European Central: Russian Opposition After Navalny
AP Photo l Jean-Francois Badias
On February 16th, 2024 at approximately 2:20 pm Moscow time, the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) in Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug announced the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in the FKU IK-3 prison colony, where he was serving a 19-year sentence on what were widely seen as false charges of fraud, extremism, and violating probation. Having previously survived a poisoning in 2020 (Conducted by the FSB, according to Bellingcat), Navalny’s death is widely viewed as occurring on the orders of the Putin regime. Meduza, a Latvian-based independent news source run by Russian opposition journalists, reported that prisoners were confined to their barracks early on the night of the 15th, and that there were no medical personnel anywhere near the cell where Navalny was held in solitary confinement. Meduza’s unnamed source inside the prison colony further speculated that these were signs the death was organized in advance and an intentional act by the Putin regime.
As mentioned earlier, these suspicions are not unfounded. Navalny had, over the past two decades, been a vocal and unifying figure in the Russian opposition, going after Putin, his ministers, and oligarchs for their corruption He also directly challenged Putin’s United Russia party in the polls, running for Mayor of Moscow in 2013, directly challenging Putin for the Russian Presidency in 2018, supporting independent candidates in the 2019 Moscow City Duma elections, and vocally opposing the 2020 Russian Constitutional Referendum that granted vastly increased powers to President Vladimir Putin. The aforementioned anti-corruption activities included the investigations He is not Dimon to you, which accused Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of embezzling almost $1.2 billion, as well as Putin’s Palace, an investigative film about a massive Italianate dacha on the Black Sea that Putin built through misappropriated state funds. He also created the Foundation for Combating Corruption, an organization that worked to investigate high-level corruption by Russian Government Ministers. This organization was declared an extremist group in 2021, and liquidated by the Russian Government. It has since been relaunched as an international organization
These activities made Navalny the most visible face of Russia’s struggling anti-Putin opposition, especially to Western observers, leading to his receiving a number of awards including the Knight of Freedom award presented by the Casimir Pulaski Foundation, the Boris Nemtsov award (named for the vocal Russian opposition figure assassinated in 2015), and the Sakharov prize, the European Parliament's highest award for the defense of human rights. After his arrest, Amnesty International recognized Navalny as a prisoner of conscience, and even from his jail cell, he maintained his position as Putin’s most significant opponent until his transfer to the IK-3 Arctic penal colony in 2023.
Alexei Navalny’s death may have weakened the Russian opposition, but, by all appearances, not as much as Putin may have hoped. According to the Times Radio, a service provided by the Sunday Times, a major British broadsheet, thousands of mourners and protesters turned up at Alexei Navalny’s funeral, making “a statement that an alternative future for Russia still exists”. New opposition leaders have also begun to emerge. Yulia Navalnaya, Alexei Navalny’s widow, has pledged to take his role as the head of the aforementioned Foundation for Combating Corruption. To take her late husband’s place as the head of Russia’s anti-Putin opposition, she would have to unite the many quarreling subfactions in the opposition, whose disagreements have bubbled to the forefront after Navalny’s alleged assassination.
Yulia Navalnaya appears to be taking up this charge, however. At a security conference in Munich, less than an hour after her husband’s death, she stated “I want Putin, his coterie, all of his friends [and] his government to know that they will bear responsibility for what they’ve done with our country, my family and husband. And this day will come soon”, a call for vengeance that received a standing ovation. Al Jazeera also reports her vowing to continue her husband’s work, and describing his death as Putin “murdering [Russia’s] future”, setting herself up to take up her late husband’s mantle but with a more aggressive tone.
Another prominent opposition leader has yet to commit his support, though. The chess champion Garry Kasparov, another vocal anti-Putin critic who has been living in exile since 2013, has taken a harder line against Putin, forming the Anti-war Committee of Russia, a coalition of Russian exiles opposed to the war in Ukraine, as well as drafting Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s “declaration of Russia’s democratic forces”, an opposition manifesto signed by prominent exiles. Kasparov has advocated for a harder line against Putin, blaming the West for Navalny’s death in a scathing editorial published in the Wall Street Journal, arguing that Western governments have been too conciliatory towards Putin and should be more forceful, letting Ukraine into NATO and not excluding the possibility of direct military intervention in Russia. Whether these exiled hardliners will support Yulia Navalnaya in her attempts to reunify the opposition remains to be seen. No matter what happens, though, despite Navalny’s death, it is clear that the Russian opposition to the Putin regime lives on.
