Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death, explained
Navalny’s death is the end of an era for Russia — and cements Putin’s grip on power.
Navalny has been imprisoned several times; in 2014 he was put under house arrest for embezzlement charges that critics say were meant to discredit him, and he was detained in 2019 for what authorities claimed was an unauthorized protest.
In August 2020, Navalny was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok while on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow; he spent several months in Germany recovering from the near-fatal poisoning. When he returned to Russia in January 2021, he was almost immediately detained and imprisoned until at least 2031 for various charges, including extremism.
“We’re in this perpetual state of being shocked but not surprised” about Navalny’s death, Sam Greene, director for democratic resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), told Vox in an interview. “There’s no question about who’s culpable, but how that culpability is structured is a question to which we’ll probably never know the answer. The fundamental truth is that the Kremlin killed its most potent opponent.”
That is how Navalny’s death is being processed among Russian dissident expatriates.
“This is not death, this is a brutal murder,” Russian dissident and member of the artist collective Pussy Riot Nadya Tolokonnikova wrote on her Instagram Friday. “Navalny is the soul of free Russia and I, like you all, was sure that he is immortal as a soul.”
Navalny’s probable death strengthens a reality Putin has been building in Russia for a while — that there is no alternative to Putin, and that there is no hope and no room for dissent.
“Now, there’s not even the slightest public wiggle room when it comes to opposition,” Eliot Borenstein, interim vice chancellor and vice provost for Global Programs at New York University, told Vox in an interview.
Since Putin’s return to power, Russia has made public dissent almost impossible, essentially outlawing the free press or pushing it into exile, outlawing protests and speech that condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and most recently, cracking down on LGBTQ Russians by labeling the global LGBTQ movement an extremist movement. That’s not to mention the effects of those crackdowns and what happens to people who dissent — whether that’s arrest, prison, or worse.
“That’s been the goal for years — to make post-Putin Russia, Russia without Putin, unimaginable,” Borenstein said.