Alexei Navalny's recent passing has placed focus on the corruption of the Russian government and its persecution of its enemies. Today, we recount the all too brief life and death of Alexei Navalny.
Alexei Navalny's recent passing has placed focus on the corruption of the Russian government and its persecution of its enemies. Today, we recount the all too brief life and death of Alexei Navalny.
Episode 296 - Alexei Navalny - Life, Hope, and Death
Last time, listened to my interview with Professor Maya Vinokour about her book, Workflows: Stalinist Liquids in Russian Labor Culture. Today, we take on a very contemporary event, the death of Alexei Navalny. I say death, but I am inclined to view his passing as murder. There is little doubt that when he was sent to the IK-3 "special regime" colony, known as "Polar Wolf", in Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug in Western Siberia, he was meant to die there. This past week, his funeral was held in Moscow, with thousands of people lining the streets near the Russian Orthodox Church where his funeral was held. This represents the power he had to inspire people and why Puttin needed him gone. His influence is greater now though in his death than when he was alive. This episode is also not meant to be a comprehensive review of Navalny’s life. To dig deeper, I’d suggest the movie Navalny, the 2022 American documentary film directed by Daniel Roher.
Born on June 4, 1976, in Butyn, in the Odintsovsky District, Moscow Oblast to Lyudmila and Anatoly Navalny. Alexei is of Russian and Ukrainian heritage and grew up in Obninsk, about 100 kilometers or 62 miles southwest of Moscow. He would spend his childhood summers with his grandmother in Ukraine, which allowed him to be fluent in Ukrainian as well as Russian. His grandmother lived near Chornobyl when it exploded in April 1986, and he was able to see how the Soviet government tried to cover it up. This was his first introduction to government corruption. Obviously, it would not be his last.
Navalny’s father was a career Soviet army officer, and his mother was an economist. They currently own a basket-weaving factory, which they ran from 1994, in the village of Kobyakovo, Vologda Oblast. As far as I can tell, they still do, although information about them and their business is hard to come by.
After graduating from Kalininets secondary school in 1993, Navalny attended the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia in Moscow, graduating with a law degree in 1998. From there, he continued his studies in securities and exchanges at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, graduating in 2001. Alexei then received a scholarship to the Yale World Fellows program at Yale University in 2010.
His legal career started right after graduating with his law degree, working for several different companies. This was an era when Russia was trying to find its way from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. As some put it, it was like the wild wild west of the 19th century in the US. Corruption, embezzlement, and bribery were so commonplace that they were considered a cost of doing business in Russia.
About a year ago, I talked about how the formerly government-owned businesses were made private, and the people were given the equivalent of shares in the companies but had little to no way of using them to buy food or pay the rent. Instead, many sold those shares for cash at a vastly undervalued amount to unscrupulous people who eventually became the oligarchs.
Alexei Navalny was appalled by what he saw, so he decided to get involved in politics to see if he could make a difference. Navalny joined Yabloko in 2000, a political party that promoted liberal democracy and a market economy. Yabloko has a checkered history, with various people being involved and then ousted depending on which way the wind blows. In 2007, Navalny was expelled from the party for “nationalistic activities,” including attendance of a far-right march, but he claims that it was due to personal disagreements with the leader of Yabloko, Grigory Yavlinsky.
At this point, in 2008, Alexei began his political and stakeholder activism. He bought a small number of shares in several corporations in an attempt to hold the directors accountable. Navalny would grill the management about inconsistency in the financial statements. Afterward, he would blog about what he found, which gained national attention. Many of the men and women who were part of the upper management of these companies were allies of Vladimir Putin, who began to put a target on him. His blog was so popular that it forced then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to admit that corruption was so rampant that “a trillion rubles (about $31 billion) was being embezzled annually from the state procurement system.”
While this was an embarrassment to the government, and Navalny would begin to make some serious enemies, what he did in December 2010 would ramp up the pressure against him. Alexei launched the whistleblowing website RosPil, a Russian abbreviation for "Russian Saw"—saw as slang for " embezzle," as in to saw off a piece of a contract. It would begin to reach a far larger audience, at times over 1 million visits a month. It tried to expose the immense corruption and embezzlement that was occurring throughout the Russian government and companies. It allowed citizens to post anonymously about what they saw. This caused Navalny to call Putin’s political party the United Russia, the “party of crooks and thieves.”
Now, the heat began to focus on the Russian government as the election of December 2011 was marred by irregularities. This would be the last time the United Russia would receive less than 50% of the vote. When Putin returned to the Presidency in 2012, he decided to start cracking down on the opposition parties. In June 2012, one month after Medvedev stepped down, police raided Navalny's home along with other opposition leaders under the claim of uncovering corruption.
The corruption case that the government used to persecute Navalny was known as the Kirovles case. In it, they claimed that Alexei conspired to steal timber from Kirovles, a state-owned company in Kirov Oblast, in 2009, while acting as an adviser to Kirov's governor Nikita Belykh. A previous investigation into the accusation was dropped because there was little to no evidence against Navalny. Re-opening it was a clear sign that they were out to get him. Alexei thought that the charges were "weird" and false. He stated that the governments agents "are doing it to watch the reaction of the protest movement and of Western public opinion ... So far they consider both of these things acceptable and so they are continuing along this line".
On July 13, 2013, Navalny announced his bid to become mayor of Moscow. The very next day, he was found guilty of embezzlement in the Kirovles case and sentenced to five years in prison. The subsequent protests were so large that he was freed almost immediately to allow him to appeal the verdict. On September 8, 2013, the election was held, with Putin ally Sergey Sobyanin being reelected with 51.3 percent of the vote to Navalny’s 27.2. This was a surprising result for Alexei as he had to canvas for votes in public as he was not allowed access to television stations.
His conviction was upheld in October, but Navalny's sentence was suspended. This made him unable to run for office again, but he was allowed to remain politically active. This was the slow process of weakening Alexei publicly without looking overly severe in their treatment of him. Putin was playing the long game, knowing his opponent was still very popular and could cause him considerable problems.
In December 2014, Navalny was convicted of fraud on what appears to be trumped-up charges and sentenced to 3 ½ years in prison along with his brother Oleg, who was charged and convicted of the same offense.
Six years later, in 2020, the famous poisoning incident of Alexei Navalny occurred when he became seriously ill on a flight between Tomsk in Siberia, where he was campaigning, and Moscow. When tests were run on him, it was determined that a Soviet-era nerve agent, Novichok, was the poison used. Of course, the Kremlin denied any involvement in the incident, but that is obviously untrue. Fearing for his life, the family had Alexei flown to a Berlin hospital, where he would be placed into an induced coma until he was well enough to be released.
Here is why the claim by the Russian government was false. According to Britanica.com, in the biography of Navalny, "While recovering in a German clinic, Navalny worked with Christo Grozev of the investigative journalism group Bellingcat to uncover the specifics of the Novichok attack. Grozev and his team had unmasked several of the Federal Security Service (FSB) agents who were involved in the poisoning, and Navalny called one of the men whom Grozev had identified. Posing as the aid of a senior Russian security official, Navalny and the agent had a lengthy conversation about the details of the assassination attempt. The agent claimed that ‘it would have all gone differently’ if not for the plane’s emergency landing in Omsk and the hasty intervention of emergency medical personnel. The publication of the call was an embarrassment for Putin, and the FSB claimed that it was fake.”
On January 17, 2021, Alexei Navalny would make both a brave and a stupid decision, eventually costing him his life. He decided to return to Russia. The second he stepped off the plane, he was arrested by the FSB and sent to prison to serve his originally suspended sentence. The reason given was that he didn’t report to security services while he was in Berlin, even though he was in a coma for months.
To protest his arrest and imprisonment, on March 31, Navalny announced that he was going on a hunger strike. This would go on for three weeks, which elicited an extensive series of protests around Russia. Seeing that elections were planned for later that year, the Kremlin would begin to ratchet up the pressure by announcing in June, through a Moscow court, that any political party that allied or even sympathized with Navalny would be deemed to be an “extremist” organization and its members would be banned from participating in the election.
In March 2022, one month after Russia invaded Ukraine, Navalny was found guilty of new charges of fraud and contempt of court. This was followed by a sentence of nine years in prison, but the prison would be a "strict regime penal colony." In other words, he was being sent to hell. It would be the notorious IK-6 maximum-security prison in Melekhovo, roughly 150 miles (240 km) east of Moscow. There, in almost constant solitary confinement, he would sit until he was transferred in December to the IK-3 "special regime" colony, known as "Polar Wolf," after being missing for three weeks. Less than two months later, on February 16, 2024, he would be declared dead. The authorities claimed he died after going out for a walk after feeling unwell in the morning. The official statement was, "All necessary resuscitation measures were carried out but did not yield positive results... The paramedics confirmed the death of the convict."
Alexei Navalny is now a martyr. He sacrificed his life in order to expose the massive corruption that is ever so pervasive in today's Russia. What his legacy will be is still to be decided. A war still rages on in Ukraine, and opponents and former friends of Putin are still mysteriously dying, including one defector from the Russian army showing up dead in Spain recently.
I can't ask if you enjoyed today's podcast, as it is a tragic story, but I hope it gave you some perspective into what is going on in Russia under Putin. As a report from Loeb & Loeb LLP issued in April of 2013 named, "An Analysis of the Russian Federation's prosecutions of Alexei Navalny", a paper detailing Investigative Committee accusations. The paper concludes that "the Kremlin has reverted to misuse of the Russian legal system to harass, isolate and attempt to silence political opponents. Join me next time when we finish the series on the people's perspective; this time, it's on the Russian Revolution. It will be followed two weeks later with a topic I've been wanting to cover for a long time, the history of the Kremlin.
So, until next time, Dasvidania eh Spasiba za Vinyamineya.