Navalny’s death

 

February 19, 2024

By Daniel E. Slotnik

Good morning. We’re covering the impact of Aleksei Navalny’s death and the fall of Avdiivka in Ukraine.

Laying flowers at a memorial for Aleksei Navalny in Moscow on Saturday. Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA, via Shutterstock

What Aleksei Navalny’s death means

Aleksei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, died on Friday in a penal colony. He was 47.

Navalny’s body has not been released to his family, and the cause of death remains unclear.

Navalny was the Kremlin’s fiercest critic. He publicly denounced the corruption he saw at the core of President Vladimir Putin’s political party at immense personal cost: He barely survived an attempted poisoning and had been imprisoned since 2021.

His death prompted mourning in Russia — where at least 366 people have been detained for expressing their grief — and left the opposition questioning its future.

Yesterday I spoke with Anton Troianovski, The Times’s Moscow bureau chief, about the response to Navalny’s death and the future of Russia’s opposition.

What kind of reaction are you seeing in Russia? How are people mourning?

All over the country, people are laying flowers at memorials to Soviet repressions. A lot of cities in Russia have these memorials that were generally put up in the 1990s, honoring the victims of the gulag and other repression during the Soviet Union. And it seems that people are kind of automatically gravitating to those places in order to honor Navalny’s memory.

Of course, we’re talking about the minority of people who are brave enough to do that. Human rights groups have reported hundreds of arrests already of people who have gone just to lay flowers. Even doing that is a very dangerous statement in today’s Russia. And at the same time, on state television, which is the main news medium in Russia today, there is pretty much no reporting on what has happened.

What does this mean for the opposition in Russia?

It’s a devastating moment for the opposition in Russia. I don’t think you can say it any other way. Navalny was the hope for people opposed to Vladimir Putin, though Navalny was a controversial figure in some ways. There were people who thought, especially earlier in his political career, that he was kind of too nationalist. He had quite a direct, brusque style that turned some people off.

But no one disputed that he was the main alternative to Vladimir Putin in Russian politics. He was really the only figure of all the various political figures in the last 24 years seeking to challenge Putin. He was the only one who was able to appeal not just to urban liberals in Moscow but really to a much broader cross-section of Russians. He was incredibly adept at using YouTube and social media to penetrate the bubble of propaganda created by state television. And he was able to build a nationwide political network that repeatedly was able to organize mass protests.

What can the opposition do going forward?

Shortly before his death, Navalny endorsed an idea that another exiled opposition figure came up with, which was to say: How about everyone who is opposed to Putin goes to a local polling station at exactly the same time on March 17, the last day of the election? And opposition figures are saying that the time should be noon local time in your city.

So that’s something that it seems the opposition in exile is very much going to be pushing on social media, on YouTube. And opposition figures are thinking that even in the current repressive environment, perhaps this is a relatively safe way to protest because no one says you’re not allowed to go to the polls.

Opinion

Aleksei Navalny could be more dangerous to Vladimir Putin’s dictatorial rule in death, writes Serge Schmemann. Watch: The Oscar-winning documentary “Navalny” is chilling to see after the opposition leader’s death.