John Jurgensen, WSJ, Feb. 16, 2024
Daniel Roher, a 30-year-old Canadian filmmaker based in Los Angeles, found out about Alexei Navalny’s death on Friday when his wife, Caroline, woke him up at 4 a.m., having seen the headlines while tending to their 3-week-old baby.
Few people outside Russia got to know Navalny as closely as Roher and his crew, who made an Oscar-winning documentary film with the Russian dissident during what turned out to be Navalny’s final days of freedom.
In an interview after hearing the news, Roher described the unusual window he had into the central conundrum of Navalny’s last years: After Russian operatives nearly poisoned him to death with a nerve agent, why did he return from exile to his homeland, setting the stage for his imprisonment? Navalny died in a Russian penal colony at age 47, according to Russian news reports.
“He wanted to continue the fight against Vladimir Putin” and a quest toward “what he called ‘a great Russia of the future,’” Roher says. “His political calculus was that to achieve this objective, he had to go back, that if he stayed in the West he would be relegated to obscurity.”…SOURCE