Alexei Navalny is dead. I had to repeat the phrase in my head many times before I started to believe it. Somewhere, in my subconscious, I believed that Vladimir Putin’s toughest opponent was indestructible. Invincible.
I’m not the only one, it seems. Addressing the powerful of this world on the stage of the Munich Security Conference in Germany, Alexeï Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaïa, also refused to take the Russian authorities’ word on Friday. “We cannot believe Vladimir Putin and his government. They lie all the time, the Russian politician’s wife said, with astonishing calm. I wondered what Alexei would do and he would be on this stage. »
Is Alexei Navalny dead? Physically, it is highly probable, even if we await confirmation from loved ones. After all, Vladimir Putin’s rivals and critics never live long, quiet lives. Even the bravest.
As luck would have it, their death most of the time occurs before a significant event. Should we remember that we will mark the second anniversary of the Russian invasion next week and that a presidential “election” will take place in mid-March? This is an excellent time to terrorize the remaining opposition.
On Friday, the death of Alexei Navalny was triumphantly announced on Russian television. “They said that Western influence is decreasing in the country and that this is a sign of victory,” reports Maria Popova, professor of political science at McGill University.
Nothing surprising there. The Russian regime is trying to show that its people are behind it and that dissonant voices are manipulated by exogenous forces.
It is precisely to counter this propaganda that Alexeï Navalny returned to Russia in 2021, despite the obvious danger. To show that he was a Russian politician, first and foremost.
And this is where you have to keep your eyes open. The physical death of man does not mark the end of the movement he launched. Alexei Navalny has awakened hundreds of thousands of young Russians to resistance. He showed them that it is possible to oppose intelligence to brute force.
These young people may not rise up tomorrow morning, but they are there. In Moscow as in Novosibirsk. And unlike Vladimir Putin, they have the future ahead of them. Together they can become invincible.
On Friday, the symbolism of the short intervention by Navalny’s wife at the Munich Security Conference, while restrained, was obvious. On this same platform, in 2007, Vladimir Putin half-heartedly declared war on NATO. Several Western leaders – who then held him in high esteem despite his authoritarian tendencies in Russia – were taken aback.
PHOTO KAI PFAFFENBACH, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Alexei Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, speaking at the Munich Security Conference in Germany on Friday
It was also that year that Alexeï Navalny began his career as a political activist. A business lawyer, he began buying shares in semi-private companies in Russia. He then appeared at shareholder meetings and asked questions to expose corruption and the links between power and the business community. His blog summarized his findings.
Four years later, in 2011, his in-depth knowledge of the web propelled him to the forefront of the political scene. With a network of collaborators equipped with cameras, Alexeï Navalny showed the electoral fraud – as crazy as it is widespread – in which the Russian president’s party was engaged.
This scandal gave rise to the biggest protest movement in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. At its head, the Moscow jurist landed in prison for the first time. He responded by creating the Anti-Corruption Foundation, through which he continued to expose the chicanery of Russian leaders and oligarchs.
What followed was a series of trials, prison sentences, physical attacks and attempted poisonings from which the opponent survived almost miraculously.
In 2020, secret agents attempted to kill him by putting a Novichok nerve agent in his underwear. In a coma, he was transported to Germany, where he got back on his feet.
We know the details of the assassination attempt because Alexei Navalny himself investigated the case and obtained a confession from the agent responsible. Everything is immortalized in the excellent documentary Navalny by Canadian Daniel Roher.
It was therefore with full knowledge of the facts that the tall guy with the piercing gaze decided to return to Russia on January 17, 2021. He was arrested immediately, before the eyes of his wife and his lawyer. Thousands of Russians showed up at Moscow airports to support him. The same day, a video of his own revealing the existence of a crazy luxury palace, which allegedly belonged to Vladimir Putin, went around Russian social networks as well as the rest of the world.
Once again, Alexeï Navalny was one step ahead of the Kremlin and the secret agents of the FSB, the organization which succeeded the KGB and from which Vladimir Putin came.
The response was merciless: new sentences of 9 years and 19 years were added to his prison sentence of two and a half years.
Behind bars, Alexeï Navalny has never stopped making his voice heard and demanding the departure of “Tsar Putin”, the end of the war in Ukraine and the improvement of his detention conditions.
His loved ones feared the worst at the end of December, when the opponent disappeared from the radar for several days. He reappeared in one of the worst prisons in Russia, located very close to the Arctic Circle.
Thursday, during an appearance before a judge who had just approved that he be placed in solitary confinement, he put on jokes and sarcasm. He looked in good shape. Straight as a bar, as usual.
Less than 24 hours later, prison authorities announced the death of the political prisoner. He apparently “lost consciousness” after a health walk. Nobody believes a word of it.