The Times Magazine 49hide themselves. There will be a car outside
your house and it follows wherever you go.”
She has been arrested scores of times, and
beaten on many occasions. “It’s an ongoing
struggle with yourself. For sure, when you’re
brought to a police station it’s not a pleasant
procedure... You know the law. You know
what they can and can’t do with you. But
our government doesn’t really care about the
law. Sometimes they use force against you.
Sometimes they beat you.”
She adds, “I don’t see myself as a hero or
something. I’m just trying to contribute my
word to what’s going on.”On the face of it Tolokonnikova and Navalny
are very different. He is a law graduate who
spent a year at Yale. He has a striking (and
very strong and supportive) wife, Yulia, and
a daughter studying at Stanford. He has
nationalist leanings, while Tolokonnikova
is a social progressive. “We have a different
political agenda,” she says, and jokes that
she looks forward to opposing him in a free
Russian parliament.
But they have made common cause since
meeting at a dissidents’ march in Moscow in- “We are part of the same activist family
and have been working together on projects
for many, many years,” she says. “To stand
against an authoritarian government you
have to be really good at co-operating and
co-ordinating your efforts.”
While Tolokonnikova battled for human
rights, Navalny made his name as a blogger
exposing the corruption of Russia’s leading
companies and politicians. In 2011 he set up
the Anti-Corruption Foundation in Moscow
- now one of Russia’s leading independent
investigative forces. He has no political party,
but a nationwide network of organisers
dedicated to thwarting the Kremlin’s election-
rigging. He has a YouTube channel with
6.4 million followers, and 2.5 million followers
on Twitter.
Like Tolokonnikova, he has been repeatedly
harassed and arrested. He was convicted on a
trumped-up charge of embezzlement that he
successfully challenged in the European Court
of Human Rights. He was placed under house
arrest for a year. His brother, Oleg, was jailed
for three years in what Navalny called an
act of “hostage taking”. He ran for mayor of
Moscow in 2013, winning 27 per cent of the
vote, but was barred from challenging Putin in
the 2018 presidential election because he had
a criminal conviction. By then he had become
Putin’s most formidable opponent.
Tolokonnikova talks admiringly of his
courage, his use of humour to ridicule Putin,
and his political skills. “He’s very energetic.
He’s very positive in the worst possible
conditions... He’s incredibly effective, a
good manager and a good organiser.”
She was “devastated” when she heard
of his poisoning last August, and swiftly put
his aides in touch with the German doctors
who had saved her husband two years earlier.
Just in time a private plane flew him to Berlin
from the city of Omsk, where he had been
comatose in hospital for four days.
As Navalny recovered, so did his tactical
genius. He teamed up with the investigative
website Bellingcat to identify the Federal
Security Service (FSB) agents responsible
for poisoning him. He then telephoned one
of his would-be assassins, pretending to be a
senior government official, and tricked him
into revealing how they had put novichok in
his underpants.
When Navalny announced he was
returning to Russia last month Tolokonnikova
was “in awe” of his courage. “We all understood
that Putin was not going to let him go,” she
says. “At that point Putin saw Navalny as his
personal enemy because he had committed
the ultimate crime. He had made Putin look
stupid, and for Putin as a thug that’s the worst
thing you can do to him.”
Navalny ensured his airport arrest was live
streamed. From his prison cell, two days later,
he had his team release a two-hour video
exposing Putin’s secret $1 billion Black Sea
palace that has since been watched 110 million
times. He used his court hearing on February 2
to mock the regime, calling Putin “Vladimir,
the poisoner of underpants” and asking how
he could respect his parole terms when he was
poisoned and comatose in Germany.
“Don’t be afraid,” he urged his followers,
and on January 23 and 31 hundreds of
thousands of Russians braved freezing
temperatures, warnings of mass shootings
by the security forces and the very real danger
of arrest and incarceration to protest insupport of Navalny in 180 towns and cities
from the Crimea to Vladivostok. Around
11,000 were arrested in an unprecedented
wave of repression, much of it captured on
mobile phones and posted on social media.
Tolokonnikova says Putin is “panicking. He
makes stupid mistakes one after another. In
2021 people don’t tolerate violence any more.
It’s not OK to beat your own citizens with
police batons... People are being tortured and
beaten in police departments. They’re being
held in inhuman conditions. They’re being
held in police buses for over 40 hours without
being able to get food or water.”
Putin never mentions Navalny by name.
He responds to his opponent’s challenge not
with subtlety or cunning, but with the blunt
instruments of repression. His legitimacy
is draining away. “Navalny is giving Putin’s
government and Putin the rope to hang
themselves,” she says.
Putin has also managed to turn Navalny
into a global symbol of resistance – the
modern-day equivalent of the Soviet dissidents
Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
But it is still hard to see Putin falling,
I argue. He still controls all the levers of power
including a pervasive security apparatus, a
formidable state propaganda machine and the
judiciary. He has survived previous waves of
protest without much trouble, and although
this one is bigger only a tiny fraction of the
Russian population has joined it.
Tolokonnikova is unperturbed. The real
battle is for the hearts and minds of her
fellow Russians, she argues. They are sick
of corruption, falling living standards and
repression, but they have to surmount what
she calls their “political depression” or
“learnt helplessness” – the idea that there
is nothing they can do to change their lives,
as encapsulated in the popular question, “If
not Putin, who?”
Navalny gives them that choice, she says.
These protests are not only bigger than previous
ones, but 40 per cent of the participants are
protesting for the first time. “He is able to
galvanise people who didn’t believe in the
importance of political action before.”
Navalny has survived assassination. He has
not been forced into exile. He has not been
broken. With his mockery and defiance he,
like Tolokonnikova and Pussy Riot, is making
the regime look ridiculous. He is chipping
away at the fear which has sustained it for
21 years, she insists. “When each citizen of
Russia refuses to fear, it will lead to the
immediate overthrow of Putin.” n‘WHEN EACH CITIZEN OF RUSSIA REFUSES FEAR,
IT WILL LEAD TO THE OVERTHROW OF PUTIN’
With Pyotr Verzilov in 2014. The couple have now separatedAP