Obituary: Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most vociferous Putin critic

Alexei Navalny was born in 1976, in a village simply to the west of Moscow. He grew up in Obninsk, a city 100km (62 miles) south-west of Moscow, finally graduating in regulation at Moscow’s Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia in 1998.

But it was one other decade earlier than he started his rise as a pressure in Russian politics, making his title as a grassroots anti-corruption campaigner. His weblog took purpose at alleged malpractice and corruption at a few of Russia’s large state-controlled firms.

One of his techniques was to turn out to be a minority shareholder in main oil corporations, banks and ministries, and to ask awkward questions on holes in state funds.

His constant message was a easy one: that Mr Putin’s celebration was stuffed with “crooks and thieves”.

He accused the president of “sucking the blood out of Russia” via a “feudal state” concentrating energy within the Kremlin. That patronage system, he claimed, was like tsarist Russia.

It helped that Navalny spoke the road language of younger Russians, and used it to {powerful} impact on social media. His Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) made detailed claims about official corruption.

Then, in 2011, he would lead massive road protests towards President Putin.

For the remainder of his life, he could be out and in of jail, whereas his organisations could be banned as “extremist”.

In 2017, he was barred from standing within the normal election. At the time, he was broadly considered the one candidate with an opportunity of difficult President Putin.

He would additionally survive a number of suspected – and one confirmed – makes an attempt on his life.

The first time Navalny suspected he had been poisoned, he was in jail serving a sentence for calling for unauthorised protests. Then 43, he was taken to hospital with a swollen face, eye issues and rashes on his physique.

At the time, stories instructed it was an allergic response – one thing he and his physician have been fast to query. Officially, he was identified with “contact dermatitis”.

Navalny – who had beforehand suffered chemical burns to an eye fixed after been focused with antiseptic inexperienced dye in 2017 – later wrote that the docs who handled him acted “like that they had one thing to cover”.

But it was the second alleged poisoning a 12 months later which actually caught the eye of the worldwide media.

In August 2020, Navalny collapsed on a flight over Siberia and was rushed to hospital in Omsk. That emergency touchdown saved his life. A German-based charity persuaded Russian officers to permit him to be airlifted to Berlin for remedy.

The EU then imposed sanctions on six prime Russian officers and a Russian chemical weapons analysis centre, accusing them of direct involvement within the poisoning. Russia retaliated with tit-for-tat sanctions.

Novichok was the chemical weapon which practically killed former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England, in March 2018. A neighborhood girl later died from contact with Novichok.

Mr Putin admitted that the state was protecting Navalny underneath surveillance – it was justified, he alleged, as a result of US spies have been serving to the blogger.

Recovered, Navalny returned to Moscow on 17 January 2021 and was instantly detained, as he knew he could be. He mentioned on Instagram that he felt he had by no means left – so there was no alternative however to return.

He would by no means be free once more, regardless of his supporters staging mass protests throughout Russia. Police responded to the protests with pressure, detaining 1000’s for attending the unauthorised rallies.

The arrests didn’t deter his staff from their mission. A video of “Putin’s palace” on YouTube was shortly printed, specializing in an enormous luxurious Black Sea palace, allegedly gifted to Mr Putin by wealthy associates.

The video has been seen nicely over 100 million instances. The Kremlin dismissed it as a “pseudo-investigation” and Mr Putin referred to as it “boring”, denying the claims. Later billionaire businessman Arkady Rotenberg, considered one of Mr Putin’s closest mates, mentioned it was his personal palace.

The courtroom case which adopted allowed Navalny to make public his allegations towards President Putin, in what was now an intensely private battle: he accused the president of ordering state brokers to poison him – and repeated that in courtroom.

“His foremost gripe with me is that he’ll go down in historical past as a poisoner,” Navalny instructed the courtroom scornfully. “We had Alexander the Liberator, Yaroslav the Wise, and we could have Vladimir the Underpants Poisoner.”

Underpants had turn out to be a social media meme in Russia after Navalny carried out a phone sting in December 2020 on a Russian FSB state safety agent, who revealed that Novichok, a extremely poisonous Russian chemical weapon, had been smeared on Navalny’s underwear.

But whereas it highlighted as soon as extra the Kremlin’s alleged makes an attempt on his life, it didn’t cease the courtroom discovering him responsible. On 2 February 2021, a Moscow courtroom jailed Navalny for violating the phrases of a 2014 suspended sentence for fraud – a case which he mentioned had been politically motivated within the first place.

Meanwhile, he and his anti-corruption staff – all banned from standing in parliamentary elections – have been nonetheless combating the Kremlin, this time making a “good voting” app that inspired voters to again candidates who had an opportunity of defeating Mr Putin’s United Russia celebration in September 2021.

But Navalny was not a easy hero, battling towards a strong regime. He has been accused of xenophobia.

In movies courting again to 2007, he’s seen showing to check ethnic battle to tooth decay and likened immigrants to cockroaches. He additionally mentioned the Crimea peninsula “de facto belongs to Russia”, regardless of worldwide condemnation of Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Ukrainian territory.

The feedback led – controversially – to Amnesty International revoking his standing as a “prisoner of conscience” in February 2021, earlier than conceding it had been subjected to an “orchestrated marketing campaign” to “delist” him after which reversing its resolution.

Meanwhile, the Russian authorities continued to punish Navalny. In March 2022, his sentence was elevated by nine-years after he was discovered responsible on new costs of embezzlement and contempt of courtroom. He was moved to a brand new penal colony at Melekhovo, round 250km (150 miles) east of Moscow.

In June 2022, his allies raised the alarm after they found he was now not in that jail. Federal jail authorities later admitted he had been moved to a penal colony with a tricky fame, the IK-6 jail, greater than 155 miles (249km) east of Moscow, the place he mentioned he was repeatedly placed in solitary confinement.

His final sentence, handed down by judges in August 2023 and which prolonged his jail time period to 19 years, noticed him moved to a most safety penal colony often reserved for Russia’s most harmful criminals.

His harsh remedy mirrored the very fact than Mr Putin and his regime feared the affect that Navalny’s campaigns had been gaining, Prof Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of former Soviet chief Nikita Khrushchev and worldwide affairs specialists, instructed the BBC on the time.

“Putin does not even point out his title, anyone within the Kremlin cannot his point out title,” she mentioned, drawing a comparability with the fictional Harry Potter character Voldemort – who can be known as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”.

“Navalny is a menace to Putin’s private energy, Putin’s private fame of himself. And Putin does not actually deal with his enemies frivolously and Navalny sadly took this – as they are saying in Russian – this ticket to be Putin’s private enemy.”

Yet regardless of the confinement of his final years, Navalny grew to become one of many main home voices towards the battle in Ukraine.

During a courtroom look in May 2022, he accused Mr Putin of beginning a “silly battle” with “no goal or that means”. And in September, he accused Russian elites of getting a “bloodthirsty obsession with Ukraine” in an article for the Washington Post.

His basis additionally continued to oppose the federal government all through his imprisonment, talking out towards the mobilisation of some 300,000 civilians to struggle in Ukraine and pledging to be a “partisan underground” motion inside Russia.

Navalny instructed the BBC that the most effective factor Western states might do for justice in Russia was to crack down on “soiled money”.

“I would like folks concerned in corruption and persecution of activists to be barred from getting into these international locations, to be denied visas.”

The information of his loss of life on 16 February was instantly greeted by a wave of tributes from world wide.

He had made the “ultimate sacrifice” in his struggle “for the values of freedom and democracy”, mentioned the European Union Council president Charles Michel, whereas French international minister Stéphane Séjourné mentioned he had “paid along with his life for his resistance to a system of oppression”.

However, precisely how – or why – he died has but to be established. He leaves behind his spouse, Yulia, and two kids.

According to his staff, that they had not been knowledgeable instantly of his loss of life when it broke in newspapers internationally.