different
ideological leanings under a shared call for reviving the Russian nation.
Among the financial backers of NAROD was the political technologist
and commentator Stanislav Belkovsky, who was closely associated with the
anti-Putin oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Belkovsky has said he donated
several tens of thousands of dollars to help launch NAROD.
The movement’s manifesto, which Navalny signed, proclaimed:

Russia is facing a national catastrophe. In peacetime, in a favorable

economic situation, in the richest country in natural resources and
territory, the population is rapidly degrading and dying out.
The lack of an adequate reaction of society to an unprecedented
level of corruption, to official lies, to widespread bribery and theft, to
bureaucratic lawlessness and a cynical attitude of the authorities
towards the people, allows this handful of people who have usurped
power in the state to prolong the days of snickering and detachment
from society.
The main attributes of democracy—the principle of separation of
powers, the institution of free elections, the federal structure, local
self-government, the independence of the courts, and much more—
have been virtually eliminated. They were replaced by the power
vertical—a set of commercial clans that usurped the functions and
powers of the state…
If Russia does not acquire a national program for the future, then
the country will disintegrate and disappear from the political map of
the world.

In connection with the launch of NAROD, Navalny made two videos,

posted on YouTube, that documented his virulently anti-immigrant views
with racist and even violent overtones.
 In the first video, Navalny, identifying himself as a “certified
nationalist,” promoted his support for legalizing gun ownership. “Hello,
today we are going to talk about pest control,” Navalny declares in the same
chipper tone that he would later make famous in his anti-corruption
exposés. He is standing behind a table, and arrayed in front of him are a
slipper, a flyswatter, and a handgun. “None of us is immune from a
cockroach crawling into our house, or a fly coming in through a window,”
Navalny says, as animated images of a cockroach and a fly appear on a
screen next to him.
“Everybody knows that a flyswatter is great help against a fly and a
slipper against a cockroach. But what happens when the cockroach is too
big or the fly too aggressive?” On the screen, a photo appears of three men
who look to be ethnic minorities, under the caption “Borderless Homo
sapiens.” Suddenly, a ghoulish intruder runs into the room completely
covered in a black cloak, seeming to shout, “Allahu Akbar!”
“But in this case,” Navalny intones, taking the gun from the table in
front of him and shooting the intruder, “I recommend a pistol.” The video
ends with the message: “Firearms should be permitted” printed on the
screen.
In the second video, Navalny, dressed up as a dentist, talks about how
fascism can be prevented by deporting migrants from Russia. “Our society
is corroding,” Navalny says as images of skinheads and Asian immigrants
flash on the screen.
“The clinical picture is clear even to a nonspecialist,” Navalny says.
“There is no need to beat anyone. Everything that interferes with us should
be carefully but firmly removed by deportation.
“Only someone with calcium in their head thinks that nationalism is
violence,” Navalny proclaims. “A tooth without a root is called dead. A
nationalist is someone who does not want them to remove the Russian root
from the word ‘Russia.’ We have the right to be Russian in Russia and we
will protect this right.” The video ends with a tagline: “Think about the
future. Become nationalist.”
The videos were amateurish and bizarre. Over the years, Navalny
struggled to defend himself against accusations of ethno-nationalism, in
part because of his anti-immigration statements and policy positions, but
also because he had made unmistakably racist comments. He apologized for
some of these; others he simply tried to deny.
A fellow member of Yabloko, Saadat Kadyrova, who is of Azerbaijani
descent, had once lodged a complaint against Navalny for using crude,
racist language in front of her while working in one of the party’s offices
and then insulting her directly when she challenged him.
According to Kadyrova, who has recounted the story many times, the
incident began when Navalny asked why she was going to so much trouble
to invite a Chechen Duma deputy, Aslambek Aslakhanov, to speak at an
event. Navalny, she said, referred to Aslakhanov with the phrase “black
ass,” a derogatory term referring to people from the Caucasus or Central
Asia. She suggested she call Aslakhanov’s office and dared Navalny to say
it directly.
At that point, she said, he turned the epithet on her, calling her “a black
ass who had come down from the mountain.” When Kadyrova shot back,
“And what are you?” according to her account, Navalny replied, “I am the
affectionate representative of God’s chosen nation.”
Navalny has denied the incident ever took place, but Kadyrova’s account
has remained consistent over the years and was corroborated by documents
showing she filed a complaint with Yabloko’s leadership, though nothing
was done.
When Russia fought a brief war against Georgia in 2008, Navalny’s
reaction bordered on extreme. He called for “a complete blockade of
Georgia” and to “expel all Georgian citizens on our territory from the
Russian Federation.” Even worse, he referred to Georgians as “rodents.” He
later apologized for the rodent remark.
The suspicions of Navalny’s nationalist leanings have never dissipated
and later would be fanned by Ukrainian anger over Navalny’s statements
about annexed Crimea.
In an exchange in 2012 with the Russian novelist Boris Akunin, the
writer noted that many of his acquaintances had mixed feelings about
Navalny and he asked if he could start with a “childlike” question.
“If I understand correctly, you are a supporter of the idea of a ‘national
Russian state,’” Akunin wrote. “What is that in a federation where a
hundred different nationalities live, and in large cities the ‘mestizo’
population almost predominates? Should all ethnically non-Russians or
semi-Russians feel like second-class people in your Russia?”
 Navalny immediately took grave offense, or at least feigned it. “To be
honest, I did not expect such questions from you or from the democratic
intelligentsia from your circle,” he replied. “The democratic intelligentsia
should, in theory, read the newspaper, and if they are even slightly
interested in my activities, they should have a basic understanding of my
political views. Know about the Yabloko party, about the Democratic
Alternative movement, about current activities.
“Your question is not childlike but offensive. You work, you work, and
then the ‘democratic intelligentsia’ is interested in whether I consider
someone as second-class people,” Navalny shot back. “There are no
second-class people, and if someone thinks so, then he is a dangerous
lunatic who needs to be reeducated, treated, or isolated from society. In
principle, there can be no question of any restriction of the rights of citizens
on the basis of ethnicity. By the way, I myself am half-Russian, half-
Ukrainian, and I don’t want to feel like a second-class person.”
Navalny has made efforts to show he opposes discrimination or racial
aggression of any kind. But his own evident unconscious biases, and his
willingness to forgive more virulent expressions of nationalism in search of
electoral support, have raised questions that will follow him for as long as
he is a public figure with political ambition.
In another conversation with Adam Michnik, the Polish historian,
Navalny again sought to clarify himself. “My thinking is that we need to
communicate with nationalists and conduct explanatory work among them.
By no means are all nationalists in Russia driven by a clear-cut ideology,”
he said. “They just identify some general injustice or other, and respond to
it by directing aggression against people of a different color and/or eye
shape. I believe it’s essential to explain to them that the problem of illegal
migration is going to be solved not by violence against migrants but by
other means entirely, democratic methods.”
Navalny conceded that Putin’s brand of neo-imperialist nationalism had
won the day, leaving no space for the civic-minded nationalism that
Navalny himself envisioned. “So far admittedly, I’ve accomplished nothing
but damage to my own image,” Navalny told Michnik. “I’m branded a
nationalist by liberals and a liberal by nationalists. And everyone has me
down as a fifth columnist.”
But even two years after his conversation with Michnik, in July 2017,
Navalny remained willing to risk his reputation to engage with nationalists.
That summer, he agreed to a public debate with Igor Girkin, a former
Russian security officer, who had been involved in the military annexation
of Crimea and would later be convicted of murder by a Netherlands court in
connection with the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was
shot down over eastern Ukraine.
Girkin had publicly challenged Navalny to the debate, and Navalny,
never one to back down from a fight, agreed. It was livestreamed on
Navalny’s website and drew criticism that Navalny had merely provided a
platform for a war criminal.
Girkin, who also goes by the nom de guerre “Strelkov,” was also
believed to be responsible for at least three extrajudicial killings in Russian-
controlled areas of Donbas. When Navalny was asked during the debate if
he believed Girkin was a war criminal, he said it was up to a court to
decide.
The court in the Netherlands did just that, a little more than five years
later, convicting Girkin in absentia and sentencing him to life in prison for
the MH-17 killings.
Yevgeny Feldman, a photographer who traveled extensively with
Navalny to document his presidential campaign in 2017, was among those
to criticize him for engaging Strelkov. “I can understand holding a
discussion with politicians who have even the craziest of views,” Feldman
tweeted. “I can’t understand someone who executes the unarmed.”
Navalny, however, had never given up on the idea that he could
somehow engage even the most militant of Russian nationalists.
Vladimir Tor, an organizer of the Russian March, described meeting
Navalny in 2006, when authorities were threatening to ban the annual event.
“Alexey and I spent hundreds of man-hours discussing our cases,” Tor told
Afisha magazine. “There may be liberal nationalists, democratic
nationalists, conservative nationalists, traditionalist nationalists. Navalny,
probably, can be ranked in the line of a moderate national democrat.” Tor
said that Navalny’s nationalist views were pragmatic and smart for a
politician. “A politician who seeks the sympathy of the majority in Russia,
in fact, should take national problems seriously. Because it is the Russians
who are his voters,” Tor said.
Interviewed for the same article, Ivan Bolshakov, another member of
Yabloko, said: “Navalny believed that there was nothing contradictory
between democrats and nationalists, he said that many nationalists,
speaking out against the regime of Vladimir Putin, are also in favor of the
democratic structure of the state. This means that you need to join with
them. Of course, he is not a fascist. But he’s an ethnic nationalist, and the
official position of Yabloko was that we saw this as a danger.”
Oleg Kozyrev, Navalny’s collaborator on DA! and a fellow regular at
Albats’s Tuesday night gatherings, said that he had no trouble reassuring
those with doubts about Navalny, who asked “What if he becomes a
dictator?” and he would simply tell them about Navalny’s love for animated
comedies. “I usually say, ‘Guys, he has a great sense of humor. How can a
person who loves Futurama become a dictator?’”
Kozyrev said that he and Navalny were bound together by a desire to
use civic activism to improve the world. “There was a time when we all
tried to create a healthy environment, built not just on protest or criticism,
but on the defense of understandable ideas. Kozyrev told Afisha, “We
wanted to help where the government does not help, to protect where it
does not protect.”
On the issue of the vocational schools, at least, they succeeded. “We
launched a vigorous action: pickets, leaflets, called the mayor’s office. And
in the end, the court took our side,” Kozyrev said.
Navalny proclaimed victory on LiveJournal: “The punishing hands of
the Committee to Protect Muscovites and the ‘DA’ movement have finally
reached out to the Government of Moscow!!!!”

Navalny’s clash with Yabloko reached its decisive climax in December

2007 when the party leadership called a meeting to consider Navalny’s
expulsion. The decision, of course, was already made and Navalny knew it.
But he was not about to go quietly, and he used the meeting to vent seven
years of pent-up frustration and fury with Russia’s failed liberals.
Navalny’s speech that afternoon was arguably his most important public
statement yet as an aspiring politician, and it was a virtuoso performance—
oozing with trademark Navalny scorn and sarcasm. At the very start, he
noted that his personal status was up for discussion “at the first meeting
after the very dramatic failure of the Duma elections.”
“This suggests,” Navalny said archly, “that the issue of my expulsion is
seen as a key political issue and the most important stage of Yabloko’s exit
from the crisis. I’m a little embarrassed by this attention but thank you
anyway.”
In his speech, Navalny expressed pride in his work since 2002,
especially in helping to organize street actions, and mobilize the party’s
youth wing. And he voiced special satisfaction over creating the Committee
to Protect Muscovites, which he called “the most successful human rights
organization in Moscow.”
Navalny asserted that the youth wing, and the Moscow division of
Yabloko, of which he had become deputy head, kept the party alive from
2003 to 2005 during its toughest years. “We in the Moscow Yabloko were
the first to organize a system for collecting donations, which was later
adopted by the federal Yabloko,” Navalny boasted. He crowed about the
success of the local press operation, and gave a big shout-out to Sergei
Mitrokhin, the head of the Moscow branch.
“So, I know the value of my work, and my comrades know the value of
my work,” Navalny declared in his speech, which he posted in full on his
blog.
But then, Navalny tore into Yavlinsky, the party’s cofounder and
patriarch, who ran unsuccessfully for president of Russia in 2000 and 2004.
Navalny complained that he was once told, “your problem is that you don’t
love Grigory Alexeyevich [Yavlinsky] sincerely.”
“Yes,” Navalny now exclaimed, “I respect him for some of his past
service, but I don’t like him one bit.”
Navalny since then has griped repeatedly that Yabloko had become a
cult of personality around Yavlinsky, who had never led the party to any
serious electoral success. In his speech, Navalny excoriated Yabloko’s
leadership for not recognizing the need to broaden support and for
condemning his alleged nationalist views rather than endorsing his call for a
big-tent coalition.
“The suggested reason for my expulsion: public propaganda of
nationalistic ideas,” Navalny said. “Yes, indeed, I argue that only by
abandoning the dead-end, narrow-minded left-liberal ideology and moving
toward the creation of a national-democratic movement can the dem-
movement be revived. The experience of many neighboring countries
proves this.”
He offered Serbia as an example, pointing out that the warmongering
Communist strongman, Slobodan Milošević, was ultimately defeated by
Vojislav Koštunica, a nationalist who led a broad coalition of democratic
forces.
“Milošević’s wild, insane, totalitarian nationalism was crushed not by
the pathetic liberal opposition, but by Koštunica’s national-democratic
movement, which gained mass support from voters,” Navalny said. “I argue
that the endless equation between nationalism and fascism comes simply
from primitive thinking and simple political illiteracy.”
Navalny’s comparison was over-simplified. But it illustrated how in
2007, more than a decade and a half after the Soviet Union’s collapse,
politically engaged Russians were still struggling to find a framework for
democracy, which had never fully taken hold.
Attacking Yavlinsky, however, was not Navalny’s main purpose nor his
main concern. His main complaint was that Yavlinsky and Yabloko were
losers, and that party leaders persisted in making excuses for their electoral
failures while refusing to change.
The 2007 legislative elections had been disastrous, with Yabloko
receiving just 1.61 percent of the vote, or about 1.1 million votes out of
nearly 69 million cast. The party lost all four of its seats in the State Duma.
Navalny said he was being targeted because he refused to join his fellow
party leaders in a la-la land of excuses and rationalization. “The real reason
for my exclusion is that I openly state: ‘Yabloko has completely failed in
this election.’ And I’m not satisfied with the sweet syrupy talk about how
they stole the victory from us.
“Spreading this untruth is humiliating for the party and for all of us,”
Navalny continued. “We already went through this in 2003… It was a lie.”
Navalny accused Yavlinsky of putting his self-interests and desire for
attention ahead of the party. “The main reason for the current collapse is
that Yabloko has become a dried-up, closed sect,” he said. “We demand that
everyone be democrats, but we don’t want to be… And the worse the
results are, the stronger is the position of the leadership. The more tightly
we must rally our ranks around it.”
 Navalny’s criticism was brutal, scathing and spot-on. Yashin, who would
end up expelled from Yabloko himself a year later, said that Yavlinsky and
the party were simply unwilling to accommodate talent and success.
“There are a lot of talkers in politics and few people capable of
organizing something,” Yashin told Afisha magazine. “A person that can
also connect two words is generally a rarity. In this sense, Navalny was a
very valuable functionary for Yabloko. But as soon as you start claiming to
really influence the politics of this party, your career ends there. You are
either expelled or squeezed out.”
Navalny, in his final farewell remarks, urged Yabloko to throw off the
cloak of failure and self-deceit. “Since this may be my last speech as a
member of Yabloko, I appeal to you to stop the self-delusion on the topic of
our high results, on the topic of possible vote theft,” he said. “Stop lying
about it.” He demanded that Yavlinsky and the entire party leadership
resign.
“To the members of the Bureau who are about to vote, I want to say that
the power is in the truth, and the truth will still win,” Navalny said. Then,
jabbing his sarcastic dagger at them one last time, he threw his arm up in a
Nazi salute, shouting “Glory to Russia!” and walked out.
The vote to expel Navalny from Yabloko was nearly unanimous. Only
Yashin took Navalny’s side. Valery Borshchev, a veteran human rights
activist, abstained.
The experience in Yabloko would prove a bitter lesson, and many years
later, after emerging from his coma, Navalny would cite it as one of his
biggest mistakes.
“I’ve made a million mistakes. I make thirty mistakes a day like any
other human being. I don’t have a problem admitting my mistakes,”
Navalny told Yury Dud, in his first major interview after surviving the
poisoning attack. “But every decision we make, we think through very
thoroughly.”
“What were three most recent mistakes?” Dud asked.
“Staying with Yabloko too long,” Navalny replied.
 6

ANTI-CORRUPTION CRUSADER

“There’s only one effective way to vanquish corruption and that’s to

build a democracy.”
—Alexey Navalny, 2015

At the end of April, spring is typically in the air in Moscow, and early
May brings holidays—Labor Day on May 1, and Victory Day on May 9,
which celebrates the triumph over Germany in the Great Patriotic War.
Many Russians head off on vacation.
But instead of going to the beach, Navalny, in 2008, organized a
different type of exploratory trip—to the Western Siberian city of Surgut,
home to the drab, sprawling headquarters of Surgutneftegas, one of Russia’s
major energy companies, and where the Kremlin-connected management
was holding their annual shareholder meeting.
“Some go to May barbecues, some on tours abroad (there are these), and
I went to the city of Surgut,” Navalny wrote on his LiveJournal blog. He
also complained about the cold weather—temperatures in the low thirties
and snow. “When will they fix the weather situation in this country?” he
asked. “It would be about time.”
Navalny wasn’t sightseeing. Rather, he was taking the first big, public
step in a new role—that of shareholder activist—which would transform
him into a celebrity and propel his career from gadfly and obscure
democracy advocate to the most recognizable leader of the Russian political
opposition and Putin’s foremost nemesis.
The post-Soviet privatization frenzy in Russia had created an abundance
of publicly traded but majority state-owned companies, many under the
management—or mismanagement—of former government officials, or
cronies of current officials. The Kremlin maintained large stakes in these
corporations, especially in the energy and banking sectors, but exerted little
oversight while the managers made fortunes.
Corruption was rampant. At the same time, corporate governance was
virtually unheard of. “We have shareholders but they don’t know their
rights,” Gennadi Gerasimov, a former spokesman for Mikhail Gorbachev,
the last Soviet leader, told the Washington Post in 2003. Gerasimov, who
was also a journalist, had befriended one of the leading shareholder-rights
advocates in the United States, Evelyn Y. Davis, and had even written an
article about her. “I thought it was important for Russians to know that even
if you’re the owner of only two or three shares, you can raise hell,” he said.
Navalny wasn’t the first person in Russia to take up the cause of
shareholder rights. Bill Browder, the founder of Hermitage Capital
Management, who at one point was the largest foreign investor in Russia,
had made shareholder activism a core component of an investment strategy
that helped him earn billions.
Browder, who started out as a strong supporter of Putin, was out to make
money. His attacks on companies like Gazprom, the giant state-controlled
natural gas company, over asset stripping and other misdeeds, were aimed
at maximizing share prices and profits. Browder did not become a leading
advocate for human rights until years later, after he was expelled from the
country, and his tax adviser Sergei Magnitsky died in a Russian jail after
trying to expose a massive government tax fraud.
Navalny, on the other hand, had dabbled briefly in the stock market after
getting a graduate degree in finance and lost most of his money in the early
2000s after the tech bubble burst. When he got back into stocks in 2007, it
wasn’t to make money but to pursue justice and expose corruption.
For Navalny, the initiative was his own personal approach to “impact
investing”—taking up stakes that would give him the legal right to attend
annual meetings, demand information from executives and corporate
directors, and, when necessary, file lawsuits or criminal complaints.
By 2007, he had pulled together a stock portfolio that might have
mortified any common-sense financial adviser—a curious collection of tiny
holdings in some of Russia’s biggest energy and financial companies, with
little chance of delivering quick profits.
In addition to Surgutneftegas, they included other big Russian oil
companies—Transneft, Rosneft, Lukoil, and Gazprom Neft—as well as two
huge state-controlled banks, Sberbank and VTB; the power-generation
giants, RusHydro and Inter RAO UES; as well as Gazprom, the state-
controlled natural gas behemoth.
Navalny has often said that he simply doesn’t like to get ripped off. But
he also sensed that going after corporate corruption would inevitably reveal
the malfeasance at the center of Russia’s kleptocratic political system.
As it turned out, he was perfectly suited to be a crusader for shareholder
rights. Trained as a lawyer, he was willing to comb through the fine print of
quarterly earnings, annual reports, and other regulatory filings. But it was
his instinct to stick up for the little guy and his utter disdain for graft that
would prove most useful.
The auditorium for the Surgutneftegas annual meeting was filled with
about 350 people, many of them Surgutneftegas retirees with nothing better
to do than listen to the gray-haired corporate bigwigs recount the company’s
annual performance. Navalny was conspicuously out of place. Who was
this tall, young stranger? Why was he there?
Vladimir Leonidovich Bogdanov, the company’s general director, read
through his report, droning on about revenues and expenses, and rattling off
statistics: a 29 percent increase in capital investments for production; plans
to commission fourteen small fields in Western Siberia. Total revenue for
2007 of $23.3 billion, with net profit of $3.46 billion.
Bogdanov had led Surgutneftegas since the mid-1980s, during Soviet
times, and continued as its boss after the company was privatized in 1993.
But unlike every previous shareholder meeting, where he delivered his
report without question or debate, this time, a hand went up in the audience.
“I have something to say,” Navalny proclaimed.
The room froze.
Moving to the podium, Navalny launched into a speech. As always, he
played to the audience by first expressing effusive thanks to the local
workers. Then, he began a three-pronged attack. First, he criticized
Surgutneftegas for paying out paltry dividends—only 31 percent of net
profit, while comparable oil companies outside Russia typically paid 35
percent or more.
 As part of this complaint, Navalny also voiced his suspicions that profits
were being siphoned off by firms paid to transport and trade the company’s
oil, specifically Gunvor—a Swiss-registered firm then co-owned by
Gennady Timchenko, believed to be a close associate of Putin. Navalny
suggested that shareholders, including Russian taxpayers, were potentially
being shortchanged.
His second line of criticism involved the secrecy surrounding the
ownership of Surgutneftegas. “Surgutneftegas is one of the largest
commodity companies in Russia, and it is owned by no one knows who,”
Navalny told the online Russian news site Izbrannoe. In reply, Bogdanov
asserted, preposterously, that even he did not know who owned the
company because he owned fewer than 2.5 percent of shares—not enough
by law to demand disclosure.
Navalny’s third issue was simply a demand for transparency. He pointed
out that it was far too difficult to access company information, including its
annual report, which could be obtained only by making a request in person.
Navalny proposed a solution that was not particularly novel: publish all the
corporate materials, including about the annual meeting online. “We
insisted on publishing the company’s financial statements on the internet,”
he said.
Navalny received a smattering of applause. His appearance at the
shareholder meeting made news in Vedomosti, Russia’s leading business
daily. And in the end, while he did not get his answers, Navalny expressed
satisfaction that he was permitted to say his piece. “We must pay tribute to
Vladimir Bogdanov,” Navalny told Izbrannoe. “He did not interfere.”

That benign tolerance would not last.

While his attendance at the Surgutneftegas was his first public
appearance as a shareholder advocate, Navalny had quietly mounted
another campaign focused on an even bigger target: Gazprom, the crown
jewel of Russia’s state-controlled energy companies.
That case, which became public in late December 2008, marked the first
time that Navalny’s personal safety would be called into doubt. From then
on, it was always a question of when—not if—the hit men would come
after him.
The threat came in conjunction with Navalny’s first notable “victory” as
an anti-corruption crusader, in which he succeeded in being named as
“victim” in a criminal case against Gazprom, the state-owned natural gas
company. The case was a classic example of fraud that is rampant in the
Russian gas sector, with money siphoned off by an unnecessary
intermediary.
As would prove true with many of Navalny’s future anti-corruption
investigations, the Gazprom case did not originate with him but stretched
back to 2005. Navalny stepped in and brought attention, publicity and, most
important, tenacity, refusing to drop the matter even as the entire Russian
system—the police, prosecutors, courts, and Gazprom itself—tried to make
it all go away.
The fraud was so blatant that the Russian Interior Ministry felt
compelled to investigate, beginning a yearslong tug-of-war as authorities
repeatedly closed and reopened the inquiry. One of the biggest snags came
when Gazprom itself refused to acknowledge suffering any damage and
repeatedly declined to be named as a victim. That was where Navalny
stepped in, putting himself forward in the summer of 2008 as a victimized
shareholder, thereby salvaging the case—at least for a few months longer.
The complaint alleged that a Gazprom subsidiary called Mezhregiongaz
had defrauded shareholders by purchasing gas from a supplier, Novatek.
Rather than buying the gas directly, Mezhregiongaz used an unnecessary
intermediary, Trastinvestgaz, which charged markups of up to 70 percent—
bilking Gazprom investors of more than 1.5 billion rubles or $53 million.
But even as Navalny scored a small victory by being recognized as a
victim and plaintiff in the criminal complaint, he was warned that he was
putting himself in danger.
He described the case—and the accompanying threat—on his blog,
under the headline “How They Saw at Gazprom.” In Russian, the verb to
saw—as in cutting wood or a tree branch—is slang for “to fleece” or “to
steal” or “to embezzle,” as in “how they saw up the budget.”
Navalny’s blog entry would become the first in a series of blockbuster
attacks on mega-corruption schemes under similar headlines: “How They
Saw at VTB.” “How They Saw at Transneft.” “How They Saw at Russian
Railways.”
Even back in 2008, Navalny had a knack for explaining complex
transactions and financial frauds in simple, easy-to-follow language. The
writing on his blog was cutting and sarcastic, and often peppered with jokes
or witty observations. Sometimes he would inject acerbic or inappropriate
remarks, even threats, but stricken through in the text, signaling self-
awareness that he had perhaps gone too far.
Navalny opened his Gazprom post with a quick explanation about the
basic monopoly of the gas market in Russia. Any business needing gas, he
explained, had to buy from Mezhregiongaz, a division of Gazprom. “You
can’t buy from anyone else. Because the pipe belongs to Gazprom,” he
wrote. “And without a pipe, gas makes no sense. Without a pipe, you can
only use gas to make a beautiful, fiery torch over endless snowy fields.”
Navalny then went on to explain the egregious, if ingenious, fraud, in
which the intermediary, Trastinvestgaz, suddenly stepped in to buy gas,
which Gazprom itself had declined to purchase, from a relatively small
producer called Novatek.
Two days later, Trastinvestgaz sold the very same gas, moving through
the very same pipe, to Gazprom for nearly double the price. When Gazprom
officials were pressed to explain why they hadn’t bought the gas at the
outset for the lower price, they initially insisted Gazprom didn’t have the
cash to complete the transaction. But, according to Navalny, Trastinvestgaz
had bought the gas using a loan from… Gazprom.
“In such a simple way,” Navalny wrote, “the effective managers from
Gazprom, by moving pieces of paper around the table, earned 1.5 billion
rubles [about $53 million]. Just in this episode. It is clear that this is only
the tiny tip of the big iceberg.”
While Navalny reveled in being named a victim in the case, he also
described a sinister warning that accompanied his little victory.
“The investigator in the case, a very cheerful lieutenant colonel, said to
me at our first meeting: ‘Alexey Anatolyevich, I will now issue a decision
recognizing you as a victim,’” Navalny wrote. “‘But I consider it my duty
to warn you—a man in Novatek’s leadership, who was aware of the scheme
and signed everything, tragically died under strange circumstances after the
investigation began. Looks like he crashed on a snowmobile.’”
Navalny’s LiveJournal blog post that day—December 28, 2008—offered
an early example of his dark humor about the risks to his own life in taking
on Russian corruption and powerful corporate interests, as well as Russia’s
most powerful, and dirty, politicians.
“Just in case,” Navalny wrote. “I officially declare: I do not ride
snowmobiles. I do not plan to go skiing this year or next. I am not fond of
rock climbing and hang gliding. I drive a car carefully. I do not wash
windows, especially when they’re open. I don’t like to eat puffer fish or
anything like that for breakfast. I don’t run across the road at red lights. I
swim very well. I don’t make a habit of walking where bricks, slates or
pianos fall from above, etc.
“This is not to say that I am very afraid of ‘countermeasures’—just in
case,” he wrote.

The battle with Gazprom would drag on for years.

Meanwhile, Navalny was developing a knack for using his small stock
holdings to stir up big trouble. Among those holdings were two shares of
Transneft, the giant state-controlled oil pipeline company. And on August 6,
2008, Navalny launched another crusade on his LiveJournal blog: an effort
to uncover how Transneft suddenly had become one of Russia’s biggest
charitable donors—giving away nearly 7.2 billion rubles, or roughly
$300,000 million in 2007—and to figure out where the money had gone.
Navalny learned of the situation from an article in Vedomosti on March
24, 2008, about Transneft’s third-quarter results, which showed the stunning
giveaway. The article described how Transneft in 2007 had smashed all
records for charitable contributions in Russian history, and given away far
more money than it paid in dividends to shareholders—the main
shareholder, of course, being the Russian government.
The huge amount of money being siphoned out of the company would
have been enough to trigger Navalny. But the company’s explanation was
the sort of preposterous nonsense that makes him spitting mad. “Excess oil
is found annually in the Transneft system due to inaccuracies in measuring
instruments, oil evaporation,” Vedomosti reported being told by Transneft
managers. “How to spend the money from the sale of surplus oil is decided
by the board of directors of the company.” In recent years, the company told
the newspaper, “all the proceeds from the sale of unaccounted for oil” were
donated to charity.
Mikhail Barkov, a Transneft vice president, said the money went to
support orphanages, cancer hospitals, sports organizations, and religious
groups. Interestingly, Barkov seemed to go out of his way to note that
Semyon Vainshtok, who had recently stepped down as Transneft’s
president, “had nothing to do with it” because the company had not sold
any excess oil until after Vainshtok left the company in October 2007.
“The largest philanthropist in Russia is Transneft,” Navalny proclaimed
in mock amazement. “Last year the company spent 7,193,000,000 rubles on
charity,” he wrote. Apparently concerned that the magnitude wasn’t coming
across, he added: “In words: seven billion one hundred ninety-three million
rubles.
“This is a very generous donation, because in the same year, Transneft
spent only six billion rubles on the repair and maintenance of all oil
pipelines,” Navalny wrote. “That is, charity is more important for Transneft
than oil pipelines, despite the fact that dealing with oil pipelines is
Transneft’s main and only task.”
Navalny noted that Russia’s blogger community should take special
interest, given the rising popularity of online crowdfunding. Every day, it
seemed, someone was posting another heart-tugging story worthy of
donations. Navalny’s question was simple: “For what laudable purposes is
Transneft giving out such colossal sums?”
“I asked many people connected with charity about Transneft,” Navalny
wrote. He switched to all caps for emphasis: “BUT I HAVE NEVER MET
A PERSON WHO WOULD KNOW THE FATE OF EVEN A SMALL
PART OF TRANSNEFT’S CHARITY MONEY.”
To Transneft, Navalny put the question very politely: “Please tell us
which organizations were the recipients of the company’s charitable
assistance?” At first, he said, he got vague but polite replies about how the
company provides “open and transparent charitable assistance to many
organizations. Then,” Navalny wrote, “they began to snap, like ‘It’s none of
your business who we help.’ Now that I have filed a lawsuit, Transneft
claims this is confidential information.
“Can a state-owned company give $300 million confidentially to
charity? It seems to me—no,” Navalny wrote, answering his own question.
“To Transneft, the government of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of
Energy and everyone else that I applied to, it seems yes.”
Navalny reflexively divides human beings into good and bad. Often his
instincts are right. Sometimes he misfires. But he typically reserves special
venom for people he perceives as bad who were put in positions that
demanded they do the right thing. Identifying specific individual villains in
the vast cesspool of Russian kleptocracy has always been one of Navalny’s
extraordinary talents. In the case of Transneft, at least initially, Navalny
decided that the primary villain would be Oleg Vyacheslavovich Vyugin,
who had been elected to serve as an independent member of Transneft’s
board of directors.
Navalny opened his public campaign against Vyugin in a blogpost on
September 8, 2008, under the headline: “Next Generation Manager.” He
began by linking to Vyugin’s official biography as head of the Federal
Service for Financial Markets of the Russian Federation. Vyugin’s résumé
was impressive: undergraduate and graduate degrees in the physical and
mathematical sciences; teaching and research positions focused on
consumer demand, trade, and economic forecasting; and then a series of
important positions in government and in the private sector, beginning with
his appointment in 1993 as head of the Macroeconomic Policy Department
at Russia’s Finance Ministry. From 2002 to 2004, he was first deputy
chairman of the Russian Central Bank. “Ufff,” Navalny wrote on his
LiveJournal blog. “I’m tired just listing the merits.”
Navalny noted that Vyugin, at that point, was chairman of the board of
directors of MDM Bank—“but not only,” he noted. “Because Oleg Vyugin
is a very respected person, he is called an independent director in various
places. Because it is a great honor to have Oleg Vyugin as an independent
director. It has a very positive effect on our, and the foreign, business
community.
“They know Oleg Vyugin very well as a man who stands up for
transparency and efficiency,” Navalny wrote, his sarcasm dripping down
the screen. “Oleg Vyugin on the board of directors is like a signal:
‘Everything is OK with us. Everything is transparent and efficient, because
Oleg Vyugin himself vouched for us. His reputation is at stake, and he
values it.’” Now, Navalny reiterated, Vyugin was on Transneft’s board.
 “And so,” Navalny wrote, “O. V. Vyugin will receive (or has already
received) an official letter. In which there will be no anthrax powder, but
there will be a request from one of the shareholders of OAO AK Transneft
to provide assistance in obtaining at least some information about the 12
billion rubles that were withdrawn from Transneft over the past two years
as charity expenses.”
Navalny’s arch reference to anthrax offered a bit of insight into a man
growing into his role as a major public figure. The bioweapon was back in
the news that summer in a big way in the United States and international
media, after the FBI named a suspect in a string of anthrax attacks that had
terrified the U.S. in 2001 following the 9/11 terror attacks. The suspect,
Bruce E. Ivins, was a longtime researcher on biological weapons who
worked at an army laboratory. He had become interested in anthrax after a
1979 outbreak in Sverdlovsk, the Russian city now known as
Yekaterinburg. At least sixty-four people had been killed by anthrax after an
accidental release at a Soviet military facility.
Navalny is a news junkie. In those days, when not railing against
corruption, he often used his blog to comment on current events and pop
culture—mainly in Russia, but also from the United States and around the
world. The anthrax joke was also the kind of stray, biting remark that in the
future would make Navalny vulnerable to lawsuits and prosecutions. Was
he joking, or had he threated Vyugin’s life? As Navalny kicked up dust, and
ticked off ever more powerful people, his opponents would file lawsuits or
pursue criminal charges against him for far less.
Navalny’s lawsuit was specifically aimed at Vyugin, demanding that he
meet his obligations as an independent member of the board of directors. In
November 2008, Navalny issued a “statement” following a hearing in the
case in Moscow. He noted that Vyugin did not attend but had sent three
lawyers, who argued that as an independent director he had the right to
ignore the requests of minority shareholders.
“The position of Oleg Vyugin is bewildering,” Navalny wrote in his
statement. “This is a famous person with a good reputation. He was elected
an independent director of the company and, obviously, should advocate for
transparency in the work of the company and the fight against theft with it.”
He added: “I approached him expecting support for my legitimate claims.
However, Vyugin prefers to sacrifice his reputation in order to cover up the
dubious dealings going on in Transneft.”
Navalny was pouring it on—counting, it seemed, on Vyugin actually
being on his side. “We have serious grounds to believe that, under the guise
of charitable activities, theft on an especially large scale has occurred and
continues to occur,” he wrote. “It is a pity that Vyugin ended up on the other
side of the barricades. It remains to be hoped that he is not personally
involved in these frauds.”
Navalny ended with another sharp dose of personal invective. “I will
add that not so long ago, Oleg Vyugin was awarded the Golden Diploma for
his personal contribution to increasing the transparency of the domestic
stock market.
“How this diploma is linked to Vyugin’s support for the secret charity of
Transneft is unclear,” Navalny jabbed. “But I decided for myself that from
now on all letters to Vyugin (and obviously there will be) will be addressed
to: Oleg Vyacheslavovich Vyugin, an independent member of the Board of
Directors of AK Transneft OJSC, winner of the award ‘for personal
contribution to increasing the transparency of the stock market’ holder of
the Golden Diploma.”
About three dozen comments were posted in response, and Navalny
relished the engagement. One reader posted, “Is there a chance after Vyugin
to go higher? I wish for all the good people from Transneft to become not
only owners of golden diplomas, but also golden cages as permanent
residence.”
Navalny replied: “Vyugin is just that—a side question. The real villain is
Vainshtok and Co. Gradually, we will get to the bottom of them.”
A month later, Navalny appealed again to Vyugin, noting comments that
Vyugin had made after the assassination of Andrei Kozlov, the deputy
chairman of the Central Bank of Russia, who had been targeted for cracking
down on large-scale money laundering. Vyugin, speaking to journalists in
Singapore at a meeting of G-7 finance ministers in 2006, had said that
Italy’s fight against the mafia and corruption had started “when people
appeared who said to themselves: ‘I am threatened, my work is dangerous,
but I will do what my conscience tells me.’”
Navalny wrote: “I completely agree with you and believe now is the
time to do what your conscience says.”
“Now” was overly ambitious and optimistic. Transneft refused to
divulge any information. But Navalny was making an impact. Journalists
and other activists were also following his lead. In May 2009, Vedomosti
reported that in the disclosure documents of a bond prospectus, a Transneft
subsidiary had revealed making large charitable donations to two
organizations, the “Assistance Fund” and “Kremlin-9.” The amount of
money involved was nowhere near the total that Transneft had said it
donated to charity, but finally there was some indication of where such huge
sums had gone. Kremlin-9 was particularly interesting, given that it was
established as a charity to help employees and former employees of the
Russian security services—in other words, to help people like Putin.
Not quite a year later, on September 3, 2009, Vyugin published an op-ed
in Vedomosti calling for an overhaul of Russia’s economy following the
2008 financial crisis. Navalny at first didn’t read it, but then spotted praise
for the article by Konstantin Sonin, a brilliant, Western-minded Russian
economist. When he read the op-ed, Navalny was blown away and
infuriated.
In the article, Vyugin had called for major reforms, including greater
efficiency in public administration, and new mechanisms for publicly
evaluating the quality and effectiveness of state institutions. He had also
stressed the importance of the media’s role in informing the public and
facilitating accountability.
Lashing out on his blog under a headline of “excellent hypocrisy,”
Navalny praised the article, saying, “After reading, it even makes you
want… to slam your palm on the table and exclaim, ‘Why are we sitting
here? It’s clear what to do!’ The wise Oleg Vyugin says a lot of right
things.”
But then Navalny called Vyugin a hypocrite and a liar, adding,
“Transneft is essentially now an organized criminal group.” About a month
later, Vyugin wrote Navalny a letter saying that he was formally urging
Transneft’s chairman, Russian energy minister Sergei Shmatko, to publish
full information about Transneft’s claimed 15 billion rubles in charitable
donations from 2005 to 2008.
Navalny declared a truce and proclaimed victory. “Well done. What can
I say?” he wrote on his blog. “The man had the courage to be consistent and
admit that he was wrong.” But he also knew that Vyugin’s change of
position would not do anything to change Transneft’s behavior. “I am quite
sure the board of directors will reject the proposal,” Navalny wrote. “But at
least the question will be officially announced.”
He also vowed to keep going after Transneft, warning: “Soon on our
screens there will be a lot of interesting things about them.” As it turned
out, the estimated $500 million siphoned off through charity was just
scratching the surface when it came to alleged fraud and embezzlement at
Transneft.

While battling with Transneft, Navalny was simultaneously locked in

arbitration with Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, demanding that it
disclose basic corporate information as required under Russia’s law “On
Joint Stock Companies.” Such information is typically published and sent to
shareholders as a matter of routine in countries with normally functioning
securities markets and regulatory and judicial systems. Not in Russia.
As Navalny mounted these shareholder-rights crusades, he discovered
that his anti-corruption campaigns provided a strong organizational
framework for his broader political activity, and helped generate publicity
and name recognition.
On November 30, 2009, Navalny published his most explosive
investigation to date, alleging a massive fraud at VTB Bank, which was 85
percent owned by the Russian government. The head of VTB’s supervisory
board was Finance Minister Alexey Kudrin, and in May 2007 Putin
personally had urged Russian citizens to buy shares in VTB in a limited
initial public offering.
In his post, headlined “How They Saw at VTB,” Navalny described a
scheme in which VTB managers invested in oil rigs, that would in turn be
leased to drilling companies—specifically thirty rigs made by a Chinese
manufacturer, Sichuan Honghua Petroleum Equipment, which amounted to
4,500 train cars of equipment.
The rigs would have cost $10 million apiece from the manufacturer. But
VTB bought them through an intermediary company in Cyprus, which
charged $15 million, inflating the overall price by $156 million—which, of
course, was siphoned off. But there was a second layer to the scam. Rather
than leasing the rigs directly to energy companies, VTB then created a shell
company called Well Drilling Corporation, according to Navalny’s
investigation, which acted as another intermediary. The rigs were leased to
Well Drilling for 200,000 rubles per day, and then to the final customer for
double that. Over the lease term of eight years, Navalny calculated, $400
million would be stolen.
Except the scheme didn’t quite come together. Only some of the rigs
were leased. The rest were stashed in the remote northern region of Yamal,
where Navalny traveled to see the hunks of metal laid out in snowy fields
—“fifteen hectares,” Navalny wrote, “littered with pieces of iron.”
Now, he wanted his readers to understand the impact. With Putin
encouraging them, 150,000 investors bought shares in VTB. “Do you still
think that VTB shares fell from 13.6 kopecks per share (the price of the
“people’s IPO”) to the current 6 kopecks due to one international financial
crisis?” Navalny asked. “Or are the reasons for the fall also in… uh…
specific management methods?”
He urged his followers to join the campaign. “Can we do something to
help? Of course, you can and, moreover, we are in dire need of help,” he
wrote. “There are about 150,000 minority shareholders of VTB. These
people were cruelly screwed over and robbed. I am now forming a pool of
shareholders who are ready to enter into this business. Continue the
investigation. Claim damages. Initiate a criminal case. Torture and hang
etc.” He added, “Remember the more publicity, the greater the chance of
success.”
Navalny was making a mark, infuriating his targets in government and
business circles, and impressing journalists and citizens fed up with decades
of boundless Russian corruption and malfeasance.
Vedomosti named Navalny, at age thirty-three, as its “private individual
of the year” for 2009, as part of an annual rankings list. Calling him
“minority shareholder of the largest companies in Russia,” the newspaper
said: “A lone hero, prudent businessman, or manager of the ‘Bring State
Companies to Clean Water’ project? We do not know this about Navalny, a
minority shareholder in leading companies. It doesn’t matter. Navalny was
not afraid to declare war on ‘effective managers,’ as he calls them, of state-
owned companies. While professional investors quietly solve their
problems, a simple person, invested with neither status nor power, is trying
to fight the system.”
The newspaper noted that Navalny might pivot back into politics, but
more important, it said, he was setting an example: The little guy could
fight back and make a difference. “One in the field is not a warrior,”
Vedomosti said. “Navalny encourages other shareholders to participate in
their projects. This could be a springboard for his return to politics. But now
something else is more important—by personal example he proves to
citizens [they have] the ability to protect their rights.”
In March 2010, Navalny teamed up with Forbes Russia to request
routine company documents and information from ten of Russia’s biggest
companies to test the quality of corporate governance. The result was a
hodgepodge of responses.
Gazprom provided the documents quickly, along with an invoice for the
643-ruble, or roughly $21, cost of photocopies. Other companies, like
RusHydro and Inter RAO, provided partial documents, saying some
material was confidential. VTB provided complete information but charged
about $422 for 2,373 sheets of paper. Sberbank, Russia’s largest savings and
loan, responded after a long delay, but sent the documents for free.
Transneft, Gazprom Neft, and Rosneft did not provide information.
Navalny in the article appealed to the Federal Financial Markets Service
and to the prosecutor’s office. The overall conclusion: “A total mess in the
country with corporate government standards.”
Navalny persisted with his own court cases and notched some small
victories.
In May 2010, a court ruled that the police had not properly investigated
Navalny’s complaint against Transneft, and ordered them to do so.
Rosneft’s lawyers, meanwhile, had gone to great lengths to justify not
giving Navalny the information. One argument was that he simply did not
own enough shares. As a result of a company court filing that September,
Navalny said that he was glad to know that he owned 0.00000326 percent
of Rosneft.
Navalny, who was on a fellowship at Yale University at the time,
responded on his blog by feigning an American accent. “In America,” he
wrote, “in such cases, they say ‘Oh my goodness.’ What they say in
Russian in such cases, you will now understand for yourself.”
According to Rosneft’s lawyers, Navalny wrote in disbelief,
“Shareholders are big, small and insignificant. And their rights are
respectively large, small or insignificant. But the most trash is that Rosneft
decided to prove in court that A. A. Navalny is not an ordinary
shareholder.”
Indeed, in its court filing the company argued: “It is also an obvious fact
that A. A. Navalny is not an ordinary shareholder… and his goals are
inextricably linked with his socio-political activities.”
Navalny, in his post, tried to tweak Peter O’Brien, a Rosneft vice
president, writing in Russian transliteration: “Petrucho, what’s up? I notice
you enjoy being a bad Russian guy. Just remember you have the Bribery
Act in your home country.” O’Brien is actually American, so the Foreign
Corrupt Practices Act would be the relevant statute, not Britain’s Bribery
Act, but Navalny’s point was clear.
The arbitration court ultimately agreed with Navalny on his right, as a
shareholder, to the disclosure of company information. In August 2010, the
court ordered Rosneft to provide him with the minutes from meetings of the
board of directors.

Initially, Navalny had used the LiveJournal blogging platform as a place to

post transcripts of his radio appearances. But as he grew more politically
active, the internet would prove to be his only way to get around the
government’s ironclad control of all television media. Kremlin propaganda
was so widespread across the many different channels that Navalny
derisively referred to Russian television as the “zombie box”—sort of like
“idiot box” in English, but more insulting.
Navalny wasn’t the only outraged Russian leveraging the blogosphere to
engage in more open political discourse and to play online vigilante. But he
was arguably the most effective—and the most popular.
On October 7, 2010, Yevgeniy Lerner, cofounder of a web design firm
called Artus, published an outraged post on LiveJournal describing how
Russia’s Ministry of Health had put out a public tender calling for the
design of a social networking site to connect medical providers and
patients. The first issue: an absurd cost of 55 million rubles, or about $1.8
million. The second: it had to be completed within sixteen days.
“What a cool and most importantly new idea!” Lerner wrote, with
scathing sarcasm. “In short, such an internet resource will dramatically
improve the quality of medical literacy and services provided in our
country. Glory to our own Ministry of Health and Social Development, the
most caring ministry in the world. Hooray! Is there someone, besides the
employees of the Ministry of Health and those who are going to do this,
who believe that they will create something useful and worth that kind of
money?”
Lerner tipped off Navalny, who posted about the tender two days later,
calling on readers with web development expertise to weigh in, even though
Lerner, in fact, was in the business and one of Moscow’s top experts.
“Uh mmmm… I don’t understand the cost of sites etc. at all,” Navalny
wrote. “But I have a little experience when other people made websites for
me. Based on this experience, I personally can say that never, neve-eve-
ever, can you make a complex site (especially a social network) in 16 days.
But, judging by the price, the site should be VERY fancy.”
Navalny, wasting no time, flat-out accused the ministry of fraud. “My
first impression: The vendor is known. The site is ready. The money is
sawed. And of course, I really want to take a stick with a sharp nail at the
end and start poking it at the Ministry of Health.” He urged his followers to
file complaints with Russia’s Federal Anti-monopoly Service.
Two days later, the tender was cancelled. Posting under the headline
“Hehehehehehehe,” Navalny crowed about his quick success.
Navalny’s followers identified other tenders for similar health ministry
IT projects at inflated prices. The official in charge of them, Oleg Simakov,
head of the health ministry’s digital information department—nicknamed
“Eyebrows” by Navalny because of his unibrow—was forced to resign.
“Congratulations and thank you to everyone who participated in the
sharp-stick poking,” Navalny wrote gloatingly after the original tender was
annulled. “And it only took two posts. One. Two.”
Well, technically three, counting the original post by Lerner, who
discovered the whole scheme. But after giving Lerner a brief, initial
acknowledgment of the tip, Navalny wasn’t about to let someone get in the
way of his growing legend as Russia’s main anti-corruption cowboy of the
interwebs.
Indeed, Navalny’s stature and name recognition were soaring. He was
attracting new attention and new sources. And in November 2010, he
published his biggest investigation yet.
This was the revelation Navalny had hinted at while pushing on the
charity issue. Headlined “How They Saw in Transneft,” Navalny’s post
alleged that Transneft executives, led by Vainshtok, had stolen at least $4
billion during construction of the 2,600-mile-long Eastern Siberia Pacific
Ocean (ESPO) oil pipeline. Some Russian media reports later put the figure
at $2 billion. In any case, it was a staggering sum.
The allegations, which Vainshtok and Transneft vehemently denied,
dwarfed all of Navalny’s previous disclosures and were based on
documents leaked to him that were prepared as part of an audit, which had
been ordered by Russia’s federal Accounts Chamber. The audit of the
pipeline project, and Transneft’s responses to it, were immediately declared
classified.
Navalny opened his report by noting the personal significance of the
investigation. “This is a very important post for me,” he wrote. “I have been
working on this case with my colleagues for many months. I will be very
grateful to everyone who reads and helps.”
“But before you start reading, take a look in your wallet,” he continued.
“You may not have noticed, but about 1,100 rubles”—about $35—“was
missing. Not much, for each of us, but this amount was stolen from every
adult resident of Russia. In total, according to our estimates, at least $4
billion was stolen during this story.”
Navalny’s personal pitch reflected his growing realization that many
ordinary Russians were as outraged and offended by corruption as he was,
and that he had an opportunity to enlist them to fight against it. Along with
his blog post, Navalny released a nearly five-minute-long YouTube video,
testing out a format which would later become the main media platform for
investigations by his Anti-corruption Foundation.
The video, with an opening credit declaring “Alexey Navalny presents,”
included some strange sound effects but mainly featured Navalny, in a blue
button-down with a microphone attached to his lavender tie, delivering an
engaging summary of the investigation’s findings.
The ESPO scheme was just a bigger, sprawling version of frauds that
Navalny previously investigated. Construction of the giant pipeline was
outsourced mainly to offshore companies, which had no capacity to do the
work but were merely shells used to hire subcontractors, inflating the
project’s cost for no obvious reason other than theft.
At the time, Navalny and his team could not fully get to the bottom of it
all. He speculated that the whole situation was exposed only because the
Kremlin had grown unhappy that more money from the ESPO project
wasn’t being funneled to the top of Russia’s power vertical, and Putin had
moved to replace Vainshtok with Nikolai Tokarev, who had served with
Putin in the KGB in Dresden. It was Tokarev who had ordered a review of
the ESPO project, and the compilation of documents that later ended up in
Navalny’s hands.
Ironically, when Tokarev took over the job in October 2007,
Kommersant had reported that “he was the only one of the four presidents
of Transneft whose appearance in the company was not accompanied by a
scandal. His predecessor, Semyon Vainshtok, calmly completed the
deadline in his contract.”
Vainshtok and his associates denied any wrongdoing related to ESPO or
the exorbitant charitable donations, and no charges were brought. Putin
himself, at one point, commented on the case and indicated the allegations
were unfounded. In a sign of his good standing with the Kremlin, Vainshtok
was briefly put in charge of the government’s overall construction efforts
related to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. But after less than a year in
the job, Vainshtok left Russia to live in London and later Israel, where he
obtained citizenship.
He used his huge wealth for all sorts of investments, including the
purchase of 35 percent of the Lipstick Building on the East Side of midtown
Manhattan. More than a decade after Navalny’s investigation, the Pandora
Papers, a giant trove of leaked documents related to offshore wealth,
confirmed that Vainshtok was one of three owners of Vniist, a Cypriot
company, that won numerous contracts related to ESPO, including for
design and survey work. Hundreds of millions of dollars were funneled
through Vniist to family trusts in New Zealand created by Vainshtok and his
partners, according to news outlets that reported on the Pandora Papers.
Until the fall of 2010, Navalny had been working with a small team from
his own little law office in Moscow. But the Eyebrows escapade at the
Health Ministry had given him an idea.
In early December 2010, Navalny announced the launch of a new
antigraft website called RosPil—again playing on the word “saw.” Its logo
was a double-headed eagle, Russia’s national insignia, with each of the
birds wielding a handsaw.
The idea was to enlist the internet masses to scour for outrageous public
procurement contracts, taking advantage of new public transparency
requirements implemented by President Dmitry Medvedev, and to then
blow them up by filing complaints that the government would be obligated,
by law, to answer.
It worked. Millions of dollars in contracts were annulled as a result of
RosPil’s attention. And more important, Navalny was collecting record
levels of donations for his work. In the week after his first request for
donations to RosPil, some $120,000 came in. The framework for his future
organization was quickly coming together.
Navalny expanded his team by hiring four lawyers, including Lyubov
Sobol, who would become one of his top lieutenants and closest confidants.
And he would create several other initiatives aimed at crowdsourcing
pressure campaigns to improve government administration in Russia,
including RosYam, which focused on repairing potholes. In September
2011, Navalny brought all of these projects under the umbrella of the Anti-
corruption Foundation,
In his own way, Navalny was creating outlets for a slice of Russian
society fed up with corruption and the country’s slow pace of development
—including its stubborn adherence to strange bureaucratic rituals putting
process over outcomes. And they succeeded.
Harvard Business School, among others, used RosPil as a case study in
fighting public corruption. That said, Navalny’s larger goal was not to
cancel a raft of public tenders or fill a bunch of potholes, but to foster
political change, and he was not yet making a major impact in shifting
Russia’s political landscape.
 In 2011, Navalny told Miriam Elder of the Guardian that he believed
there would need to be new leadership in Russia for anything to change.
“Change cannot come about under this leadership. These people will never
deny themselves billions of dollars. Sooner or later, something will change
and these documents we gather will be used so they will all be put in jail.”
Nonetheless, Navalny had no intention of giving up.
“To outsiders our efforts might appear futile, even impossible,” he wrote
in an article for Harvard University’s Nieman Reports journal, which he
coauthored with Maxim Trudolyubov, the editorial page editor of
Vedomosti.
“Corruption, some say, is an internal issue and it is inevitable in
countries that are moving from state-run to market-driven systems,” they
wrote. “But corruption is not just a pile of rocks placed in our way while we
head down the road toward something different. It involves crimes that
thwart the progress of entire societies; in Russia the consequences of
widespread corrupt practices are disastrous.”
They continued: “Corruption is not just theft. It leads to moral and
physical suffering and the destruction of people. Thousands in Russia are
serving prison terms on charges cooked up by those who took their
businesses away or needed to get rid of witnesses.”
Navalny, in any case, had found his central, defining political mission
and ideology. The success of RosPil had proven the power of the fight
against corruption to motivate thousands of Russians, not only to break out
of the pervasive national apathy and actively join the fight, but to donate
money to the cause.
The Anti-corruption Foundation, established in September 2011, was not
only the organizational umbrella for Navalny’s various projects but also
what Andrew Roth of the Guardian called “a guerrilla newsroom, an
opposition research center and a campaign strategy headquarters.” In short,
it was Navalny Inc.
The Foundation also provided Navalny with a stable source of financing.
At the outset, a dozen founding donors agreed to commit roughly $10,000 a
month. They included Boris Zimin, who had been living outside of Russia
since 2004, and Vladimir Ashurkov, a former banker and top executive at
the Alfa Group Consortium, the sprawling holding company founded by the
oligarch Mikhail Fridman.
 Navalny’s slick videos, infused with his deadpan humor and arch
sarcasm, generated millions of views, and helped him to build a network of
supporters across Russia and to win sustained international attention.
After more than a decade of searching, Navalny had found a defining
message that could unite many disparate opposition forces. And yet, in a
country built largely on endemic corruption, it was by nature an anti-
establishment message with little chance of winning popular support among
the country’s elite.
Navalny was not naïve about this, or about the excruciating difficulty of
his crusade.
“It is foolish to expect that people who have at hand 2 million police
officers, half a million FSB officers, administrative resources from
executive authorities throughout the country, television, and billions of
dollars will simply give up,” he said in an interview with the Moskovsky
Komsomolets newspaper. “The government is doomed. It devours itself and
the country, but these people will resist for a long time. The coming to
power of a man with views like mine means that they will lose their billions
and their freedom. The country still receives huge incomes from commodity
exports—and they do not want to give this money to anyone. These are
concrete figures with many zeros in accounts in Swiss banks, which are
guarded by the police, the press, Channel One.”
But he was also blunt about the political motivations of his anti-
corruption work. He was not some goody-two-shoes whistleblower, but a
politician.
“In our country, politicians are treated badly, and many, knowing this,
mimic, calling themselves ‘civil activists,’” he told Moskovsky
Komsomolets. “But I don’t want to deceive anyone. My main activity is the
fight against corruption. Corruption is the main political problem in our
country. The corruption ‘vertical’ has become a system of control. So, my
work is absolutely political. I don’t write manifestos, but every line of my
legal inquiries is full of politics.”
 7

BLOGGER, STREET FIGHTER,

POLITICIAN

“Our police wagon is Number 2012. Attention! DO NOT SET IT ON

FIRE. Just puncture the tires.”
—Alexey Navalny, Moscow, March 5, 2012

However long overdue, Navalny’s break with the Yabloko party in

December 2010 brought freedom and uncertainty. “My life as a
nonsystemic oppositionist began,” he said.
The State Duma elections, which took place days before Navalny’s
expulsion from the party, were a disaster for the opposition. According to
the official results, which were almost certainly falsified, United Russia
won 65 percent. Putin had cemented his control. The Communist Party, the
far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, and A Just Russia, a centrist
party with no clear ideology, were designated as the “systemic opposition”
and permitted to clear the 5 percent threshold and enter parliament.
Yabloko, with a reported result of 1.6 percent, was completely iced out,
losing its four seats in the parliament. The Union of Right Forces similarly
lost its three seats.
Navalny voiced contentment that he had boycotted. “I feel great
satisfaction from the fact that I did not go to the polls yesterday,” he wrote
on LiveJournal. “Let them go to hell with this clowning. The dumb idea to
come and spoil the ballots also failed: 1.1% nationwide. It is clear that
almost all are spoiled by accident.”
 Sergei Mitrokhin, then the deputy head of Yabloko, complained that the
vote was rigged, and Yabloko had actually won 8 percent. Navalny posted
Mitrokhin’s gripes without adding further comment, but his silence was
heavy with sarcastic derision. Mitrokhin complained of “colossal stuffing of
ballots,” carousel voting—in which groups of people are transported to vote
multiple times at different polling stations—and other predictable dirty
tricks. “There is nothing to celebrate here. It was a gigantic disgrace to the
whole world,” Mitrokhin wrote. “In order to maintain his influence, Putin
once again humiliated the national dignity of the citizens of Russia.”
There were other signs that Putin and his security services were
tightening their grip. For instance, Natalia Morar, a co-founder of DA!, was
suddenly expelled from Russia.
Morar, a citizen of Moldova, had written an article in New Times
magazine describing a vast money-laundering scheme that the Kremlin used
to finance—and control—all political parties in the country. She was just
twenty-four and had only recently graduated from university. But her
investigative digging had angered, among others, Alexander Bortnikov, a
close Putin ally who was then deputy head of the FSB.
That December, Morar had gone on a reporting trip to Israel. When she
landed back at Domodedovo Airport in Moscow, she was detained and
deported on orders of the FSB. Moldovan citizens did not need visas to
enter Russia and all of Morar’s papers were in order.
Navalny heard about the situation while she was still in detention at the
airport. “They found the most dangerous migrant,” he posted angrily.
“Cattle, freaks and scum.”
In some ways, Morar was lucky. A little bit more than a year earlier,
Anna Politikovskaya, a journalist with Novaya Gazeta who had reported
aggressively on abuses in Chechnya, was shot to death in the elevator of her
Moscow apartment building. Two years before that, Politikovskaya had
survived an apparent poisoning attack, in which she fell ill on a flight
between Moscow and the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.
At that point, Navalny had no clue that, within a decade, the fates of
Morar and Politikovskaya—exile or death—would become very real
options in his own life.
Instead, Navalny, working with his collaborators in NAROD, organized
an election postmortem roundtable event called: “The Death of the Russian
Opposition and the Possibility of Its Revival. New Oppositional Discourse.”
Among the topics to be discussed were “the systemic opposition as part
of the political machine of the Kremlin” and the “possible creation of a
qualitatively new opposition ready and capable of a real struggle for
power.” Navalny’s announcement of the event included a note that it would
be followed by a buffet. At least the opposition, or what was left of it,
would not go hungry.
A report that Navalny published on behalf of NAROD summed up the
conclusions of the roundtable and included a scathing indictment of the so-
called systemic opposition.
“We can regard the actions of the systemic opposition in one and only
way: a betrayal of the country and voters in the name of preserving its cozy
commercial place in the Kremlin political system,” NAROD said in the
statement posted by Navalny.
“The opposition parties had a chance to adequately meet the test of
2007: to announce a boycott of the elections in September this year and
thereby delegitimize the entire Kremlin political structure,” the statement
said. “However, the systemic oppositionists deliberately did not use this
chance. Now, they are reaping the rewards. Even their humiliating defeat,
they are not able to accept with dignity.”
NAROD urged a quick and total overhaul of the approach to politics.
“Ahead is the presidential election,” they wrote. “The opposition could
seriously compete with the current government only in one case: if it put
forward a single and only candidate from all anti-Kremlin forces: left,
liberal, nationalist. But there is practically no hope for this.”
That prediction was accurate. Despite years of calls for Russia’s
democratically minded political forces to unite, the disparate groups
remained fractured and they could not muster an agreed-upon presidential
candidate to challenge Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s
designated successor, in the March 2 presidential election.
Still, after eight years with Putin in power, the tandem switch created a
sense that things might be changing. Medvedev, who had met Putin when
they worked for Anatoly Sobchak in St. Petersburg’s city government, was
an academic, a law professor, and an author of a civil law textbook. Unlike
Putin, he was never part of the Russian security services, from whose ranks
came many of Putin’s closest allies and confidants.
 Where Putin was widely known as a technophobe, Medvedev was a
lover of gadgets. He was interested in the movement toward electronic
government services, even assigning members of his team to study the
progress being made in neighboring Georgia. And, of course, for whatever
it was worth, he had publicly proclaimed a commitment to fighting
corruption.
Ultimately, it would all prove to be a mirage, deceiving not only
Russians but also Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who were seduced
into attempting their ill-fated “reset” with Russia.

For Navalny, the key deceptive development was Medvedev’s December

2008 nomination of Nikita Belykh, the former leader of the Union of Right
Forces political party, to be governor of the Kirov region, a forested area
located between Moscow and the Ural mountains.
Belykh was a year older than Navalny and one of the brightest young
prospects in Russian opposition circles. The Union of Right Forces was
founded by Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar—the main proponents of
Russia’s post-Soviet liberal economic reforms—and would always be
tarnished by the negative fallout of privatization, which yielded Russia’s
oligarchic system. Vast, previously state-controlled wealth, much of it tied
to Russia’s seemingly boundless natural resources, had ended up in the
hands of a select few, many of them robber barons.
Originally, Navalny cheered those so-called reforms. But he later
concluded that Chubais was a hypocrite and the man primarily responsible
for Russia’s path toward authoritarianism and crony capitalism. After
preaching the gospel of private ownership, Chubais went on to earn a
fortune running two state-owned companies, the power monopoly called
Unified Energy System of Russia, or UES, and Rusnano, the government-
financed nanotechnology firm.
“As an erstwhile devotee of Yeltsin and Chubais, I can say that Chubais
arouses more negative emotions in me now than Putin does,” Navalny told
Voronkov. “It’s to none other than Chubais, I believe, that we owe the
existence of Putinism.”
 In 2015, Navalny got a chance to confront Chubais personally with his
allegations of hypocrisy, appearing opposite him during a live, televised
debate moderated by Ksenia Sobchak on TV-Rainn. Navalny opened by
quoting “a wonderful, very smart person” who in 2006 said: “‘State
capitalism is inefficient, almost always corrupt, and strategically not
viable.’ In 2006, that person was Anatoly Borisovich Chubais.” Navalny
said Chubais had betrayed his younger self and that Rusnano should not
exist in its state-owned form.
Chubais replied by saying that while Navalny had a potentially bright
future as a politician, he was viewing the world in overly black and white
terms. “Alexey Anatolyevich,” Chubais said, “please don’t confuse the term
‘state capitalism’ with the term ‘state company’—these are not quite the
same thing, or rather not at all the same thing.”
Navalny accused Rusnano of squandering public funds; Chubais insisted
that the state could play a useful role as an incubator of innovation. The
debate was anticlimactic, with no knockout blow from either side.
Future disagreements and disappointments aside, Navalny, in the late
2000s, had good reason to find common cause with the Union of Right
Forces, known by its Russian acronym SPS.
Other founders of the party included avowed democratic politicians like
Boris Nemtsov, the first post-Soviet governor of the Nizhny Novgorod
region who later served as energy minister of Russia and as deputy prime
minister in the late 1990s. He went on to become a deputy chairman of the
State Duma, and the head of the SPS faction in the Duma, from 2000 to
2003.
Belykh had been a member of the legislative assembly in his native
Perm region, which is adjacent to Kirov. He then served as a deputy
governor of Perm before being catapulted into the SPS leadership in May
2005. In that role, he became allies with Maria Gaidar, who had joined the
party following in the footsteps of her father.
Belykh had participated in the first DA! public debate. With Navalny
moderating, Belykh had argued that “classical Italian fascism” was
embodied by the forces in the Kremlin. The Russian authorities, he said,
operated according to a well-known principle, being the loudest in the
crowd to shout “Stop thief!” when in fact they themselves were the thieves.
When one member of the audience asked the prominent journalist Oleg
Kashin, a member of the jury, why he had voted for Belykh, Kashin replied:
“Belykh looks like me, a fat, kind guy from the provinces. I like him.”
Navalny also liked Belykh, and the feeling was mutual. When the final
debate ended in a bloody brawl, Belykh went to the police station to give a
witness statement on Navalny’s behalf. And when Belykh was appointed
governor of Kirov, he invited Navalny and Maria Gaidar to join his team.
Gaidar was reluctant. She was engaged to be married and had plans to
spend time in the United States. Navalny, however, was enthusiastic. After
nearly a decade of working on the political fringes—campaigning,
advocating, and criticizing, but never making decisions—he saw Belykh’s
offer as a chance to make a difference from the inside.
“Nikita invited me and Alexey to come with him, to work with him,”
Gaidar recalled. “And Navalny accepted. I wasn’t sure because I had my
personal life plans. I was about to get married and to leave to go to the U.S.
for a while to study. But then, I remember, Navalny told me, ‘No, you have
to go. You have to use this opportunity. You have to do something. You
know, it’s a great opportunity.’
“I remember that he visited Kirov region even before, ahead of me, like
one week or two, and he said, ‘It’s cool. We’re going to do great things
here. You should come. You should work here.’”
In Kirov, their paths diverged. Gaidar focused on social services,
particularly health care and welfare programs, and she became a deputy
governor. Navalny worked on economic affairs and, because he was still
contemplating his own political ambitions, preferred to remain an outside
adviser to Belykh. He did not accept an official government position.
“Navalny was from the beginning focused on corruption and business
transparency,” Gaidar said. “I think that even Belykh offered him a position,
but Navalny wanted to continue his political work and do it just part-time,
not take any position, still be an adviser.”

Navalny started out with a quick success, spotting a scheme to dilute the
value of a region-owned distillery with a new public stock offering. He
managed to stop it and trumpeted his initial victory.
 The main industry in Kirov, however, is not booze, but forestry and
timber, and Navalny quickly learned that it was rife with corruption.
Following a common pattern in post-Soviet Russia, the costs of doing
business were largely centralized and borne by the government, while the
profits were decentralized and gobbled up by private entities.
The government-owned timber company, Kirovles, was losing money, in
part because the thirty-six timber mills it controlled were selling directly to
customers and pocketing the cash. In Russia, timber is the common man’s
extraction industry. Most regular people can’t just dig an oil well or build a
gas pipeline. But they can cut down trees.
In Kirov, Navalny tried to clean things up and impose reforms, but
mainly he just made enemies. “Navalny got engaged in that, and I think that
was his biggest mistake ever,” Gaidar said. “Because it’s a very
decentralized corruption. It’s not a corruption that you can fix with just
abolishing one law or just taking out some unneeded procedure at the top
level.
“All the Kirov region really lives on that,” she said. “Everybody gets
some money out of it. Police at the local level. Some customs officers.
Somebody working on the railroad. Somebody from measurements…
Usually it’s some bureaucrat’s corruption, or some oligarch’s corruption.
Then, it was people’s corruption. It’s not that there was a great corruption
that goes to Swiss banks or to offshores.”
People representing these entrenched interests complained repeatedly
about Navalny to Belykh, and tried every possible strategy to preserve the
old corrupt system that Navalny was working to destroy, including by filing
legal cases against him. Years later, one of those cases would come back to
haunt him, revived by the Kremlin to convict him of serious crimes and bar
him from running for public office.
But at the time, Navalny was just stuck in a thankless and fruitless
crusade against endemic corruption. “He ended up having all the region
fighting against him,” Gaidar said, while Belykh had grown exhausted with
all the complaints he was getting about Navalny.
“Their relationship started to deteriorate, and actually he stopped
listening to Navalny at some point,” she said. “Belykh didn’t listen to
Navalny, didn’t want to help him anymore. Even though they agreed
together on the plan… Navalny was very angry and very disappointed. He
was feeling that he was wasting his time.”
Navalny began a series of intermittent blog posts under the heading “100
Facts About Kirov Region” in which he complained about his frustrations
there, and poked fun at the bureaucracy he encountered. This included local
officials insisting that they could not install Wi-Fi in the main regional
administration building, and unsuccessful attempts by maintenance staff to
use glue or a heavy weight to hold down loose tiles on the building’s front
steps. The posts, unsurprisingly, did not win him local friends.
Navalny appeared to take particular pleasure, so to speak, in relaying an
item from the local newspaper Vyatsky Observer headlined: “FSB Loves
from Behind.” A Federal Security Service officer in the Kirov region had
been involved in four car accidents within two years, the most recent being
the “rear-ending: of a vehicle.” Navalny quoted the newspaper, which
reported that the FSB officer had “recklessly violated the integrity of an
Opel hatchback.”
Meanwhile, Yulia Navalnaya, who had moved to Kirov with a seven-
year-old and a new baby, was miserable. A cosmopolitan Muscovite, she
was living away from family and friends, in a place where hunting was the
main recreational activity, and local residents were deeply suspicious of
outsiders.
The Navalnys’ daughter, Dasha, was bullied in school. At one point a
teacher cut her out of a school performance, demanding that she give her
costume to another child. “The teacher just comes in and says, ‘You don’t
fit here, give your costume to another girl,’” Gaidar recalled. Yulia,
indignant, refused. She took a crying Dasha and the costume, and stormed
out.

While things were going badly in Kirov, Navalny’s reputation as an online

anti-corruption crusader was soaring. Day after day, he waged combat
against Gazprom, Transneft, VTB, and others on his blog, in the courts, and
in newspaper and radio interviews.
In October, Navalny blogged about Sergei Magnitsky, a tax adviser to
Bill Browder, once Russia’s largest foreign investor. Magnitsky had been
arrested and imprisoned after exposing a massive tax fraud by the Russian
authorities.
Government officials had seized some of Browder’s companies, then
filed tax returns fraudulently claiming a refund of 5.4 billion rubles—
roughly $230 million—which was promptly issued. The money quickly
vanished.
Navalny expressed amazement at the scheme, but he also seized the
moment to take a shot at Browder, who was once an ardent Putin supporter.
“Browder himself is not at all perceived by me to be some bunny-boy. He’s
still an Uncle,” Navalny said, using Russian slang for a wise guy in the mob
sense. “A few years ago, he praised Putin enthusiastically and argued he
was being picked on unfairly.
“Well,” Navalny added with his mocking tone, now Browder lost $230
million “and changed his mind.”
Magnitsky had been sent to jail after blowing the whistle on the officials
who stole the $230 million. He was imprisoned, denied medical care, and
then died in captivity.
Navalny set aside his annoyance at Browder’s flip-flop and reacted to
the news with horrified dismay. “They killed him,” Navalny wrote on
LiveJournal on November 18. “The news of the death of Sergei Magnitsky
in ‘Matrosskaya Tishina’ is monstrous.
“The damage done to the country by this assassination has yet to be
assessed but I’m sure it will be very significant,” Navalny wrote.
He was wrong. Nothing was done to Magnitsky’s tormentors, and
Browder undertook a yearslong crusade to win some semblance of justice
by securing passage of “Magnitsky Act” laws targeting human rights
abusers.
Navalny’s blog for the balance of 2009 showed him still trying to weave
his personal political views into a coherent ideology with popular appeal.
He was still convinced that the right balance would be a mix of liberal
economics, progressive social-welfare policy, and conservative positions on
migration and gun rights.
Under the headline “God Made Man, but Samuel Colt Made Them
Equal,” Navalny again extolled his support for gun rights. He described the
case of a Moscow businessman who was nearly murdered but fended off his
attackers because he owned a private security company and, therefore, was
licensed to carry a gun, a Makarov IZH-71 pistol.
“Arm yourself with whatever you can,” Navalny wrote. “And demand
the legalization of short-barreled firearms. If the most corrupt and unlawful
people in the country (I mean the police) are armed, then why is it
forbidden for normal citizens?” He included a link to his strange pro-gun
YouTube video, which he made after the creation of NAROD.
Meanwhile, Navalny scored a huge win with his investigation “How
They Saw at VTB,” about the drilling rigs purchased at inflated prices.
After the investigation was published, Navalny employees of VTB and
VTB-Leasing reached out to tell him that managers were in a panic, running
around with copies of his blog post, as one put it, “like rodents in a burning
grocery store.” Days later, Kostin, the head of VTB, announced it had fired
the head of VTB Leasing and was taking steps to avoid major losses.
But the company did not admit wrongdoing and said it would cooperate
with authorities if anyone could provide evidence of misconduct. Navalny,
of course, immediately began laying out that evidence.
Navalny’s fights were gaining recognition, including internationally.
“Although I am not a rock star, I have realized the dream of any rock star,”
he wrote on his blog on December 6. “Got a Grammy. Gave an interview to
Rolling Stone magazine.
“But there is a problem,” he added. “In the city of Kirov, where I now
live most of the time, it is absolutely impossible to buy Rolling Stone
magazine.”
That December, Maria Gaidar’s father, Yegor, the former prime minister
and market reformer, died. Navalny lamented that he never had the chance
to meet him, though they had long planned to arrange it.
“I was his fan in the romantic time of the formation of a market
economy,” Navalny wrote. “To the point of hoarseness, I cursed everyone
who was against him. The romantic time has passed, and Gaidar remained
one of the few who retained unconditional respect and reverence for
himself. Didn’t steal. Didn’t become an oligarch. Didn’t grab the oil fields.
Although he had more opportunities than others.”
“It was always disgusting to hear stories about Gaidar’s incredible
wealth, because I saw with my own eyes that the family lives modestly,”
Navalny continued. “Even in liberal political circles where, let’s face it,
specific people love to pour mud on each other, no one would ever dare to
reproach Gaidar,” he added. “We are all orphaned.”

Despite his limited success in cleaning up the timber industry, Navalny was
using his time in Kirov to make other progress. He completed the
requirements for being admitted to the bar as a lawyer, and he studied
English. But it was clear Navalny’s days in Kirov were numbered.
Navalny had been making snarky remarks about Kirov virtually from
the outset, and now he began to take jabs at his boss, Governor Nikita
Belykh.
At one point Belykh announced that he had decided to forego his salary
and would donate the money instead to build handicap access ramps in
Kirov.
Navalny sarcastically joked that other officials would follow Belykh’s
lead and “the world’s largest ramp for the disabled will be built in Kirov.”
He conceded that his boss was not pleased. “Belykh did not appreciate
the idea,” Navalny wrote. “He said that they don’t understand my jokes in
Kirov. And the local deputies of the United Russia have already
complained, like, ‘Navalny in his LiveJournal denigrates the Kirov
reality.’”
That year, for Christmas, Navalny and his wife traveled to the United
States, visiting Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas. In a sign of his
emerging public personality, Navalny kept blogging while on vacation,
maintaining the banter with his followers and allowing them to tag along
virtually on his trip.
But Navalny was also discovering that his followers would hold him
accountable—for his words and deeds.
At one point, he asked the Russian blogosphere for advice on buying an
iPhone in the United States without a contract, which was not possible at
the time. “To get a contract, you need an American ID,” Navalny
complained. “Give someone some useful advice: How to deceive the
American system?”
One follower quickly fired back a comment: “Interesting… you yourself
write how officials scam the Russians. At the same time, you ask for advice
on how to deceive the Americans.”
Navalny answered: “I’m not going to rob anyone. You can definitely
buy it without a contract.” Other followers suggested he was wasting his
money.
Upon returning to Moscow, Navalny was infuriated by the delays and
hassles at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, especially outside where most
of the cars coming to the arrivals terminal were clogged into just one of
three roadways. Navalny railed against what he presumed was a money-
making scheme reserving a two-lane roadway, left mostly empty, for
specially branded taxis.
“In general, the Sh-2 airport is an ideal illustration of the fact that
despite the huge number of people in uniform in the country, there is no
power at all. Not vertical, not horizontal, not anything else,” Navalny wrote.
Describing his airport experience, he added: “This is hardcore hell.”
The post struck a chord, garnering 887 comments, and prompting
Navalny to later joke that some of his followers were now worried that he
had given up the protection of minority shareholder rights and was instead
going to dedicate himself to air passengers. That post also yielded what may
have been Navalny’s first presidential endorsement.
Rustem Adagamov, who had long ranked as the most popular Live-
Journal blogger in Russia, posted a link to Navalny’s diatribe against the
airport. “P.S.,” Adagamov wrote, “If someday normal, fair presidential
elections took place in our country and Alexey began to apply for this
place, I would vote for him with both hands. Seriously.”
By late January, it was clear that Navalny was under siege in Kirov. The
regional legislature’s Ethics Committee held a hearing to scrutinize his
objectionable blog posts.
“Here he swears, but here he defames, and here he laughs at the
Kirovites and here the police are offended,” Navalny mocked them, adding
that in his view the local lawmakers were not just opposed to him but intent
on obstructing any advancement whatsoever.
“Well, my appeal to the deputies of the Legislative Assembly of the
Kirov region,” he wrote. “Be afraid. I’m a popular blogger. They read me in
the Kremlin. High-ranking idle officials. They will read this post and punish
you. For disobedience and Holocaust denial, disbelief in modernization:
forced to live on one salary.”
 Maria Gaidar said Navalny began pushing to leave Kirov, though she
was committed to completing some of her projects, which were achieving
some success. She had managed, for instance, to win World Bank funding
for a project that was helping to train local officials.
“He was disappointed,” Gaidar said, recalling Navalny’s reversal after
he first urged her to work in Kirov. “He was saying, ‘You have to leave.’ He
told me, ‘You have to come’ and then he told me, ‘It’s stupid there’s no way
to do anything, to achieve anything here. We should focus on politics.’”
With Gaidar’s encouragement and recommendations from Albats, Sergei
Guriev—then the rector of the New Economic School in Moscow—and
others, Navalny applied for a place in Yale University’s World Fellows
Program. In late April, he was accepted. His experiment working in
government proved a failure, but he had learned firsthand about the
excruciating difficulties of public service, especially in trying to eradicate
corruption.

Ahead of his departure for New Haven, Navalny promised his followers
that he would continue, and even expand, his crusade against the corrupt
“effective managers” of Russia’s companies. He also told them that he
looked forward to learning more about anti-corruption laws in the United
States and European Union, opening up new legal strategies.
“We should be able to piss off EMs where the greedy crooks from the
Prosecutor General’s Office and the Russian courts won’t protect them,” he
wrote. He also urged his followers to keep up their own efforts and he
reassured them that he would not disappear. “After all, I spent a year stuck
among the bears, snows, and manatees of the Kirov region,” he wrote
sarcastically. “The internet in New Haven is definitely better than the
internet in Kirov.”
“Now on to the Oscar speech,” Navalny blogged. “That is, I have not
received an Oscar yet, but I already have a lot of gratitude. Here are the
people who made it happen. Thank you very much—in the order they
appeared on screen.”
The list included Maria Gaidar and Sergei Guriev; a professor at Yale,
Aleh Tsyvinsky; Albats; Garry Kasparov; Maxim Trudolyubov, the editorial
page editor at Vedomosti; and Alexey Sitnikov, his English teacher in Kirov.

As Navalny and his family planned for their adventure in America, Russia’s
hopeless democratic politicians gathered once again, on June 15, 2010, in
Moscow. This time they met under the banner of Democratic Choice, an
organization created earlier in the year to replace the Union of Right Forces,
which succumbed to Kremlin co-option and collapsed.
On its website, Democratic Choice was described as “a political
organization founded in 2010 by a group of Russian politicians who
advocate Russia’s return to a democratic, European path of development,
against anyone’s monopoly on power, for open, fair and free elections, and
freedom of the media. We are for Russia to finally become a normal,
civilized European country.”
The group was led by Vladimir Milov, a former deputy energy minister.
Navalny was cited among the notable personalities supporting the initiative
along with Yashin; Boris Nemtsov; another former deputy prime minister
and former head of the Republican Party of Russia, Vladimir Ryzhkov; and
the economists Evgeny Gontmakher and Irina Yasina.
In its founding manifesto and other public proclamations, Democratic
Choice said that it was committed to participating in elections and would
forgo boycotts, which Navalny, among others, had advocated in the past.
Instead, the group said that it was committed to using elections as a way to
reach out to voters even if the Kremlin made it virtually impossible for new
parties and candidates to register or win a place on the ballot.
On that Tuesday in June, Democratic Choice met at the Ararat Hyatt
Hotel, for an event titled: “Electoral Cycle 2011–2012: What Should the
Democratic Opposition Do?”
Posting on his blog the following day, Navalny laid out his own answer
to that question in a long treatise, explaining among other things why his
past instinct to boycott elections was a mistake. But the most important part
of the Ararat hotel meeting was not what happened, but who Navalny met—
and he described the situation obliquely, perhaps not even realizing the
significance of it himself.
Navalny had been struck by the account of an independent city council
candidate in Yekaterinburg who, against all odds, had used online
campaigning to win a seat. “The dudes from the regions spoke very
interestingly,” Navalny wrote, “about the specific practical experience of
slapping United Russia in the elections.”
The “dudes” were really just one dude: Leonid Volkov, a physics, math
and computer programming whiz who in March 2009 had gotten himself
elected to the city council in Yekaterinburg, after running a groundbreaking
campaign largely online.
Volkov was born in 1980, part of that same post-Soviet generation of
1976–1982, and he quickly became Navalny’s most important political ally,
forging a partnership that would take them through Navalny’s historic
campaign for mayor of Moscow in 2013, and his renegade campaign for
president in 2017-18 when he was barred from the ballot.
Their work together, developing political parties and a nationwide
network of local offices, as well as a system called “Smart voting” designed
to break United Russia’s monopolistic grip on Russian politics, ultimately
led to Navalny being poisoned and imprisoned, and to Volkov living in
exile.
Navalny and Volkov were not just kindred spirits. They had an instant
mind-meld, as if they shared some special sequencing of political DNA.
Consider this post on LiveJournal and try to guess which of the two wrote
it:

According to my political views, I am a liberal, a democrat, and I

consider the European path to be the right way to develop Russia.
My dream is for our country to become a normal European country,
while retaining its identity and culture. Therefore, I am disgusted by
the policy pursued by our government in recent years: a policy aimed
at re-creating totalitarian procedures, imperial thinking, economic
and political isolation from the outside world, a policy of saber-
rattling.
The logical consequence of this policy was the restriction of
freedom of the press and freedom of elections, the independence of
 the judiciary was completely violated, the executive and legislative
powers merged in ecstasy, and the Constitution of the Russian
Federation was violated.
The immediate consequence of this was rampant corruption,
simply put, all-consuming theft. That is why the global financial
crisis hit Russia much harder than most developed countries. I
believe that it is not too late to return Russia to the normal path of
development of a democratic country: with free elections, free courts
and the press; with a free market with the proper level of state
regulation, but without state corporations; with fair competition and
without raiding by law enforcement agencies; with a transparent and
accountable government, with a low level of corruption, with a large
and stable middle class, with a really working local government. It is
necessary that people themselves decide how to live their lives.

Those lines were written by Volkov laying out his positions for voters in
the municipal elections in Yekaterinburg. But Navalny could have delivered
those same lines in any campaign speech of his own without changing a
word.
Volkov was one of just two independent candidates to win seats on the
thirty-five-member city council, which was otherwise dominated by
members of United Russia.
Volkov shared Navalny’s visceral hatred for the authorities in power. On
Election Night, even as he was on the cusp of victory, Volkov lashed out.
“The election campaign was very dirty,” he wrote. Incumbent candidates
used public resources for their own campaigns, he complained, and election
rules demanding fair competition were just ignored.
Volkov took credit for a groundbreaking candidacy. “No one has ever
done what I’m about to do,” he wrote. “But after all nobody also conducted
a municipal election campaign on the internet; no one has ever collected
more than 100,000 rubles by voluntary donations via the internet; and my
82 meetings in courtyards… were also worth a lot.”
But with the final tally still not in, Volkov wanted everyone to know that
the fight wasn’t fair. “Now, when nothing is clear, I repeat once again: even
if I win, I will still know and remember that my victory could have been
much bigger.”
Volkov recalled how he was often invited to meetings in Moscow, like
the Democratic Choice gathering, as a token representative of the regions.
“Someone ‘from the regions’ was me,” he said. “Because I was elected, so I
was a member of the council, and I was, well, rich enough to come on my
own. So they didn’t have to cover my tickets.”
“This conference, it was quite stupid,” Volkov recalled in an interview in
Vilnius, adding that in the crowd of tired elders of the Russian opposition,
“Navalny was such a contrast. He was so different.”
The old crowd of liberal lions, Volkov said, offered nothing beyond a
tired strategy of expressing offense and outrage without any concrete
action.
“The typical modus operandi for these famous and really renowned
opposition politicians, like Kasyanov who was a former prime minister, and
Kasparov who was Kasparov,” Volkov explained, was this: “Putin does
something bad, something we don’t like, and we issue a statement—we
condemn it and say we are gravely concerned. So, they didn’t do anything.”
Navalny by contrast was a doer. “Navalny was such a difference because
he actually operated projects,” Volkov said. “Like, OK, here’s the issue.
Let’s tackle it. I liked his approach very much.”

In his own treatise summing up the Democratic Choice conference on

LiveJournal the following day, Navalny laid out what would become his
and Volkov’s main electoral strategy for the next decade: urging voters to
back any party other than United Russia and any candidate other than those
loyal to Putin. Navalny also advised his democratic compatriots to give up
any hope of uniting—what he called “an all-galactic unification”—for the
foreseeable future.
But his main point was an anything-but United Russia strategy. (He had
not yet branded them as the Party of Crooks and Thieves). “We must urge
everyone to go to the polls and vote for anyone, but against [United
Russia],” he wrote. “Even if we ourselves do not have the opportunity to
run.”
 “I don’t give a damn if, as a result of my work, the mandate goes to
Yavlinsky or Zhirinovsky,” he added, referring to his old boss in Yabloko,
and to the head of the far-right Liberal Democratic Party. “The main thing
—to destroy the monopoly.”
While Volkov could fairly claim to be the first to have run and won an
internet election campaign in Russia, in the fall of 2010, Navalny scored his
own precedent-setting triumph in online voting—but it was only a
simulation.
While Navalny was on his fellowship at Yale, two Russian news outlets,
Kommersant and Gazeta.ru, decided to hold a virtual election for mayor of
Moscow, aiming to gauge who city residents would want to replace Yuri
Luzhkov, who had been dismissed by the Kremlin.
Navalny won in a landslide, garnering 45.02 percent of the vote; second
place went to “against everyone” at 13.64 percent. Nemtsov scored 11.99
percent.
Just 2.82 percent went to Sergei Sobyanin, a deputy prime minister and
chief of staff of the Russian government, who would actually be appointed
to the mayoral post by President Dmitry Medvedev two weeks later.
Just a few weeks later, in Washington DC, Navalny’s victory would be
cited in his introduction at a hearing of the U.S. Helsinki Commission
focused on “advanced fraud schemes in the Russian market.”
Noting Navalny’s crushing victory in the virtual mayoral election, Kyle
Parker, a policy adviser on the commission, said: “So Alexey, sort of, in a
sense, represents a generation that has been locked out of politics and have
taken to other means. And Alexey has made extensive use of new media
and other modern technologies to advance his message.”
Navalny offered a bare-bones introduction of himself and his work. “My
law practice focuses on the shareholders’ rights,” he said. “We work within
the corporate system by pressing management to maintain transparency, to
respect the law and to abide international standards of accountability. We
use both traditional media and grassroots methods, especially blogs, to rally
public interest in corruption. My personal blog has about 50,000 readers
daily and has proven very efficient and effective.”
Navalny’s hope was to explain to the American authorities how big-
ticket corruption was ultimately connected to the highest echelons of
Russian power, and to lay out how Washington could help, particularly by
tightening enforcement on Russians who funnel the proceeds of their
corrupt schemes abroad, purchasing real estate and other assets in the
United States and Europe.
Navalny, wearing a dark suit and pink tie, described how a gas pipeline
stretching across Europe had cost triple to build in Russia, compared to a
similar section in Germany despite wages and materials being far more
expensive in Germany. “A construction company was engaged to build the
Russian part of the pipeline without even bidding,” Navalny testified. “This
company belongs to Vladimir Putin’s former judo coach, Arkady
Rotenberg. He and his brother were named the main construction
contractors for Gazprom, the largest company in Russia.”
Navalny recounted his efforts to expose the dealings between Russia’s
major oil companies and Gunvor, the secretive trading firm headquartered
in Switzerland. “All companies refused to give any information about their
cooperation with Gunvor, so I filed suit,” he said. “Finally, the judge held
all Gunvor’s documents to be privileged and we can understand pretty well
the real reason of this decision because the only one piece of information
about Gunvor is well-known. That one of the owners of this middle-man
company is Gennady Timchenko, old friend and colleague of Vladimir
Putin.”
Navalny accused Timchenko of making a fortune but gave no proof that
he had done anything illegal. Timchenko successfully sued the opposition
politicians Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov for defamation after they
published a report alleging that he owed all his business success to Putin.
“His position allows him to skim a small percentage off the top of each
of millions of barrels sold and all legally—very good business,” Navalny
said of Timchenko. “And he’s a billionaire as well. Actually, it’s a very
interesting Russian phenomenon why all friends of Vladimir Putin who
want to be in business, they became billionaires so soon.”
Navalny also tried to give Washington incentive to join his fight. “So
why does it matter for you?” he asked. “Corruption in Russia affects share
pricing for shareholders around the world, which hurts corporate portfolios
and the retirement funds of the little American guy. It also made a hit to
your tax base and your economy because U.S. funds have invested billions
of dollars in Russian companies.”
At that moment, in Washington, Barack Obama’s much ballyhooed
“reset” with Russia was underway. Navalny cautioned his American
listeners not to be overly romantic. “I don’t want to push this idea of bad
president and good president,” he said. “Actually, it’s not true that we have
a bad Mr. Putin and a good Mr. Medvedev.”
Still, he acknowledged that Medvedev and some of his top advisers,
notably Arkady Dvorkovich, seemed open to reforms, including greater
transparency requirements. “They’re open-minded and they understand that
it’s much more profitable to be more transparent. You can attract cheaper
money and you can attract more investors and so on and so forth,” he said.
Navalny had described his effort to expose the suspicious “charity” at
Transneft, and now he explained how Medvedev had suggested privatizing
the company and also had proposed removing government officials from
corporate boards to be replaced with independent directors.
“Transneft was powerful enough to cancel this idea,” Navalny said.
“And a couple of weeks ago the government declared that they are not
going to privatize this company.” What Navalny did not point out was that
the head of Transneft, Nikolai Tokarev, was a close friend of Putin’s, a
colleague from when they served together in the KGB in East Germany.
The hearing in many ways was emblematic of Navalny’s overall time at
Yale. He was learning a lot about the American system, and one of the
things he learned was that the U.S. system did not have very much interest
in learning from him. In fact, it did not have very much interest in Russia at
all, a surprise given Russia’s obsession over its rivalry with the United
States.
For whatever it was worth, though, Navalny left his listeners in
Washington with a key point about himself, and about his country.
“I’m not a dissident,” he said. “I’m an activist. I consider investment in
Russia to have very high potential. I hope Americans will continue to invest
in Russia, but we need a little more political leverage to protect those
investors.”

Throughout his time in New Haven, Navalny continued to push his anti-
corruption work and he had come up with an answer to a question that had
nagged him for years: how to harness the many offers of assistance from
readers of his blog.
By creating the RosPil website, he would crowdsource the scrutiny of
government procurement contracts and identify those that seemed corrupt.
Anyone could spot a potentially fraudulent tender and then submit it to
Navalny’s team, which would carry out verifications and pursue the cases
most worthy of attention.
Upon Navalny’s return to Moscow, his name recognition was soaring,
and it was then supercharged when he uttered the famous “Party of Crooks
and Thieves” line on the radio. Journalists were calling nonstop. When he
returned to Finam FM to debate the Duma member Yevgeny Fyodorov, two
magazine writers, Julia Ioffe of the New Yorker and Yulia Gutova of
Russian Reporter, were in the studio gathering color for long profiles of
him.
In March 2011, Navalny went on the attack against proposed changes to
Russia’s government transparency laws, which had allowed RosPil to
identify vast amounts of graft. Navalny noted that the new law had been
drafted at the Higher School of Economics, where the rector, Yaroslav
Kuzminov, was married to Elvira Nabiullina, then Russia’s minister of
economic development.
Kuzminov, offended by the allegation of collusion, challenged Navalny
to a public debate. It was held at the school on the evening of March 18,
and livestreamed on the internet. The hall was packed, and it remained full
for much of the four-hour event, even as Navalny and Kuzminov sparred
over the minutiae of procurement law.
Konstantin Sonin, a prominent economist and newspaper columnist,
called the debate “a landmark event.”
“Navalny could very much emerge as the political leader of a new
generation of Russians,” Sonin wrote in the Moscow Times. “They have
been waiting for a leader with Navalny’s qualities for more than a decade.”
He added, “The Navalny-Kuzminov debate was the first meaningful
discussion by prominent individuals to be aired in many years.”
The larger problem, Sonin lamented, was that active Russian citizens
following the debate would have no way to act on what they had concluded.
“Ideally, Russians would now be able to choose between the important
positions taken by Kuzminov and Navalny as voters in democratic countries
everywhere do—through free elections,” Sonin wrote.
But Russia was not a democratic country, a point that would be driven
home mercilessly on September 24, 2011, when Medvedev and Putin,
speaking at a convention of the United Russia party, announced that the
tandem would switch places again: Putin would return to the presidency.
The announcement infuriated many Russians, including Navalny and
Volkov. That day, Volkov was attending a conference at the Institute for
Contemporary Development, a think tank in Moscow that was close to
Medvedev. A year earlier, the institute’s top policy analysts had published a
report, “Russia in the 21st Century: Vision for the Future,” that favorably
envisioned Russia joining NATO and the European Union. Now, as they
watched the United Russia conference on television, Volkov could see
many of them were crushed.
“All people on Twitter started to calculate like, how old am I going to be
in 2024,” Volkov said, “because everyone realized it was decided Putin will
stay until at least 2024.”
Anger over the tandem switch would simmer for months before finally
boiling over after reports of widespread fraud in the December 4 State
Duma elections. Cheating in Russian elections was nothing new, but for the
first time, ubiquitous cell phone cameras yielded instant video evidence of
ballot stuffing, carousel voting, and other irregularities. It wasn’t enough
that Putin had made clear that voters’ opinions were worthless, and they
would have no real say in the presidential election. Now, they could see
firsthand that the parliamentary vote was also rigged.
Solidarity, another coalition of democratic political forces, had obtained
a permit for a public rally to be held the day after the elections on Chistye
Prudy, one of Moscow’s charming public squares.
Navalny, on his blog, implored people to attend no matter their political
leanings.
“There will be a rally in protest against election fraud,” he wrote. “It is a
must to come to it. The meeting is permitted. Its formal organizer is
Solidarity, but that doesn’t matter now. Whether you like it or not, you have
to come. This applies to everyone. Nationalists, liberals, leftists, greens,
vegetarians, Martians.” The Party of Crooks and Thieves, he wrote, “stole
everyone’s votes.”
Privately, however, Navalny had little hope for the event. “I went,
although I thought that the rally would be a failure,” he said days afterward,
speaking to a journalist from prison.
Yashin had heard Navalny’s pessimism firsthand. “I have a funny
correspondence with Navalny an hour before the rally,” he said. “I wrote
him an SMS: An hour ago, the Communists gathered 100 people on
Pushkin Square.”
Navalny replied: “I’m afraid that not much more will come to us.”
He was wrong.
Thousands turned out for what stunningly became one of the biggest
protests Moscow had seen in many years. To get to the stage, Navalny
actually had to fight his way through the crowd and scale over a police
barrier. Once on the main platform, he delivered a fiery speech.
“Hi everybody,” Navalny began. “While jumping over the fence to get
to this rally, I forgot everything I wanted to say.”
He asked for a show of hands from those who voted and thanked them
for fulfilling their duty as citizens. “Thanks,” he said, then his tone shifted.
“Thanks for telling these goats, we’re here,” he said. “For telling the
bearded [Central Election Commission Chairman] Churov, we exist!
“We have our voice and we exist!” he shouted.
“Yes,” the crowded shouted back.
“We exist!”
“Yes,” the crowd shouted again.
“They hear this voice and they’re scared,” Navalny said.
He then turned his attention to the derision directed at them by the
propagandists on Russian state television, the idiot box that Navalny feared
was turning Russia into a zombie-nation. “They can laugh in their zombie
box. They can call us microbloggers or internet hamsters. I am a net
hamster! And I am going to cut the throats of these beasts! Together we’ll
do this. Because we exist!”
Navalny said he did not understand why he bothered to go to the polling
station to vote, and that some jerk had asked if he voted for United Russia.
“I said no,” he shouted to the crowd. “Tell me: Did you vote for United
Russia?”
“No,” the crowd shouted back.
“What is this party called?”
“Crooks and Thieves,” the crowd shouted.
 “It’s the party of crooks, thieves and murderers,” Navalny thundered.
“These people should be afraid of us. And they should understand that we
hate them.
“We repeat it every time and maybe some think it’s a joke. We don’t
forget and we don’t forgive,” he said, launching a new chant.
“We don’t forget! We don’t forgive! We don’t forget! We don’t forgive!”
“They are no one. With us are these astronauts in camouflage uniforms,”
Navalny said, referring to the helmeted riot police. “That means we are the
power; they are no one. And we say: We are the power. After these
elections, these Kremlin thieves have no right to tell anyone they are the
rightful authority. They are no one.
“We don’t need these crooks and thieves,” he said. “We want another
president. Not a crook.”
Moving to wrap up, Navalny said he would try an experiment, but the
crowd wasn’t done and began shouting, “Putin’s a thief! Putin’s a thief!
Putin’s a thief.”
But one more thing that’s important to understand, Navalny said,
picking up a line he had used at the nationalist Russian March. “All for one
and one for all,” Navalny shouted. “There’s no other choice.”
“All for one,” he shouted.
“And one for all,” the crowd shouted back.
“See, it works not only for the Russian March,” he said, adding: “We’re
correct! We’re here! We exist! All for one and one for all!”
It was the first of a series of electrifying performances by Navalny at the
front of large crowds that assembled in Moscow for the so-called white-
ribbon protests, which were held over the three months ahead of the March
4, 2012, presidential election.
It was also the night of his first arrest.
After the rally, many of the participants marched toward the FSB
headquarters at Lubyanka. They had no permit to do so. Among others,
Navalny and Yashin were detained and ferried to a distant police station far
from the boisterous crowd. Video showed Navalny being hustled away to a
police van, a helmeted officer on each arm.
Navalny was sentenced to fifteen days, beginning a pattern of arrests
and short sentences over the ensuing months.
Four days after his arrest, Navalny spoke by phone from jail with New
Times magazine and said the conditions were uncomfortable but not
inhumane, though he said he had not yet been allowed to shower.
“This is clearly not a sanatorium and not a resort. It is rather unpleasant
to be here, but it cannot be called some kind of ‘torturous conditions,’” he
said. “However, I believe that we are all being deprived of our liberty quite
illegally.”
Navalny said there was a clear need for continued protests but he urged
that they be carried out peacefully, and said far more people were needed
than the seven to ten thousand who appeared on December 5, 2011.
“On the one hand, it’s a lot, and I’m glad that so many came,” he told
New Times. “On the other hand, it is not enough: After all, they stole the
votes from millions quite brazenly and openly! There are many videos that
talk about this, and as far as I understand, now no one doubts that there
were falsifications… We need to continue actions, but we need to hold them
only in a legal format. No need to set fire to cars and beat the police. But we
must go out.”
He also sought to deflect attention from himself. “I am very grateful to
those people who go to pickets with slogans: ‘Freedom for Navalny,’
‘Freedom for Yashin,’” he said. “But these slogans must be changed.
‘Freedom for all political prisoners!’ There are about sixty-five people in
this special detention center for political people. No need to single out one
person. And this slogan should be used on a par with another: ‘We demand
fair elections, we demand a revision of the election results.’”
When the journalist asked Navalny if he would run for president, he
refused to answer, saying it was a stupid question under the circumstances.
A few days later Putin hosted his annual “telethon.” Typically held each
December, the Russian leader spends hours fielding questions from
constituents on live TV. And that year, he used the event to mock the
protests, which he said were being fomented by the United States. He said
that when he saw the protesters wearing white ribbons, he thought they had
condoms pinned to their shirts and were speaking out against AIDS.
The derision from the once-and-soon-to-be-again-president only fueled
the anger and future protests, which continued at times in a joyous, carnival
atmosphere.
Navalny missed a follow-up demonstration on December 10 because he
was still in jail. But he was again the most electric speaker at a huge rally
on Sakharov Avenue on December 24, which drew a crowd of more than
eighty thousand.
“Who is the power here?” he shouted.
“We are!” the crowd roared back.
“They stole our votes,” Navalny said. He added at another point: “I can
see that there are enough people here right now to seize the Kremlin and the
White House”—Russia’s government headquarters building, where the
prime minister’s office is located. “We are a peaceful force and will not do
it yet. But if these crooks and thieves try to go on cheating us, if they
continue telling lies and stealing from us, we will take back what is ours.”
To keep things organized, the opposition formed a Coordinating
Council. Navalny was elected to it, of course. But his public stature clearly
had shifted in a way unlike others. Calls grew for Navalny to seek public
office, and in Russia only one office really matters: the presidency.
“Navalny went to jail as a blogger, and came out as a presidential
candidate, unexpectedly for himself,” the writer Viktor Shenderovich said
on Ekho Moskvy radio that January.
“Obviously he changed his status while sitting in prison, and it is clear
that he himself is not ready for this. Just like we ourselves are not ready,”
Shenderovich added. “We are trying to comprehend what is happening on
the fly, and it is clear that our analyses of a month ago have nothing to do
with reality.”
The protests were the largest public outpouring that Russia had seen in
decades. But they were confined mainly to Moscow, with only a smattering
of small demonstrations elsewhere. In hindsight, it is also clear that
conditions were simply not right for a full-scale uprising that could take
down the government. Unlike in many countries that had just experienced
the Arab Spring, quality of life was good in Russia, especially in big cities,
and still improving.
Many of the Russian protesters were simply too comfortable—
especially Moscow’s young, middle-class professionals. Their participation
in rallies would often fit in between other items on the urban social
calendar, which included meals in Moscow’s hip restaurants or grabbing
drinks in the city’s trendy bars.
Navalny himself, after participating in the December 24 rally, flew off
for a Christmas vacation in Mexico.
 “¡Feliz Navidad!” he posted on LiveJournal, wishing his followers
Merry Christmas from the ancient Mayan city of Chichén Itzá. There, in the
Mexican sun, he continued to work on RosPil projects and to give media
interviews about the budding protest movement. In a blog post published on
Orthodox Christmas, Navalny offered a detailed explanation of how RosPil
was managing its thousands of online donations.
On March 4, 2012, Putin was overwhelmingly reelected to the
presidency, a deflating moment for the opposition. Still, the next day,
several thousand demonstrators, including Navalny, gathered at Pushkin
Square in the center of Moscow. By evening, many of them had been
arrested and the crowd was dispersed.
Navalny, flashing his signature humor, continued tweeting even after
getting bundled into a police wagon. “Our police wagon is Number 2012,”
he posted. “Attention! DO NOT SET IT ON FIRE. Just puncture the tires.”

With Putin restored to the Kremlin for at least a dozen more years, the
opposition suddenly lacked a clear mission.
One lesson was that they had failed to mobilize Russians outside of the
capital, so Navalny and others turned their focus to the regions, looking for
ways to be relevant.
They found an initial cause to take up in Astrakhan, a regional capital in
southern Russia located on the Volga River delta. An opposition mayoral
candidate, Oleg V. Shein of the Just Russia party, was on a hunger strike to
protest what he said were falsified tallies that robbed him of victory in the
March 4 election. Appeals to election officials and to the courts yielded
nothing.
By the time Navalny and other activists from Moscow, including Ilya
Yashin and Ksenia Sobchak, arrived in Astrakhan on April 9, Shein and a
small group of supporters had not eaten solid food for twenty-six days.
At a downtown plaza in Astrakhan, Navalny gathered with about two
hundred supporters of Shein. “It’s a crucial moment,” Navalny said in an
interview. “We need to inspire these people. You know these small little
conflicts; we have a lot of them.
 “The local authorities, they just don’t care,” Navalny continued. “When
the federal media is promoting this information and it’s promoted from the
internet, it’s a real problem. That’s why it’s so important to attract people
from Moscow.” But the paltry number of protesters who turned out that
Tuesday—fewer than five hundred people in a city of five hundred
thousand—did not bode well for the Russian opposition, in Astrakhan or
anywhere.
The following month, in Moscow, protesters clashed violently with
police at a demonstration on Bolotnaya Square on the day before Putin’s
inauguration. Navalny was among those arrested. Once again, he got a
fifteen-day sentence, but others who were implicated in fighting with the
police were charged with serious crimes.
Navalny had proven that he could electrify a crowd, and he had crossed
over from his niche as an anti-corruption blogger into a new role as
arguably the leading voice of the opposition. But the path forward was
unclear.
There were rivalries and tensions in the motley array of opposition
forces. Eduard Limonov, the writer, poet and founder of the left-wing
National Bolshevik party, wrote a brutal assessment of Navalny as part of a
series of political profiles published on the Svobodnaya Pressa news site.
Limonov, who fled the Soviet Union in 1974 and returned to Russia in
1991, derided Navalny as an ineffective “front man” for a group of
capitalists:

An oversized guy, a big frame in blue jeans and a shirt without a tie,
preferably small-check. When contemplating him, the thought arises
of the American type of health, of oatmeal and milk… The Navalny
phenomenon testifies that our intelligentsia has successfully adapted
the American figurative range for themselves. Not a Stalinist in a
clumsy suit, not a protest rocker in a leather jacket, not a fat deputy
in a Brioni suit, not a Russian intellectual with a scraggly beard and
glasses (half-Chekhov, half-Trotsky…), but really a citizen of the
world, instead of a tie—a smile.
A pinch of Assange, vaguely reminiscent of Ralph Nadar… the
second, young edition of Boris Nemtsov—that’s Navalny for you. In
 fact, that’s all. Navalny has no other advantages. He is not witty or
smart.
Navalny is not the leader of a political party or even a prominent
activist in any party. As a fighter against corruption, Navalny is
ineffective. It is not his fault… he is probably a good corruption
investigator, but the authorities do not want to prosecute the corrupt
officials he discovered. [So] he is still ineffective.

Limonov, who died in 2020 at the age of seventy-seven, claimed that

Navalny had visited him to talk about the elections to the opposition’s
Coordinating Council. “He called himself a politician so often that I
realized that he did not believe that he was a politician. But he was told that
he was a politician,” he wrote. “Navalny was created by the media.”
Limonov’s criticism also reflected annoyance, or envy, at how Navalny
had become the centerpiece of protests. “The masses took to the streets not
because they were fascinated by Lyosha Navalny,” Limonov jabbed, “but
because they were outraged by Vladimir Putin.”

Emboldened by Putin’s victory, and shaken by the volatility of the Moscow

protests, the Kremlin started cracking down on dissent and on perceived
foreign influence, which Putin insisted was responsible for the unrest rather
than genuine public anger over outright fraud in the Duma elections, and his
decision to return to the presidency for a third term.
In June, Putin signed a law raising the maximum fine for participating in
an unsanctioned public rally to 300,000 rubles, or about $9,100, from 1,000
rubles, or roughly $30. Organizers of such protests could be hit with triple
that: fines of 1 million rubles.
In July, the squeeze tightened again. Putin signed a law vastly expanding
government control over internet content. Under the guise of combating
child pornography, the law authorized the government to shut down sites it
considered a threat.
Putin that month also signed amendments to existing laws that created
new requirements for nongovernmental organizations and other nonprofit
groups to register as “foreign agents” if they received any financing from
abroad, even if the money was not used for political purposes. Once
registered or designated as a foreign agent, a host of other daunting
administrative obligations followed. The new rules threatened to destroy
many civil society groups, including some that were not at all political but
focused on issues like public health.
Late that December, Navalny took aim at one of the main champions of
all this draconian legislation, a United Russia member of the Duma named
Sergei Zheleznyak.
“I’m sure you hate this lying, hypocritical scoundrel as much as I do,”
Navalny wrote on his blog. But then, for effect, he argued with himself.
“Stop. And why did I call Zheleznyak a ‘deceitful, hypocritical scoundrel’?
What right did I have? After all, a person has the right to a striped suit and
his own point of view… He is a patriot. He is sincerely rooting for Russia.
He prefers everything Russian… Agents of influence must be fought.”
Navalny explained: Zheleznyak’s children were attending expensive
schools in Europe, including one daughter at the American School in
Switzerland and one at university in Britain. At the same time, Navalny
posted financial disclosure information showing Zheleznyak owned assets
that seemed to far outstrip his income as a member of parliament, including
expensive real estate and cars.
Navalny noted that at the same moment, United Russia—at Putin’s
behest—was moving to ban the adoption of Russian orphans by U.S.
citizens, as retaliation for Congress approving Browder’s Magnitsky Act.
Putin was enraged by the law, which created mechanisms to levy sanctions
against alleged human rights violators, including in Russia.
“These scoundrels still have enough conscience to shout that sick
orphans cannot be adopted by foreigners,” Navalny wrote. “[Zheleznyak]
himself sent three children abroad, but on the other hand he will stand as a
wall [against] some unfortunate three-year-old autistic person, lying in dirty
diapers and having the prospects of only a nursing home until age 18, being
taken abroad.”
The battle escalated when Zheleznyak hit back at Navalny on Facebook,
calling him a “scumbag” and saying it was out of bounds for Navalny to
involve Zheleznyak’s children in a political fight. Navalny was apoplectic.
“Nothing terrible will happen to your children, Monsieur Zheleznyak,
fortunately,” he fired back. “They are safe, abroad, studying in elite
educational institutions. Their dad, of course, is a corrupt scoundrel, but
there’s nothing to be done about it.”
But then he pointed out how many children had been harmed by Putin’s
crackdown on their parents, whose only crime was supporting the political
opposition. This included his own eleven-year-old daughter, Dasha, “whose
children’s belongings were seized during a search, and whose computer,
phone and photographs have not yet been returned.”
Navalny noted the government’s efforts to sever the custody rights of
Yevgeniya Chirikova, an environmental activist, and Maria Baronova, a
member of the protest group Pussy Riot. Similar actions, he pointed out,
were taken against those charged with crimes for fighting with police at the
rally on Bolotnaya Square before Putin’s inauguration, including Maxim
Luzyanin, who had a fifteen-year-old son.
“He won’t go to Switzerland,” Navalny wrote in a scathing post. “His
mother now spends money on lawyers.”
“This bastard here on TV talked about patriotism, and flew to his family
abroad for the weekend,” Navalny wrote, noting that Zheleznyak’s family
was enjoying a pampered life while United Russia was banning adoptions
and depriving orphans of families. “They are literally ready to eat children,”
he wrote, “just to have their own privileges and status, to be outside the
law.”
Many of Navalny’s darkest warnings about Putin and Putin’s enablers
and supporters proved awfully accurate, though not necessarily in the ways
he expected. Slightly more than a decade later, in 2023, the International
Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin and Russia’s children’s
rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, accusing them of war crimes by
illegally transporting Ukrainian children to Russia.
But as the year drew to a close, Navalny faced several challenges.
Among the opposition, there was still no unified political movement. The
protests of 2012 had been squashed. Putin had been reelected for another
six years and was certain to stay, as Volkov warned, until at least 2024, and
Navalny had not yet managed to form a viable political party structure.
Navalny, however, had emerged as the brightest light—or most
“fashionable,” to use Limonov’s word—among the opposition leaders,
putting a target on Navalny’s back. He was no longer just an annoying
blogger or occasionally cutting voice on the radio. He was now a threat to
Putin’s regime with clear, if not entirely formed, political ambitions—a
threat that would potentially need to be silenced, or eliminated.
 8

PROSECUTION, PERSECUTION,
PRISON

“I am not afraid and, once again, I call on everyone else in the room
not to be afraid either, because there is nothing to be afraid of here.”
—Alexey Navalny, Prison Colony No. 2, February 15, 2022

Navalny was in a large room in Prison Colony No. 2, which had been
transformed into a makeshift courtroom, to face the latest criminal charges
against him. It was February 15, 2022, and Navalny had been in jail for
more than a year since his return from Germany.
This time he was facing an allegation of fraud, that he had
misappropriated donations to the Anti-corruption Foundation and used them
for personal expenses. Navalny brushed aside the accusations as absurd,
noting that his organization maintained meticulous accounting and could
prove how each kopeck was spent.
He also had zero expectation that the legal proceedings would
correspond to reality.
“I understand,” he said. “This is not my first trial. I am not a naïve
person. The verdict will be guilty. It will be a rather long term… since I
insulted this dark lord of yours, Putin. I not only survived, but I returned. So
he said, ‘He kind of thinks that he is so cool, let him sit in prison and stay
there for life.’ And there will be this case, and the second case, and the
third. And you will endlessly increase the term for me.
“Well then what can I do,” Navalny asked. “My activities, the activities
of my colleagues, are more important than just the specific fate of a person.
And I think the worst thing I can do, the real crime I can commit, is to be
scared of you—you and those behind you. I tell you again: I am not afraid,
and once again I call on everyone else in the room not to be afraid either,
because there is nothing to be afraid of here.”
Indeed, at that point, Navalny had been under prosecution—or
persecution—in the Russian judicial system, one way or another, for fifteen
years.
The first effort to bring a criminal case against Navalny appears to have
been after the bloody brawl that erupted at the thirteenth DA! debate in the
fall of 2007. Navalny was brought to the police station, and it was quickly
clear that he, rather than the hooligans who instigated the fight, was under
scrutiny of the police.
Despite video evidence and numerous witness statements by Belykh,
Yashin, and others, it took six months before the case was finally closed
without charges. Navalny described the situation in a December 2007 email
to Frank Conatser, a grant officer for the National Endowment for
Democracy, which had helped finance the debate series.
“You may have heard that our project has faced more than just
provocations from the Kremlin youth organizations,” Navalny wrote. “Now
these are provocations with the use of violence.” He included links to
photographs of the episode. “In addition, after the last debate, they are
trying to fabricate a criminal case against me personally. We’ve hired
lawyers and hopefully they’ll settle this case.”
Russia’s corrupt and politicized judicial system is regularly used to carry
out vendettas and settle scores, even more often in business than in politics.
And the next investigation of Navalny grew out of his effort to clean up the
timber industry in Kirov.
In February 2010, the FSB had arrested another adviser to Governor
Belykh in Kirov, Andrey Votinov, and accused him of extracting a bribe of
2 million rubles from Vyacheslav Opalev, the head of Kirovles, the
regional-owned timber company. In return, according to the FSB, Votinov
let Opalev keep his job despite substantial evidence that he was
incompetent or corrupt or both. Opalev was also arrested.
At the time, Navalny and his main colleague in Kirov, Pyotr Ofitserov,
had been working to get Opalev fired as part of what they hoped would be a
broad shake-up of Kirovles. Instead, Navalny and Ofitserov got shaken up
—prosecuted on fabricated charges of embezzlement.
As a result of mismanagement, corruption, and the 2008 financial crisis,
Kirovles led by Opalev had accumulated massive losses, totaling some 240
million rubles, or $7.5 million. Navalny and Ofitserov initially faced
criminal charges over losses totaling just $42,000, or 1.5 million rubles.
The case was as absurd as it was byzantine. And yet, Navalny
acknowledged there was reason to be concerned. Votinov was actually the
second Belykh adviser to be arrested in what appeared to be retribution
against the new governor and his team. Another adviser, Roman Shipov,
had been arrested in the summer of 2009 and charged with fraud. So when
rumors began swirling that Navalny would be the third, he did not wait
around to find out. Navalny and his family returned to Moscow.
Sure enough, within weeks news reports appeared in Kremlin-connected
media outlets saying that Navalny was under investigation. “Adviser to the
governor of the Kirov region Alexey Navalny, better known as a fighter for
the rights of private shareholders, may be brought to trial for fraud,” the
government-controlled newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported. “Law
enforcement agencies of the Volga Federal District, with the support of the
Federal Security Service, are conducting checks on the involvement of the
well-known blogger in gray schemes in the forest complex of the Vyatka
region,” the newspaper said.
Navalny was at Yale when news of the case broke. At the time, he
described the situation in Kirov as a simple matter of revenge—perhaps
organized by Transneft or VTB as retribution for his investigations into
their corporate malfeasance. He also suspected that it was payback from the
disgruntled Kirovles director, Opalev, who, as a cooperating witness against
Navalny, was providing the trumped-up evidence that the authorities
needed.
Kirovles, Navalny noted on his blog, had an effective monopoly on the
forest business in the region yet had lost tons of money. “Despite such a
privileged position, the office was (and still is) in a very deplorable
situation: huge debts, salary delays, etc.,” he wrote. “The director of the
enterprise was a hellish swindler by the name of Opalev. He organized
some completely unthinkable schemes for the sale of forests, through 36
different branches, and no one really understood where, what and for how
much. I began to squash this crook on the subject of centralization and
transparency of sales… I got him fired and a decision was made to conduct
a full audit.”
Navalny said he planned to post all the information about the Kirovles
case online “both for those who want to understand in more detail and for
those who are interested in the mechanics of the fabrication of a criminal
case.”
But he also said that the case was so weak that he doubted the
authorities actually intended to bring it forward. Instead, he said, it was
designed to scare him into staying in the United States.
“As I understand it, the main idea is that I should not return to the
Russian Federation, frightened by a fabricated case,” Navalny wrote. He
added: “My dear crooks! It was obvious that you would depict something
like that and I was ready for it.
“I’m not scared and I’m coming back.”
A pattern was beginning to emerge.

Some commentators noted that as an unofficial adviser to Belykh in Kirov,

Navalny did not even have authority to make or enforce any governmental
decisions, so he could not possibly be held responsible for anything that
occurred with the timber company.
As Navalny predicted, the Kirovles case was flimsy and investigators in
the Kirov region could not make it stick. They decided to drop it. But
suddenly, officials in Moscow intervened; the headquarters of the
Investigative Committee declared the case reopened. But now it would be
sent, instead, to investigators in the Volga Federal District to reexamine,
suggesting that the local authorities in Kirov had failed in their assigned
task to make a case.
“The investigation of the century continues,” Navalny proclaimed on his
blog.
He noted with some amazement how the decision was announced on
television by Vladimir Markin, the chief spokesman for the Investigative
Committee. “Funny, right?” he wrote. “All the cases that I investigate for
hundreds of millions and billions tend to go downhill and are never
commented on TV. The case against me for 1 million rubles is rapidly
traveling up and is receiving active comments from the leadership.”
Officials in the Volga Federal District also did not see any merit to the
case. But in May, the Investigative Committee headquarters in Moscow
announced that a case was opened and Navalny would be prosecuted.
“Navalny convinced Opalev to sign a deliberately unprofitable
contract… for the sale of timber products,” Markin said, announcing the
case. “In fact, I can say that Navalny, in his actions, applied the tactics and
techniques that raiders use when seizing enterprises.”
Navalny marveled at the audacity. “In order to mold a real criminal case
out of a complete fiction, it was necessary to raise it to the highest level—
the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation,” he blogged. “At
the level of Kirov, they issued a refusal to initiate a case, at the level of the
Volga Federal District, too. In total, as I understand it, there are already five
‘refusals’ in the case.”
The charge against Navalny actually did not even amount to theft. He
was accused of causing damage “absent signs of theft” that resulted in a
significant loss. And yet, it carried the possibility of a five-year prison
sentence.
The harassment, however, was just getting started. And the Investigative
Committee made little effort to disguise its plans. Markin, the spokesman,
said that Navalny had put a bullseye on his own back.
“If a person tries with all his strength to attract attention, or if I can put
it, teases authorities—‘Look at me, I’m so good compared to everyone
else’—well, then interest in his past grows and the process of exposing him
naturally speeds up,” Markin said.
On the evening of Friday, May 13, 2011, three police officers knocked
on Navalny’s apartment door and demanded to see him. He wasn’t home.
His wife reached him by phone and Navalny referred the cops to his lawyer,
thinking the visit was connected to Kirovles. In fact, a whole new
investigation was underway: Navalny had been accused of desecrating the
Russian Federation’s official emblem of a two-headed eagle, which he had
used in the logo of RosPil, his antigraft initiative.
Playing on the Russian slang for “embezzle,” which is “to saw,” each of
the eagles in the RosPil logo held an old-fashioned hand saw, and one of
United Russia’s Duma members had taken offense. Navalny’s real “crime,”
of course, was criticizing the man’s extravagant official travel.
“Remember the puffy-loafer from the party of Crooks and Thieves,
deputy Pavel Zyryanov?” Navalny asked his LiveJournal followers. “The
one whose deputy activity consists of business trips to Cuba, Germany and
Taiwan?”
“Well, at the request of this senseless creature, the Prosecutor General’s
office is conducting a powerful check to see if the RosPil logo is a
desecration of the state emblem of the Russian Federation,” Navalny wrote.
Another, more sinister, development also emerged that spring.
Navalny had been running RosPil on record-setting private donations,
which he summarized in intermittent blog posts laying out the operation’s
finances in detail. Most donations were made online, through Yandex
Wallet, typically by bank transfer. The Yandex system was supposed to be
confidential.
But suddenly that May, donors to RosPil got strange phone calls
demanding to know why they donated to Navalny’s organization.
“About four weeks ago I received the first letter from the series
‘Morons, who did you tell my number to!!?’” Navalny wrote on
LiveJournal.
He described donors’ nearly identical complaints: A woman, claiming to
call from a nonexistent media outlet, demanded information about why they
had given money to Navalny and asked who had given them the money to
donate. It was clear to the donors that the caller also had information about
other financial transactions.
Navalny explained that despite craving more information about his
donors, he typically could see only a Yandex Wallet user’s account number.
Surnames would be visible only if the donor specifically added a note.
Navalny stressed that he had anticipated such meddling when he first
opened the account. “I asked the Yandex people a direct question: The
Kremlin Thieves will definitely not like the project… to whom and on what
basis can transaction data be provided.”
The answer, Navalny said, was only “at the formal written request of the
special services.”
“On this I calmed down,” he wrote. “Paper is paper. You can’t hide it
later. It will be clear who is interested and you can ask the question: For
what purpose are you interested? For the request, some grounds are needed.
There should be something formal where it says:

Navalny is financed by the CIA

The CIA is financed by Navalny
Navalny is financed by Bin Laden
Bin Laden is financed by Navalny
RosPil is a terrorist network
Navalny eats children
Everyone who transfers money to RosPil eats children
RosPil was created to ban Medvedev from dancing and take away his
iPad.

“Imagine my surprise,” Navalny continued. “When Yandex replied: The

information regarding your account was transferred to the FSB of the
Russian Federation at their official request.”
Navalny expressed anger and disbelief. “After all, I’ve been trying to get
the attention of these guys for so long,” he wrote. “For the last three years I
have been regularly writing various complaints and statements to this
department. And never. Not once did these powerful fighters for banknotes
consider my writing worthy of their attention.”
“But,” he added, “the parasites see a threat just in the fact that people
themselves unite to fight corruption, and even finance such a fight
themselves.”
Navalny urged “the blogger Medvedev, whom some also call President
Medvedev” to intervene and demand that the FSB adhere to the law. Of
course, nothing came of it.

Navalny, looking back, has said it was clear the Kremlin shifted tactics after
Putin’s return to the presidency, ramping up its harassment and persecution
of opposition figures. “Putin realized that it’s not affordable for his system
to give people more democracy,” Navalny told the U.S. news program 60
Minutes. “He completely changed his strategy, and started to arrest people,
started to fabricate criminal cases.”
Navalny’s tactics also began to evolve, as he increasingly positioned
himself as the leader of the Russian opposition.
A three-part “dialogue” with the writer Boris Akunin on LiveJournal,
initiated by Akunin, reflected a rising demand among supporters for
Navalny to clarify his positions.
In essence, it was a call for him to grow up as a politician, to show that
he was capable of taking charge. The need for such leadership grew even
more urgent as the protests of the first half of 2012 petered out, and the
opposition entered a bleak period.
As Putin cracked down, Navalny’s clash with the authorities grew more
personal, and more visceral. With the Investigative Committee leading the
push on Kirovles, Navalny hit back hard at its head, Alexander Bastrykin, a
friend and university classmate of Putin’s who reported directly to the
president.
In early July, Navalny published a post called “Bastrykin with a Gun in
the Forest,” accusing the Investigative Committee chief of ordering
subordinates to fabricate the Kirovles case against Navalny. The headline
had a double meaning understood by most Russian readers: The month
before, Bastrykin had been publicly accused of escorting a deputy editor of
the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, Sergei Sokolov, into the woods outside
Moscow, threatening to kill him, and gloating that he would then be in
charge of the investigation.
Several of Novaya Gazeta’s journalists were murdered over the years,
and the newspaper’s chief editor, Dmitry Muratov, who years later would
win the Nobel Peace Prize, issued a public appeal to Bastrykin, recounting
the episode and demanding security guarantees for Sokolov. Bastrykin
apologized for the forest incident and kept his job.
Navalny, in his blog post, also referenced past examples of erratic
behavior by Bastrykin, including an incident in 2004 in St. Petersburg, in
which he pulled a gun and threatened a man walking a dog.
In late July, Navalny hit Bastrykin again, this time under the headline
“About Real Foreign Agents,” in which he recounted allegations that
Bastrykin owned substantial real estate in the Czech Republic that he had
failed to disclose, as required by Russian law, and that he had failed to pay
certain taxes.
 “Let’s talk about foreign agents,” Navalny wrote. “Not those nonexistent
ones that United Russia is trying to expose, but the real ones: high-ranking,
cynical, deceitful. Those who prefer to earn (steal) in the civil service of
Russia, but associate their cozy future with living outside of it.”
Navalny acknowledged the futility of his attacks on one of Russia’s most
powerful law enforcement officials with personal ties to Putin, someone
who could threaten to murder a journalist and face no consequences.
“Of course, we understand that the more crooked, thieving and criminal
an official is, the more stable his position in Putin’s system of power is,”
Navalny wrote. “I personally understand that the more I piss on this or that
swindler, the dearer he is to Putin.”
Still, Navalny said he was formally appealing to Putin and to the
Investigative Committee to open investigations into Bastrykin.
“It’s funny, yes, but the crimes of the head of the Investigative
Committee Bastrykin should be considered by the Investigative
Committee,” he wrote. In September, Navalny slapped Bastrykin again,
calling him a “double foreign agent” and linking to a report in Novaya
Gazeta that Bastrykin and his wife also owned real estate in Spain.
There were other signs that Navalny’s battles with the government had
escalated to a new level.
On August 6, 2012, on a bit of a lark, an employee of the Anti-
corruption Foundation returning from summer holidays decided to sweep
the office for bugs, only to discover a listening device and video camera
stashed in the walls.
Navalny described the situation in a blog post titled, “Just Because You
Are Paranoid Doesn’t Mean You Aren’t Being Followed.” He included a
video of roughly a dozen police officers in the office after he reported
finding the bugs. “Honestly, I thought they would hide them better,”
Navalny said.
On December 14, 2012, as the Kirovles case slowly churned forward,
the Investigative Committee announced another major criminal case. This
one, against Navalny and his younger brother, Oleg, accused them of a
bizarre scheme to defraud the French cosmetics maker Yves Rocher by
overcharging the company for shipping its products.
Oleg Navalny had worked for the Russian postal service and started a
business providing commercial shipping for customers like Yves Rocher.
 Navalny, who had been invited to serve on the board of directors of
Aeroflot, Russia’s main airline, was in an audit committee meeting when
his phone started blowing up with news of the case. His parents and brother
also called. The police were carrying out searches.
The day before the announcement of the Yves Rocher case, Bastrykin
had a “working meeting” with Putin at the Kremlin. According to a partial
transcript, published by the Kremlin, Putin asked about developments in
key areas including organized crime, terrorism, and drug trafficking.
Bastrykin claimed success on all fronts but emphasized a different area of
focus: About 10 percent of cases were “corruption-related,” he said.
“In the first nine months of this year alone, we initiated more than
twenty thousand criminal cases of corruption, that is, every tenth case that
was investigated is aimed at combating corruption,” he said. “Of this
number, about sixteen thousand are cases against officials at various levels:
municipal, subject, federal, and cases against special subjects—these are
deputies at various levels, officials, administrators and law enforcement
officers.”
The numbers, which were impossible to verify, seemed outlandishly
high. Navalny, meanwhile, suspected that he was a topic during the
meeting.
“Yesterday Bastrykin met with Putin, got the go-ahead to start a fake
case,” Navalny alleged to the journalist Oleg Kashin. “This is complete
bullshit.”
The opposition had been planning a march on December 15, and
Navalny and his supporters immediately interpreted the Yves Rocher
announcement as an intimidation tactic.
Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila, was so angry she went on Ekho Moskvy
radio.
“The statement of the Investigative Committee on the eve of the
Freedom March says that they want to blackmail my son through his family
so that he does not go to this march, so that Alexey stops his political
activities altogether,” she said. “But I want to say that they will not succeed,
because the whole family supports Alexey. And we ourselves, and all our
friends, of course, will definitely go. We cannot call anyone, but I just want
to say that by our example everyone can understand how opposition figures
are persecuted in the country.
 “And the last thing I want to say,” Lyudmila Navalnaya added. “I hope
that during my lifetime I will hear that Mr. Bastrykin and all his classmates
at St. Petersburg University, who are involved in the political persecution of
Alexey, will wake up in the same morning and hear the same news about
themselves.”
The Investigative Committee accused the Navalny brothers of a massive
theft, totaling some $1.8 million. “Oleg and Alexey Navalny fraudulently
embezzled the funds of a trading company in the amount of more than 55
million rubles,” the press release declared. “The Navalny brothers spent
most of this amount on their own needs.”
Navalny was even more furious than usual. He tweeted a photo of Oleg
standing in his tiny kitchen holding his baby in his arms. “I stopped by my
brother’s to find out how things are going and see if he hides 55 million in
his kitchen of 5 (five) square meters,” Navalny tweeted.
On LiveJournal, Navalny admitted that there was something different
about seeing his family in the crosshairs. “Well, I’m not going to lie: This is
an unpleasant thing,” he wrote. “It’s one thing when Kremlin-crooks climb
specifically at you. You are ready for this. The wife is ready. It’s another
thing when they have already gone to a wide circle of relatives.”
The next day, Navalny went to the Freedom March. Demonstrators
gathered on Lubyanka Square, outside the headquarters of the FSB, where
many placed flowers on a monument to victims of oppression. Predictably,
Navalny and the other organizers were arrested as police cleared away the
protesters. They were released later that night.
But Bastrykin wasn’t done.
Three days later, the Investigative Committee announced that it had
launched another case against Navalny, this one involving the privatization
of the Urzhum distillery in Kirov, which had been Navalny’s initial focus.
In fact, Navalny had stopped an effort to dilute the company’s value. The
privatization had gone forward two years after he left the region. On
Twitter, Navalny expressed disbelief. “Hahaha. WUT?!” he posted.
Speaking to the Interfax news agency, which had reported the latest
case, Navalny said that the Investigative Committee had a new strategy:
“Not a day without a new case,” and, he said, “Every new press release
must mention me.” He added, “We are going to pin every crime that
happens in Russia on you. And if you are innocent and can prove it in one
case, we’ll pin 10 others on you, and you will not be able to do anything
except come to the Investigative Committee.”
Navalny’s assessment was pretty much spot-on. Within a week after the
distillery announcement, the Investigative Committee brought forward yet
another potential criminal case—this one dating to 2007, when Navalny and
Gaidar used a corporate entity Navalny created called Allekt to do
campaign advertising and publicity work for Gaidar’s party, the Union of
Right Forces, which was led at the time by Belykh.
Approximately 100 million rubles, roughly $4 million, had moved
through the Allekt, according to the Investigative Committee, but it insisted
that there was no evidence that any advertising work had actually been
done. Belykh insisted that everything was in order and the work was related
to advertisements placed on outdoor billboards.
No one had ever complained—and by that point, even if money had
disappeared, the Union of Right Forces no longer existed as a party. No
matter. The Investigative Committee used the case as the basis to order
searches of Navalny, Gaidar, and their associates. Among those to be
targeted was a Navalny employee, Georgy Alburov, who was still in high
school in his native city of Ufa in 2007 when the alleged crime occurred.
Another was the head of Navalny’s Anti-corruption Foundation, Vladimir
Ashurkov, a financial whiz and former senior executive at Alfa Group
Consortium, one of Russia’s biggest private investment firms, owned by the
oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven.
As flimsy as the Allekt case might have been, the allegation was not
new. It first surfaced after a 2010 hack of Navalny’s e-mail that exposed
correspondence with Belykh, and they had denied any wrongdoing. Back
then, Yevgenia Dillendorf, a spokeswoman for Yabloko, raised a different
question—about the propriety of Navalny working for the Union of Right
Forces, a rival party, when he was still in the leadership of Yabloko.
It was clear that the Investigative Committee was going to throw
everything it could at Navalny. And not quite three months later, it attacked
again, alleging that Navalny had falsified his credentials as a lawyer.
To be admitted to the bar in Russia requires documenting professional
experience, which the Investigative Committee said Navalny had
improperly claimed as head of legal services for Allekt. The Kirov bar
association, where Navalny first applied, said that everything had been in
order. Navalny later transferred to the Moscow bar association.
The Allekt case also led to a different strange case, in which the
Investigative Committee accused Navalny of possessing a stolen painting
that they had seized from his apartment during a search.
The drawing, called Good-Bad Man, was made by an artist, Sergei
Sotov, in the city of Vladimir, and hung on an outdoor fence along with
many other pictures. It was brought to Moscow as a gift for Navalny by
Alburov.
The artist said he routinely left pictures outdoors to be taken or
discarded. But the authorities insisted that it was stolen—an example of the
extreme crackdown against Navalny and his associates. Navalny said he
thought it was a joke and that Bastrykin merely wanted the poster for
himself after seeing it on Navalny’s Instagram.

This was Navalny’s new reality. His existence going forward would be
defined by police searches and court appearances, including repeated trips
to Kirov, where the Kirovles case was being heard by a judge named Sergei
Blinov, who was exactly Navalny’s age.
Blinov was from a small town about forty miles outside of Kirov, where
he had been a judge in the local district court. He was married with two
children and loved to play hockey. According to New Times magazine, in
the previous two and a half years he had issued 130 verdicts—all guilty.
The parallels between Blinov and Navalny were equally striking and
mystifying: two accomplished young lawyers from the same generation
who as teenagers had watched the Soviet Union collapse. Somehow, one
emerged as a major threat to Russia’s authoritarian regime, fighting it at
every chance; the other was its dutiful servant, delivering guilty verdicts as
expected. Why, after all, would the authorities bring charges in the first
place, if not to pronounce guilt?
Before the start of the trial, however, Navalny made a calculated bet to
raise the stakes by publicly declaring that he intended one day to run for
president of the Russian Federation.
“I want to become president,” Navalny said in an interview on TV Rain
on April 4, 2013. “I want to change life in the country. I want to change the
system of government in the country.” He said that given Russia’s vast
wealth of oil and gas reserves, its 140 million citizens should live at least as
well as people in neighboring Estonia.
Simply by voicing his presidential aspirations aloud, Navalny had reset
the terms of the case in Kirov. Putin’s henchmen in the law enforcement
bodies were no longer prosecuting an annoying blogger who had insulted
United Russia. They were now persecuting Putin’s declared rival.
Shortly before the opening of the Kirovles trial in April 2013, Mark
Galeotti, an expert on Russian history and security issues, explained why
the Kremlin regarded Navalny as such a threat.
“He has brought the issue of the corruption elite into the center of
Russian politics, and has done more than anyone else to connect that with
the United Russia bloc, that bastion of the cynical, the careerist and the
corrupt,” Galeotti wrote on his own blog. “At present, there is no one else
who can assume his mantle, no one else who has a chance—no more than a
chance—of being able to turn the middle-class metropolitan opposition into
a credible political force. Which is, of course, why the Kremlin wants him
out of the way, whether in prison or, much more likely, smeared and given a
suspended sentence which will preclude him from standing for political
office.”
That April, following one court hearing in the case, Navalny submitted a
petition to Judge Blinov asking for the travel restrictions that he had been
placed under to be lifted during the May holidays—when Russians who
aren’t attending shareholder meetings in Siberia typically go on vacation.
Navalny and Blinov, after all, were part of the generation of Russians
that had grown up with the ability to travel freely and see the world. “I
would like to go to Egypt,” Navalny told the judge. “But if I can’t go
abroad, at least somewhere to the south, for example, to the Astrakhan
region. Yes, [or] at least to some Nizhneivkinsky sanatorium.” He was
referring to a spa located in the Kirov region.
At that, Blinov cracked a rare smile and declared: “The court does not
issue vouchers to the sanitorium.” But he granted Navalny’s request.
Meanwhile, other machinations were developing in the Kremlin.
The appointed mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin (whom Navalny
trounced in the virtual vote in 2009), announced that he was resigning to
force early elections.
Legislation adopted the previous year had revived the possibility of a
direct mayoral election, which had not been held in Moscow since 2003,
and Sobyanin’s masters in the Kremlin had decided the moment was right
to carry out a bit of political kabuki theater.
While the government had managed to squash the protests, many
Russians were genuinely offended by the tandem switch and left feeling
that their votes were meaningless. The Kremlin seemed to sense a need to
restore a veneer of democracy. And what better way than to allow Navalny
to campaign for the country’s second most important public office?
On June 4, the same day that Sobyanin announced his resignation to
trigger early elections, Vyacheslav Volodin, the first deputy head of Putin’s
presidential administration and overseer of the domestic politics portfolio,
gathered a group of political scientists and laid out his vision for
orchestrating real, participatory elections in Moscow.
The absurdity and inherent contradiction of staging a genuine election
did not seem to register. Or, as often happens with absurdities in Russia,
everyone just nodded and went along as if it was the most normal thing in
the world.
Volodin told his assembly of experts that Russian politics needed “to
become more transparent and competitive, candidates from the government
need to participate in debates, and opposition members should be allowed
to participate,” according to the Gazeta.ru news site. When asked
specifically about Navalny, Volodin said: “His participation in the Moscow
mayoral elections would benefit the political system.”
Konstantin Kostin, the head of the Civil Society Development Fund,
told Gazeta.ru that Volodin expressed a desire to create a political system
that was “not manually managed” but that also “maintains stability and
predictability”—again with no nod to the contradiction.
Volodin stressed that Navalny’s legal fate was in the hand of the courts.
That offered a convenient way for the Kremlin to hedge its bets and keep up
the appearance of a separation of powers between the president’s office and
the judiciary where clearly none existed. If Navalny’s campaign somehow
did well, he could always be imprisoned.
Putin and his team, however, were clearly calculating that the slew of
news about criminal charges had weakened Navalny’s public standing and
eroded trust in his anti-corruption investigations. This was reflected in
opinion polls, including by the Levada Center, which conducted its surveys
without the government putting a thumb on the scale.
By allowing Navalny to run for mayor—and lose—the Kremlin could
create a mirage that the Russian election system was free, fair, and open for
competition, and also that Navalny was an unworthy candidate who could
not even persuade his core base of supporters—urban elites in the capital—
to entrust him with a position of authority.
One of Navalny’s weaknesses is his inability to walk away from a
confrontation, even when it is clear that he is being provoked, or that he
will be forced to fight on someone else’s terms, or on unfriendly turf. Even
when, with a bit of perspective, it is clear that victory, at best, would prove
hollow and likely carry a cost.
When challenged to a public debate, Navalny could never refuse.
The Finam FM radio host Yury Pronko had used this weakness to draw
Navalny back in the studio for a clash with the United Russia deputy
Yevgeny Fyodorov. And it was this instinct, born from his days growing up
as a military brat, as a fighter among fighters, that propelled Navalny out
onto the street to brawl with the hooligans after the DA! debate.
So, when invited—challenged, really—by Putin’s top political
technologist to run against Sobyanin, Navalny could not resist. This was not
a virtual poll conducted by newspaper editors but an election campaign,
with his name on an actual ballot, for mayor of Moscow, a world capital of
more than 11 million people. Navalny took the bait.
In many ways, the crafty operators in the Kremlin had left him with no
choice. If Navalny had refused to jump into the ring, it would confirm that
he was not a serious politician but just an attention-seeking harpy, as Putin
and his proxies alleged. But it was clear from the outset that the situation
was entirely “manually managed”—to use Volodin’s phrase—and
Navalny’s defeat was preordained.
Navalny, for instance, could not even get on the ballot without accepting
the help of United Russia to obtain the minimum number of required
signatures from municipal lawmakers to qualify as a candidate. Then, he
would be running in a snap election, a situation that always favors the
incumbent. The vote would be held on September 8, with many of the city’s
residents caught up in the frenzy that follows the postsummer return to
work and school routines.
The Kremlin, of course, also made sure that Navalny got minimal to no
exposure on the federal television channels, other than the continuing
negative coverage of his legal prosecutions. Kirovles, in particular, was an
insurance policy. The outcome of the trial could—and would—be
manipulated to achieve the Kremlin’s goals.
Navalny, however, would not shy away from the fight, no matter how
unbalanced. With the deck clearly stacked against him, he began building a
campaign operation with his friend Leonid Volkov as its manager and chief
strategist. He also needed the backing of a party, which he got from RPR-
PARNAS, the Republican Party of Russia—People’s Freedom Party
coalition, of which Boris Nemtsov was then a leader.
In a fifteen-page campaign “program,” Navalny laid out the basis of his
candidacy: a need to end corruption and raise the standard of living in the
capital. “Moscow has sufficient resources to become a comfortable city that
does not lag behind other European capitals in terms of quality of life,”
Navalny declared, “a city in which free citizens have a sense of their dignity
and can directly influence the policy of city authorities.”
Noting that Moscow’s budget was comparable to New York City’s,
Navalny asked: “Why despite these huge resources, have the Moscow
authorities still not been able to cope with traffic jams, crime, arbitrary
police, poor quality of medical care, education, and poor urban spaces? The
answer is very simple: theft and inefficient spending of the city’s funds.”
“Moscow,” Navalny’s program continued, “needs full transparency of
all decisions, accountability of the authorities to citizens and a victory over
corruption. It is thanks to this that it will be possible to free up huge
resources that will help solve the key problems of our city.” Noting that
many candidates would make identical promises, Navalny added: “Choose
the one who will not deceive the voters.”
The campaign program boasted that “Navalny has unique long-term
experience successfully combating theft and inefficient spending of budget
money. Only the RosPil project prevented the inefficient spending of more
than 50 billion rubles of budget funds”—roughly $1.65 billion.
Plus, it said: “Navalny knows Moscow’s problems firsthand. He lives in
an ordinary apartment in Maryino, is stuck in traffic with us, his children
going to ordinary schools and kindergartens; the whole family uses an
ordinary district medical clinic.” The program noted his role creating and
directing the Committee to Protect Muscovites combating illegal
construction. “Navalny conducts all his activities public and transparently,
reporting on his every project, every step he takes.” It added, “Navalny
owes nothing to the federal government. He is not bound hand and foot by a
system of undercover arrangements with the current bureaucratic clans.”
The campaign platform was consistent with Navalny’s positions over
many years, and among his priorities it included “reducing illegal
migration, which has negative impact on the labor market, leading to an
increase in crime and social tension.” The trope of the criminal immigrant
was as low as it was predictable and false.
On this basis alone, there could be little doubt that Navalny was a
genuine politician. But Navalny had learned from past criticism and was
also working to adopt mainstream positions that would prove durable. As a
result, his platform on migration also included efforts to protect migrants
from exploitation in the labor market.
Still, it was clear that he had fallen into the Kremlin’s trap. He told
voters that they should choose the candidate who would not deceive them,
and yet the cloud of criminal cases around him raised all sorts of doubts. He
insisted that Moscow was in a miserable situation but in fact, residents of
the Russian capital were genuinely living better than at any other point in
their lives.
The problems Navalny cited were quite real, but in relation to how
Russians had suffered over the decades, they were miniscule. The shelves
of the “hyper” supermarkets like Aushan and Perekrestok were overflowing
with goods from all over the world. Sobyanin had launched a beautification
initiative that was transforming the city’s parks into magical oases. The
city’s arts, entertainment, and restaurant scenes were thriving.
In early July 2013, Navalny delivered an impassioned closing statement
in the Kirovles trial, urging the court first of all to spare his codefendant,
Pyotr Ofitserov, a father of five, who was entangled in the whole mess only
because of his ties to Navalny.
“Our remarkable trial resembling a TV series—and sometimes it looks
like a TV series resembling a trial—is coming to an end,” Navalny said.
“All of us including myself know perfectly well that the main purpose of
this trial was similar to a TV series: to make it so that the federal channels
could mention my name in the news in the context that this is the man who
stole all timber in the Kirov region, that this is that crook. As if this can
change all that I write about the swindlers who really steal billions from all
of us and who seized the power in our country.”
This was the first of the “last word” statements that Navalny would
make in a series of criminal trials in the ensuing years, and a pattern was
being set at the outset. Navalny used the speech to slam the crooks and
thieves who were plundering Russia’s wealth and, in Navalny’s view,
driving the country into despair and geopolitical disrepute. He disregarded
and disrespected this judge and all the future judges as pathetic bit players
in a larger political drama—a saga in which Navalny and his nemesis,
Putin, fundamentally refused to hear each other. Neither man was going to
stop or go away.
“If somebody thinks that having heard the threat of the six-year
imprisonment I would run away abroad or hide somewhere, they are
mistaken,” Navalny said in the drab courtroom in Kirov. “I cannot run away
from myself. I have nothing else but this and I don’t want to do anything
else but to help my country, to work for my compatriots.”
Navalny also denounced the indifference that was pervasive among his
fellow citizens. He had long maintained—and would for years to come—
that Putin enjoyed a core of genuine support, having effectively used
soaring oil and gas prices to raise standards of living. Putin’s officials took
vast bribes, and Putin himself had bribed the country. By all evidence, he
had bought their complacency at a discount, with millions still living in
poverty without indoor plumbing, or a normal, well-paved national highway
system.
“I think that no one of us has the right to neutrality,” Navalny said. “No
one has the right to evade the work aimed at making our world better. We
do not have this right. Because every time someone thinks, ‘Why don’t I
step aside and wait?’ he only helps this disgusting feudal regime which, like
a spider, is sitting in the Kremlin. He helps these 100 families, which are
sucking from all of Russia. He helps them to put the Russian people on the
path of degradation and drinking to death, and to take away all of the
national wealth.”
Navalny warned that he and his supporters would not be deterred—
either by the Kirovles case or by the stiff charges brought against those
arrested at the protest on the day before Putin’s 2012 inauguration. “If
anyone thinks that myself or my colleagues will cease our activity because
of this trial or the Bolotnaya trials or the many other trials going on all
around the country,” he said, “they are gravely mistaken.”
Two weeks later, on July 17, Navalny’s mayoral candidacy was
officially registered, after he accepted forty-two signatures of municipal
deputies gathered by United Russia. The next day, Navalny, his wife, a
phalanx of prominent supporters, and a flock of Moscow-based journalists
were back in Kirov to hear the verdict in the Kirovles trial.
During the hearing, Navalny projected his usual aloofness and disdain
for the proceedings. He spent much of the three-hour proceeding posting
messages and photographs on Twitter, ignoring an order from Blinov to
shut off all cell phones.
As expected, Navalny and Ofitserov were found guilty. The shock was
Blinov’s sentence: five years for Navalny in a penal colony and four years
for Ofitserov. The sentences were shorter than the eight-year maximum, and
less than the six years that the prosecutor requested, but still strikingly
harsh.
For more than thirteen years of Putin’s rule, the Russian authorities had
generally refrained from using blunt force to sideline political challengers.
Instead, they were banned from government-controlled television, co-opted
with jobs or government financing, discredited by the release of
embarrassing material, or hounded by repeat arrests and short
administrative sentences of perhaps fifteen days at a time.
In the drab courthouse, journalists gasped. Ofitserov’s wife burst into
tears. So did Navalny’s press secretary, Anna Veduta. Yulia Navalnaya,
stone-faced, kept her composure. Navalny posted one last message for his
followers: “O.K. Don’t miss me. And most importantly—do not be lazy.”
Navalny hugged his wife. Then, he and Ofitserov were led away in
handcuffs.
Outside the court building, fittingly located on the same street as a
puppet theater, Navalnaya said that her husband would not be intimidated.
“Alexey was as ready for this as one can be,” she said. “If anyone believes
that Alexey’s investigations will cease, that is not the case. The Anti-
corruption Foundation will continue working as before.”
 9

MAYORAL CANDIDATE, STATESMAN

“Is Crimea a bologna sandwich or something, to be passed back and

forth? I don’t think so.”
—Alexey Navalny, Ekho Moskvy Radio, October 15, 2014

Upon news of the verdict and prison sentence, thousands of demonstrators

in Moscow took to the streets, clogging Manezh Square near the Kremlin in
a spontaneous display of fury.
There was also widespread international condemnation.
The White House spokesman, Jay Carney, said the “United States is
deeply disappointed and concerned.” He added: “Navalny’s harsh prison
sentence is the latest example of a disturbing trend of government actions
aimed at suppressing dissent and civil society in Russia.”
But the Kremlin’s script was still unfolding. In Kirov, the public
prosecutor called on Blinov to release Navalny the following day and allow
him to remain free pending his appeal—a move that would keep Navalny
out of prison for more than a month, temporarily neutralizing anger over the
verdict, and allowing him to play his part in the mayoral election scheduled
for September 8.
The next day Navalny was set free, his release requested by the very
same prosecutor who had asked that he be locked up immediately upon his
conviction.
Opposition politicians insisted that the protesters in Moscow the night
before, shouting “Freedom!” and “Navalny!” had forced the Kremlin to
back down. But others speculated that Navalny was just a pawn in a larger
game that was still going precisely according to plan.
The authorities and Navalny said that his campaign for mayor would
proceed. Sobyanin, in a television interview, urged that Navalny be allowed
to stay in the race. “I think it would be wrong to remove any of the
candidates,” Sobyanin said. “We have spent a lot of effort so that
Muscovites had the right to a choice, the maximal choice, and to register,
among others, Navalny’s candidacy. So, I consider it necessary to do
everything so that all registered candidates continue to participate.”
Navalny’s supporters were jubilant, but the celebration was premature.
He had been convicted of a serious crime, which meant that even if he won
the election, he would be barred from serving in public office unless he also
won his appeal. There seemed little chance of that.
Blinov, the trial judge, had proclaimed the contradictory testimony of
the main witness, Opalev, the disgruntled former director of Kirovles, to be
convincing and persuasive, and he had barred the defense from calling most
of its witnesses.
At the court hearing where he was set free, Navalny was offered the
chance to make a statement. He accepted, only to mock the process and
urge the three judges to check if something was wrong with the prosecutor.
“I request that you verify the identity of Prosecutor Sergei Bogdanov,”
Navalny said. “It’s possible that it is not Prosecutor Bogdanov, but his
double. Because it was namely Prosecutor Bogdanov who demanded that I
be arrested in the courtroom.”
One of Navalny’s lawyers, Vadim Kobzev, called his client’s release
“clearly a political decision.” Among Moscow political commentators,
debate raged over whether the whiplash developments reflected Kremlin
incompetence or exquisitely planned strategy.
Outside the courthouse, Navalny acknowledged that the situation was
bizarre. “We understand perfectly that what just happened is a completely
unique phenomenon in Russian jurisprudence,” he said. “Nothing like this
has happened to anyone else.”
And he conceded that his capriciously granted freedom could be
snatched away at any moment. “Even if we have just a couple more months
to fight,” he said, “we will fight.”
Navalny spent the rest of the summer on the campaign trail. In one
campaign newsletter, a headline declared: “He Does Not Lie and He Does
Not Steal.” But many people, including some of Navalny’s opponents,
complained that the mayoral race was fixed and that Navalny was just a tool
of the Kremlin.
“Deception!” the candidate of the Just Russia party, Nikolay Levichev,
declared in a campaign flyer. “Instead of discussion of the different
candidates’ programs they serve up this fixed match between Sobyanin and
Navalny.”
Even as Navalny campaigned in an electoral process devised by the
Kremlin, Russian law enforcement agencies kept hounding him. Following
a complaint by Levichev, Moscow police raided the apartment of a Navalny
supporter and seized campaign materials, allegedly printed in violation of
electoral rules. Meanwhile, prosecutors said they were investigating
Navalny’s campaign for taking illegal donations from foreigners.
On its website, the Navalny campaign offered advice to its volunteers
about how to deal with hecklers and provocateurs: “If a maniac with a
chainsaw grabs the leaflets off you, it’s better to hand them over. We can
easily print more leaflets, but printing a new one of you will be more
difficult.”
Despite the suspicions of a fix, there was a sense of excitement on
Election Night—a rarity in Russia. Navalny lost, as expected. But his
campaign performed far better than predicted. He and his supporters were
convinced that they had managed to deny Sobyanin the 50 percent majority
needed to avoid a runoff. Navalny immediately disputed the results and
demanded a recount.
The results were slow to come in, which only fueled Navalny’s initial
allegations of malfeasance. “We regard what is happening as falsifications,”
he said. “I once again call on both the Kremlin and the Moscow City Hall to
abandon falsifications and go to the second round.”
Several hours later, the election commission announced its final tally:
Sobyanin at 51.37 percent; and Navalny at 27.24 percent, with 100 percent
of precincts reporting.
 The next day, Navalny spoke to supporters in the courtyard outside his
election headquarters and demanded a recount. “We do not recognize these
elections,” he said.
Navalny and Volkov said their exit polling data indicated that Sobyanin
got 46 percent of the vote, and Navalny up to 35 percent. They also alleged
that Sobyanin won significantly more support than average at polling
stations without observers present, and an unusually high percentage among
voters who requested to vote from home because they could not physically
get to the local polling station. Under the law, local election stations were
required to have portable ballot boxes that could be brought to voters who
met the requirements for at-home voting.
“Sobyanin cannot consider himself the mayor of all Muscovites, he
cannot consider himself a legally elected mayor if he does not agree to our
demands and does not agree to a recount,” Navalny said.
Tens of thousands of supporters attended a demonstration on Bolotnaya
Square, which Navalny proclaimed a victory rally. “Every third voter voted
for us—and this is a victory,” Navalny said. Supporters chanted, “We are
the power!” and “Second round!”
“We are not calling for unrest, we want a reasonable solution: a recount
in problem areas,” Volkov said. He insisted that Sobyanin had not crossed
the 50 percent threshold required to avoid a runoff.
The election commission, however, refused to budge. There was little
point in protesting. As September wore on, Navalny thanked his supporters,
claimed victory, and moved on. By early the next month, he was back to
defending himself in the litany of criminal cases—so many, in fact, that he
faced an absurd scheduling conflict in which the Kirov court and a Moscow
court each demanded his appearance on the same day, October 9.
Navalny’s lawyers told the Kirov court that he could not make it; he was
due at a previously scheduled hearing in Moscow. The Moscow court sent a
fax, saying it had agreed to change the date of its hearing. Then, it sent
another fax, rescinding the change.
Navalny, sarcastic as ever, posted: “Of course, I am pleased that I am
such a sought-after criminal that there is direct competition in the courts.
But I would like the shaman who gives instructions to the courts to make up
his mind.”
On October 16, Navalny finally returned to court in Kirov to hear the
outcome of his appeal. Toward the beginning of the proceedings, a judge
asked about the presence of journalists in the courtroom: “Do the parties
have objections to the work of the press?”
Navalny quickly quipped: “In terms of objections, we would like
Channel One, Channel Two, and NTV to cover the case more objectively.”
Outside, on the street, Navalny’s supporters protested on his behalf. In
the courtroom, the trio of appellate judges rejected a request by Navalny’s
lawyers to call the witnesses that had been barred by Blinov during the
original trial.
Navalny, given the chance to make a final statement, noted the
Groundhog Day aspect of the entire exercise. “There is a sad joke on
Twitter, that the decision of the Kirov Regional Court can be appealed in
the proper manner only on Manezh Square,” he said.
Navalny continued: “The ‘last word’ is considered a kind of dramatic
moment in a person’s life,” he said. “But here in the city of Kirov, I am
already saying a third ‘last word.’ There are already so many cases against
me that I will have to say many more last words.”
The judges ruled that they were converting the prison terms of Navalny
and Ofitserov into suspended sentences. The decision set them free, but it
also barred Navalny from holding public office, at least for the length of the
suspended sentence.
“It’s strange to call it ‘victory,’” Navalny wrote later on LiveJournal.
“We’re just so used to the lack of justice that when an innocent person is
put in jail, we feel sad. And when the authorities, frightened, give an
innocent person five years probation, we rejoice and congratulate each
other.” Still, he acknowledged that he was happy not to be going to jail.
“So, I want to say thank you again: this is your merit, of course, and not
mine,” he wrote. He urged his supporters to keep pressing for the release of
the defendants in the Bolotnaya case, who had been arrested during the
protest ahead of Putin’s inauguration.
“If it worked for me, it can work for them,” he wrote. “So, we will find
the right formats of work.”
At the same time, Navalny acknowledged that Bastrykin and Putin had
won this battle, if not the longer fight.
“The most important Kremlin goal that they set for themselves when
starting these criminal cases—to ban me from participating in the elections
—was achieved by them technically,” he wrote. “I can’t run. But
participation in elections is not only ‘being a candidate.’ And I, and those
who are around me, we are engaged in politics to make life better. For your
future and the future of your children.”
Navalny added a warning: “If someone there believes that I will now
shy away from every rally and any activity in fear of an administrative
offense that will turn a suspended sentence into a real one, then this is in
vain.”

In late November 2013, public anger in Ukraine at President Viktor

Yanukovych boiled over, setting off the Maidan Revolution. The 2014
Winter Olympics—in Sochi, Russia—was also fast approaching. Whatever
little tolerance Putin might have had for dissent soon evaporated.
Putin held back until the closing ceremony of the games. Then, he
ordered the invasion of Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that holds near-
mythic status in Russia as a favorite summer holiday destination.
Two days after Yanukovych fled Kyiv for Russia, abandoning his
presidency, Navalny and hundreds of others demonstrated outside a
courthouse in Moscow where defendants in the Bolotnaya case were being
sentenced. Many of those at the court later joined other demonstrators in
Manezh Square. Navalny was among those arrested, and he was accused of
violating his suspended sentence in the Kirovles case. He was put under
house arrest.
As a result, Navalny was confined to his apartment in Moscow; the
revolution on Maidan in Kyiv reached a bloody climax; and then Putin’s
soldiers without insignia, the so-called “polite green men,” seized control of
the Crimean peninsula and Kremlin proxies carried out a referendum
declaring independence from Ukraine.
Navalny was prohibited from using the internet. But he was following
the news and, with his wife posting on LiveJournal on his behalf, Navalny
voiced unequivocal solidarity with the protesters camped out in the
Ukrainian capital, demanding Yanukovych’s ouster.
On February 20, after shooting broke out on Maidan and scores of
protesters were wounded, Navalny urged his followers not to pay attention
to reports on Russian “zombie” television that they were “radicals with
firearms.” The demonstrators, he said, linking to a list of the dead, were
“ordinary people, hard workers.”
Navalny blasted Yanukovych for shooting people to protect his ill-gotten
wealth and wrote that he “should immediately call early elections” and the
Ukrainian parliament, he said, “should start constitutional reform.”
The next day, Navalny expressed hope that one day Russians would rise
up for democracy like the Ukrainians. “The mafia power of Yanukovych
fell precisely because in Kiev there were a sufficient number of people who
were ready to patiently stand on the street in the cold for as long as
necessary,” he wrote. “Without fear of arrests and detentions, they will not
detain everyone. Whether such people will be found in Moscow is a
question that only we ourselves can answer.”
On Saturday, February 22, Yanukovych fled Ukraine, and Putin’s
soldiers quickly arrived in Crimea.
On March 2, 2014,
after the Russian parliament authorized the use of military force in
Ukraine, Vladimir Ashurkov posted a statement on behalf of the central
council of Navalny’s Party of Progress, calling on Putin to put a stop to any
military activity:

In the coming hours or days, our country may begin aggression

against a neighboring state whose people are closest to the Russians
from a historical and cultural point of view. Over the past two
months, the Ukrainian people have come a long way in liberating
themselves from the authoritarian, corrupt system of power that
violates the constitutional rights of citizens, which was personified
by President Yanukovych.
Military aggression will lead to the violation of international
treaties, the destruction of relations with Western countries, and to
the international isolation of the country. The reputation of a reliable
partner in foreign policy will take decades to restore. A significant
deterioration in the economic situation in Russia will inevitably
follow, and the introduction of economic sanctions against the
 aggressor country by the international community will become
probable.

The statement noted that there was no evidence to support Putin’s wild
assertion that Russian-language speakers in Ukraine were under threat. “It’s
not too late to stop this adventure,” the Party of Progress declared. Putin, of
course, did not stop.
He annexed Crimea later that month and fomented a separatist war in
the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. In Russia,
nationalist fervor soared after the illegal annexation. Ilya Ponomarev, the
only member of the State Duma to vote against annexation, ultimately had
to flee the country. “Crimea is ours” became a national rallying cry, even
for young Russian children.
Navalny, from house arrest, said he recognized he had a duty to issue an
opinion, and to comply with terms of his house arrest, he said he would
write it out on paper and have others post it to LiveJournal on his behalf.
Navalny issued an extremely long statement, explaining why Putin
could not accept a successful democracy movement on Russia’s doorstep.
“In Ukraine, there was a popular uprising against the corrupt, thieves’
government,” he wrote. “The core of this uprising was Kyiv and the
western regions of the country, but it was supported (tacitly) by most of the
southeast”—Yanukovych’s base.
“The people have the right to revolt in conditions when other political
methods of struggle have been exhausted,” Navalny continued. To illustrate
his point about corruption, he described how Yanukovych’s son, a dentist by
professional training, had become a billionaire, and one of the wealthiest
people in Ukraine, after his father came to power. “What better illustration
of monstrous corruption?” Navalny asked.
Navalny also noted that Ukraine’s ex–prime minister Mykola Azarov
had railed against Europe but then went to live in Austria where his family
had amassed huge wealth. “What could better illustrate the monstrous
hypocrisy?” he asked. Azarov, like Yanukovych, later sought refuge in
Russia.
Navalny asserted that Putin could not tolerate the images of ordinary
Ukrainians walking through Yanukovych’s abandoned and opulent
residence, with its private zoo and a golden toilet—the type of extravagance
that Navalny’s investigators alleged had been installed for Putin in his own
palaces.
“We all understand that Putin is going to be the president of Russia for
life with the rights and lifestyle of an emperor sovereign,” Navalny wrote.
“An uprising against a fellow thief-emperor in a neighboring country is a
threat, a challenge, and a terrible example.
“Therefore, Putin is simply personally taking revenge on the entire
Ukrainian people and the entire country of Ukraine. This is not crazy
revenge; he believes that it is very rational—to go to any lengths, to show
that such revolutions end badly. Like, ‘There will be a collapse of the
country.’ So he arranges the collapse of the country.”
In his post, Navalny repeated his long-held belief that there was a
fraternal bond among Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians—a view that
he acknowledged was controversial and would lead to accusations of ethno-
chauvinism.
“You can call me a Slavic chauvinist, but I believe that Russia’s most
important strategic advantage in this raging world is not oil, gas, or nuclear
bombs, but friendly (and even fraternal, whatever) relations between
Russians and Ukrainians and Belarusians,” he wrote. He described spending
a week in jail with a Belarusian, an Azerbaijani, and an Uzbek—all “good
guys”—but Navalny said that with a Belarusian or Ukrainian, he felt instant
“unity and common cultural codes.”
“I don’t know how to call it more precisely,” Navalny wrote. “No one
forms any fraternities and does not oppose other nationalities, it’s just
immediately clear: They are the same as me. I understand that this is a
rather politically incorrect idea.” He tried to explain, noting that he felt no
common bond with someone from Uzbekistan, under age forty. “They don’t
know Russian. We read different books, we watched different films, we
have different proverbs, we have different values and guidelines.
“I do not want to say that there is a contradiction, and the inhabitants of
Central Asia are our enemies, but still, with Ukraine and Belarus, we are
like brothers in different apartments, and not just neighbors,” he wrote. “It
is clear that there are nuances, different territories, and so on.
“Arriving in Kyiv, do you feel like you are in a foreign city? No. Me
neither,” Navalny wrote. “That’s the point.”
 His larger point, however, was that violence between Russians and
Ukrainians was unthinkable to him. “If Russians and Ukrainians are told to
shoot at each other, then they should stand back-to-back at the border and
shoot at those who give such orders,” he wrote.
Navalny’s views were complicated and, in some aspects, contradictory,
and definitely controversial. He voiced deep unhappiness that Crimea had
ever become part of Ukraine.
“Crimea was handed over by the illegal voluntaristic decision of the
tyrant Khrushchev,” he wrote.
But he also said that he did not support any effort to absorb Crimea into
Russia—a point that many Ukrainians who now disdain Navalny often
forget or choose to overlook. “International agreements and Russia’s word
must be worth something,” Navalny wrote, citing the Budapest
Memorandum of 1994, under which Russia committed to respect and
protect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in exchange for Kyiv surrendering
its nuclear arsenal. Also, he added: “Changing the borders of states in
Europe using troops and force is unacceptable.”
But Navalny’s post, published four days before the staged independence
referendum in Crimea, contained some grave underestimations of Putin—an
early indication that he did not fully grasp how far his nemesis was willing
to go.
Navalny predicted, wrongly, that Putin would balk at fully absorbing
Crimea into Russia. “We will see the classic Putin story, ‘two steps forward
one step back’… That’s what he always does.”
Not this time. Putin moved to annex Crimea on March 18, and days later
the Russian Parliament ratified the move.
Consequently, Russia came under a barrage of international sanctions.
International flights to Crimea were cut off. Yet public opinion in Russia
was overwhelmingly in favor of what Putin had done.
That March, Navalny was feeling the pressure of house arrest. Ahead of
his son Zakhar’s birthday, he submitted a petition asking for permission to
take him to the movies to see the animated film Rio 2. “Zakhar is six years
old today,” Navalny wrote on LiveJournal. “He also demands that I take
him to Rio, which, in modern times, is not a trivial task.”
Navalny also had the Anti-corruption Foundation embark on a new
project: sociological research and opinion polling. This included an effort to
measure Russian public opinion about what was happening in Crimea, and
the picture was complicated. More than 55 percent believed the rights of
Russian speakers were being infringed upon in Crimea, a main Kremlin
propaganda point. More than 85 percent said they wanted Crimea to
become part of Russia. But nearly 75 percent also said they viewed war
between Russia and Ukraine as “impossible.”
In the following months, Navalny would continue to calibrate his public
statements on the Crimea question, trying to balance his criticism of Putin’s
illegal annexation and Navalny’s personal view, shared by a majority of
Russians, that Crimea was rightfully Russian.
During a radio interview in October 2014, Navalny offered a blunt and
realistic but controversial update to his position, which set off a storm
among Ukrainians.
“Is Crimea ours?” the editor in chief of Ekho Moskvy, Alexey
Venediktov, asked Navalny on-air.
“Crimea belongs to the people who live in Crimea,” Navalny replied.
“You will not escape answering. Is Crimea ours? Is Crimea Russian?”
“Crimea, of course, now de facto belongs to Russia,” Navalny said. “I
believe that, despite the fact that Crimea was seized in blatant violation of
all international norms, nevertheless, the reality is that Crimea is now part
of the Russian Federation. And let’s not fool ourselves. And I strongly
advise Ukrainians not to deceive themselves either. It will remain part of
Russia and will never become part of Ukraine in the foreseeable future.”
Venediktov pressed the point, asking if Navalny would return Crimea to
Ukraine should he ever become president of Russia.
“Is Crimea a bologna sandwich, or something, to be passed back and
forth? I don’t think so,” Navalny said.
He was then pressed on whether Russians and Ukrainians were the same
people. “My opinion, as a person who spent a lot of time in Ukraine, with
relatives, etc.,” he said. “I don’t see any difference between Russians and
Ukrainians at all.” Navalny understood, though, that his position would not
sit well with everyone: “I think that such a point of view will cause some
kind of monstrous indignation in Ukraine,” he said.
Two months later, Navalny was back in court, this time in Moscow, where
he and his brother, Oleg, faced a decision in the bizarre Yves Rocher fraud
and embezzlement case.
The verdict, of course, was guilty. But in a dastardly move, the judge
suspended Alexey Navalny’s sentence while condemning Oleg Navalny to a
real sentence of three and a half years in a prison colony.
Navalny, enraged, practically choked on his words as he berated the
young judge, Yelena Korobchenko. “Aren’t you ashamed of what you are
doing?” he cried out, tears in his eyes. “Why are you jailing him? What a
dirty trick. I don’t even understand. All of this is being done to punish me
more?”
Oleg Navalny hugged his wife and kissed his mother, before being led
away. Navalny had turned his back to the crowd, his arms folded and head
slightly bowed. Yulia Navalnaya put an arm around her husband’s neck and
pressed her lips to his cheek. In more than a decade as an oppositionist, it
was by far the most difficult moment Navalny had faced.
Outside the courthouse, his rage continued to burn. He called for a huge
street demonstration. “This government does not deserve to exist,” he told a
crush of journalists and television cameras. “It should be destroyed. I am
calling on everybody today to take to the streets until this government,
which is simply tormenting innocent people, is removed.”
Infuriated, Navalny left the courthouse and began walking through the
streets toward Manezh Square, near the Kremlin, where the unauthorized
rally was to take place, but he never made it. The police grabbed him
outside the Ritz Carlton Hotel on Tverskaya Street, which he had just joked
that his supporters should take by storm because it would be more
comfortable than where he would probably spend the night.
The police, however, did not arrest him. They merely brought him home
to his apartment and posted five officers outside his door to enforce his
house arrest. Meanwhile, riot police dispersed the crowd in Manezh Square,
which had dwindled to about 1,500.
In an interview with Novaya Gazeta before the verdict, Oleg Navalny,
who was married with two young children, said he understood that the
government might extract revenge on him for his brother’s political activity.
“We absolutely knew that sooner or later this all would touch us,” Oleg
Navalny said. “It is easy to influence a person through his family.”
 The jailing of his brother had a profound impact on Navalny, fueling his
desire to see Putin’s lackeys brought to justice. In his conversation with
Michnik, the Polish historian, Navalny described his fury and hunger for
accountability. “I can forgive my own persecutors,” Navalny said, “but I’ve
no moral right to forgive those who persecuted others. Lots of people are
now behind bars as a result of their support for me, and I can’t very well tell
them, ‘Sorry, but I’ve forgiven your persecutors.’”
 10

PRISONER

“Our friendly concentration camp—that’s what I call my new home.”

—Alexey Navalny, Prison Colony No. 2, March 2021

Pobeda Airlines Flight 936 was descending toward Moscow’s Vnukovo

Airport, located on the southwest edge of the Russian capital.
The airport, built in the late 1930s by prisoners from Likovlag, a forced
labor camp that was part of the brutal Soviet gulag system, has a special
VIP hall, and is frequently used by President Vladimir Putin and other top
officials. It is also favored by oligarchs and corporate titans with private
jets.
Pobeda, whose name means “victory” in Russian, serves the opposite
end of the air travel market—as the ultra-low-cost subsidiary of Aeroflot.
But on this particular Sunday, January 17, 2021, Flight 936, a Boeing 737-
8AL originating at Berlin’s Brandenburg airport, effectively had been
converted into a VIP charter of a different sort: carrying Navalny, his wife,
Yulia, and dozens of Russian and international journalists who were alerted
in advance so they could travel along to document Navalny’s triumphant,
brave, and arguably reckless return home.
Navalny, once again, was in his favorite spot: as the protagonist of yet
another episode of high drama in his fight against the evil forces of Putin.
Brought back, literally, from the dead after surviving the poisoning attack,
here he was in Seat 13A, his wife next to him and his lawyer, Olga
Mikhailova, across the aisle.
With Covid rules still in place, Navalny wore a black face mask; Yulia
wore purple. Stewardesses crouched down to take selfies with him.
Reporters from news organizations around the world leaned over the seats,
shouting questions at him, taking photos and videos with their cell phones,
begging him for a word or two. Many posed variations of the same
throwaway queries: How does it feel to be going home? Aren’t you afraid?
The plane, flying east, descended steadily for an on-time arrival. But as
its altitude crossed just below seven thousand feet, the aircraft suddenly
banked southeast, away from the airport, and then hooked north, according
to the Flightradar24 tracking site, which was live-tweeting Navalny’s
return.
As Navalny’s plane made these strange turns, other nearby airliners,
including flights from UTAir and Rossiya Airlines, were ordered to circle in
a holding pattern.
The pilot of Flight 936 came on the PA system to announce that
Vnukovo was closed for “technical reasons” because an “aircraft rolled out
of the runway,” according to a reporter for the Russian newspaper
Kommersant who was on board. Passengers snickered. The pilot said there
would be a roughly thirty-minute delay. Reassuringly, he added: “We have
enough fuel to wait.” One passenger grumbled that Navalny was “the
technical problem.”
On the ground, Pobeda Airlines issued an absurd statement saying a
brush from a snowblower was stuck on the tarmac at the intersection of two
runways. “Due to the closure of Vnukovo for technical reasons, three of our
flights left for alternate airfields,” the airline said.
Meanwhile, mayhem was unfolding inside the Vnukovo arrivals hall,
where hundreds of Navalny supporters had answered his public entreaty to
greet him in person. Helmeted riot police brandishing truncheons—some in
all black, others in blue-gray camouflage—began clearing the building,
dragging people out into the minus-six-degree cold, arresting them, and
hustling them onto waiting police wagons.
Russian media had speculated about whether Putin’s government would
be brazen enough to detain Navalny instantly at the airport—a slightly
curious question, given the Kremlin had been brazen enough to send a team
of assassins to kill him with a chemical weapon.
Commentators wrestled with the question of whether Navalny should
risk returning to Russia. Some concluded that if he failed to do so, his
political career would be finished. He would be relegated to near
irrelevance, as an exiled dissident, they said, like the former chess
champion Garry Kasparov, or the ex-oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who
served ten years in a Russian prison before being pardoned by Putin in
2013.
Others said that the government would be making a huge mistake by
jailing Navalny, instantly transforming him into a Mandela-like figure—a
prisoner of conscience who would haunt the Kremlin until his release. The
smarter play, they suggested, would be to prolong the cat-and-mouse game
that had been played for years, leaving him free but under constant threat of
arrest, closely monitored but not martyred.
Now, with the plane circling above Moscow, some observers wondered
if Navalny would be allowed to land at all and, if so, where. On
Flightradar24, as many as 530,000 people were following along at one
point, as Navalny’s flight was rerouted to Sheremetyevo airport north of the
city.
Earlier on the flight, Navalny, with his trademark carefree confidence,
had insisted to reporters that he had no fear and did not expect to be
detained. Now, he apologized to those around him for the inconvenience.
In fact, there was no doubt Navalny would be arrested. The only
question was when.
Top Russian prison officials had openly declared their intention to
charge him with parole violations, and to convert his suspended sentence in
the Yves Rocher case to a real prison term. They had even scheduled a court
hearing in anticipation of his return—effectively pleading publicly with
Navalny not to come back. All this presented Navalny with what Putin
himself later called a clear, “conscious” choice: exile or jail.
For Navalny, exile was never a consideration. Asked during his first
interview after emerging from the coma about his plans, Navalny told Yury
Dud: “Recover—I don’t know to what percent, no one knows—and after,
I’ll return.”
When Dud pressed him about what might make him choose not to return
to Russia, Navalny’s face darkened, and he stared back as if the question
was an insult. “I exclude this possibility,” he replied.
People close to him were not surprised.
“You have to keep in mind that when we talk about Navalny, we’re
talking about two people,” Albats said. “Politician Navalny is not one
person, it’s two—Alexey and Yulia Navalny, that’s number one. And if
even Yulia failed to convince him not to go—and she tried—nobody can.”
Once Navalnaya understood that there would be no stopping Navalny’s
return, she instead pleaded with him merely to wait until he was fully
recovered.
“He was still in the hospital, they hadn’t discharged him yet, but he
already understood everything,” Navalnaya explained to Dud in the
interview. “I told him, ‘I know you want to go back as soon as possible, but
I am really asking you: Recover fully and then you go back because we—I
don’t know what’s waiting for us in Russia, and if you go not fully treated,
it’s possible that we won’t be able to save you a second time.’”
“I am not afraid to go back to Russia,” Yulia insisted at another point.
“We are absolutely going back to Russia.”
That Navalnaya could seriously contemplate needing to save her
husband from another assassination attempt underscored that he would
never choose exile. But it also revealed that Navalny, his wife, and his inner
circle had not accepted the new reality.
Navalny, in interviews, had described his inability to fully comprehend
the extent to which his life was at imminent risk. At the same time, he noted
that there was virtually no point in obsessing over precautions given the
multitude of methods Putin’s assassins could employ.
Masha Gessen, of the New Yorker, who has known Navalny for years,
spoke to him shortly after he emerged from his coma and noted that
interviewers had long asked Navalny why he hadn’t been killed yet. “So,
you have this understanding that you should have been killed by now, and
you have people you know who nearly died from being poisoned,” Gessen
said. “And yet somehow your mind tells you, ‘this won’t happen to me,
because’—why?”
“Because you think rationally,” Navalny replied. “There are a million
ways to isolate someone or kill them, but this is like some trashy thriller. I
find myself living inside of a James Bond movie.” He added, “It’s like if
someone asked me if I believe that I’m at risk for being beheaded with a
lightsaber. I’d say no, even if I saw that someone I know is missing an arm
and it looks to have been lasered off.”
But on the cusp of their return to Russia, the Navalnys were in denial
about a broader point: Putin was done fooling with him. The cat-and-mouse
days of suspended sentences, probation, home arrests, and the like were
finished. Putin wanted him out of the picture. And since he refused to die,
and refused to stay outside of Russia, he would go to prison.

Navalny, arguably Putin’s harshest critic, had once again underestimated the
Russian dictator. Putin, as would become clear, was already preparing to go
to war against Ukraine. And if he was willing to start a land war in Europe,
to kill thousands of innocent Ukrainian civilians, why would he hesitate to
eliminate one irksome Russian citizen?
“Who needs him anyway?” Putin famously declared. If the Russian
security services wanted to kill Navalny, he said, they could have done so.
Navalny, however, was still driven by the outrage and indignation that
had fueled his entire public life—even after weeks in a medical coma, even
after realizing that the state-sponsored assassins had tried to kill him
multiple times and, on purpose or by accident, had poisoned his wife. He
was also still driven by his political ambitions.
“I have every right to go back,” Navalny said on the flight from Berlin,
where he and Yulia tried unsuccessfully amid the commotion to watch an
episode of Rick and Morty. “I don’t expect anything to happen. Nothing
will occur.”
Moments after landing at Sheremetyevo, Navalny was confronted at
passport control by a phalanx of police officers. Even then, Navalny did not
flinch.
“This is my home. I’m back. People keep asking me if I’m afraid. I am
not afraid,” he said. “Because I know that I’m right. I know that the
criminal cases against me are fabricated.”
He added: “I don’t just have the truth on my side, I have the courts on
my side. They are threatening to arrest me in connection with a case on
which the European Court has ruled in my favor. So, I’m not afraid of
anything, and you shouldn’t be afraid of anything, either.”
In some ways, Navalny had been preparing for years for this moment.
For a political opposition figure in Russia, imprisonment is inevitable. And
for Navalny, as always, there was simply no backing down from the fight.
Yet, on some level, he still seemed to believe that he would be the
exception—that his millions of followers, his honesty, his humor, his core
patriotic Russianness, would somehow save him from his inescapable fate.
That Putin would not dare jail someone visited in his hospital room by
German chancellor Angela Merkel. That he had carved out a protected
space in Russian political life.
But he had not yet managed to change Russia.
If Navalny thought that remaining outside the country would spell
instant irrelevance, pinning the dreaded label of “dissident” to his shirt
instead of “opposition politician,” which he preferred, he had miscalculated
his own ability to control the situation.
Navalny had worried that he would be irrelevant living in Berlin or
Warsaw or Vilnius. Instead, he would struggle to remain relevant while
locked inside an eight-by-ten-foot isolation cell. There was also the
challenge of staying alive in Russia’s brutal prison system. His access to
food and to medical care were now controlled by the same murderous
regime that poisoned him.
Whatever he thought, whatever he envisioned, Navalny’s return home
completed his transformation from gadfly, anti-corruption crusader, activist,
and aspiring politician to dissident—and political prisoner.

After the police led Navalny away in the airport, the director of Amnesty
International’s Moscow office, Natalia Zviagina, quickly issued a statement
declaring him a “prisoner of conscience” and demanding his freedom as
well as the release of the numerous supporters who were arrested as
Navalny arrived back from Germany.
“Alexey Navalny has been deprived of his liberty for his peaceful
political activism and exercising free speech,” Zviagina’s statement said.
“Amnesty International considers him a prisoner of conscience and calls for
his immediate and unconditional release.”
She also demanded a full investigation of the poisoning attack and an
end to the Kremlin’s crusade against Navalny and his team. “The Russian
authorities must end their campaign of intimidation and political
persecution against their critics, including the staff members and supporters
of Navalny’s Anti-corruption Foundation,” Zviagina said.
The judicial proceedings against Navalny were swift and
characteristically absurd, beginning with the makeshift courtroom set up at
a police station where he was being held in Khimki, near Sheremetyevo
airport, the day after he was detained. A lawyer for the Anti-corruption
Foundation, Vyacheslav Gimadi, had tried to see Navalny at the jail, but
was told that he was sleeping. An update only came the following morning.
Apparently, the authorities did not want to create an opportunity for
Navalny’s supporters to gather outside a courthouse, so they assembled a
courtroom in the police station.
“Madness,” Volkov tweeted at 12:35 p.m. on Monday, January 18.
“They are afraid to take Alexey to the court. They are bringing the court to
Alexey.”
Mikhailova, Navalny’s lawyer, received a written notification one
minute before the hearing was scheduled to begin. As always, the Navalny
media machine was in high gear. Kira Yarmysh, the press secretary, posted
a video to YouTube of Navalny, wearing a blue hoodie, inside the makeshift
courtroom ridiculing the hastily improvised proceeding.
“It’s impossible what’s going on here,” Navalny said, sitting in the
“hearing room” and looking directly into the camera as he spoke. He
accused the authorities of tearing up Russia’s code of criminal procedure,
adding: “It’s just lawlessness to the highest degree.”
The authorities gave conflicting explanations. At one point they said the
hearing was held in the police station to allow media coverage because
journalists would have been barred from a courthouse due to Covid
restrictions. Later, they said the problem was that Navalny did not have a
recent negative Covid test and could not be brought to the court.
Only the state-owned Russia-24 television channel, and Life News, the
pro-Kremlin news portal, were given access to cover the hearing in person.
Legal experts later noted that the location of the hearing was not in itself
any violation of judicial rules, but that other aspects of the process broke
Russian law. Given that Navalny’s case was based on an alleged parole
violation, he should not have been put under immediate detention. The
outcome, in any event, was that Navalny was ordered jailed for thirty days,
with another hearing set for February 2.
World leaders began calling for Navalny to be set free. Outgoing U.S.
secretary of state Mike Pompeo issued a statement demanding Navalny’s
“immediate and unconditional release.” Jake Sullivan, days away from
becoming the national security adviser for President Joe Biden, tweeted:
“The Kremlin’s attacks on Mr. Navalny are not just a violation of human
rights, but an affront to the Russian people who want their voices heard.”
On January 23, and again on January 31, tens of thousands of Russians
demonstrated in cities across the country to protest Navalny’s arrest.
Thousands were arrested.
The Russian watchdog group OVD-Info estimated that on January 23
“in 125 cities, the police detained at least 4,033 people” and it said that “in
many cities, the police use unreasonable and excessive violence while
making arrests.”
In all, more than one hundred thousand people protested Navalny’s
arrest. It was the largest outpouring in Russia in years but, on the whole, in
a country of 130 million people, it was not much. The heavy-handed
response demonstrated Putin’s diminished tolerance. OVD-Info called it
“the most large-scale and flagrant attack on the right to freedom of
assembly in the entire modern history of Russia.”
In 2013, after the verdict and sentencing in the Kirovles case, the
Kremlin quickly approved Navalny’s release pending his appeal in response
to the protests in Manezh Square in Moscow. But the nationwide protests in
2021 had no noticeable impact. Though thousands were arrested in more
than one hundred cities, Putin paid no mind.
Navalny was transferred to the Matrosskaya Tishina, or “Sailor’s
Silence,” prison in Moscow—also known as Pretrial Detention Facility No.
1—beginning his awful odyssey in the penal system.
In another video, just before being led away, Navalny reiterated his
version of F.D.R.’s famous line that “the only thing we have to fear is fear
itself.”
“Well, that’s it, if you believe the court documents, I’m going to
Matrosskaya Tishina,” Navalny said. “And I want to tell everyone one
thing: You don’t need to be afraid of anything, you can only be afraid of
your own fear. Bye.”
Navalny arrived at the detention center at about 8 p.m. Alexey
Melnikov, the secretary of the Moscow Public Monitoring Commission,
which oversees prison conditions, visited Navalny there, and reported that
his cell had a refrigerator, an electric kettle, a television, and hot water, and
that he would need to spend two weeks in quarantine.
Fifteen days later, following the February 2 court hearing—where
Navalny proclaimed Putin to be “Vladimir, the Poisoner of Underpants”—
the judge, Natalya Repnikova, found Navalny guilty of the parole violations
and converted his suspended sentence in the Yves Rocher case to a real
term. With the sentence adjusted for time spent under house arrest, he faced
just over two and a half years.
Navalny’s lawyers appealed. But as he waited for the case to play out,
the Kremlin tightened the screws a bit further. At the detention center,
Navalny was labeled as a prisoner “prone to escape.” Navalny mocked the
absurd designation, noting the obvious point that he had insisted on
returning to Russia from Germany, despite the obvious risk of arrest.
However ridiculous, the designation would follow him through the prison
system and justify harsher treatment.
On February 20, a court in Moscow scheduled a Navalny double billing;
his appeal of the parole violation decision and the trial in another trumped-
up case in which he was accused of slandering an elderly military veteran.
Navalny lost both, of course. In the slander case, he was fined 850,000
rubles, or about $11,000. Losing the appeal, however, meant that Russia’s
penitentiary service could now transfer Navalny to a prison colony, which
would make his cell with the electric kettle and television seem like a
luxury hotel room.
Navalny was transferred out of that Moscow detention center on
February 25, the first of several moves that for days would leave his
lawyers and family without any knowledge of his whereabouts. In what
would become a pattern, one of Navalny’s lawyers, Vadim Kobzev, tried to
visit him at Matrosskaya Tishina only to be told that no such prisoner was
there.
Russian media had already been reporting that Navalny would end up at
IK-2, or Penal Colony No. 2 in the Vladimir Region, which was infamous
for being one of the toughest camps in the Russian prison system. It was
known for “breaking” prisoners through rigid enforcement of oppressive
rules—no talking, hands always behind the back, and so on.
 News accounts focused, in particular, on the high-security barracks, or
Sector of Enhanced Control A, which when abbreviated in Russian spells
out the word suka: “bitch.”
The news site Znak.com interviewed Dmitry Demushkin, a right-wing
nationalist political activist who had been imprisoned at IK-2 after being
convicted of “inciting hatred” for posting a photograph of a nationalist
march. Demushkin described losing nearly half his body weight—dropping
to 130 pounds from 230—while in the high-security barracks, where he said
guards would often awaken inmates once an hour at night on the pretense of
making sure they had not escaped.
Once again, Navalny’s team moved to strike at the Russian authorities as
quickly as possible, releasing a twenty-minute video detailing how IK-2
operates, including beatings of prisoners instantly upon their arrival, and the
denial of medical care.
The video included interviews with Demushkin, who described how
inmates live in open barracks, are kept on their feet most of the day, and
how he was harassed with incessant commands—repeatedly ordered to state
his name, the crimes he was convicted of, and the start and end dates of his
sentence.
Dmitry Nizovtsev, a Navalny associate from the Far East city of
Khabarovsk who anchored the video, accused the Kremlin of trying to
banish Navalny into silence.
“Now, according to Putin’s plan, there should be silence,” Nizovtsev
said. “Two and a half years of long-awaited silence. It seems to Putin that
his main dream is finally coming true—Navalny disappears. No one knows
where he is and what he is, no one follows what Navalny does and says.
But, of course, we will not please Vladimir Vladimirovich like that.”
In the video, Nizovtsev cited a report that Navalny had been spared a
customary beating upon his arrival at IK-2, which was consistent with the
accounts of Demushkin and of Konstantin Kotov, another political activist
who had been jailed at IK-2 for participating in small, peaceful, but
nonauthorized pickets in Moscow. They said that prisoners jailed for
political activism were typically spared beatings to avoid public scandal.
There was one small issue with the video: Navalny had not yet reached
IK-2. Six days after his disappearance from Moscow, he surfaced at a
different pretrial detention center in the town of Kolchugino, in Vladimir
Region, about one hundred miles northeast of Moscow, where he was
placed in a “quarantine cell” with two other prisoners.
Kobzev, his lawyer, said on Twitter that the defense team had been able
to see him: “He is in complete isolation, he does not receive letters.” He
added, “There is nothing in the cell except a television. There is no
refrigerator, not even a kettle.” The lawyers explained that Navalny had
been placed there temporarily because some paperwork in the slander case
had not been completed.
Intent on showing that his spirits had not dampened, Navalny’s team
posted for him on Instagram describing how he was toasting crackers with
his two cellmates—Dmitry, charged with theft; and Sergei, charged with
fraud. “Everything is fine with me,” Navalny wrote, while adding that he
had not yet been able to access the prison library. “Believe it or not we toast
crackers, and I never thought it could be so exciting.
“Hope you are doing well and don’t get bored,” Navalny wrote. With a
wink emoji, he added: “Don’t forget to eat healthy.”
Navalny’s team also sent an update on his whereabouts from his Twitter
account, posting: “He is in a great mood and says hello to everyone.”
Exaggerated or not, that great mood would not last long.
On March 12, Navalny disappeared again. His lawyers went looking for
him in Kolchugino. They were stalled there until 2 p.m. and then told he
had left—but given no information about his destination. From there, they
went to Pokrov, about an hour’s drive south, where officials at IK-2 said
they had no information about him and that the prison was closing early that
day, at 3:30 p.m.
On Navalny’s Twitter account, his team posted: “Where Alexey is, is
still unknown.” However, Tass, the state-run news agency, reported that he
had been transferred to IK-2. In fact, he had arrived there the day before, on
March 11.
Three days later, it was confirmed in an Instagram post, showing
Navalny, unsmiling, and with his hair newly shaved off. Again, he tried to
start out light. “Three things never cease to amaze me,” he wrote: “The
starry sky above us, the categorical imperative within us, and the amazing
feeling when you run your hand over your freshly shaved head.
“Hello everyone,” he proclaimed, “from the Sector of Enhanced Control
A.”
 As the inmates who served time in IK-2 had predicted, Navalny was not
beaten. But as they had also predicted, he was the target of other types of
brutality, including his fellow inmates being told not to talk to him or
acknowledge his existence.
IK-2 made a quick impression on Navalny. “I have to admit that the
Russian prison system managed to surprise me,” he wrote in comments that
his team posted on Instagram. “I did not imagine that it was possible to set
up a real concentration camp 100 kilometers from Moscow.
“I have not yet seen any violence or even a hint of it, but from the tense
posture of the convicts, standing at attention and afraid to turn their heads,”
he continued. “I easily believe the numerous stories that here, in IK-2
‘Pokrov,’ quite recently people were beaten half to death with wooden
hammers. Now the methods have changed.”
He described a prison community hauntingly in order—“regime, charter,
daily routine—the literal execution of endless rules”—a suffocating,
Orwellian discipline—“there are video cameras everywhere, they are
watching everyone, and at the slightest violation, they make a report.”
Navalny also described torture through sleep deprivation, though he
tried to make light of it. “At night, every hour I wake from the fact that a
man in a peacoat is standing next to my bed,” he wrote, describing his
treatment as a prisoner deemed at high risk of escape. “He records me on
camera, and says, ‘Two thirty a.m., Convict Navalny… In place.’
“Our friendly concentration camp,” he wrote in the post. “That’s what I
call my new home.”
But within days, there was no more joking. Navalny began complaining
of severe back and leg pain, of torture by sleep deprivation, and of being
denied access to medical care.
On Thursday, March 25, Navalny’s team published two statements in
which he appealed to leaders of the Federal Penitentiary Service and to
Russia’s general prosecutor for proper medical treatment.
Two days earlier, his supporters had launched a new website,
free.navalny.com, and announced their plans to campaign for his freedom.
“Today we are launching our big political campaign,” they wrote. “We
demand the release of Alexey Navalny. We see that all Putin’s hatred was
personified in one person. Because of Navalny, Russia is ready to withdraw
from the Council of Europe, terminate agreements, and leave international
organizations.” They added, “Navalny is the Putin regime’s biggest
problem. And if we really want to fight this regime effectively, then now
there must be one demand: freedom for Alexey Navalny.”
Navalny had been warned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch who
spent ten years behind bars, about the danger of becoming seriously ill in a
Russian prison colony. “You will die,” Khodorkovsky had said. Navalny, of
course, also knew how Magnitsky had died.
In his public letters, Navalny complained of acute back and leg pain, for
which he said he was given only ibuprofen, and he demanded that he be
treated by his own doctor. Navalny’s lawyers echoed the demand, and Yulia
Navalnaya appealed to Putin to release her husband. But there would be no
second chance to go abroad for treatment.
“We will not respond to this appeal,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov
told journalists on his daily conference call. “Now that this citizen is a
convict and a prisoner of a colony, the recipient for such appeals is the
Federal Penitentiary Service.”
Was Navalny really in poor health? Not even five months before his
arrest at the airport, of course, he had been poisoned with a chemical
weapon, spent weeks in a coma and months in recovery, learning to walk
again, his hands shaking. He was also now living in an open barracks with
other prisoners; tuberculosis was common in Russian prisons, and Covid
was still rampant in Russia.
At the same time, Navalny and his team were clearly leveraging
everything they could to break the prison regime that was designed to break
him, and to try to guarantee his safety by convincing the world that his life
was in constant peril.
Prison officials said that on March 24, the day before Navalny’s health
complaints were published, he had been taken for an MRI scan. Navalny
acknowledged this, griping that he had no idea where they had taken him
for the scan or what, if anything, it had shown.
The authorities later said the scans revealed two herniated disks and a
bulging disk in his back, confirming that his back pain and the
accompanying numbness he described in his legs were real.
In any case, Navalny’s ability to generate international media attention
meant his complaints could not be ignored. A regional official of the
Federal Penitentiary Service issued a statement saying, “Convict A.
Navalny is being provided with all the necessary medical assistance in
accordance with his current medical recommendations.”
The penitentiary service also denied that Navalny was being tortured
with sleep deprivation, insisting that the hourly security checks did not
interrupt convicts’ rest.
Vladimir Grigoryan, deputy head of the Public Monitoring Commission
in Vladimir, flat-out accused Navalny of lying.
“Navalny is faking,” Grigoryan told TV Rain, the independent television
station. “So don’t worry about him.” Another member of the commission,
Yuri Belokrylin, told the channel, “I don’t trust Navalny,” and added, “I
have a very negative attitude towards him.”
Navalny punched back, issuing a statement through Kobzev, his lawyer,
calling the commission in Vladimir “a bunch of crooks and liars who serve
the administration of concentration camps, worsening the situation of
prisoners.”
On March 28, a group of doctors sent an open letter, ultimately signed
by more than five hundred physicians, to the head of the Federal
Penitentiary Service warning of “serious consequences including
irreversible, complete or partial loss of lower limb functions” and
demanding that officials “immediately provide medical assistance” for
Navalny. They urged that he also be evaluated by doctors who treated him
in Germany and wrote that denying Navalny adequate pain relief “can be
considered… direct torture.”
Three days later, on March 31, Navalny raised the stakes, declaring that
he was beginning a hunger strike, and generating worldwide headlines.
“I have the right to call a doctor and get medicine,” Navalny’s team
posted on Instagram on his behalf. “Neither one nor the other is given to
me, stupidly. The pain in my back moved to my leg. Parts of the right, and
now the left leg lost sensation. Jokes are jokes, but it’s already annoying.”
Navalny complained again of “torture” by sleep deprivation. “Well,
what to do,” he asked in the post. “I went on a hunger strike demanding that
the law be fulfilled and that a visiting doctor be allowed to see me. So, I’m
lying hungry, but so far with two legs.”
Navalny’s initial success in continuing his battle with Putin from prison
became clear the next day, when Maria Butina, a Putin-aligned member of
parliament and personality on the pro-Kremlin, propagandist RT television
channel, showed up unexpectedly at the prison colony in Pokrov. She
ambushed Navalny with cameras rolling, as he lay on his bed reading a
book.
Butina, who once worked as an assistant to a Russian senator, Aleksandr
Torshin, gained worldwide infamy after she was arrested and convicted in
the United States of acting as an unregistered agent of the Russian
government. An investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee
concluded that she had tried to set up secret back-channel communications
between Moscow and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Butina had used a romantic relationship with a U.S. Republican political
operative named Paul Erickson to build ties to the leadership of the
National Rifle Association, looking to use it as a way to improve relations
between Russia and the Republican Party. In Russia, she founded a gun-
rights organization called Right to Bear Arms.
Butina also had a romantic relationship with Patrick Byrne, the
Overstock.com CEO, conspiracy theorist, and Trump supporter. She was
arrested in July 2018, pleaded guilty later that year, and served five months
at a federal prison in Tallahassee. Then, she was deported to Russia, where
she was greeted as a national hero and given plum jobs.
In addition to her election to the Duma and her job at RT, Butina was
appointed as a member of the Public Commission, an agency that functions
as a sort of ombudsman body, which gave her authority to visit prisons,
including IK-2 in Vladimir.
That Thursday, she arrived at the prison wearing what appeared to be a
designer plaid overcoat, along with plastic gloves. Initially, she wore a
common light blue face mask, adhering to the prison’s Covid rules, but
shortly after confronting Navalny, she removed the mask as RT’s cameras
recorded their tense exchange.
In many ways, it was a remarkable showdown, which revealed how
petty and nasty the feud between the Kremlin and Navalny had become. But
it also demonstrated why, for many Russian viewers, the entire situation felt
scripted and theatrical. For some of those viewers, it undoubtedly
succeeded in obscuring the fact that Navalny was a prisoner of conscience,
unjustly deprived of his liberty because of his political views.
“Hello,” Butina says, greeting Navalny formally. “I’m Maria. How do
you feel?”
 As she arrived, striding into the open barracks, Navalny was lying on a
bottom bunk at the far end of the room, which RT on its website later
characterized as a “place of honor” near the windows. He was apparently
alone in the room, reading a book.
Butina approached the bed, but Navalny asked her to back away. “Let
me try to get up,” he said. “It’s uncomfortable for me to talk to you lying
down.” As he walked toward the center of the room, Navalny gestured at
damage to the floor, and Butina, glowering at him, immediately pounced.
“You, Alexey Anatolyevich, were not in an American prison,” she
snaps. “It’s a perfect floor.”
From there, a twenty-minute exchange of vitriol unfolded. Guards and
other prison officials stood by as Butina scolded Navalny for refusing to
fulfill work duties and accused him of forcing other prisoners to do his
share, while Navalny derided Butina as a liar and Kremlin shill who was
trying to put on a show.
The episode, which RT cut into several edited videos to avoid showing
Navalny’s face, got widespread attention on Russian state-controlled
television, and it was ugly.
Butina clearly was on the attack, her jaw clenched, eyes narrowed in
sarcastic fury. She gestured aggressively at the eggshell-blue walls and the
surrounding room with mostly empty metal bunk beds, with her hands still
in the plastic gloves as she accused Navalny of exaggerating about poor
conditions and dismissed his allegations of torture.
She compared the colony to a summer camp for Pioneers, the Russian
equivalent of the Boy or Girl Scouts. “Is this a torture correctional facility?
Are you out of your mind? Have you traveled around the Russian regions,”
she said. “This is better than in a hotel in the village of Kosikha in the Altai
Territory. I grew up there.”
Navalny pointed out that he had been to Butina’s native Altai Territory.
He was splashed in the face with green dye in Barnaul, its capital, in 2017.
Butina claimed that she was visiting the prison colony in her official
capacity as a member of the Public Commission, and later said that she was
outraged by Navalny’s description of the commission in Vladimir as
useless. “I was obliged to stand up for my colleagues,” she said in an
interview with the news site Gazeta.ru.
Her assertion of professional solidarity seemed more than a stretch.
Butina’s ability to assert, on firsthand authority, that inmates in the United
States suffered worse conditions—“I was in prison,” she carped at Navalny
—made the clash a classic set piece of Kremlin propaganda and
whataboutism.
Her report for RT included interviews with other prisoners who said that
Navalny refused to participate in the work regimen, or to clean the barracks.
And she also interviewed the cashier of the prison shop who said that
Navalny had come in once and bought chocolate and canned fish. That
Navalny was able to stand up, walk around, and speak to her, was enough to
cast doubt on his claims of being in precarious health.
Sergey Markov, the television commentator and former Putin adviser,
posting on Facebook, wrote: “In general, it is clear that the story about
Navalny, who is almost tortured and who does not receive medical
assistance, apparently is a big lie.”
In some of her own commentary afterward, Butina accused Navalny of
being a “faker” and insisted that he showed no sign of being tortured with
sleep deprivation. “Be a man,” she said, addressing Navalny. “Serve your
sentence.”
But Butina also faced a torrent of criticism over her claim that the prison
colony offered better conditions than hotels in Altai Territory. Some noted
scathingly that there was not even a hotel in the village of Kosikha that she
had referenced. Others said that her comment amounted to a less than
ringing endorsement of the tourism industry, or of living conditions in the
region where she grew up and that she was supposed to represent in
parliament.
“So, what could be better than the confession of a propagandist that in
Russia people live worse than in prison,” the journalist, Anastasia
Kirilenko, wrote.
Navalny’s team, posting on his behalf in self-defense, said that instead
of sending his requested doctor, prison officials had sent a “wretched
propagandist” and that he had lost nearly eighteen pounds since arriving in
prison, even before starting his hunger strike, dropping to about 183 pounds
from 205. The post said Navalny had called Butina “a parasite and servant
of thieves.”
Lyubov Sobol, one of Navalny’s top lieutenants, said that if Butina liked
the prison colony so much, she should stay there. Yevgenia Albats was
harsher, tweeting that Butina should “be pitied” for how she had been used
and abandoned by the Russian government while in the United States but
also noting how “she returned and once again collects for a life in
prostitution.”
Maria Pevchikh, furious, unleashed a thirty-tweet thread, describing
Butina as an “extremely mediocre and untalented” person.
Pevchikh posted images of certificates showing Butina had participated
in a knitting class and a life-skills course while in prison in the United
States. She also posted a letter written by an Orthodox priest on Butina’s
behalf, assuring a federal judge that all she wanted was to return to her
family in Russia “and start a Christian family.”
She noted the priest’s reference to visiting Butina numerous times while
she was in prison to hear her confessions. “I remind you,” she tweeted,
“that not even a doctor is allowed to see Navalny, who is barely walking
and starving.”
“I could write as many more tweets about the adventures of the fools
Butina and Torshin in the USA, but laughing at their absurdity distracts
from the main thing,” Pevchikh wrote, summing up. “Butina is an
unprincipled corrupt creature who was sent to IK-2 to make fun of
Navalny.”
“Bedding,” she added, using Russian slang for a trashy whore.
Days after Butina’s visit, Navalny was sent to the prison infirmary—not
for his back pain or the loss of sensation in his legs—but with a cough and
high fever. Tests for tuberculosis and Covid came back negative, and he
returned to his barracks after three days.
The Navalny team continued to drive the narrative. Within two weeks,
there were headlines around the world saying that Navalny, still on a hunger
strike, was near death. “Navalny’s Health in Prison Is Dire, His Doctors
Say,” the New York Times proclaimed.
One of those doctors, Yaroslav Ashikhmin, had issued a statement
saying Navalny could die “at any moment.” Ashikhmin cited blood tests
showing abnormally high levels of potassium and warned that Navalny
could suffer cardiac or kidney failure.
Yulia Navalnaya told journalists that her husband had lost another
fifteen pounds. Another doctor, Alexander Polupan, posted Navalny’s blood
test results on Facebook, and wrote: “This absolutely indicates
hospitalization. If treatment doesn’t start, he’ll will die in the next few
days.”
The penitentiary service announced that Navalny would be transferred to
a hospital in a nearby prison, and that he had agreed to “vitamin therapy.”
But Anastasia Vasilyeva, the head of the Doctors’ Alliance trade union and
one of Nvalny’s personal physicians, said it was unsuitable. “This is
absolutely not a hospital where they can diagnose and treat his problems,”
she wrote.
Navalny’s supporters called for nationwide protests two days later, timed
to coincide with a major speech by Putin to the Federal Assembly, Russia’s
upper chamber of parliament.
After the initial protests following Navalny’s detention in January, his
team had promised to hold another day of mass demonstrations to demand
his freedom once five hundred thousand people registered to attend. Now,
still forty thousand short of that goal, they said that Navalny’s health had
forced them to move faster. The timing, to coincide with Putin’s speech,
however, was not accidental.
In fact, Navalny’s team had reason to believe that if they waited much
longer, they would miss their last opportunity to organize street protests.
On April 19, Russian prosecutors went to court and initiated a legal
process to declare the Anti-corruption Foundation an extremist
organization, equating it with Al Qaeda, and potentially putting all its
employees and associates at risk of arrest and prosecution. Borrowing the
subtitle of Navalny’s LiveJournal blog, the demonstrations were billed as
“the last battle between good and neutrality.”
On the morning of April 21, the authorities moved preemptively and
arrested two of Navalny’s top lieutenants, lawyer Lyubov Sobol and press
secretary Kira Yarmysh. Wishful news accounts tried to portray the protests
as impactful, noting that demonstrations got underway in the Russian Far
East, even before Putin started his speech.
Turnout, however, was lackluster. In Moscow, an estimated ten thousand
people gathered near Manezh Square and on streets near the Kremlin.
Extensive police barricades, however, prevented demonstrators from
coalescing, and there were relatively few arrests. Across the country, fewer
than two thousand people were detained at protests. All in all, the
opposition seemed deflated and defeated, with its leader jailed and
reportedly on the brink of death, and his organization facing potential
extinction.
A decision had to be made. Navalny’s choice was literally to live to fight
another day.
In a series of highly choreographed statements, five of Navalny’s
personal physicians issued a public plea urging him to end his hunger strike,
which was now into its fourth week. In their statements, the doctors claimed
partial victory—“thanks to the huge support of world and public opinion”—
and announced that Navalny had been taken to a civilian hospital in
Vladimir, where he was evaluated. They said he had undergone a procedure
called electroneuromyography, which checks for potential nerve damage,
and also had consultations with a neurosurgeon, a nephrologist, and a
neurologist.
“All medical reports and examination results were submitted to us today
for our opinion through lawyers and relatives,” the doctors said. Warning
that Navalny was at risk of dying, they added, “We understand that if the
hunger strike continues even for a minimal time, unfortunately, we will
soon have no one to treat.”
Navalny, playing his part, issued a statement, carried forward by his
lawyers and posted on social media, saying that he had agreed to follow his
doctors’ advice, based on their political diagnosis of victory.
“Doctors whom I fully trust made a statement that we have achieved
enough for me to stop my fast,” Navalny said in his statement, which was
posted on Instagram.
And, just to add a dash of heroism to his self-preserving decision,
Navalny described being moved to tears when his lawyers informed him
that some supporters had gone on hunger strikes in solidarity. “Friends, my
heart is full of love and gratitude for you, but I don’t want anyone
physically suffering because of me,” Navalny said.
Volkov also declared victory, claiming the protests had secured
Navalny’s treatment.
“What can be achieved by rallies?” Navalny’s top adviser tweeted. “As
soon as the rally was announced, Alexey was taken for a multidisciplinary
examination to a civilian hospital in Vladimir, and a large number of tests
were carried out. As soon as the rally took place. As soon as the rally took
place—today, all of a sudden, we were given all the survey materials.”
 When exactly Navalny went to the civilian hospital in Vladimir, or if he
ever did, is unclear. The Federal Penitentiary Service—which on April 19
had announced his transfer to a prison hospital in a different camp, IK-3—
did not issue any statement about taking him to a civilian hospital. And it’s
not clear when Navalny’s lawyers or his wife would have been able to
obtain medical records.
Within a week, Navalny appeared in a Moscow courtroom via video link
for hearings related to his appeal of the slander case. He wore his blue
prison garb and appeared gaunt, with his head shaved.
In his closing statement, Navalny was emotional but rambling. He railed
against Putin, calling him a “naked, thieving king” who “doesn’t give a
damn about the country.” He alleged that Russia’s oil and gas wealth had
been stolen from its people.
Navalny also blasted the effort to label the Anti-corruption Foundation
as extremist, noting that he had investigated Moscow’s chief prosecutor and
linked him to luxury properties abroad. “This prosecutor is a civil servant
here, stealing millions and investing abroad,” Navalny said. “In a secret
process, he is trying to recognize as extremists and ‘foreign agents’ me and
people like me—patriots of the country who are trying to protect the
country from you traitors.”
The judge, Nataliya Kurysheva, tried to cut him off, but Navalny,
characteristically, barreled over her. “You know everything I say is true,” he
snapped. “And I am very, very kind to you, given the fact that I consider
you all traitors and the occupying power.”
Wrapping up, he added, “Your government is quite successful, because
for twenty years you managed to rob our people living in this country,
deprive them of their future and take out their wealth. But it will end sooner
or later.” Judge Kurysheva, of course, denied his appeal.
It was a day of multiple defeats, as Volkov announced that there was no
choice but to shut Navalny’s network of regional offices. Six months later,
Russia banned the “Smart voting” web site and Apple and Google removed
the app from their download stores.
With his appeals denied, and the Kremlin refusing to flinch, Navalny’s saga
was entering a new and difficult phase, one that would test his ability to
remain relevant, and the ability of his team to sustain public attention on his
situation, while also operating almost entirely from exile.
But it was also a phase that would give Navalny time to reflect on his
own political views and goals, on the future of Russia, and on the world. To
open this chapter, Navalny returned to his core roots, as an anti-corruption
crusader.
In August 2021, just before the first anniversary of his poisoning attack,
Navalny published an op-ed in the Guardian, Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, and Le Monde, calling on world leaders to address the scourge of
corruption.
Navalny opened the piece with his trademark irony, crediting corruption
with helping him survive the assassination attempt. “When a country’s
senior management is preoccupied with protection rackets and extortion
from businesses, the quality of covert operations inevitably suffers,”
Navalny wrote. “A group of FSB agents applied the nerve agent to my
underwear just as shoddily as they incompetently dogged my footsteps for
three and a half years.”
But Navalny then turned to a serious treatment of the role of public
corruption in some of modern history’s worst geopolitical debacles, making
credible arguments that the failure of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan
was rooted in public corruption, and that Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution—
and Putin’s backlash against it—had its origins in the corrupt regime of
former president Viktor Yanukovych.
Navalny proposed five steps for addressing major state-sanctioned
corruption.
He called for establishing a special formal designation of “countries that
encourage corruption”—so that measures could be taken against a group of
states, not just individual governments. Second would be “enforced
transparency” so that any and all business dealings with countries deemed
corrupt would have to be open to public scrutiny.

You work for a state-owned company in a country at high risk of

corruption and want to buy a villa on the French Riviera? Fine, go
 ahead, but you should know that all the information about the deal
will be publicly available. You want to have dealings with an official
in Minsk or the aunt of a Russian governor? No problem, but you
will have to publish the entire paper trail of the transaction, and will
no longer be able to conceal the bribe you pay through that “regional
representative” or “local partner.”

Third, Navalny said that superwealthy individuals who have benefited

from corruption, notably Russian oligarchs connected to Putin, must be put
under sanction. Fourth, he called for aggressive prosecution under existing
laws such as the Federal Corrupt Practices Act in the U.S. and the Bribery
Act in the UK. And fifth, he demanded creation of an international body or
commission to crack down on former public officials enriching themselves.
“Legalized bribery is flourishing,” Navalny wrote, “often in the form of
board memberships at state-owned companies.”
Stepping up his use of international media, Navalny agreed to a written
question-and-answer interview with Andrew E. Kramer of the New York
Times, sending out fifty-four pages of handwritten responses to the
journalist’s questions.
In the exchange, Navalny described the difficulties of his life in the
penal colony, including being forced to watch state-controlled Russian
television for many hours each day.
Navalny expressed confidence that Putin and his system could be
defeated if only free and fair elections were permitted.
“I answer firmly and without a drop of doubt: Yes. If we could
participate in elections, even without money or information resources, we
would defeat Putin’s party, United Russia,” he wrote. “Our program is
better, and we have a vision for the future of Russia while Putin does not.”
Navalny insisted that Russia’s core nature was democratic, a view not
commonly shared by many Russians who readily acknowledge a historic,
national preference for strongman rulers.
“Putin is not eternal, physically or politically,” Navalny wrote to
Kramer. “What is important is this: The Putin regime is an historical
accident, not an inevitability. It was the choice of the corrupt Yeltsin family.
Sooner or later, this mistake will be fixed and Russia will move on to a
democratic, European path of development. Simply because that is what the
people want.”
Navalny, of course, used part of the exchange to bash Putin. “We clearly
have to deal with a person who has lost his mind, Putin. A pathological liar
with megalomania and persecutory delusion,” he wrote.
Navalny also repeated his long-standing complaint that Western
sanctions often harm too many regular Russian citizens, and are overly
focused on midlevel government officials while allowing the wealthiest
Putin-connected oligarchs to splash money around the West with impunity.
“For now, all sanctions were tailored to avoid almost all significant
participants in Putin’s gangster gang,” he wrote “Do you want evidence?
Name one real evildoer who suffered. The airplanes, the yachts, the billions
in Western banks—everything is in its place.”
But even as Navalny appeared to be adjusting to his imprisonment, the
Kremlin stepped up its pressure campaign, arresting more of his associates,
and initiating new legal cases against Navalny.
Navalny responded with trademark sarcasm.
“That moment when you ask the visiting lawyers: ‘Well, how are things
outside?’” he posted on Instagram in late September 2021. “And they: ‘Yes,
nothing; everything is the same.’ And then after a pause: ‘Ah, here. A new
case has been opened against you! Creation of an extremist community!
That’s up to 10 years!’”
In all, Navalny noted then, he had four new cases pending, with
potential sentences totaling twenty-three years. “They can, of course, come
up with something else, but all the same, the maximum term for the totality
of sentences is no more than 30 years,” he wrote, adding a winking emoji.
“So don’t worry, I’ll be released no later than the spring of 2051.”
Some of Navalny’s supporters hoped that he would be rewarded for his
bravery in returning to Russia with the Nobel Peace Prize. Instead, the
committee gave the honor to Dmitry Muratov, the longtime editor of
Novaya Gazeta, an independent Russian newspaper, and Maria Ressa, a
journalist from the Philippines. Since Novaya Gazeta’s founding in 1993,
six of the newspaper’s journalists have been murdered because of their
work.
Some of Navalny’s allies were furious, believing Muratov had made too
many accommodations to survive in the Putinist system. Navalny, however,
congratulated him and seized the opportunity to speak out about the
importance of a free press.
On Oct. 20, the European Parliament announced that Navalny had won
the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.
Though the award pegged Navalny as a dissident, he nonetheless
expressed gratitude.
Addressing the Parliament and its members, he wrote: “I want to say
(and I will take the courage to say this not only on my own behalf but also
on behalf of many others): many thanks for creating this prize in general
and for naming it after my great compatriot.
“I dedicate my prize to all kinds of anti-corruption fighters around the
world,” Navalny wrote, “from journalists to lawyers, from officials (there
are some, yes) and deputies to those who take to the streets to support this
fight. I wish them perseverance and courage even in the scariest of
moments.”

As 2021 drew to a close, the world was fixated on Russia’s menacing

military buildup on the Ukrainian border.
Navalny, who was learning about these events primarily by being forced
to watch Russian state-controlled television, noticed the rising drumbeat of
hostility toward NATO and the West.
“The TV set in our barrack hysterically fights NATO all day long,”
Navalny’s team tweeted on his behalf. “On every channel, they talk about
NATO threats. Putin himself laments that NATO is at our doorstep and we
have nowhere to retreat.”
On many levels, the developments seemed absolutely mad—but for
Navalny they were also maddening. He had warned about the West’s
coddling of Putin and Putin’s oligarch cronies for years. The response, as
his daughter had told the European Parliament the previous week, amounted
to a bunch of platitudes and repeated pleas for pragmatism.
Navalny’s frustrations were clearly building, and his tweet thread wove
the news developments into a scathing indictment not just of Putin, but of
the Putin-connected, often UK-based oligarch Roman Abramovich, and of
the European Union and the United States for hypocritically maintaining
business ties and other dealings with Russia’s elite.
Abramovich, who owned the storied British soccer team, Chelsea FC,
was reputed to be one of “Putin’s wallets”—known for opening his own
checkbook to cover the costs of pet projects of the Russian leader. For
years, Abramovich denied these allegations and even sued journalists who
wrote about his ties to the Kremlin. But in 2023, Greg Miller of the
Washington Post reported how a foundation connected to the oligarch paid
for one of Putin’s seemingly most endearing purchases—an apartment in
Tel Aviv given as a gift to Putin’s high school German teacher, who was
living in Israel on a modest pension.
Navalny never had any doubts about the role of Abramovich and other
oligarchs. In his thread, he described how Abramovich had managed to
secure Portuguese citizenship and had also bought himself a new Boeing
787 airplane for $350 million—a nice sale for the American airplane
manufacturer.
Abramovich managed to get citizenship—and an EU passport—through
a program for people who claim Sephardic Jewish ancestry, but Navalny
ignored this. He presumed instead that Abramovich had bribed his way to a
new nationality, though the situation was not nearly so simple, and
investigations so far have found no evidence of bribery.
“He finally managed to find a country where you can give some bribes
and make some semi-official and official payments to end up in the E.U.
and NATO—on the other side of Putin’s front line, so to speak,” Navalny
wrote. He described how Abramovich made billions off the privatization of
Russian enterprises and from buy-back deals.
“Well, there you go,” he wrote. “‘Putin’s wallet’ flies on an expensive
plane to a NATO country. How brave of him. And everyone is happy. Putin
and Abramovich steal from the budget and invest money in the West. The
West scares itself with Putin’s attack on Ukraine but gives citizenship to his
trusted oligarch. Portuguese officials carry suitcases with money. The U.S.
economy received $350 million. TV presenters praise Putin for his fight
against NATO while foaming at the mouth. A perfect cycle of hypocrisy
and corruption.”
Investigations are still ongoing into how Abramovich became a
Portuguese citizen, but the rabbis in Portugal and Russia who supported his
application have denied any wrongdoing. And Portuguese officials have
complained that Navalny’s characterization of their country as corrupt was
inaccurate and unfair. Abramovich, meanwhile, had also become a citizen
of Israel, proving that Portugal was not the only U.S. ally willing to roll out
a welcome mat for the Putin-connected business titan and his fortune.
Navalny’s larger point, that Western nations remained all too happy to
grant citizenship or sell airplanes to a Putin ally, was still valid. But he had
reached beyond the facts. His lack of access to independent information
was starting to take a toll.
Within two months, Putin proved to be more evil than even Navalny had
ever warned, rolling tanks into Ukraine and unleashing a full-scale land war
in Europe in the twenty-first century.
Navalny’s I-told-you-so’s piled up in abundance. The Russian military
proved to be far weaker than anyone expected—hollowed out by years of
corruption that left troops ill-equipped. The Kremlin launched an even more
draconian crackdown on free speech, arresting not only political opposition
figures but also ordinary citizens merely for speaking out in favor of peace.
And Prigozhin, the billionaire who Navalny’s team had targeted for
allegedly poisoning school lunches, took on a central role in the war,
deploying his Wagner mercenary group to fight in Ukraine.
While Navalny sat in prison, Prigozhin, who had served nearly a decade
in jail for robbery and other crimes, began visiting prison colonies to recruit
convicts to fight in Ukraine in exchange for being granted a pardon by
Putin.
With the world’s attention diverted, and a country of 40 million people
under attack, Navalny found it harder to generate interest in his own
predicament.
In March 2022, he was convicted in another case—this time trumped-up
fraud charges—and sentenced to an additional nine years in prison. The
judge ordered that sentence to be served in a maximum-security prison, and
in June 2022, Navalny was transferred to IK-6, a penal colony in the town
of Melekhovo, still in Vladimir Region, but two hours farther east.
In IK-6, his lawyers allege, he has been repeatedly placed in a
punishment cell. Though prison regulations limit such brutal solitary
confinement to fifteen days at a time, Navalny’s team has said that prison
officials pile on allegations of misconduct, so that as soon as he is released
from the punishment cell, another reason can be cited to send him back.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine presented Navalny and his team
with an extraordinary opportunity to leverage global sentiment against
Putin. Suddenly, much of the world was coming around to a position that
Navalny had articulated for years. As U.S. president Joe Biden put it,
during a speech in Warsaw on March 26, 2022: “For God’s sake, this man
cannot remain in power.”
But the invasion also vastly increased the challenge that Navalny’s
family and his team face in trying to sustain public awareness about his
continuing incarceration, and about the abuses that he is suffering in prison.
The Putin regime’s repression of political opponents, even the alleged
poisoning attempts, now paled in comparison to the war crimes that Russian
soldiers were accused of in Bucha and elsewhere in Ukraine.
In a bid to position Navalny as a prominent critic of the invasion, he and
his team turned to the question, suddenly of intense interest in capitals
worldwide, of what a postwar Russia might look like.
From a legal and political standpoint, this was far more difficult, and
potentially perilous, than it might seem.
Tough new laws prohibited any criticism of the Russian military or the
war, so any antiwar statement by Navalny would risk new criminal
prosecutions that could add years to his sentence.
Politically, war inevitably spurs national unity and a public demand for
loyal support, if not for the goals of the conflict then at least for the soldiers
who were sent to fight. Despite signs of public discomfort over Putin’s
September 2022 military mobilization campaign—which prompted
hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men to flee the country—in public
opinion polls, a majority of Russians still profess to support the war.
By speaking out against the war, which the Kremlin calls “a special
military operation,” Navalny risks seeming unpatriotic, and putting himself
at political odds with the Russian public that he still hopes might vote for
him some day.
On top of this, Navalny’s compatriots in the Russian political opposition
are either in prison like he is, or no longer in Russia. And the people most
likely to support his political outlook have fled the country in large
numbers, perhaps never to return.
Despite these risks and obstacles, Navalny and his team had no choice
but to try to capture some of the global public attention focused on Russia
and the war.
So, in a 2,135-word essay published in the Washington Post, Navalny set
out to answer a question: “What does a desirable and realistic end to the
criminal war unleashed by Vladimir Putin against Ukraine look like?”
In the article, Navalny argued that Western powers should strive not
only for Ukraine to emerge victorious in defending its sovereign territory,
but they should also commit to making sure that Navalny and the Russian
opposition emerge victorious in their war against Putin.
“The issue of postwar Russia should become the central issue—and not
just one element among others—of those who are striving for peace,”
Navalny wrote. “No long-term goals can be achieved without a plan to
ensure that the source of the problems stops creating them. Russia must
cease to be an instigator of aggression and instability. That is possible, and
that is what should be seen as a strategic victory in this war.”
The central point of his essay, if there was a central point, seemed to be
that to achieve regional peace and stability, Russia must become a
parliamentary republic with constitutional changes to limit the authority of
the overly strong presidency.
That central point, however, was at times difficult to discern. The article
rambled from one theme to another, trying unsuccessfully in the end to
avoid numerous pitfalls. A pro-Russian argument would fall on deaf ears in
the West; an anti-Russian argument would alienate his countrymen at home.
Navalny seemed to be trying to make French president Emmanuel Macron’s
point that Russia should be defeated but not humiliated.
Navalny, in the op-ed, tried to reassure readers of his core belief that
most Russian people are good, while also criticizing the West for
misreading and mishandling the situation in Ukraine and, at the same time,
pummeling Putin and “all Russians with imperial views.”
He also issued a stern warning that simply defeating Russia militarily
will not bring about the needed political change or the desired lasting
stability:

It is easy to predict that even in the case of a painful military defeat,

Putin will still declare that he lost not to Ukraine but to the
 “collective West and NATO,” whose aggression was unleashed to
destroy Russia.
And then, resorting to his usual postmodern repertoire of national
symbols—from icons to red flags, from Dostoevsky to ballet—he
will vow to create an army so strong and weapons of such
unprecedented power that the West will rue the day it defied us, and
the honor of our great ancestors will be avenged.
And then we will see a fresh cycle of hybrid warfare and
provocations, eventually escalating into new wars.

In the op-ed, Navalny insisted that many Russians were concerned about
the terrible violence being inflected on Ukrainians.

Yes, propaganda and brainwashing have an effect. Yet we can say

with certainty that the majority of residents of major cities such as
Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as young voters, are critical of
the war and imperial hysteria. The horror of the suffering of
Ukrainians and the brutal killing of innocents resonate in the souls of
these voters.

But this was no “Letter from Birmingham Jail” trying to rally the
Russian people to take morally just action. It was a polemic against Putin.
And it was a plea for the West to help Russia rewind the clock to the days
shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and let the country choose a
different form of government without a strong executive presidency.
“Russia needs a parliamentary republic,” Navalny wrote. “That is the
only way to stop the endless cycle of imperial authoritarianism.”
He then went on to make arguments that seemed to support his thesis but
were historically inaccurate, claiming that Russia’s neighbors that chose the
parliamentary republic model (the Baltic states, according to Navalny) were
thriving while those that chose a presidential-parliamentary model
(Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia) “have faced persistent instability and
made little progress.”
“Those that chose strong presidential power (Russia, Belarus and the
Central Asian republics),” he wrote, “have succumbed to rigid
authoritarianism, most of them permanently engaged in military conflicts
with their neighbors, daydreaming about their own little empires.”
In fact, these countries took a variety of paths. Lithuania has a
semipresidential system, not quite the same as its neighbors Latvia and
Estonia. Moldova, meanwhile, has a parliamentary system that gives little
real authority to its president.
A bigger flaw in Navalny’s argument was his presumption that the West
could exert much influence over Russia’s future political choices. And his
assertion that “parliamentary democracy is also a rational and desirable
choice for many of the political factions around Putin” seemed far more
aspirational than grounded in any reality.
Parliamentary democracy, Navalny wrote, “gives them an opportunity to
maintain influence and fight for power while insuring that they are not
destroyed by a more aggressive group.” In fact, with Western sanctions
biting, many members of the Russian elite seem fairly eager for Russia to
return to being a relatively stable oligarchic kleptocracy—accused of public
corruption and a rigged judicial system at home, but not atrocities abroad.
Despite these flaws, Navalny’s op-ed included some important insights
about Russia’s war in Ukraine for Western readers trying to make sense of
how it all came about:

First, jealousy of Ukraine and its possible successes is an innate

feature of post-Soviet power in Russia; it was also characteristic of
the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin. But since the beginning of
Putin’s rule, and especially after the Orange Revolution that began in
2004, hatred of Ukraine’s European choice, and the desire to turn it
into a failed state, have become a lasting obsession not only for Putin
but also for all politicians of his generation.

By unlucky timing that neither his lawyers nor Washington Post opinion
editors could have predicted, Navalny’s column was published on
September 30, 2022—the day that Putin delivered a speech declaring his
intention to annex four Ukrainian regions—Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson,
and Zaporizhzhia.
Navalny’s op-ed got little traction and generated little public discussion.
With Putin brazenly planning to redraw the boundaries of Europe, there was
little bandwidth to consider the future of Russia.
On January 17, 2023—the second anniversary of his imprisonment—
Navalny’s supporters announced a new campaign to free him. But there was
no reason to hope or believe it would succeed.
Navalny’s daughter, Dasha, appeared in a video, urging his release, but
now casting him as a victim of his antiwar statements rather than his
decades of anti-Putin statements.
“Of course, the real reason my dad is in a punishment cell are his
antiwar statements. And now they’re tormenting him and depriving him of
any connection with the outside world in order to silence him,” Navalnaya
said. “But my father is not afraid and will not stop fighting. My dad is an
innocent man and deserves to be free.”
Navalny also sent a message noting the anniversary.
“It has been exactly two years since I returned to Russia,” he wrote. “I
have spent these two years in prison. When you write a post like this, you
have to ask yourself: How many more of such anniversary posts will you
have to write?
“Life and the events around us prompt the answer: However many it
may take,” he wrote. “Our miserable, exhausted Motherland needs to be
saved. It has been pillaged, wounded, dragged into an aggressive war, and
turned into a prison run by the most unscrupulous and deceitful
scoundrels.”
Saving the Motherland, however, would have to wait. For the moment,
Navalny’s main task was to survive—at least until the end of the war—and
to hope Putin wouldn’t win.
 11

LAST WORD

“This is the main thing in politics—people who just stand together

somewhere.”
—Alexey Navalny, Barnaul, March 20, 2017

Alexey Navalny and Leonid Volkov, his friend and chief campaign
strategist, were walking along Molodezhnaya Street in the Siberian city of
Barnaul. Piles of dirty snow lined the street. It was March 20, 2017, and
they were in town to open a local headquarters in preparation for Navalny’s
plan to challenge Putin in the 2018 Russian presidential race.
Navalny, in a blue parka with a scarf tied tightly around his neck,
stopped to shake hands with an older woman wearing a yellow beret and a
man in a cap with a long white beard. Despite the subfreezing temperature,
Navalny did not wear a hat. Suddenly, as Navalny turned away from the
couple, a man in a black jacket threw bright green liquid into Navalny’s
face, bolted down the street, and jumped into a waiting Nissan Qashqai.
Other Russian political opposition figures had also faced these so-called
zelyonka, or “brilliant green dye,” attacks. The liquid, a common antiseptic,
stains the skin and can take a week or more to remove. The assailant
escaped, and Volkov later reported that the getaway car had been traced to
the parking lot of the regional administration building.
Navalny quickly posted a video joking about his new likeness to Shrek,
or the Hulk, or the main character in the movie The Mask.
“Maybe in the Kremlin they think I won’t make video addresses with a
green face,” he said. “But I will definitely make them because more people
will watch them now and it definitely won’t stop me.
“My stylish green face perfectly fits the interiors of our headquarters,”
he said, standing in front of a colorfully painted wall. “I’m a bit worried
about my teeth: they are green too! I hope they will be white again.”
Navalny and his team had rented out conference space in a nearby hotel
to meet with local volunteers, but the hotel’s owners balked and refused to
allow the gathering. They said the space could not accommodate so many
people—but political pressure, fear, or both seemed more logical
explanations.
Instead, Navalny met his supporters outside in the cold. With his face
and hands now a faded—but more evenly spread—shade of green, he
climbed onto a pile of snow to address the crowd. “This government has
pumped out $3 trillion worth of oil and gas and still cannot give people
$500 [monthly] salaries,” he said. “Nothing good will ever come of it.”
Raising Russia’s minimum wage was among the planks of Navalny’s
presidential platform, and he spoke about the challenges Russian citizens
faced to meet the rising cost of home utilities. He also urged his followers
to not be afraid to gather for rallies.
“This is the main thing in politics—people who just stand together
somewhere,” Navalny said, his ears stained a slightly darker green than the
rest of his face. “This is the biggest threat that exists for this government.”
Navalny and Volkov were aggressively building their campaign
operation, even though Navalny was technically barred from running
because of his criminal conviction in the Kirovles case.
His original conviction had been ruled invalid by the European Court of
Human Rights, in Strasbourg, France, which found that he and his friend
and colleague, Pyotr Ofitserov, were tried and baselessly found guilty of
doing nothing more than conducting normal business transactions. The
Russian Supreme Court vacated the verdict and sent the case back to Kirov
for retrial. In February 2017, the Kirov court convicted Navalny again,
without any new evidence, and imposed another five-year suspended
sentence. Navalny’s victory in Strasbourg merely gave Russia another
chance to bar him from running for office.
Navalny leveraged the zelyonka attack for publicity and fund-raising,
turning his new look into a popular internet meme. Supporters posted
photos of themselves with green faces.
 Back in Moscow, six days after the incident in Barnaul, Navalny was
arrested as he arrived at a protest rally that he had called to fan the fury
against Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. It was less than a month after the
release of the video Don’t Call Him Dimon, which showed extravagant
properties allegedly belonging to Medvedev. Thousands turned out in
Moscow and in cities across the country. Hundreds were arrested.
After Navalny was detained, protesters tried to stop the police wagon he
was in from pulling away. “Guys, I’m fine,” he tweeted, urging them to
continue the protest by marching along Tverskaya Street in the center of the
capital. Some protesters arrived with their faces painted green. Others
carried yellow rubber duckies, a nod to the “duck house” shown in the
video at the center of a lake of one of Medvedev’s properties.
In addition to arresting Navalny on-site, police raided the offices of the
Anti-corruption Foundation and detained staffers who were livestreaming
the protest.
A month after the protest, on April 27, Navalny was attacked again with
brilliant green dye, this time near his office in Moscow. Video of the
incident showed a man walking up just as Navalny was about to climb into
a waiting car, throwing the liquid in his face and bolting off in a run.
Navalny was left hunched over, wincing in pain.
Paramedics who responded to the scene wrapped bandages around
Navalny’s head, covering his right eye. He once again posed for a photo
with staffers, but this time Navalny was not in such good humor. He was
hurt. Doctors diagnosed a chemical burn. “It looks comical,” he tweeted.
“But the eye burns like hell.”
In early May, Navalny said he had been advised to have eye surgery at a
specialized clinic abroad. Pro-Kremlin news outlets reported that Navalny
“had been reminded” by the Federal Penitentiary Service that he was not
allowed to travel outside the country because of his suspended criminal
sentences.
Curiously, though, on the same day, Navalny reported that he had
received a call from prison officials telling him that he could come pick up
his passport. Navalny thought it was a prank but, in fact, the passport was
waiting for him.
Navalny’s lawyer, Vadim Kobzev, said Navalny intended to go abroad
for surgery despite the warning that doing so was a violation of the terms of
his suspended sentence. Within days he and his wife, Yulia, were on a plane
to Barcelona. Life News, the Kremlin-connected television station, posted
photos, which it said had been submitted by a “citizen journalist,” of
Navalny sitting in a window seat, wearing a pink T-shirt. Yulia was next to
him. Both were focused on their mobile phones.
Navalny’s need for treatment coincided with Russia’s May holidays,
when the couple often went on vacation. On May 9, while Russia was
celebrating Victory Day—the annual commemoration of the Soviet Union’s
triumph over Nazi Germany—Navalny posted on Instagram from Spain,
announcing that he had eye surgery but that the doctors told him it would
take another several months for his eyesight to recover.
He posted a photo of himself with his right eye looking bloodshot, but
he seemed to be in good spirits. “When I asked them to give me x-ray or
infrared vision in the hospital,” he wrote, “they answered with a categorical
refusal. Another manifestation of Russophobia.” Navalny had still not given
up on the idea of becoming a superhero.
It would be silly and naïve not to recognize the restoration of Navalny’s
passport as part of the Kremlin’s hope that Navalny would finally just give
up and stay abroad. If he returned, the unauthorized trip would provide
another potential legal justification for converting his suspended sentence
into a real one and throwing him in prison.
Moskovsky Komsomolets, quoting anonymous sources, reported that
Navalny had appealed directly to the Kremlin for permission to travel
abroad. And Volkov initially declined to comment when journalists asked
about reports in government-connected news outlets that Navalny had left
the country. Volkov claimed not to know Navalny’s whereabouts, an
assertion that defied credibility.

Such incidents—in which the Russian regime inexplicably seemed to

extend Navalny a bit of kindness after likely being behind an attack on him
in the first place—have fueled conspiracy theories that Navalny is actually
an agent of the Kremlin, part of the never-ending Kabuki theater of Russian
politics.
 In his conversations with Navalny, which were turned into a book,
Michnik, the Polish historian, drew a parallel to efforts in Poland to expose
Lech Wałęsa, the Solidarity leader, as an operative of the Security Service.
“In Russia, you’ll get radicals claiming that ‘Navalny is a Kremlin project!’
either on account of their own stupidity or just to line their own pockets,”
Michnik said.
“Many people do say that,” Navalny replied.
In the same part of their conversation, which took place in 2015,
Navalny noted that he was working to form a political party with Mikhail
Kasyanov, who had served as prime minister under Putin for nearly four
years from May 2000 to February 2004. In 2015, Kasyanov had become a
leader of the People’s Freedom Party, PARNAS, along with Boris Nemtsov,
and there was hope that the still-disparate democratic forces in Russia could
unite in time for elections to the State Duma, which would be held in
September 2016.
At the time of negotiations with Kasyanov, Navalny was the leader of
the Progress Party, a name that he and Volkov settled on after the Russian
election authorities refused to register the People’s Alliance Party because,
they said, another party with the same name already existed. Volkov had
founded the People’s Alliance in 2012, but Navalny initially refrained from
joining, convinced that the authorities would kill the party if he was
formally associated with it.
“People’s Alliance is my party,” Navalny said at a party congress in
December 2012. But he also explained that he would not formally join,
citing the criminal investigations proceeding against him and the lawsuits
that he was entangled in related to his shareholder activism. A year later,
after his bid for mayor of Moscow fell short, Navalny agreed to become the
leader of the People’s Alliance. In February 2014, it became the Progress
Party.
In early 2014, the Kremlin was focused on one of Putin’s most beloved
pet projects—the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi. Its other focus was the
volatile political situation in neighboring Ukraine, where prodemocracy
demonstrators were occupying Maidan Nezalezhnosti—Independence
Square—in the center of Kyiv, the capital. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of
2003–2004 had set off panic in Moscow, and this time it was worse.
Initially, the demonstrations on Maidan were a protest against then-
president Viktor Yanukovych’s decision, under Russian pressure, to not sign
far-reaching political and economic agreements with the European Union.
Yanukovych had promised to sign the accords, and his refusal to do so, at a
European Union meeting in Vilnius in November 2013, left many
Ukrainians feeling utterly betrayed. The protests, however, morphed into an
unstoppable force after the Ukrainian riot police, acting on orders from the
president’s office, savagely beat some of the young demonstrators gathered
on Maidan. That violence prompted thousands of people previously not
motivated to take to the streets in fury.
Navalny, for his part, opened 2014 by releasing an investigation into
cost overruns and corruption related to the Sochi Olympics, which was
costing Russia more than $45 billion. He and his team created an interactive
website, sochi.fbk.info, laying out the vast sums of taxpayer money that
were being poured into projects that would never generate sufficient return
on investment. The site also described how state-controlled corporations,
including Gazprom and Russian Railways, had been forced to take on huge
projects related to the Olympics that would almost certainly result in losses
to taxpayers and shareholders.
Oligarchs had also been pressed into service, but many were overseeing
projects using money loaned by the government-owned Vnesheconombank.
“All major private investors—billionaires Vladimir Potanin, Oleg
Deripaska and Viktor Vekselberg—have received substantial financial
support from Vnesheconombank, reaching 90 percent of the whole project
costs,” Navalny’s investigation concluded. “Out of 20 Vnesheconombank
loans for $7.6 billion, nine loans for $5.8 billion need to be restructured.
According to the business newspaper Vedomosti, these projects are
unprofitable with loans being unrecoverable without additional support.”
In putting a spotlight on corruption related to the Olympics, Navalny
had to be mindful that hosting the games was a matter of national pride and
that many Russian voters were excited about it.
“We are proud that Sochi hosts the Winter Olympic Games,” the Anti-
corruption Foundation posted on the website’s home page. “This is a unique
sports event for everybody. However, officials turned the Olympics into a
source of their income. The Anti-corruption Foundation proves that with
figures and facts. Learn who cashed in on the most expensive Olympic
games ever.”
 On February 22, 2014, while the games were still underway, the protests
in Kyiv turned deadly. Riot police shot and killed more than one hundred
demonstrators. Yanukovych fled the capital, abandoning his presidency, and
sought shelter in Russia—a cowardly move that would stand in stark
contrast to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision eight years later to
stay in Kyiv even as the Russian military invaded his country and Western
nations offered to evacuate him.
Within days of Yanukovych’s gutless departure, Putin ordered the
invasion and annexation of Crimea, and Russia began fomenting a
separatist war in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas. These events,
entangling Russia in military conflict for years to come, further reduced the
Kremlin’s already miniscule tolerance for political dissent.
In spring 2014, the Russian authorities also opened a criminal case
against Vladimir Ashurkov, the former Alfa Group executive who had quit
his lucrative corporate career to take on a full-time role as executive
director of the Anti-corruption Foundation. Ashurkov and his partner,
Alexandrina Markvo, left Russia for Britain shortly after he received a
summons from the Investigative Committee in an embezzlement case,
which was connected with fund-raising he had done for Navalny’s mayoral
campaign. The couple applied for political asylum, which was granted the
following year.
By 2015, Russian opposition politicians—and their supporters—were
under intense pressure.
On February 27, Boris Nemtsov was murdered on a bridge near the
Kremlin. Months earlier, Nemtsov had issued his own report on corruption
surrounding the Sochi Olympics. Together with another opposition
politician, Leonid Martynyuk, Nemtsov alleged that $25 billion to $30
billion had been stolen in Sochi.
An assassin shot the fifty-five-year-old Nemtsov six times in the back as
he walked across the bridge with his twenty-two-year-old girlfriend, Anna
Durytska, a fashion model and finalist in the Miss Ukraine Universe
pageant of 2018.
Navalny was confined under house arrest at the time and learned the
news the next day. He was shattered.
“I’m in such shock that it’s hard to even find words,” he wrote on his
blog. “Boris came here to visit me a couple of days ago, he was as usual
energetic, cheerful, full of plans. He charmed the policemen, chatted
merrily with them, explained how it was beneficial for them to support the
demands of the Spring march, handed out brochures with his report. I can’t
even imagine not seeing him again.
“This is a terrible tragedy and loss for all of us; Borya was a very good
decent person,” Navalny wrote, referring to Nemtsov by an affectionate
diminutive. “A big, genuine politician and a decent person—this is not so
common. My most sincere condolences to his family, relatives, friends, and
indeed to everyone. We really lost something that cannot be replaced.”
Navalny added that he would not speculate about the killing, but he
expressed a desire to pay his last respects. “I hope they will give me the
opportunity to get to say goodbye to Boris.”
Within hours, however, Navalny felt compelled to share another
observation: The Russian security services must have known—immediately
—who killed Nemtsov. “A short remark, which I think is important to say
now, while the investigation is in ‘hot pursuit,’” Navalny wrote.
“For all practical purposes, I rule out that Boris Nemtsov was not under
surveillance last night,” Navalny wrote.
He had met with Nemtsov at the end of January and they had discussed
and agreed to hold a demonstration on March 1 to protest Russia’s military
intervention in Ukraine. The meeting was not public knowledge, but shortly
afterward, a journalist from Tass had called Nemtsov demanding to know
what he had agreed with Navalny.
“The key organizers of large opposition rallies / marches are always
under surveillance the day before. That is, even for those for whom ‘in
ordinary life’ [surveillance] is not carried out,” Navalny wrote. “Boris was
exactly that kind of key organizer. You can easily see both from his latest
recordings and from his public appearances. And of course, we all have
seen the publication of operational materials (filming, wiretapping) about
Nemtsov many times, showing how tightly he was” watched, Navalny
added.
“Based on experience and practice, I cannot allow that last night he
could walk towards the Kremlin without prying eyes,” Navalny concluded.
Five Chechen men were eventually convicted of Nemtsov’s killing,
which was supposedly a murder-for-hire scheme, but who ordered the
killing was never determined. Nemtsov had recently warned publicly about
the strongman Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, and how he had amassed
a personal army. One theory was that Kadyrov ordered the killing, either to
be rid of a nagging critic or as a favor to Putin. Another theory was that
Kadyrov, who was locked in a rivalry with the Russian special services in
Moscow, wanted to show them that he was untouchable.
The protest march that had been intended to denounce Russia’s military
intervention in Ukraine instead became a procession of mourning.
Supporters left piles of flowers on the bridge at the location where Nemtsov
was killed.
Nemtsov’s murder marked the crossing of a red line in Russian politics
that Navalny must have recognized as a threshold moment. Russian
politicians who had fallen out of favor, or joined the opposition, were
frequently jailed and harassed, but had never been assassinated.
In July 2015, the Russian government took aim at Boris Zimin,
Navalny’s longtime patron, and his father, Dmitry Zimin.
Their family’s charitable foundation, called Dynasty, which had financed
numerous scientific and educational projects, was branded a “foreign agent”
under the 2012 law intended to stigmatize organizations that received
funding from abroad.
In the Zimins’ case, Dynasty provided financing for numerous worthy
Russian projects, and the money had come from Dmitry Zimin’s own work
in the Russian telecommunications industry. The authorities said that the
law applied because the accounts holding Dynasty’s money were located
abroad. Boris Zimin was already living outside Russia, and Dmitry Zimin
had left the country a month earlier. Instead of accepting the insulting label,
they simply closed the foundation.
Navalny’s effort to form a democratic coalition with Kasyanov, the
former prime minister, fell apart in early 2016. There were numerous and
predictable disagreements over candidates and places on party lists. But
another major factor was an investigative documentary broadcast by NTV,
the Kremlin-connected channel, which obtained secretly recorded video of
Kasyanov with Natalya Pelevina, a member of the PARNAS general
council who was also Kasyanov’s lover.
The documentary showed intimate scenes of Kasyanov, who was
married, and Pelevina in bed. But the bigger political damage came from
their surreptitiously recorded conversations, in which they trashed other
opposition leaders, including Navalny. In the footage, Pelevina described
Navalny as “shit” both as a person and as a politician, but she and
Kasyanov acknowledged a need to work with him because of his media
appeal.
Pelevina also derided Ilya Yashin as “a beast,” “complete scum,” and
“without principles.” Komsomolskaya Pravda, reporting on the NTV
exposé, noted that “the ostentatious solidarity and public unity shown at
forums and events” with Navalny “turned out to be pure lies.”
The NTV revelations were predictably devastating. Yashin, then a
deputy chairman of PARNAS, called for removing Kasyanov from the top
slot on the coalition’s candidate list for the September 2016 Duma
elections. Volkov and others agreed, and demanded that Kasyanov compete
in a primary election with other contenders.
In the end, however, it was too big of a breach. In late April 2016,
Navalny and Vladimir Milov, still the chairman of Democratic Choice,
decided to break with Kasyanov. Around the same time, conspiracy theories
were spreading about Navalny as an operative of foreign intelligence
services, including MI6 and the CIA.
One report broadcast on Russian state television alleged that Navalny
was working in cahoots with Bill Browder, the former head of Hermitage
Capital and champion of the Magnitsky Act. Among the preposterous
assertions in the report were that Browder, given the code name “Agent
Solomon,” paid for Navalny to carry out corporate blackmail. It also
claimed that Browder and Navalny were part of a CIA operation initiated in
1986—when Navalny was just ten years old—aimed at changing the
constitutional systems of countries in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
Harassment by the law enforcement authorities, and violence, also
continued.
In mid-May 2016, Navalny and Volkov led staffers of the Anti-
corruption Foundation and their families on an outing in Russia’s Krasnodar
Region. Their group, of parents and children, including Navalny’s daughter
and son, was accosted upon its arrival at Krasnodar airport. Then, the
families were followed on their trip by guys in a jeep, including on
segments of their hike through a forest.
Two colonels from the Ministry of Emergency Situations even
demanded that Navalny give signed, written assurance that the group would
not hold rallies and fireworks in the mountains, according to a summary of
the trip that he posted on his blog.
At one point, the bus carrying the group was stopped by the police. The
families were detained for about an hour and a half, supposedly as part of a
national antiterrorism campaign called Operation Anaconda, aimed at
rooting out individuals with ties to the Islamic State.
Finally, while they were trying to fly home from an airport in Anapa,
Russia, they were accosted by a group of Cossacks who threw the men,
including Navalny, to the ground while kicking, punching, and beating
some of them. One of Navalny’s associates, Artem Torchinskiy, was
hospitalized after being kicked repeatedly in the head and went home with
his right eye swollen shut.
“The action was clearly coordinated by the police,” Navalny said,
adding, “The police no longer just protect the attackers, but work with
them.”
Navalny likened the situation to Latin America in the 1970s and ’80s.
“A standard intimidation tactic for authoritarian regimes is to recruit
informal but controlled groups to carry out violent actions,” he wrote. “No
elections and no public outcry will be able to influence this…
“Just take to the streets. We need real solidarity in the face of a semi-
fascist state.”

Under the headline “Surely I Should Apologize,” Navalny, on his blog on

May 5, 2016, offered a remorseful mea culpa about the collapse of the
attempted democratic coalition with Kasyanov.
“I apologize to everyone who, from the creation of the democratic
coalition a year and a half ago, I promised that everything would be
different for us.” He had promised candidates would be chosen through
competitive primaries, that disputes would be settled by voting, that the
strongest nominees, not those favored by party leaders, would be put
forward to run.
“Alas, nothing happened,” Navalny wrote, adding, “It’s a pity… This is
my personal defeat as a big supporter of internal elections. A year and a half
wasted.
“OK, let’s draw conclusions and move on,” he wrote. “In general, my
position has not changed since 2011: the government will not change as a
result of elections.”
Navalny linked back to an interview he had given to Yevgenia Albats
and New Times in 2011, in which he delivered a long discourse that
amounted to his same comment after the attack by Cossacks in Anapa: Just
take to the streets.
“Power in Russia will not change as a result of elections,” Navalny had
declared in 2011, predicting that Russia would have its own version of the
Arab Spring. “We call it the Tunisian scenario because there is no other
name. It is clear that in Russia the scenario will be some other, and no one
understands which one. There will be some kind of confrontation between
the corrupt elite and the broad masses of the people.”
Albats asked if he was just waiting then for the wave to materialize.
“My idea is that we do not know when this moment will happen, but we
can bring it closer with all our might,” Navalny replied. “They are crooks
and thieves. We need to fight them, create problems and stress for them,
involve more and more people in creating problems. The more actively we
work in this direction, the closer is the moment when everything will
change.”
Navalny, in 2011, had expressed confidence that change would come,
and he allowed that softer change might be possible, as in the 1989 Velvet
Revolution in Czechoslovakia.
“One way or another, the regime changed as a result of pressure from
broad sections of society on the authorities,” he said. “This pressure can be
of different intensity: from negotiations to standing on the street and crowds
of people who throw officials out of their offices and hang them. And the
sooner the government itself, its most far-sighted representatives enter into
negotiations, the less likely the scenario becomes in which they will simply
be dragged out by the collar. I don’t think it’s possible with the help of
cunning political technology or Twitter to make people take to the streets,
chase away thieves and swindlers, and normal people come in their place.
The moment will come.”
Navalny’s belief that Russia’s government would only change through
upheaval was not the only long-standing view he was clinging to with
fervent conviction. He also still insisted that Russia must clamp down on
immigration and impose a visa regime on the former Soviet republics in
Central Asia.
A few days before Victory Day that year, Russia’s security services
claimed to have disrupted a plot by “immigrants from Central Asia” to
carry out terror attacks during the May holidays. Navalny, however, insisted
that the Russian government itself was at fault.
“I just want to make an important correction right away: there is no need
for any immigrants from Central Asia to ‘penetrate’ into the territory of
Russia. You just need to buy a ticket on your national passport and board a
plane—and you can bring instructions here from ISIS, even from the
Nicaraguan Contras,” Navalny wrote. “No control, no background checks
and connections, no serious questioning, no chance of rejection. Why does
it happen that it is so easy to come here from countries neighboring
Afghanistan and others with high terrorist risks?”
He answered his own question: “Because a certain V.V. Putin and United
Russia in his pocket have long and consistently rejected all proposals to
introduce a visa regime with the countries of Central Asia.”
Navalny expressed dismay that travelers to Russia from Norway and
Finland must obtain a visa but not those from Tajikistan or Uzbekistan. “I
don’t know what benefits I have from the fact that people from Norway can
enter here only with a visa, and from Tajikistan even without a passport,” he
wrote. “I estimate the probability of penetration of terrorists from Norway
as lower. I estimate the probability of importing heroin from Iceland as
lower. I assess the probability of a flow of refugees from Luxembourg as
lower than in Uzbekistan. Only with Norway, Iceland and Luxembourg do
we have barriers and borders, but not with Uzbekistan.”
Navalny could certainly boast of consistency in his views. What he did
not anticipate, however, was that the visa-free regime with Central Asia
would end up allowing hundreds of thousands of Russian men to flee and
escape military conscription in the fall of 2022.
Navalny had long said that Putin’s true power lay in his genuine political
popularity, and that his main weapon was “his ability to bribe the
population.”
But for all of Navalny’s fatalism about the inability to change Russia
through elections, he insisted on participating in them and trying to find
ways to break the grip of Putin and United Russia at every level, from local
municipal councils to the presidency.
In an interview with Nataliya Vasilyeva of the Associated Press, while
under house arrest in December 2015, Navalny reiterated his view about the
pointlessness of elections in Russia. “The regime in Russia will not change
as a result of an election,” he said. “In a situation where we are barred even
from running, I don’t see how it can.”
He also said that Putin’s claimed approval rating of 84 percent was a lie.
“Eighty-four percent means nothing in an authoritarian state. Why can’t
they allow us to run?” He added, “Many people in Russia simply don’t
believe that Russia has a future.”
In October 2017, the European Court of Human Rights sided with
Navalny again, ruling that his rights and those of his brother, Oleg, had
been violated in the Yves Rocher embezzlement case. But Russia’s Central
Election Commission nonetheless ruled that Navalny could not run for
office until 2028, a decision affirmed by the Russian Supreme Court.
Navalny, furious over the court’s decision, tweeted: “We don’t recognize
elections without competition.”
Barred from the ballot, Navalny called for a boycott. The refusal to let
him run prompted criticism from the United States. Asked about that
criticism, Putin derided Washington for only complaining about one of
several would-be candidates who did not meet the qualifications to run.
“The character you mentioned is not the only one who was banned,”
Putin said at his news conference in December 2017, once again refusing to
utter Navalny’s name. “For some reason others were not mentioned. This
seems to reveal the U.S. administration and other nations’ preferences
regarding who they would like to promote in Russia’s politics and who they
would like to see among the country’s leadership, if not the leader. And
apparently, these are the people they count on, they rely on. And in this
case, they gave themselves away, they would have done better if they had
kept silent.”
Putin went on to win the March 2018 presidential election with 77.5
percent of the vote, defeating a field of mostly tired, systemic opposition
candidates, including Grigory Yavlinsky of Yabloko, who Navalny had
urged to step aside to make way for young leadership back in 2007.
In May 2018, Navalny changed the name of his party to Russia of the
Future. He and Volkov also advanced their “Smart voting” strategy by
launching a website and cell phone app to help voters select the candidates
most likely to defeat those running for United Russia.
That system, as well as the network of more than eighty campaign
offices that Navalny had opened while campaigning for president,
positioned Russia of the Future to make gains in local elections, especially
in Moscow in 2019, and in regional elections, as in Novosibirsk and Tomsk
after Navalny was poisoned in 2020.
But darker designs were underway in the Kremlin, including planned
changes to the Russian Constitution to let Putin be leader for life, and even
grimmer plans for the war against Ukraine. There was little patience left for
Navalny and his band of aspiring democracy superheroes flying their
drones over important officials’ country estates and harping about
corruption.
In 2019, Putin’s regime shifted into a systematic effort to put Navalny
and the Anti-corruption Foundation out of business.
A fraud case was opened against Volkov, and he left Russia that summer.
In April, a catering company called Moscow Schoolchild reportedly
connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary
group, sued Navalny and his colleague, Lyubov Sobol, for defamation,
claiming economic harm. A Navalny investigation had accused the
company of serving tainted lunches that set off an outbreak of dysentery
among Moscow schoolchildren. Prigozhin, nicknamed “Putin’s chef” after
earning a fortune off of government catering contracts, denied any
connection to the company.
As persecution of Navalny by the Russian courts continued, so did the
rebukes of Russia by the European Court of Human Rights. In April, the
Strasbourg court ruled that Navalny’s rights were violated when he was put
under house arrest. He was awarded €20,000 in damages.
Navalny and his wife strive not to show signs of the stress that his
political work puts on their family. And Yulia Navalnaya, in particular, has
said she makes it her duty to keep life as normal as possible for their
children.
The pressure, however, is omnipresent, and that June it almost boiled
over. “I remember… a simple everyday story about our family,” Navalnaya
later recounted. Their daughter, Darya, was graduating from high school,
but on the day of the ceremony, Russian authorities arrested a journalist,
Ivan Golunov, after apparently framing him on drug charges. A spontaneous
rally was called, and Navalny felt compelled to go.
“Alexey called me, realizing that he was not getting to Dasha’s
graduation, and said: ‘Well, you understand that I can’t not go to this
rally?’” Navalnaya recalled. “I answered briefly: ‘Of course, I understand.’
“It was the only time, in all the years, when I burst into tears after the
call,” she said. “I felt sorry for both Dasha and my husband, it was very
important for our whole family and for the two of them too, because Dasha
is ‘daddy’s daughter.’ But he could not do otherwise, and I had no right to
dissuade him. Three people were arrested at the rally; one of them is
Alexey.”
In the end, Navalny was released from the police station in time to get to
Dasha’s graduation. Photographs showed her in a sparkly silver dress,
clutching her diploma, her father in a dark suit and thin red necktie.
That summer of 2019, the Moscow election authorities refused to
register a slew of independent candidates for the September City Council
elections, citing irregularities with the required signatures they had
collected to get on the ballot. Among the rejected candidates were several
Navalny associates and allies, including Lyubov Sobol, Ivan Zhdanov, and
Ilya Yashin. On July 14, dozens were detained during a protest outside the
Election Commission offices in Moscow. Smaller daily protests continued
at Moscow’s Trubnaya Square until July 20 when a larger rally, estimated at
more than twenty thousand people, was held on Sakharov Avenue.
Navalny issued an ultimatum warning of another rally on July 27 if the
authorities did not accept the registration of the independent candidates. On
July 24, Navalny was detained outside his apartment building and put under
arrest for thirty days for calling the unauthorized rally. In between, Navalny
and his team had published an investigation showing that Vladimir
Solovyov, one of the Kremlin’s loudest propagandists on state television,
had obtained a permanent residence permit in Italy. On July 27, the day of
the protest, more than one thousand people were arrested, including many
of the rejected candidates. Their homes and offices were also searched.
In September, despite the effort to stack the ballot, United Russia
suffered a stinging defeat, losing fifteen of the forty seats that it had held on
the forty-five-member City Council. Three recognized opposition parties—
the Communists, A Just Russia, and Yabloko—picked up the seats. United
Russia retained a slim majority of twenty-five seats, but it was still a
stunning blow. The unexpected losses demonstrated the potential power of
Navalny’s “Smart voting” strategy even if his own party’s candidates were
barred from running. In response, the authorities carried out a series of raids
against the Anti-corruption Foundation and Navalny’s offices across Russia.
In October, a Moscow court ruled in favor of Moscow Schoolchild in
the tainted lunches case and ordered Navalny and Sobol to pay $1.15
million for damages.
“So, they poisoned children in schools and kindergartens. Cases of
dysentery were proven with documents. But we should pay,” Navalny wrote
on Instagram. Prigozhin, the mercenary boss, paid the debt to Moscow
Schoolchild so that Navalny’s penalties would be owed personally to him.
Prigozhin later threatened to bankrupt Navalny’s operation. “I intend to
strip this group of unscrupulous people of their clothes and shoes,” he said
in a statement. After his statement, the court froze Navalny’s bank accounts
and put a lien on his apartment.
That same month, in October 2019, the Anti-corruption Foundation was
branded as a foreign agent. In July 2020, Navalny announced that he was
dissolving the foundation because it could not afford to pay the judgment to
Prigozhin, or court-ordered damages in other lawsuits.
“S.O.S. Liquidation of the F.B.K.,” the headline on Navalny’s blog
declared, using the foundation’s Russian acronym.
“You know what stores often do, they write in big letters:
LIQUIDATION. THE STORE IS CLOSING. LAST SALE,” Navalny
wrote. “People buy into this publicity stunt, sweep away supposedly
discounted goods, but in fact, no one closes. In our case, we really have to
say that the non-profit Anti-corruption Foundation, which I founded nine
years ago, has come to an end, because it was simply taken away from us.”
In his post, Navalny described constant raids, hundreds of searches of
his offices nationwide, and the repeated confiscation of equipment, “from
phones and laptops to lamps and kettles.
 “We were illegally recognized as foreign agents, even though we never
received a penny of foreign money,” Navalny said. “They fabricated
criminal cases against us. Bank accounts of FBK and all other legal entities
were frozen. The accounts of hundreds of employees and members of their
families were frozen. My accounts were frozen and my father’s, mother’s,
wife’s and even those of my children.”
The major problem was the giant judgment owed to Prigozhin. Navalny
noted with dismay that the verdict was allowed to stand even though
Sobol’s investigations had proven Prigozhin’s company was liable for the
dysentery outbreak among schoolchildren, and another court had ordered
damages paid to the victims’ families.
“Something happened that can only happen in Putin’s court,” Navalny
wrote. “Despite the fact that we have proven poisoning. Despite the fact
that Prigozhin paid compensation in court. He sues me, Sobol and FBK,
declares that he did not poison anyone, and demands an unthinkable amount
from us.
“A separate irony is that having poisoned hundreds of children, he paid
them,” Navalny wrote, “and we who forced him to pay, must pay him 293
times more.”
Navalny said it was clear that he and Sobol would never be able to pay
the debt, and would have to live indefinitely with their accounts and assets
frozen. “Now the question,” he said, “is what to do with the FBK? We
already have nothing. Everything was taken from previous searches. And
now they will take away both the organization itself and the current
account. Our name is dear to us, but, as I have said many times: FBK is not
an office or a piece of paper from the Ministry of Justice. FBK is people. It
is those who come here to fight corruption and you who support it.
“We will switch to another legal entity, and let Putin and Prigozhin
choke on it,” he wrote. In 2019, he said, 21,467 people donated to the
foundation, and most crucial were the 7,607 who had registered to make
monthly donations. He urged them to sign up to donate to the new legal
entity.
Three weeks before Navalny’s SOS announcement, the FSB assassins
trailed him on vacation to Kaliningrad, where they may have mistakenly
poisoned Yulia Navalnaya. A month later, the alleged kill team followed
Navalny to Tomsk, according to the Bellingcat-led investigation, snuck into
his hotel room while he was out for a swim in a local river, and laced his
underpants with a chemical weapon.
On the anniversary of Navalny’s poisoning, German chancellor Angela
Merkel traveled to meet Putin at the Kremlin on her last visit to Russia
before retiring in December 2021.
“Of course, we discussed the very depressing situation with Alexey
Navalny,” Merkel said at a news conference after their meeting. “From our
perspective, his sentence and imprisonment in a correctional facility were
based on a court ruling that the [European Court of Human Rights] found
unobvious and disproportionate. This is unacceptable to us. I once again
demanded that the president of Russia release Alexey Navalny and stressed
that we would continue to monitor this case.”
Putin pushed back hard. “With regard to the subject you just mentioned,
he was not convicted for his political activities, but a criminal offense
against foreign partners,” Putin said in response to a reporter’s question.
“As far as political activity goes, no one should be using political activity as
a front to carry out business projects, which, on top of that, violate the law.”
But Putin quickly turned to his classic whataboutism, accusing the
United States of squashing protesters from the Occupy Wall Street
movement, and France of doing the same with the Yellow Vest
demonstrators, who demanded lower taxes and higher minimum wages.
Putin also referred to the prosecutions in the United States of people who
had breached the U.S. Capitol building seeking to overturn Donald Trump’s
defeat.
“As for us, our political system is evolving, and all citizens of the
Russian Federation have the right to express their opinions on political
issues, form political organizations, and participate in elections of all
levels,” Putin said in comments that defied reality. “However, this must be
done within the limits of applicable law and the Constitution. We will do
our best to keep the situation in Russia stable and predictable.
“Russia exhausted its limit on revolutions back in the twentieth century,”
he continued. “We do not want revolutions. What we want is evolutionary
development of our society and state. I hope that this will be so. As for the
decision of the judicial authorities of the Russian Federation, please treat
these decisions with respect. Fighting corruption is critically important, but
it should not be used as a tool in a political struggle. We, as well as you, are
well aware that this toolkit is used to achieve political goals.”
Merkel did not let Putin go unanswered. “I would like to emphasize that
we have talked at length about the way we understand political systems and
freedoms. I believe that the questions of good governance and fighting
corruption are actually entwined.”
She added, “Within the European Union we believe in the need to
discuss these matters, since there is a genuine link between corruption and
political activity, no matter where it takes place. This includes Germany, I
believe. Fighting corruption requires independent courts, a free press, as
well as non-profit organizations that refuse to play along.”

Navalny himself could not have made the point any plainer. But Putin had
long stopped caring about the views of Merkel or any other Western leader.
He had outlasted them all.
Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 showed that even
Navalny’s darkest warnings about Putin had not anticipated the Russian
leader’s willingness to wreak death and destruction, and the war quickly
distracted from Navalny’s fate.
But in April 2022, after the liberation of the Kyiv suburb of Bucha,
where Russian forces committed atrocities against the civilian population,
Navalny noted that even in Ukraine, the birthplace of his father and paternal
grandparents, there were signs of the Kremlin’s animosity toward him.
“A passport with the surname Navalny lies next to the dead body on the
ground,” he wrote in a statement posted by his team on social media. “This
is one of the people killed in the Ukrainian village of Bucha. Ilya Ivanovich
Navalny. Everything indicates that they killed him because of his last name.
That’s why his passport was defiantly thrown nearby. A completely
innocent person was killed by Putin’s executioners (what else can I call
them? definitely not ‘Russian soldiers’) because he is my namesake.
Apparently, they hoped he was a relative of mine. I don’t know if he is
related to me. He is from the same village as my father.
“Maybe he is my relative, but there are generally lots of Navalnys in that
village,” Navalny continued. “I remember that, as a child, I was amazed
when I looked at the monument to those who died in the Great Patriotic
War. I’m used to the fact that my last name is rare, but there were several
Navalnys in a row there. Well, now there will be another monument in
Ukraine to those who died in the war, and the name of Ilya Ivanovich
Navalny, born in 1961, will be there among others.”
Navalny urged Russians to protest, but most of the political opposition
had either been arrested or had fled. Within months, hundreds of thousands
more Russians would escape to neighboring countries, seeking to avoid
conscription.
“This war was also unleashed by a raving maniac obsessed with some
nonsense about geopolitics, history and the structure of the world,” Navalny
wrote, comparing Putin to Hitler. “This maniac will not stop himself. He,
like a drug addict, got hooked on death, war and lies—he needs them to
maintain his power. It is now everyone’s duty to make at least some, even
the smallest contribution to stop this war and remove Putin from power.
Protest wherever and however you can. Agitate however you can and
whomever you can. Inaction is the worst possible thing. And now its
consequence is death.”
Just before the first anniversary of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine,
Navalny posted a blunt restatement of his opposition to the war in which he
called—unequivocally this time—for the respect of Ukraine’s
internationally recognized border as defined in 1991, which included
Crimea. He did not mention the illegally annexed peninsula by name, but he
also did not repeat his “bologna sandwich” remark asserting that Crimea
would not be returned.
“What are Ukraine’s borders? They are the same as Russia’s—
internationally recognized and defined in 1991,” Navalny wrote. “Russia
also recognized these borders back then, and it must recognize them today
as well. There is nothing to discuss here.”
“Almost all borders in the world are more or less accidental and cause
someone’s discontent,” he added. “But in the twenty-first century, we
cannot start wars just to redraw them. Otherwise, the world will sink into
chaos.”
In his post, which he called “15 points from a Russian citizen who
wishes the best for his country,” Navalny declared that Russia’s military
defeat was inescapable, and he called for immediately ending the war and
withdrawing Russia’s troops, for the investigation of war crimes, and for
Ukraine to be compensated for damages using Russia’s oil and gas
revenues.
He blamed the war on Putin and reiterated his call for the reformation of
Russia’s government as a parliamentary republic, with free elections and an
independent judiciary.
Navalny also pushed back on the view, increasingly prevalent in
Ukraine, that all Russians harbor imperialist aspirations to subjugate
Ukraine and other neighboring countries.
“Are all Russians inherently imperialistic?” Navalny asked. “This is
bullshit. For example, Belarus is also involved in the war against Ukraine.
Does this mean that the Belarusians also have an imperial mindset? No,
they merely also have a dictator in power.
“There will always be people with imperial views in Russia, just like in
any other country with historical preconditions for this, but they are far
from the majority,” he continued. “There is no reason to weep and wail
about it. Such people should be defeated in elections, just as both right-
wing and left-wing radicals get defeated in developed countries.”
Navalny, while blaming Putin, argued that most Russian people do not
support the war—a point that is contradicted by public opinion polls,
although amid a brutal crackdown on dissent it is hard to know if Russians
are sharing honest views. “The real reasons for this war are the political and
economic problems within Russia, Putin’s desire to hold on to power at any
cost, and his obsession with his own historical legacy,” Navalny wrote. “He
wants to go down in history as ‘the conqueror tsar’ and ‘the collector of
lands.’”
Navalny urged that Russia cut its losses as quickly as possible and begin
addressing the damage. He reiterated the need to compensate Ukraine. “We
have hit rock bottom, and in order to resurface, we need to bounce back
from it,” he wrote. “This would be ethically correct, rational, and profitable.
We need to dismantle the Putin regime and its dictatorship, ideally through
conducting general free elections and convening a constitutional assembly.
We need to establish a parliamentary republic based on the alternation of
power through fair elections, independent courts, federalism, local self-
governance, complete economic freedom, and social justice.”
He concluded: “Recognizing our history and traditions, we must be part
of Europe and follow the European path of development. We have no other
choice, nor do we need any.” Since February 20, 2023, the post has been
pinned to the top of Navalny’s Twitter feed, which as of this writing has 2.9
million followers.

In March 2023, the movie that Navalny and his team helped make about his
poisoning, filmed during his recovery in Germany, won the Oscar for best
documentary.
Yulia Navalnaya and her children, Dasha and Zakhar, joined the
filmmakers onstage to accept the golden statue, along with the Bellingcat
journalist, Christo Grozev, and the head of the Anti-corruption Foundation’s
investigative unit, Maria Pevchikh.
“To the Navalny family, Yulia, Dasha and Zakhar, thank you for your
courage. The world is with you,” the film’s director, Daniel Roher, said.
“And there is one person who couldn’t be with us here tonight. Alexey
Navalny, the leader of the Russian opposition, remains in solitary
confinement… I would like to dedicate this award to Navalny, to all
political prisoners around the world. Alexey, the world has not forgotten
your vital message to us all. We cannot, we must not be afraid, to oppose
dictators and authoritarianism wherever it rears its head.”
Roher asked Yulia Navalnaya to come to the podium. “Thank you,
Daniel, and thank you to every- everybody here,” she said in halting but
perfect English. “My husband is in prison just for telling the truth. My
husband is in prison just for defending democracy. Alexey, I am dreaming
of the day when you will be free, and our country will be free. Stay strong,
my love. Thank you.”
In June 2023, Navalny was put on trial on new charges, of extremism
and running an extremist organization, the Anti-corruption Foundation.
But when Navalny appeared for a hearing, emerging from the prison
colony in which he was cut off from the outside world and denied access to
any news, he was shocked to discover that the Wagner mercenary boss,
Yevgeny Prigozhin, had led a rebellion, in which he briefly sent a column of
fighters rolling toward Moscow.
In a Twitter thread, posted by his team on June 27, Navalny described
being thunderstruck at the news that Russia had briefly faced the prospect
of a civil war. But he was even more astounded that Putin had cut a deal to
drop insurgency charges against Prigozhin and allow him to leave Russia
for Belarus.
Navalny, whose only crime had been working to expose corruption and
pleading for a chance to run in a free and fair election, was on trial for
extremism charges. And the murderous warlord Prigozhin, “Putin’s Chef”
because he became a billionaire off of government contracts, would face no
criminal charges despite having led a mutiny in which more than a dozen
Russian soldiers were killed.
“The prosecutor came in and we continued the trial in which I stand
accused of forming an organization to overthrow President Putin by violent
means,” Navalny wrote.
“While listening to these accusations, I looked at the photo of a
roadblock with a grenade launcher in Moscow’s Yasenevo district,”
Navalny tweeted, adding: “I read about how one group of Russian troops
‘took positions on the Oka River’ to defend themselves against another
group of Russian troops.
“There is no greater threat to Russia than the Putin regime,” Navalny
wrote. “It wasn’t the West or the opposition that shot down Russian
helicopters over Russia. It wasn’t the [Anti-corruption Foundation] that
brought Russia to the brink of civil war.” He added: “It was Putin who
personally did this.”
Prigozhin, of course, had been behind the lawsuits that bankrupted the
Anti-corruption Foundation, and as an ally of Putin he was the beneficiary
of years of favoritism.
Now, however, he had turned against the Kremlin. Decades of
corruption and malfeasance, and the strains of a brutal war in Ukraine, had
combined to confront Putin with the greatest threat of his twenty-three years
in power. But after the failed mutiny, Putin was still in charge, and Navalny
was still on trial.
 In his defendant’s “last word” for the extremism trial, on July 20 2023,
Navalny noted that no justice could be achieved in a Russian court, and he
said that the authorities were even trying to deny the right for his statement
to be heard by ordering a closed trial.
“Nevertheless,” he said, “I must take every opportunity to speak out, and
speaking now before an audience of eighteen people, seven of which are
wearing black masks on their heads that cover their faces, I wish not only to
explain why I continue to fight the unscrupulous evil that calls itself ‘the
state authorities of the Russian Federation,’ but also to urge you to do so
along with me.”
“The question of how to act is the central question of humanity,”
Navalny said, adding: “People have searched high and low for the formula
of doing the right thing, for something to base the right decisions on. I
really like the wording of our compatriot, the doctor of philological
sciences Professor Yuri Lotman. Speaking to students, he once said: ‘A man
always finds himself in an unforeseeable situation. And then he has two
legs to rest on: conscience and intellect.’”
“I love Russia,” Navalny said. “My intellect tells me that living in a free
and prosperous country is better than living in a corrupt and destitute one.
And as I stand here looking at this court, my conscience tells me that there
will be no justice in such a court for me or anyone else. A country without
fair courts will never be prosperous. So my intellect raises its voice again
and says it would be wise and right for me to fight for an independent court,
for fair elections, and against corruption, because then I would reach my
goal and be able to live in my free, prosperous Russia.”
“It may seem to you now that I am crazy, but you are all normal—after
all, one cannot swim against the current,” he added. “But in my opinion, it’s
you who are crazy. You have one God-given life, and this is what you
choose to spend it on? Putting robes on your shoulders and black masks on
your heads to protect those who rob you? To help someone who already has
ten palaces to build an eleventh?”
Navalny said that not everyone has to go to prison, but he urged all
Russians “to make some kind of sacrifice, some kind of effort.”
Navalny’s speech was unlike others he had given—not the closing
argument of a defendant but the potential last word of a dissident,
demanding freedom and other ideals for his nation. His imprisonment was
“a lottery,” he said, “and that ticket has been drawn for me.”
He concluded: “I am accused of inciting hatred against representatives
of the government and security services, judges, and members of the United
Russia Party. But no, I am not inciting hatred. I merely remember that every
person has two legs: conscience and intellect.”
Navalny was convicted of the extremism charges and on August 4,
2023, was sentenced to an additional nineteen years—this time in a “special
regime” prison colony, which would bar him from family visits and even
letters for a decade. That sentence, if he survives it, could keep Navalny
locked up until he is seventy-four years old; Putin would be ninety-eight.
“Navalny got horror,” Sergei Markov, a former close adviser to Putin
and still a strong supporter of the Russian president, posted on Telegram
after the sentence was announced. “Isn’t that too much? Why these
cruelties? Why can’t Navalny see his wife? He’s not a killer.”
Navalny’s torture, however, was underway well before his latest
sentencing.
In July 2023, Navalny’s family announced a lawsuit against the penal
colony where he was being held, saying his rights as a prisoner were being
violated. In the previous year, they said, Navalny had not been allowed any
family visits, and only two phone calls, eleven months earlier.
In a social media post after the August 4 sentencing, Navalny wrote: “I
perfectly understand that, like many political prisoners, I am sitting on a life
sentence, where life is measured by the term of my life or the term of life of
this regime.”
Navalny urged Russians to resist the regime, which he called a “gang of
traitors, thieves, and scoundrels.” He added: “Putin must not achieve his
goal.”
And in a blog post published a week after the sentencing, Navalny
finally seemed to accept his status as a dissident. Navalny said that in his
isolation cell, or SHIZO, he had been reading Natan Sharansky’s book Fear
no Evil, which describes how Sharansky, too, was held in solitary
confinement while imprisoned from 1977 to 1986. “While reading his book,
I sometimes shake my head to get rid of the feeling that I am reading my
personal file,” Navalny wrote in his post, and he called again for Russians
to fight corruption and demand democracy: “So that no one in 2055 will be
reading Sharansky’s book in the SHIZO, thinking: Wow, it’s just like me.”
In 2011, before the street protests that made him famous, before the
campaigns for mayor and for president, before the endless arrests, the
poisoning attempts and the green dye thrown in his face, Navalny had told
his political mentor, Yevgenia Albats, that he was prepared for a long
struggle. He said that he did not expect Russia would ever change as a
result of elections. He was honest about his ambitions but measured in his
expectations. Change would come, he said, but it was unclear when.
“It would be foolish to say that I want to investigate a little here, to catch
a few corrupt officials by the hand, but politics does not interest me,”
Navalny said. “It would be obvious to everyone that I am: a) flirting, b)
lying, or I’m just a fool. Because if you are seriously fighting corruption in
Russia, you cannot fail to understand that it is impossible to defeat it
without serious political changes. It cannot be defeated without the
possession of levers of power. This is obvious to all reasonable people, and
I’m not going to fool anyone.”
Albats, addressing him affectionately, asked: “Alyosh, do you believe
there will be light at the end of the tunnel?”
“Maybe it sounds ridiculous and naïve, but I believe in the victory of
good over evil,” Navalny said. “That is, I believe that the obvious injustice
that is happening, the obvious stupidity, nonsense—they will end. Because
people understand what is good and what is bad.”
Navalny, age 33, then known as an anti-corruption blogger and activist, in
his office in Moscow, Russia, on December 17, 2009. (Oxana Onipko/AFP
via Getty Images)
Navalny speaks to Russian political opposition activists gathered in Khimki
Forest outside Moscow at Anti-Seliger, an event to counter the pro-Kremlin
Seliger Youth Camp, on June 18, 2011. (Andrey Smirnov/AFP via Getty
Images)
 Navalny electrifies the crowd at a rally to protest fraud in the Russian
parliamentary elections on December 5, 2011, the first in a series of
demonstrations that gripped Moscow in 2011–12. (Alexey Sazonov/AFP via
Getty Images)
Navalny is released from jail on December 21, 2011, having served 15 days
after being detained at the December 5 rally. Behind him is opposition
Duma member Ilya Ponomarev. Three days later, Navalny addressed an
even larger crowd, estimated at 100,000 people. (Evgeny Feldman)
Navalny and TV presenter Ksenia Sobchak, at a sit-in on April 14, 2012, in
the southern city of Astrakhan held in support of Oleg Shein, a local
legislative candidate who said that falsified tallies denied him victory in
elections held a month earlier. Protests in Moscow, however, did not gain
traction outside the capital. (Author photo)
At a rally for Navalny’s mayoral campaign on August 21, 2013, a supporter
watches him autograph the cover of the December 2011 Russian issue of
Esquire, in which he recalled spontaneously coming up with the phrase
“Party of Crooks and Thieves” to describe United Russia, President
Vladimir Putin’s political party. (Evgeny Feldman)
Navalny addresses a throng of supporters on August 25, 2013, during his
campaign for mayor of Moscow. Although he was an officially registered
candidate, Navalny was nonetheless detained by police shortly after the
rally. (Evgeny Feldman)
Navalny and his brother Oleg exchange glances after they were convicted of
trumped-up fraud charges on December 30, 2014. Alexey was let go with a
suspended sentence but Oleg was condemned to three and a half years in a
prison colony. (Author photo)
Navalny and Adam Michnik, a Polish historian and public intellectual, at an
event in Moscow on October 2, 2015, to mark the release of their book
Opposing Forces: Plotting the New Russia, a compilation of conversations
between the two men comparing the development of democracy and
opposition politics in Poland and in Russia. (Evgeny Feldman)
Navalny, his wife, Yulia, and top political aide Leonid Volkov, at a march on
February 27, 2016, to mark the second anniversary of the murder of
opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, who was shot to death as he walked on
a bridge near the Kremlin. (Evgeny Feldman)
 Yulia helps her husband prepare for a news conference in Yekaterinburg,
Russia, on February 25, 2017, where he announced the opening of the local
headquarters for his 2018 presidential campaign. Leonid Volkov sits to the
right. (Evgeny Feldman)
 Navalny is forced into a police van after being detained at a rally in
Moscow on March 26, 2017, part of a nationwide series of anti-government
protests that followed Navalny’s publication of a video investigating alleged
corruption by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. (Evgeny Feldman)
 Navalny leaving First City Hospital in Moscow on April 27, 2017, after
being attacked by an assailant who threw green antiseptic liquid at his face,
damaging his right eye, which ultimately required surgery by specialists in
Spain. (Evgeny Feldman)
Navalny, with Yulia, admonishes his son, Zakhar, not to show any fear to
the police who detained them at a rally in Moscow on May 14, 2017, to
protest government plans to tear down Soviet-era low-rise apartment
buildings in the capital. (Evgeny Feldman)
 Navalny debates former Federal Security Service officer Igor Girkin in
Moscow on July 20, 2017. Girkin had participated in Russia’s invasion and
illegal annexation of Crimea, was accused of extrajudicial killings in
Russian-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine, and in 2022 was convicted in
the Netherlands of murder for the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
(Evgeny Feldman)
 Navalny and his advisers, including director of the Anti-corruption
Foundation Roman Rubanov (left) and press secretary Kira Yarmysh
(center), on their way to Russia’s Central Election Commission in Moscow,
where he was barred from running for president against Putin in the 2018
election. (Evgeny Feldman)
Navalny, with his wife, Yulia, daughter, Darya, and son, Zakhar, at Charité
Hospital in Berlin, on September 15, 2020. He had spent days in a coma
after being poisoned with a chemical weapon during an attempted
assassination in Siberia on August 20, 2020. German Chancellor Angela
Merkel personally announced that Navalny was attacked with Novichok, a
prohibited military-grade nerve agent. (Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty
Images)
 Police officers await Navalny at passport control in Moscow’s
Sheremetyevo Airport on January 17, 2021. He was arrested immediately
upon his return to Russia from medical treatment in Germany. (Kirill
Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images)
 Navalny flashes a victory sign from the defendant’s dock, known as “the
aquarium,” at a hearing in Babushkinsky District Court in Moscow on
February 20, 2021, where he appealed his detention on charges of violating
parole during his treatment for poisoning in Germany. (Evgeny Feldman)
Yulia Navalnaya at the 95th Annual Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre
on March 12, 2023, in Hollywood, California, where Navalny won the
award for best documentary feature. She is accompanied by her children,
Darya and Zakhar, and the director, Daniel Roher (right). (Kevin
Winter/Getty Images)
 Navalny speaks via video link at a court hearing on December 9, 2021, in
Russia’s Vladimir region, near the prison colony where he was being held,
often in solitary confinement. On August 4, 2023, Navalny was sentenced to
an additional 19 years for extremism. He has repeatedly accused prison
officials of violating his rights and denying necessary medical treatment.
(Evgeny Feldman)
 NOTES and WORKS CONSULTED

As a news-driven, unauthorized biography, this book owes much to

contemporaneous news accounts by Russian and international journalists
who have covered Alexey Navalny and his rise as Russia’s leading political
opposition figure, and to the author’s own reporting, including as a
Moscow-based correspondent for the New York Times from 2011 to 2015.
The book also relied to the greatest extent possible on primary source
audio and video, including Navalny’s many public appearances, court
proceedings, radio and television interviews, and Navalny’s own words in
his LiveJournal blog, as well as on social media and in the video
investigations produced by his Anti-corruption Foundation.
Two nonjournalistic works provided essential insights into Navalny’s
thinking. These were an early biography, Threat to Crooks and Thieves,
written by Konstantin Voronkov, a friend and colleague of Navalny’s,
published in Russia in 2012, and Opposing Forces: Plotting the New
Russia, a compilation of conversations between Navalny and Polish
historian Adam Michnik, published in 2015.

Introduction
“The Trial of Navalny. Online,” Insider, February 2, 2021.
https://theins.ru/politika/239043.
Chapter 1. Poisoning
Dasha Veledeeva, “Yulia Navalnaya: ‘If Everything Is Great Today, Then I
Am Already Happy. Because Tomorrow Everything Can Definitely Change,
and I Will Be Very Disappointed,” Symbol, February 17, 2021.
https://www.thesymbol.ru/heroes/the-symbol/yuliya-navalnaya-svoyu-
glavnuyu-zadachu-ya-vizhu-v-tom-chtoby-u-nas-v-seme-nichego-ne-
izmenilos-deti-byli-detmi-a-dom-domom/.
“Navalny Was Urgently Hospitalized with Poisoning in Omsk,”
Taiga.info, August 20, 2020. https://tayga.info/158458.
Svetlana Reiter, “Navalny’s Team Reveals Hotel Room Search That
Uncovered Water Bottle with Traces of Novichok-Type Poison”: Meduza,
September 17, 2020. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2020/09/17/navalny-s-
team-reveals-hotel-room-search-that-uncovered-water-bottle-with-traces-of-
novichok-type-poison.
Marcel Rosenbach, “Suddenly the Ones in the Gray Suits Gave the
Diagnosis,” Der Spiegel, August 21, 2020.
https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/alexej-nawalny-vertrauter-wolkow-auf-
einmal-gaben-diejenigen-in-den-grauen-anzuegen-die-diagnose-vor-a-
71cb3878-b073-4c9f-8f70-3a9242e0a42b.
Farida Rustamova, “Navalny Ended Up in Intensive Care in a Serious
Condition When He Was Returning from Siberia. What Was He Doing
There?” Meduza, August 20, 2020.
https://meduza.io/feature/2020/08/20/vo-vremya-poezdki-v-sibir-navalnyy-
popal-v-reanimatsiyu-v-tyazhelom-sostoyanii-a-chto-on-tam-delal.
Irina Kravtsova, “‘He Needs to Be Evacuated to Europe’: Interview with
Yaroslav Ashikhmin, Alexey Navalny’s Doctor, About His Poisoning in
Siberia, Possible Causes and Necessary Treatment,” Meduza, August 20,
2020. https://meduza.io/feature/2020/08/20/ego-nuzhno-evakuirovat-v-
evropu.
“A Day and a Half in a Coma: Online Broadcast About Alexey Navalny
in BSMP-1,” NGS55online.ru, August 20, 2020.
https://ngs55.ru/text/incidents/2020/08/20/69430861.
Sabine Siebold, Anton Zverev, Catherine Belton, and Andrew Osborn,
“Special Report: In Germany’s Black Forest, Putin Critic Navalny Gathered
Strength and Resolve,” Reuters, February 25, 2021.
https://www.reuters.com/article/russia-politics-navalny-germany-specialr-
idUSKBN2AP1BH.
“The Chief Omsk Toxicologist Linked Navalny’s Hospitalization to His
Diet,” Kommersant, September 4, 2020.
https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4477083.
“Novichok Trolling,” Kommersant, September 3, 2020.
https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4476810.
Christo Grozev, Pieter van Huis, Aric Toler, and Yordan Tsalov, “FSB
Team of Chemical Weapon Experts Implicated in Alexey Navalny
Novichok Poisoning,” Bellingcat, December 14, 2020.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2020/12/14/fsb-team-of-
chemical-weapon-experts-implicated-in-alexey-navalny-novichok-
poisoning/.
Anna Pushkarskaya, Elena Berdnikova, Timur Sazonov, Andrey
Soshnikov, and Ksenia Churmanova, “Who Saved Navalny’s Life, and
How, in the First Two Hours,” BBC News Russian Service, September 2,
2020. https://www.bbc.com/russian/features-54002575.
Victoria Chumakova, “Navalny’s Entire Route Tracked Before the
Poisoning: He Swam,” Moskovsky Komsomolets, August 21, 2020.
https://www.mk.ru/incident/2020/08/21/otslezhen-ves-marshrut-navalnogo-
pered-otravleniem-on-kupalsya.html.
Robyn Dixon, “Inside Room 239: How Alexei Navalny’s Aides Got
Crucial Poisoning Evidence out of Russia,” Washington Post, October 4,
2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-navalny-hotel-
poisoning/2020/10/03/b70392b4-034a-11eb-b92e-
029676f9ebec_story.html.
Eric Campbell and Matt Henry, “Maria Pevchikh: The Young
Investigator Uncovering ‘the Hidden World of Vladimir Putin,’” ABC
News Australia, February 15, 2021. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-
16/maria-pevchikh-vladimir-putin-alexei-navalny/13150492.
“‘If It Hadn’t Been for the Prompt Work of the Medics’: FSB Officer
Inadvertently Confesses Murder Plot to Navalny,” Bellingcat, December 21,
2020. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2020/12/21/if-it-
hadnt-been-for-the-prompt-work-of-the-medics-fsb-officer-inadvertently-
confesses-murder-plot-to-navalny/.
Chapter 2. Navalny vs. Putin
Leonid Parfenov, “Yulia Navalnaya: ‘The Children Know Where Dad Is
When They Imprison Him,’” TV Rain, April 14, 2013.
https://tvrain.tv/teleshow/parfenov/julija_navalnaja_deti_znajut_gde_papa_
kogda_ego_sa-341087/.
“Alexey Navalny, About Crooks and Thieves, Mushrooms and
Shwarma, Black Grouse and Nationalism,” Esquire (Russia), December
2011. https://www.buro247.ru/beauty/3883.html.
David M. Herszenhorn, “Putin Says Russia Could Have ‘Finished’
Navalny,” Politico Europe, December 17, 2020.
https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-says-russia-could-have-
finished-alexei-navalny/.
Aleksey Navalny and Adam Michnik, Opposing Forces: Plotting the
New Russia (Moscow: Novoe Izdateltsvo), 2015.
Chapter 3. Revenge
“Medvedev Against Corruption,” Vzglyad, May 19, 2008.
https://vz.ru/politics/2008/5/19/169261.html.
Roman Anin, “Presidencies: For Whom Is the ‘Gift’ on the Bolshoi
Utrish? Following the ‘Putin’s Palace,’ We Decided to Study the Objects
That Are Associated with President Medvedev,” Novaya Gazeta, February
15, 2011.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120414191448/http://www.novayagazeta.ru/i
nquests/7094.html.
Scott Shane, “From Success at Putin’s Side to Exposing Corruption,”
New York Times, February 3, 2012.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/world/europe/sergei-kolesnikov-
aims-to-expose-corruption-of-putin-era.html.
Matt Bivens, “Rybkin Affair Is No Laughing Matter,” Moscow Times,
February 16, 2004. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/archive/rybkin-
affair-is-no-laughing-matter.
Yevgenia Albats, “Clean, Concrete Candidate (Audio Files Added),”
New Times, February 27, 2012. https://newtimes.ru/articles/detail/50206.
Viktor Feshchenko, “Riding a Hype: What’s Under the Hood of Alexei
Navalny’s Media Machine,” Firm’s Secret, September 22, 2017.
https://secretmag.ru/navalnyi/.
“The Head of the National Guard, Zolotov, Challenged Navalny to a
Duel. And Did It Against All Dueling Rules,” Meduza, September 11, 2018.
https://meduza.io/feature/2018/09/11/glava-rosgvardii-zolotov-vyzval-
navalnogo-na-duel-i-sdelal-eto-protiv-vseh-duelnyh-pravil.
Andrew Roth, “Russian Officials Appropriating Jets for Family and
Lovers, Says Activist,” Guardian, December 4, 2019.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/04/russian-officials-
appropriating-jets-for-family-and-lovers-says-activist.
Pyotr Mironenko and Irina Pankratova, “Patriarch Kirill Used the
Company’s Business Jet from Navalny’s Investigation,” Bell, December 26,
2019. https://thebell.io/patriarh-kirill-polzovalsya-biznes-dzhetom-
kompanii-iz-rassledovaniya-navalnogo.
Chapter 4. Early Years
Vitaly Chervonenko and Tatiana Yanutsevich, “Navalnys’ Village. What
Ukrainian Compatriots and Relatives Say About Putin’s Main Enemy,”
BBC News Ukraine, February 4, 2021.
https://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/features-russian-55922932.
Irina Guk, “Chernobyl Childhood of Alexei Navalny,” Vesti, October 17,
2013. https://vesti.ua/strana/21302-ukrainskie-rodstvenniki-navalnogo-
rasskazali-o-ego-mestnyh-kornja.
Dmitry Sokolov and Zyubov Pavel, “Butyn as a Mirror of Russia:
Navalny’s Native Village Is Mired in Poverty and Corruption,” Sobsednik,
June 4, 2020. https://sobesednik.ru/politika/20200603-butyn-kak-zerkalo-
rossii-rodno.
Yevgenia Albats, “Enemy No. 1: Interview with the Mother of Alexey
Navalny,” New Times, April 22, 2013.
https://newtimes.ru/articles/detail/65807/.
Lesley Stahl, “The Man Trying to Beat Putin,” CBS News, July 29,
2019. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alexey-navalny-the-man-trying-to-
beat-putin-60-minutes-2019-07-29/.
Konstantin Voronkov, Threat to Crooks and Thieves (Moscow: Eksmo,
2012).
Oleg Bocharov, “The Story of One Photo: Schwarzenegger Meets His
Idol Yuri Vlasov, 1988,” Maxim, April 24, 2022.
https://www.maximonline.ru/longreads/istoriya-odnoi-fotografii-
shvarcenegger-vstrechaet-svoego-kumira-yuriya-vlasova-1988-id727832/.
Simon Shuster, “Can Crusading Blogger Alexei Navalny Save Russia?”
Time, January 23, 2012.
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,2104221,00.html.
Simon Shuster, “The Anti-Putin Movement: An Interview with the
Blogger in Chief,” Time, January 18, 2012.
https://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2104445,00.html.
Julia Ioffe, “‘These Bastards Will Never See Our Tears’: How Yulia
Navalnaya Became Russia’s Real First Lady,” Vanity Fair, July 8, 2021.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/07/how-yulia-navalnaya-became-
russias-real-first-lady.
Irina Mokrousova and Irina Reznik, “How Alexei Navalny Earns a
Living,” Vedomosti, February 13, 2012.
https://www.vedomosti.ru/library/articles/2012/02/13/pesnya_o_blogere#ix
zz1mLIgNsyq.
Chapter 5. Making of a Politician
“The Committee for the Protection of Muscovites agreed with Don-Stroy,”
Rosbalt, November 4, 2004.
https://www.rosbalt.ru/main/2004/11/04/184071.html.
“New Politics: Who Is Navalny?” Afisha, February 27, 2012.
https://daily.afisha.ru/archive/gorod/archive/new-politics-navalny/.
Julia Gutova, “Navalny, Who Are You?!” Russian Reporter, March 10,
2011. https://expert.ru/russian_reporter/2011/09/navalnyij--tyi-kto_i/.
Olga Khvostunova, “Who Is Mr. Navalny?,” Institute of Modern Russia,
January 18, 2012. https://imrussia.org/en/politics/183-who-is-mr-navalny.
Julia Ioffe, “Net Impact: One Man’s Cyber Crusade Against Russian
Corruption,” New Yorker, March 28, 2011.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/04/net-impact.
Yulia Ignatyeva, “College Students Kicked Out of the Center,” Izvestia,
September 28, 2006.
https://web.archive.org/web/20071011202544/http:/www.izvestia.ru/mosco
w/article3097073/.
Rimma Polyak, “LJ Conquers Space,” Russian Nights, Russian Journal,
November 4, 2006.
https://web.archive.org/web/20061104083143/http:/nights.russ.ru/events/11
1722334.
Rimma Polyak, “Debates—Yes?” Russian Nights, Russian Journal,
November 30, 2007.
https://web.archive.org/web/20071130033925/http:/nights.russ.ru/events/11
5959746.
Roman Ukolov, “Dispute with Scuffle and Shooting,” Nezavisimaya
Gazeta, November 1, 2007. https://www.ng.ru/events/2007-11-
01/7_disput.html.
“‘I Shot the Whole Clip’: How Navalny Managed to Avoid
Responsibility for a Fight with a Weapon in 2007,” RT in Russian, August
11, 2020. https://russian.rt.com/russia/article/771393-navalnyi-klub-draka-
strelba-delo.
Masha Gessen, “The Evolution of Alexey Navalny’s Nationalism,” New
Yorker, February 15, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-
columnists/the-evolution-of-alexey-navalnys-nationalism.
 “‘Political Nationalists’ Signed a Cooperation Pact,” Grani.ru, June 8,
2008. https://graniru.org/Politics/Russia/Parties/m.137589.html.
Chapter 6. Anti-corruption Crusader
Peter Carlson, “The Stock Character,” Washington Post, April 20, 2003.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2003/04/20/the-stock-
character/f03271e1-74ee-4cad-918e-c18ef7d0f2d9/.
“Wanted: Minority Shareholders of Surgutneftegaz Want to Know Its
Real Owners,” Izbrannoe, May 4, 2008.
https://web.archive.org/web/20101129073921/http://www.izbrannoe.ru/348
43.html.
Elena Mazneva and Irina Malkova, “Bogdanov Does Not Know the
Owners of Surgut,” Vedomosti, April 30, 2008.
https://www.vedomosti.ru/library/articles/2008/04/30/bogdanov-ne-znaet-
hozyaev-surguta.
“Rebellion of Surgutneftegaz Minority Shareholders: At the Annual
Meeting of Shareholders They Asked Bogdanov Several Uncomfortable
Questions,” Ura.ru, May 05, 2008. https://ura.news/news/38110.
Svetlana Ivanova, Vera Surzhenko, and Ekaterina Derbilova, “Billions
Out of Control,” Vedomosti, March 24, 2008.
https://www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/articles/2008/03/24/beskontrolnye-
milliardy.
Elena Mazneya and Alexey Nikolsky, “Gas Arithmetic,” Vedomosti,
December 24, 2008.
https://www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/articles/2008/12/24/gazovaya-
arifmetika.
Richard L. Cassin, “Moscow Activist Questions International Auditors,”
FCPA Blog, December 28, 2010. https://fcpablog.com/2010/12/28/moscow-
activist-questions-international-auditors/.
Miriam Elder, “Russia’s Chief Whistleblower Wants to Jail the Corrupt,”
Guardian, February 23, 2011.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/23/russia-whistleblower-
corruption.
“Navalny Published Part of the Classified Report on the ‘Sawing’ in
Transneft,” Lenta.ru, November 16, 2010.
https://lenta.ru/news/2010/11/16/transneft/.
Alexei Navalny and Maxim Trudolyubov, “Russian Journalists Need
Help in Exposing Corruption,” Nieman Reports, April 20, 2011.
https://niemanreports.org/articles/russian-journalists-need-help-in-exposing-
corruption-2/.
Andrew Roth, “Russian Court Outlaws Alexei Navalny’s Organisation,”
Guardian, June 9, 2021.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/09/russian-court-expected-to-
outlaw-alexei-navalnys-organisation.
Yulia Kalinina, “Blog Will Punish: Well-Known Anti-corruption Fighter
Alexei Navalny: ‘The Fight Against Crooks and Thieves Is My Political
Campaign, My Struggle for Power,’” Moskovsky Komsomolets, June 9,
2011. https://www.mk.ru/politics/2011/06/09/596335-blog-nakazhet.html.
Chapter 7. Blogger, Street Fighter, Politician
Ksenia Veretennikova, “Internet and Samizdat: The Opposition Discussed
Its Future in Federal Election Campaigns,” Vremya, June 17, 2010.
http://www.vremya.ru/2010/103/4/256034.html.
Maksim Ivanov, “Democrats Consulted But Did Not Agree,”
Kommersant, June 16, 2010. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1387124.
Pavel Sheremet and Olga Filina, “On a Closed Circle of Questions,”
Spark Magazine, Kommersant, June 21, 2010.
https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1386111.
Konstantin Sonin, “The Kuzimov vs. Navalny Debate,” Moscow Times,
March 23, 2011. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2011/03/23/the-
kuzminov-vs-navalny-debate-a5830.
Dmytry Lanin, “Blogger Navalny and Rector Kuzminov Did Not Hear
Each Other,” BFM.ru, March 19, 2011. https://www.bfm.ru/news/132567.
Natalia Raibman, “Navalny Wants to Become President,” Vedomosti,
April 15, 2013.
https://www.vedomosti.ru/politics/articles/2013/04/05/navalnyj_hochet_stat
_prezidentom.
Anastasia Kornya, Olga Churakova, and Roman Shleynov, “Navalny’s
Investigation into the Business of the Sons of the Prosecutor General Is Not
Yet of Interest to the Authorities,” Vedomosti, December 2, 2015.
https://www.vedomosti.ru/politics/articles/2015/12/03/619391-
genprokurora-vlast-ne-interesuet.
“Chaika Called the Revelations of the Anti-corruption Foundation
Made-to-Order and False,” Interfax, December 3, 2015.
https://www.interfax.ru/russia/482923.
“Elections of the Mayor of Moscow,” Gazeta.ru, October 8, 2010.
https://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2010/10/07_a_3426748.shtml.
Elena Ovchinnikova, “FSB Loves from Behind,” Vyatsky Observer,
January 14, 2010.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100117185759/http://www.nabludatel.ru/nu
mers/2010/3/36.htm.
Olga Kuzmenkova, “‘Then It Screamed from the Heart’: How Alexei
Navalny Did Not Want to Go to Chistye Prudy, and Ksenia Sobchak
Decided to Perform on Sakharov Avenue,” Gazeta.ru, December 5, 2012.
https://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2012/12/04_a_4878797.shtml.
Zoya Svetova, “We Are All Deprived of Liberty Completely Illegally,”
New Times, December 12, 2011. https://newtimes.ru/articles/detail/47446.
Vladimir Antipin, “Weirdo with the Letter W,” Russian Reporter,
February 4, 2010. https://expert.ru/russian_reporter/2010/04/volkov/.
Pavel Sergeev, “Leonid Volkov: Biography, Politics and Personal Life of
Navalny’s Ally,” Anews, February 5, 2021.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210205132646/https://anews.com/13648093
7-leonid-volkov-biografija-politika-i-lichnaja-zhizny-soratnika-
navalynogo.html.
Chapter 8. Prosecution, Persecution, Prison
“Votinov was Taken into Custody Right in the Courtroom,” Newsler.ru,
May 17, 2012. https://www.newsler.ru/incidents/2012/05/17/votinov17.
“Another Adviser to Nikita Belykh Is Suspected of Fraud,” Newsler.ru,
June 3, 2010. https://www.newsler.ru/incidents/2010/06/03/navalny.
Oleg Suchkov, “Unsanitary Forest,” Vek, June 3, 2010.
https://wek.ru/antisanitar-lesa.
Igor Degtyarev, “Adviser to the Governor of the Kirov Region May Be
Involved in a Criminal Case on the Fact of Fraud,” Rossiyskaya Gazeta,
June 11, 2010. https://rg.ru/2010/06/11/sovetn-gubern.html.
Mikhail Agafonov, “Alexey Navalny’s Fraud Case Reached the UPC,”
Marker, December 9, 2010.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140904085727/http:/marker.ru/news/2902.
“Nikita Belykh Called Accusations Against Navalny ‘Ridiculous,’”
Newsler.ru, December 10, 2010.
https://www.newsler.ru/politics/2010/12/10/navalny041.
David M. Herszenhorn, “Putin Critic Gets 5-Year Jail Term, Setting Off
Protests,” New York Times, July 18, 2013.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/19/world/europe/russian-court-convicts-
opposition-leader-aleksei-navalny.html.
David M. Herszenhorn, “Aleksei Navalny, Putin Critic, Is Spared Prison
in a Fraud Case, but His Brother Is Jailed,” New York Times, December 30,
2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/31/world/europe/aleksei-navalny-
convicted.html.
Yulia Chernukhina, “The Man Who Announced the Verdict on
Navalny,” New Times, April 15, 2013.
https://newtimes.ru/articles/detail/65311/.
Mikhail Rubin, Olga Churakova, and Roman Badanin, “Enemy Number
One: The Story of How the Authorities Are Fighting with Alexei Navalny,”
Proekt, August 24, 2020. https://www.proekt.media/narrative/kreml-protiv-
navalnogo/.
Evgeny Feldman and Ivan Zhilin, “The Court Changed Navalny and
Ofitserov’s Punishment from Real to Suspended (Chronicle),” Novaya
Gazeta, October 16, 2013.
https://web.archive.org/web/20131018235427/http:/www.novayagazeta.ru/n
ews/132691.html.
Chapter 9. Mayoral Candidate, Statesman
“Navalny Prepared a Truckload of Complaints About Election Violations,”
Lenta.ru, September 11, 2013. https://lenta.ru/news/2013/09/11/claim/.
Ekaterina Vinokurova, “Navalny Will Add Legitimacy to the Elections,”
Gazeta.ru, July 10, 2013.
https://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2013/07/09_a_5419993.shtml?updated.
Ekaterina Vinokurova, “Navalny Collected Signatures Without Asking,”
Gazeta.ru, July 8, 2013.
https://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2013/07/08_a_5417225.shtml?updated.
“Sobyanin Resigns to Participate in New Elections,” BBC News
Russian Service, June 4, 2013.
https://www.bbc.com/russian/international/2013/06/130604_moscow_sobya
nin_resigns.
Eduard Limonov, “Your Lyosha,” Svobodnaya Pressa, October 4, 2012.
https://svpressa.ru/society/article/59369/.
“Navalny Launches Campaign Platform, Promises ‘Wonderful Future’
for Russia,” Moscow Times, December 14, 2017.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2017/12/14/navalny-campaign-
promises-wonderful-future-russia-a59935.
Chapter 10. Prisoner
Arkady Ostrovsky, “‘I’ve Mortally Offended Putin by Surviving’: Why
Alexei Navalny Keeps Fighting,” 1843 Magazine, Economist, May 2, 2012.
https://www.economist.com/1843/2021/05/02/ive-mortally-offended-putin-
by-surviving-why-alexei-navalny-keeps-fighting.
Masha Gessen, “Why Alexey Navalny Returned to Russia,” New Yorker,
April 13, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-
alexey-navalny-returned-to-russia.
Daria Garmonenko, “The Kremlin Will Have Time to Prepare for the
Return of Navalny,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta, January 13, 2021.
https://www.ng.ru/politics/2021-01-13/1_8055_politics1.html.
Max Seddon, “Alexei Navalny Protests Breathe New Life into Anti-
Putin Feeling,” Financial Times, January 29, 2021.
https://www.ft.com/content/c2a8c193-6243-41d8-b53b-b7854d5af8f2.
“Plane with Navalny Redirected from Vnukovo to Sheremetyevo,”
Kommersant, January 17, 2021. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4652414.
Masha Gessen, “Alexey Navalny Has the Proof of His Poisoning,” New
Yorker, October 18, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-
yorker-interview/alexey-navalny-has-the-proof-of-his-poisoning.
Andrew Roth, “Kremlin Could Try to Keep Navalny Locked Away for
Years,” Guardian, January 17, 2021.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/17/kremlin-try-keep-alexei-
navalny-locked-away-years-vladimir-putin.
Andrew E. Kramer, “In First Interview from Jail, an Upbeat Navalny
Discusses Prison Life,” New York Times, August 25, 2021.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/world/europe/navalny-jail-
prison.html.
“What Is Known About the Colony Where Alexei Navalny Was Taken,”
Kommersant, June 14, 2022. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/5410316.
Maria Starikova, “The Food Is Better Than in IK-2,” Kommersant,
January 18, 2023. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/5774185.
Denis Telmanov, “‘I Am a Threat to US National Security’: Butina
About Foreign Agents, Navalny and Barbie Dolls,” Gazeta.ru, December
20, 2021. https://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2021/12/19_a_14332765.shtml.
Alexey Navalny, “Alexei Navalny: This Is What a Post-Putin Russia
Should Look Like,” Washington Post, September 30, 2022.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/30/alexei-navalny-
parliamentary-republic-russia-ukraine/.
Chapter 11. Last Word
“The Speed of Obtaining Navalny’s Passport Turned Out to Be Amazing,”
Moskovsky Komsomolets, May 8, 2017.
https://www.mk.ru/politics/2017/05/08/skorost-polucheniya-navalnym-
zagranpasporta-okazalas-izumitelnoy.html.
Sergey Polosatov, “Kasyanov and His Mistress Shook The Dirty Linen
of the Opposition,” Komsomolskaya Pravda, April 1, 2016.
https://www.kp.ru/daily/26512.7/3380893/.
David M. Herszenhorn, “Navalny Accuses Russian Forces of Killing a
Namesake in Ukraine,” Politico Europe, April 19, 2022.
https://www.politico.eu/article/navalny-accuses-russian-forces-of-killing-a-
namesake-in-ukraine/.
“Alexei Navalny Was Doused with Green Paint in Barnaul,” Vesti,
March 20, 2017. https://www.vesti.ru/article/1567276.
Yevgenia Albats, “Interview: ‘I Think Power in Russia Will Not Change
Because of Elections,” New Times, July 19, 2011.
https://newtimes.ru/articles/detail/38107/.
Robyn Dixon, “Navalny is sentenced to 19 years for ‘extremism’ as
Kremlin crushes dissent,” Washington Post, Aug. 4, 2023.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/04/alexei-navalny-
sentenced-russia-opposition/.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks goes first and foremost to Sean Desmond, my editor and above all a
great friend, for being the godfather and champion of this project and for
his patient persistence as Russia’s war in Ukraine upended our plans and
rewrote the calendar, and to my dear friend Susan Cordaro, for her
impeccable taste and encouraging Sean and I to work together.
This book would also never have been possible without many great
colleagues and friends at the New York Times, Politico Europe, and the
Washington Post. Special thanks are due to Bill Keller and Susan Chira,
who offered me a dream assignment as a New York Times correspondent
based in Moscow, and to my editors during that assignment, Joe Kahn and
Michael Slackman. Thanks also to Clifford J. Levy, who preceded me for
the Times in Moscow and who, along with his wonderful family, introduced
my family to the Novaya Gumanitarnaya Shkola—the New Humanitarian
School—and to my fellow correspondents, especially Ellen Barry, Andrew
E. Kramer, Steven Lee Myers, and Andrew Roth.
I owe a tremendous debt to the New York Times Moscow Bureau’s
longtime magician-translators, Nikolay Khalip and Viktor Klimenko, who
taught me how to work effectively as a foreign journalist in Russia. As Nik
often said, “We don’t want an interview, we just want to chat.” I also owe
huge thanks to my Russian teacher, the late Boris Shekhtman, whose
wonderous techniques and great sense of humor helped train generations of
Russian correspondents for the New York Times and other news
organizations. Thanks also to my dearest mentors at the Times—Sara
Rimer, John Kifner, Robert D. McFadden, Dan Barry, Suzanne Daley,
Alison Mitchell, Carl Hulse, and the late Robert Pear.
Carrie Budoff Brown and Matthew Kaminsky brought me to Brussels to
be part of the exciting Politico Europe project. They, along with Stephen
Brown, who is dearly missed, allowed me to keep reporting on Russia and
Ukraine as an extension of the European Union and transatlantic relations.
To my great friends at Politico Europe, especially Jacopo Barigazzi, Florian
Eder, and Rym Momtaz, who proved every day that it is possible to get the
scoop and get the joke—often at the same time. And thanks to my
colleagues at the Washington Post, especially Douglas Jehl and Sally
Buzbee, who brought me back to the Russia beat full-time, and also to the
fabulous and brave Washington Post Russia and Ukraine correspondents
with whom I work every day.
Thank you to all of the Russian and international journalists, an
incredible cadre of professionals, whose extensive and exhaustive coverage
of Navalny—in real time—provided the factual foundations of this book.
I can’t say enough about the terrific staff at Twelve, especially Bob
Castillo and Zohal Karimy, who made the production process seem
effortless.
Deep thanks to ace photographer Evgeny Feldman for the photos from
his many years of unparalleled coverage of Navalny, including from his
remarkable This Is Navalny project. And ogromnoe spasibo to Anna
Berezniatskaia for some clutch translation help with tricky Russian
phraseology.
Of course, any mistakes in this book are my responsibility and mine
alone.
A special thanks to my uncle, Moises “Mo” Herszenhorn, for teaching
me to be brave, to bet on adventure, and “to keep our name high.” Of
course, this book would not have been remotely possible without the
patient, steadfast love and support of my wife, Christina Pan Marshall, and
our sons, Miles, Isaac, and Ellis Herszenhorn, who made enormous
sacrifices to allow me to follow the news wherever it led.
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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David M. Herszenhorn recently joined the Washington Post as Russia,

Ukraine, and East Europe editor. He is the former chief Brussels
correspondent of Politico. Before joining Politico, David worked for more
than twenty years at the New York Times, as a reporter, Washington
correspondent, and foreign correspondent based in Moscow.