The prison authorities said that Mr. Navalny lost consciousness on Friday after taking a walk in the Arctic penal colony where he was moved late last year. He was last seen on Thursday, when he had appeared in a court hearing via video link, smiling behind the bars of a cell and making jokes.
Mr. Navalny had been serving multiple sentences that would most likely have kept him in prison until at least 2031 on charges that his supporters say were largely fabricated in an effort to muzzle him. Despite increasingly harsh conditions, including repeated stints in solitary confinement, he maintained a presence on social media, while members of his team continued to publish investigations into Russia’s corrupt elite from exile.
Mr. Navalny was given a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence in February 2021 after returning to Russia from Germany, where he had been recovering from being poisoned the previous August. In March 2022, he received a nine-year sentence for embezzlement and fraud in a trial that international observers denounced as “politically motivated” and a “sham.” And in August 2023, he was sentenced to 19 years in prison for “extremism.”
Mr. Navalny had effectively returned from the dead after he was poisoned with a nerve agent in Siberia in 2020, and he conducted multiple hunger strikes to improve his treatment. During his detention, Mr. Navalny was repeatedly placed in solitary confinement and complained about severe illnesses. In December, he disappeared for three weeks during his transfer to a penal colony 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
Yet even from prison, Mr. Navalny remained an unflinching critic of Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer whom he accused of corruptly skimming the country’s oil profits to enrich his friends and entourage in the security services. Mr. Putin’s political party, he once said, was a party of “swindlers and thieves,” and he accused the president of trying to turn Russia into a “feudal state.” (...)
Mr. Navalny was known for his innovative tactics in fighting corruption and promoting democracy. Defying expectations, he cannily used street politics and social media to build a tenacious opposition movement even after much of the independent news media in Russia was squelched and other critics were driven into exile or killed in unsolved murders. In the years before Russia invaded Ukraine, many of Mr. Navalny’s associates, and in some cases their relatives, were arrested or forced into exile.
At his death, he was the most prominent critic of Mr. Putin still standing in Russia, at a time when the president has engineered a path to remain in power until at least 2036. (...)
He had spoken openly of the possibility that he might be assassinated.
“I’m trying not to think about it a lot,” he said in an interview with CBS News in 2017. “If you start to think about what kind of risks I have, you cannot do anything.”
On Aug. 20, 2020, Mr. Navalny became violently ill and fell into a coma shortly after boarding a flight from Siberia, where he had met with opposition candidates for local office.
The flight made an emergency landing in the Russian city of Omsk, where doctors for two days resisted his wife’s pleas that he be transferred to Germany for treatment.
Mr. Navalny was eventually evacuated to Berlin on an air ambulance flight after a team of German doctors who had arrived in Omsk stated that it was safe for him to travel. A little more than a week later, the German government announced that he had been poisoned with a nerve agent from the highly potent Novichok family of toxins. The evidence, German officials said, was “unequivocal.”
“Mr. Navalny has been the victim of a crime,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said at the time. “It raises very serious questions that only the Russian government can and must answer.” (...)
Despite the attacks and the jail terms, Mr. Navalny persevered, he said, out of a desire to change the course of his country and not let down the people who worked with him. He was angry at what he called Mr. Putin’s self-dealing inner circle and the security services that protected it.
“I do this because I hate these people,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2011, before he rose to prominence.
Still, he struggled to unite the feuding pro-democracy opposition parties, a fractured state of affairs that has plagued Russia’s politics since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.(...)
Mr. Navalny’s support among the middle class — mostly in the capital, Moscow, where he ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2013 — brought a new type of politics to the country, one focused not on the woes of striking miners or the aloof intellectual class but on bread-and-butter issues of the new capitalist era, like protecting home equity and investments in stocks.
Years of arrests and attacks followed. (...)
In one searing exposé in 2017, he laid out a web of foundations and shell companies, all connected to former President Dmitri A. Medvedev, whose mansions, country estates, 18th-century palace in St. Petersburg and vineyard in Tuscany were displayed in the video.
“The system has turned so rotten that it doesn’t have any healthy parts at all,” Mr. Navalny said.
Mr. Navalny was detained so many times that he once joked to a judge that he wouldn’t take up the court’s time with a final statement before sentencing, because he would surely have another chance to do so again.
“The last word of the accused should be a dramatic moment in his life,” he said. “But they opened so many cases against me that this will not be my last chance to have a last word.”
Image: Sergey Ponomarev/Associated Press; Anatoly Maltsev/EPA, via Shutterstock
[ed. And just like that, a nation's hopes are dashed. See also: Navalny Challenged Russians to ‘Live Not by Lies’ (NYT); Trump, Putin, Carlson and the Shifting Sands of Today’s American Politics (NYT); and The Republican Party has grown much more supportive of Russia in recent years (NPR).]
[ed. And just like that, a nation's hopes are dashed. See also: Navalny Challenged Russians to ‘Live Not by Lies’ (NYT); Trump, Putin, Carlson and the Shifting Sands of Today’s American Politics (NYT); and The Republican Party has grown much more supportive of Russia in recent years (NPR).]
