By: Martin Makaryan
Edited By: Alexandra Huggins
Alexey Navalny, the most prominent and widely known Russian dissident and staunch opponent of Vladimir Putin’s regime, died under mysterious circumstances in a Russian prison on February 16. Authorities have not elaborated on the cause of Navalny’s death, saying that he “felt unwell after a walk” and characterizing it as a “sudden death.” But it is clear that Navalny’s slow march to death in prison, in the backdrop of previous failed assassination attempts, was the Kremlin’s doing.
The West’s reaction to the death of Putin’s most prominent critic has been unequivocal: the Kremlin must bear responsibility. Even if Western leaders do not explicitly say it in some cases, the understanding is that Navalny was killed by the regime. This is what the dissident’s wife, Yuliya Navalnaya posted on X (Twitter), accusing Putin of killing her husband.
“We don’t know exactly what happened, but there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something that Putin and his thugs did,” said President Biden. The White House followed through on Biden’s promise, imposing 500 new sanctions on Russia, amid growing skepticism about the effectiveness of extensive Western sanctions already in place.
Alexey Navalny, who had been civically active in the 2000s, began his political trajectory in opposition to the Kremlin as Vladimir Putin’s hold on the country and the regime’s authoritarianism accelerated. His main activism revolved around the anti-corruption fight for most of his life. In 2011, he founded the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a nonprofit seeking to expose and combat Russian government corruption. As his popularity grew, so did the Kremlin’s concerns over his potential to stir up a mass anti-regime movement in Russia.
The Russian government frequently and regularly detained Navalny for protests he organized in the 2010s. But the real threat to Putin’s regime came not from street protests, but Navalny’s online, 21st century-style opposition tactics. The crown jewel in Navalny’s popular investigative videos exposing the deep-seated corruption in the Russian political system was a 2021 bombshell that accused Vladimir Putin of using illicit means to build a multi-million dollar palace on the coast of the Black Sea, exposing the rot of the Russian political system at the highest level. Putin probably did not take that video, which has 130 million views on Youtube, very well.
Navalny’s harassment and persecution are not recent however. Charges against Navalny were brought on numerous occasions over the past decade. Over the years, the Russian government gradually destroyed Navalny’s potential to present a real threat to the regime. In 2017, he was formally barred from running in the country’s presidential elections. In 2020, the Kremlin was accused of a second assassination attempt on Navalny, using the Novichok nerve agent — the same rare poison used in the assassination attempt on Russian double agent Sergei Skripal who was poisoned in 2018 in the United Kingdom by two Russian intelligence officers.
The final imprisonment of Navalny came in August 2023 when a Russian court sentenced him to a further 19 years in prison on charges of “extremism” and “neo-Nazi ideology,” in addition to the 9-year sentence he was serving on what were also a series of politically motivated charges. Last year, concerns over Navalny’s deteriorating health came to light.
While the Kremlin’s persecution and assassination attempts have long sought to neutralize Navalny, the question in everyone’s mind should be: why now?
After Navalny’s death, Anne Applebaum, a historian and Senior Fellow at SAIS who has written extensively on democracy and authoritarianism and Russia, wrote in the Atlantic, “Even behind bars, the dissident leader was a threat to the corrupt Russian dictator.” Navalny had still been politically active even in prison, continuing to criticize Putin and the Russian government online. But was he really a threat to the regime from behind the bars, especially given his poor health?
There is little evidence that Putin had an actual threat to worry about. According to the Levada Center, Putin’s approval ratings have been more or less consistent over time, with the lower range being in the 60-65% in 2013 and 2020 (probably due to the Covid-19 pandemic). The regime has also been largely successful in rallying the majority of the population around the flag with a conservative, Orthodox brand of nationalism following the events of 2014 in Ukraine and especially the full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022. Even the biggest destabilization to the regime in the form of the 2023 mutiny of Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the infamous leader of the equally infamous Wagner group, was driven by a criticism of the government over the war effort, not because of pacifism or a desire for democratization.
All of this is to show that writ large, Navalny did not have the kind of widespread, mass appeal to seriously threaten the regime. He showed bravery and courage, knowing very well that his life would inevitably be at risk, but he was not the kind of leader who could have mobilized large swaths of Russians against Putin whose popularity and the success of his strongman image have once again highlighted the role of cultural context for democratization in non-Western countries.
Navalny’s bravery in anti-regime activism has elevated him to a romanticized figure in the eyes of some in the West — Russia hawks, some Ukraine supporters, and and those who see the world in terms of an existential battle between democracy and autocracy — who had a real chance of overthrowing Putin and bringing democracy to Russia. This idolized view of figures like Navalny comes with risks. As Anatol Lieven wrote in 2021, “Admiration, sympathy, and disgust are emotions, not arguments or analysis, and should be employed with great caution in the formulation of state policy.”
Navalny’s legacy — especially as more people are weighing in on his more controversial statements regarding Ukraine before the war and the flirting with the Russian ultranationalists in the 2000s — is up to Russians to decide. What is important is to understand that with Navalny’s death, contemporary Russia turns the final page, more symbolically than tangibly, on the near-term and possibly long-term prospects of regime change in Russia.
Putin’s choice to eliminate Navalny now may have been a subtle message, given his recent interview with the popular ex-Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson during which Putin clearly laid out his revisionist vision of history and what the world ought to be. Ending Navalny’s life may well be the symbolic end to the hopes of some Western circles that there is a non-regime alternative to Putin. It was also a show of strength and a warning to potential new opposition leaders. Putin’s message is clear: he is here to stay.
The United States and the West must wake up to the reality and understand that a post-Putin Russia is not in the cards. Dealing with Russia today entails dealing with Putin whose backing by the majority of the Russian society has not significantly declined even after the invasion of Ukraine. Early hopes in the immediate aftermath of the invasion that the impact of sanctions and the high casualties might have been enough to provoke a revolution against Putin have essentially evaporated, especially as Russia’s economy is actually growing.
He was courageous and spoke up for what he believed in — and paid the ultimate price for being too loud for the Kremlin’s taste. But he was not a knight on the white horse bringing democracy to Russia who would turn the country into the ideal that some in the West are hoping to see. Such perceptions and rhetoric may be useful for political purposes as war support fatigue is growing in the West, but it is not useful beyond that and in fact continues to perpetuate the fundamental misunderstanding of Russia and Russian society in the United States.