Alexei Navalny (1976 - 2024) was a Russian lawyer, anti-corruption campaigner and opposition politician who became the most prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin. [1] He founded the Anti-Corruption Foundation, whose investigations into the wealth of senior officials reached audiences of tens of millions online, and organised nationwide protests. [2] Poisoned with a nerve agent in 2020, he returned to Russia in 2021, was imprisoned, and died in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024.
Early life and education
Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny was born on 4 June 1976 in Butyn, a village in Moscow Oblast, to a family with roots in Ukraine; as a child he spent summers near Chernobyl, an area evacuated after the 1986 nuclear accident. He studied law at the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia, graduating in 1998, and later took a degree in securities and exchanges at the Finance University under the Government of the Russian Federation. In 2010 he was selected as a Yale World Fellow. [1]
Activism and the Anti-Corruption Foundation
Navalny came to public notice in the late 2000s as a minority shareholder in large Russian state-linked companies, using shareholder rights to demand disclosure of contracts and spending. His blog, and later his campaigning label for the ruling party as "the party of crooks and thieves", gave him a national profile during the protest wave that followed the disputed parliamentary elections of December 2011. [2]
In 2011 he founded the Anti-Corruption Foundation, which produced detailed video investigations into the assets of officials. Among the most widely viewed were a 2017 film about Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and the 2021 documentary about a Black Sea estate, each of which prompted street demonstrations across Russia. He also developed "Smart Voting", a tactical scheme directing opposition supporters to whichever candidate was best placed to defeat the ruling party's nominee.
He ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013 and took roughly 27 per cent of the vote, finishing second. He was repeatedly barred from presidential elections on the basis of criminal convictions that he said were politically motivated; the European Court of Human Rights found the proceedings in one of those cases to have been arbitrary. [1]
Poisoning and imprisonment
In August 2020 Navalny fell severely ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow and was flown to Berlin for treatment. The German government stated that laboratory tests, later confirmed by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, showed poisoning with a nerve agent of the Novichok group. Russian officials denied any involvement. [3]
After months of recovery he returned to Moscow in January 2021 and was detained on arrival. A suspended sentence was converted into a custodial term, and further trials for fraud and then for extremism added sentences totalling nineteen years. He was held under increasingly severe conditions, spending long periods in punishment cells, and in December 2023 was transferred to corrective colony IK-3 at Kharp, above the Arctic Circle. Amnesty International designated him a prisoner of conscience. [2]
Death and legacy
The Russian prison service announced that Navalny died at IK-3 on 16 February 2024 at the age of forty-seven. His family and supporters held the Russian authorities responsible; the government rejected the accusation. Large numbers of mourners attended his funeral in Moscow in March 2024 despite the risk of arrest. [1]
He received the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 2021, along with the Boris Nemtsov Prize, the Civil Courage Prize and other honours. [3] The documentary Navalny (2022) won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and his memoir Patriot, largely written in prison, was published posthumously in 2024.
