Russian investigative journalist and opposition figure Alexei Navalny has died. Russian authorities say that Navalny collapsed after a walk at the prison colony where he was imprisoned on false charges of corruption and extremism. The 47-year-old was detested by Vladimir Putin and his cronies for publicizing their rampant corruption and for his humorous repudiations of their efforts to portray him as a foreign stooge.
While there was always a high risk of Navalny being killed in prison, it is as yet unclear what happened to him. Navalny had been subjected to repeated ill-treatment by prison authorities and often denied basic medical care. And in December, Navalny was moved to the “Polar Wolf” maximum security prison colony in northwestern Russia. Deeply isolated and fewer than 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the Arctic-facing Kara Sea, this area was central to the Soviet Union’s gulag system. Now it’s part of Putin’s gulag network. Temperatures at the prison were well below freezing this week. Although not a physical security threat, Navalny was relocated in order to increase both his hardship and his political isolation in advance of the 2024 Russian presidential election.
Navalny’s prior experience with the Russian state means that assassination must be considered a significant possibility.
In August 2020, Navalny was poisoned by an FSB domestic security service team armed with a highly concentrated Novichok nerve agent. That same nerve agent was used by the Russian GRU intelligence service in its 2018 attempted assassination of a former Russian spy who had defected to Britain. Then, as with Navalny, the Kremlin made utterly absurd claims of its innocence. But the use of Novichok was deliberate, a one-fingered salute to the West — which knows only Russian services use Novichok — and a very Russian use of dark theater. U.S., British, Finnish, and Norwegian intelligence services will now be scouring communications/communication records at the prison in an attempt to identify what actually happened to Navalny.
In contrast, Russian state media are doing their master’s bidding with aplomb. Somberly asking inane questions about Navalny’s fate, for example, Pavel “hide and seek” Zarubin added a caveat to his report that Navalny was on the register of extremists and terrorists (the Kremlin uses this register as a catch-all for activists and journalists it dislikes — I’m on the same list).
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Unlike these prostitutes for Putin, however, Navalny gave no quarter to the threats and false criminal charges foisted onto him. As I noted last year, this courage only increased the Kremlin’s perception of Navalny as a threat to its presentation of unquestionable power. This perceived threat wasn’t primarily rooted in Navalny’s political popularity, which always remained far lower than that of Putin, but rather in Navalny’s offering of an “undeniable machismo that retains great salience in Russian society.”
So, while Navalny might now be dead, Putin has only reminded the world why it’s so important that he be resisted in Ukraine and elsewhere. Navalny’s only offense was to draw light on the truer nature of Putin’s politics. And for that, whether by slow mistreatment or direct assassination, this actual Russian patriot was killed.