Ian Garner, Unherd, Feb. 16, 2024
When Alexei Navalny chose to board a flight to Moscow in January 2021, the opposition leader must have known his death was all but inevitable. After surviving one assassination attempt, and staring down the barrel of a long jail sentence handed down by Russia’s corrupt judiciary, Navalny chose to martyr himself in the name of overthrowing Putin. Yet today, he leaves behind him no united opposition, no leader to occupy his place, and little hope that tomorrow will be any brighter for the Russian Federation.
In the three years since his return to Russia, the former lawyer and blogger made occasional appearances by fuzzy video link from remote Russian jails to respond to absurd charges. His emaciated body showed the signs of extreme suffering. Russia’s kolonii — penal colonies for hardened criminals — are brutal places at the best of times. But Navalny received a special diet of inhuman torture. Months spent alone in solitary confinement in freezing conditions and on meagre rations destroyed his health. The state even refused for long periods to turn his cell’s lights off, and blasted political propaganda into his room for hours on end.
Yet Navalny, astonishingly, seemed to remain in rude psychological health. In court the day before he died, the political prisoner was seen laughing and joking — he rarely took the regime’s show trials seriously, choosing to mock rather than participate in them — and he regularly wrote searing critiques of the Putin regime and its wars from his jail cell. When his lawyers were able to reach him, they shared these materials through Navalny’s popular social media feeds. Navalny’s body may have been broken, but he remained conscious of both Russia’s politics and, presumably, the terrible fate that awaited him. …Source