Alexei Navalny Sacrificed Himself to Show Russia That Putin Is a Monster

Alexei Navalny’s long struggle against President Vladimir Putin began with a humorous blog and culminated in repeated demonstrations of his willingness to risk his own life. It was a courageous but one-sided struggle that finally ended on Friday in a prison camp inside the Arctic Circle.

Russian prison authorities said the 47-year-old died at 2:17 p.m. on Friday after collapsing following a walk at the Soviet-era IK-3 penal colony, 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow.

Navalny’s team were shocked by the announcement of his death, which came just days after they had seen him in relatively good health.

“Alexei had a lawyer at his place on Wednesday,” Leonid Solovyev, his lawyer, told the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. “Everything was normal then.”

On Thursday, Navalny appeared in court via videolink and seemed to be in good spirits, laughing and telling the judge that he would send him his bank details so he could top it up from his “huge federal salary, because thanks to your decisions I am running out of money.”

One day later, he was dead, Russia’s leading opposition voice silenced just a month before a presidential election at which Putin will once again face no real rival.

Other dissident figures went into exile or died in mysterious circumstances over the past decade, leaving Navalny as the last national figure with a dedicated following.

Though he had been arrested many times before, Navalny’s defining moment in the eyes of many Russians came after the attempt to assassinate him with the nerve agent Novichok in August 2020. He recuperated in the sanctuary of a German hospital but chose to defy Putin and return to Russia in January 2021, knowing full well he would end up in prison.

After his inevitable arrest, he used a series of Moscow show trials to lay bare Russia’s ugliness and injustice.

He was then subjected to the harshest conditions in some of Russia’s worst prisons until his inevitable demise. The prison service in Yamalo-Nenets, where he was being held, announced his death on Friday.

Human rights defender Karèn Shainyan was among those to express their anger at Navalny’s sudden death, remembering a man who had “amazed me with his courage and with his very genuine human behaviour.”

He went on: “Everybody said the Kremlin needed Navalny, as a wild card or a bargaining chip. They do not have anybody left with such a high profile as Navalny... I cannot even imagine the pain Alexey Navalny’s wife, Yulia, and their children feel right now."

Navalny’s brutal treatment began immediately after he was first given a custodial sentence in February 2021. He launched a hunger strike after prison authorities refused to let him receive medical attention—a recurrent theme throughout his incarceration.

His Foundation for Fighting Corruption was also banned as an “extremist” organization after Navalny was jailed, with several team members subjected to their own legal proceedings. The prosecutions also kept coming against Navalny.

In 2022, he was given an additional nine-year sentence on embezzlement and contempt of court charges. Navalny was transferred to a maximum-security facility where he would soon spend lengthy periods in solitary confinement for trivial transgressions like failing to have buttons on his clothes fastened correctly.

In December 2023, Navalny disappeared from view, only to be discovered at the IK-3 penal colony, built in 1961 on the site of a former forced labor camp under Stalin.

Last year, Navalny’s team began raising concerns about his health and access to medical care. They said he was suffering from severe stomach pain and suspected he was being poisoned. In August, a court sentenced him to another 19 years on extremism and other charges which his supporters said were politically motivated.

“Navalny sped up the Kremlin’s switch to dictatorial rule by a few years, as from the moment of his return nobody cared to even pretend to follow the law any longer,” opposition politician Gennady Gudkov told The Daily Beast. “And now the regime is completely doomed.”

From the day in August 2020 Navalny collapsed in agonizing pain on the floor of a plane as he tried to return home to Moscow from campaigning in Siberia, Russians wondered if he would continue his struggle, if he would risk his life once again. “My job here is to stay that guy who is not afraid. And I am not afraid!” he told Der Spiegel in his first interview after the attack.

He was convinced that the order for the assassination plot came from the very top. “I assert that Putin is behind the crime,” he said.

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Ilya Yashin, a friend of Navalny for 20 years, said he has long been exhausted by constantly worrying about his friends being assassinated. “For years I felt worried about Boris Nemtsov. He was gunned down here in Moscow on February 27, 2015,” he told The Daily Beast.

And yet he knew trying to protect Navalny was futile.

“I never told Navalny to stay in Germany, it was useless, he made his choice long ago to become the president of Russia, and to do that he had to be on Russian soil,” said Yashin, who is also an opposition politician.

A lawyer by education, Navalny joined a liberal opposition party, Yabloko, in 2000, when he was 20. Yabloko expelled him in 2007 for his nationalist views and unapologetic participation in far-right activities. Currently, Yabloko is the only registered independent democratic party in Russia.

The year he was forced out of the mainstream opposition party, Navalny founded “The People” movement with the radical leftwing novelist Zakhar Prilepin. Together they ran campaigns where Navalny would look out at crowds of activists with his big blue eyes and tell them that no matter what kind of political background members of “The People” hailed from—nationalists, liberals, or democrats—they were going to tell the truth.

In years to come, Prilepin turned into an avid Putin supporter, fought as a volunteer in the war in Ukraine, and was awarded a manager’s job at one of Moscow’s biggest theaters. When thousands of Russians were protesting against Navalny’s arrest all across Russia in January 2021, Prilepin was busy negotiating a merger of his small political party with another pro-Putin party.

Navalny took a harder road. His campaigns first came to national prominence in 2011 during a period of protest against Putin’s return to the presidency after the former KGB officer had sat out one term as president—assuming the temporary role of prime minister—to thwart Russia’s presidential term limits.

Those anti-Putin rallies attracted as many as a hundred thousand people. “We can feel how your hands are shaking,” Navalny warned Putin. “We are the majority!”

One of his first high-profile arrests came during a protest in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square in May 2012. Cameras captured him screaming in pain as police brutally arrested him. “You are breaking my arm!” he shouted.

The Kremlin allowed him to run for mayoral elections in Moscow the following year, probably thinking that would demonstrate how insignificant he was. But Navalny won 27 percent of the vote despite his total absence from any of the state television networks during the campaign.

Just as his name was absent from the main TV broadcasts, Putin hardly ever uttered the words Alexei Navalny. For years, he referred to him only as the “blogger” and later tried to diminish him as “Berlin’s patient.”

In 2013 and again in 2014, Navalny was convicted in Russian courts for fraud and embezzlement, subjecting the campaigner to more arrests, long ordeals in court, threats of long-term imprisonment, and a clear message of intimidation. In both cases, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia had not given Navalny a fair trial.

Every time he got out of jail, Navalny and his Anti-Corruption-Foundation just got straight back to work. Along with the rallies and public events, they were becoming adept at carrying out deep investigations into corruption.

First, they targeted key figures among Putin’s loyal elite, tapping away at the Kremlin’s power structure like woodpeckers. Ultimately, Putin himself became the target of the increasingly sharp investigative reports.

Navalny got his start in anti-corruption by working at a small law firm in Moscow, where he developed the strategy of buying stocks in state-linked oil companies and banks so that he could question the companies’ leadership as a minority shareholder. By 2017, he had worked his way up to an exposé alleging that Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev had a vast network of palaces worth $1 billion. The YouTube video accompanying the investigation was viewed more than 35 million times.

Some of these investigations had been widely viewed, but Navalny did not attract nationwide popularity until the Novichok attack.

Many Russians who had never heard of him—or actively disliked the campaigner—now saw him as a martyr.

Mikhail Zygar, a political writer and historian, told The Daily Beast that since the first major anti-Putin movement on Bolotnaya Square, Navalny had become the strongest voice condemning those stealing from their own people. Navalny will be remembered as “Russia’s only real politician,” he said.

Navalny has surprised Russians many times. He transformed himself from a nationalist activist into a democrat defending liberal values, and from an atheist into a believer in Christ. In his final speech in court before his latest conviction, Navalny quoted the Bible: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”

The biggest surprise for some Russians was Navalny’s decision to return to the country after he was so close to being murdered by an FSB hit squad in 2020. Putin’s terrifying remarks on the subject only reinforced the clear and present danger. The president noted with a laugh that if Russian special services wanted to kill Navalny, “they would have finished him.” Many Russians found the sound of that laugh to be chilling.

Despite the threat to his life and the clear warning from prison authorities that he would be arrested on his return, Navalny still came back.

Some supporters accepted that this was his destiny; others regretted that he did not stay safe in Germany.

Gennady Gudkov knows the burden of Navalny’s decision all too well. He was once the strongest Kremlin critic in the Duma and credited by the Economist with "the most striking act of parliamentary defiance in the Putin era."

Then the Kremlin’s allies closed in on him, he was thrown out of parliament on spurious charges and threatened with imprisonment for his political activities. Eventually, he chose to leave the country. “My son, also an opposition leader, wanted me to leave, since two Gudkovs in prison would be too much,” he said.

Gudkov saluted Navalny for making the ultimate sacrifice: “I admire Alexei for his courage, for setting up a unique example for Russians—he is a national hero.”

Among those paying tribute to Navalny was Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion and exiled pro-democracy activist.

“Putin tried and failed to murder Navalny quickly and secretly with poison, and now he has murdered him slowly and publicly in prison,” Kasparov wrote on X. “He was killed for exposing Putin and his mafia as the crooks and thieves they are.”