Editorial: Death of a dissident

Navalny’s death raises questions over the fractured Russian opposition and whether his widow could emerge as a rallying point for anti-Putin forces

Death strikes Russian dissidents in myriad ways; radioactive poisoning, nerve agent attack, a fatal plunge from an open window or the old-fashioned way of getting shot at close range. The recent death of Alexei Navalny, a prominent opposition figure and a staunch critic of Vladimir Putin, had all the markings of yet another state-sponsored assassination. The 47-year-old dissident leader, who was often compared to Nelson Mandela for his fearless campaign against authoritarian rule, died in a penal colony in the remote Arctic Circle while serving a 19-year jail term on charges of extremism. His heart-broken widow Yulia Navalnaya has vowed to continue the fight to achieve the goal of a free and democratic Russia. Navalny began his career as an opposition politician more than a decade ago, harnessing the power of social media to reach out to the restless middle-class Russians. In August 2020, Navalny fell ill on a flight from Siberia to Moscow. He survived and was flown to Berlin, where he was treated for the effects of Novichok, a neurotoxin developed in the Soviet Union, and a weapon of choice for Russian secret agents. Despite the attempt at his life, he returned to Russia in 2021, where he was arrested on arrival for violating his parole. He had been in prison ever since. Amid the global outpouring of grief, anger and demands for justice, Navalny’s death raises questions over the fractured Russian opposition and whether his widow could emerge as a rallying point for the anti-Putin forces ahead of the presidential election scheduled next month.

On the one hand, the war in Ukraine is showing no signs of abating while on the other, the efforts to build a genuinely global coalition against Russia’s war never got off the ground. A trenchant critic of the Putin administration since the early 2000s, it was an attempt on his life in 2020 that galvanised global support behind Navalny, despite Russia’s dismissal of him as a CIA agent tasked to foment trouble in the country. A former lawyer, Navalny had the potential to emerge as a perfect challenger to Putin and the unofficial leader of Russia’s opposition, scattered across ideologies, and with its most prominent members being either incarcerated or in exile in the West. In the last two-and-a-half decades at the helm, Putin has systematically crushed all opposition. Assassination attempts against his critics have become commonplace while several journalists critical of authorities in Russia have been killed or suffered mysterious deaths. The increasing authoritarianism has meant that the space for dissent in Russia has shrunk abysmally in recent years, with severe clampdowns on civil liberties. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. So don’t be inactive,” Navalny had said while answering a question in the 2022 Oscar-winning documentary on his life.