34 Time January 31/February 7, 2022
On a cold morning in November, the
family of Alexei Navalny, the Russian
opposition leader, made the trip out
to visit him at Penal Colony No. 2.
The drive from Moscow took about
two hours, though parts of it felt like
studio they built in Eastern Europe, just
outside Russia’s border, to air broadcasts
for millions of followers inside.
Through them, I began to receive
a series of handwritten letters from
Penal Colony No. 2. “Please, not too
many questions,” Navalny told me in
the first one last October. “There’s no
time for writing here, and the process of
getting these pages out is exhausting.”
You wouldn’t know it from the volume
of his subsequent answers, about two
dozen line-ruled pages covered in a hur-
ried Russian script. The first one came
punctuated with a smiley face, as though
the dissident were still adding emojis to
the blog that started his political career.
Our exchange, which lasted through
the middle of January, coincided with
a tense time in Europe. Not long after
Navalny’s family visited him, Putin
began massing troops near Russia’s
western border, enough to launch an
invasion of Ukraine. The Biden Ad-
ministration tried to talk the Russians
down, resulting in a standoff drenched
in Cold War revivalism. Envoys of the
world’s two nuclear superpowers spent
weeks trading threats and demands.
The spectacle made Navalny cringe.
“Time and again the West falls into Pu-
tin’s elementary traps,” he wrote me,
in a letter that arrived Jan. 14. “It just
takes my breath away, watching how
Putin pulls this on the American estab-
lishment again and again.”
In its talks with Putin, the U.S. strat-
egy has been to offer Russia a “diplo-
matic off-ramp,” while also making
clear that an invasion of Ukraine would
be met with “severe and overwhelming
costs,” a spokesperson for the National
Security Council told me in response
to Navalny’s criticism, adding that the
U.S. considers his imprisonment “tobe politically motivated and a gross
injustice.”
Few people have studied Putin as
long or as obsessively as Navalny. In
his letters, he tries to explain what mo-
tivates the Russian President, and what
Putin fears. It is not what he claims to
be concerned about: the deployment
of U.S. forces in Eastern Europe, or the
chance that Ukraine might one day join
the NATO alliance. “Instead of ignoring
this nonsense,” Navalny writes, “the U.S.
accepts Putin’s agenda and runs to orga-
nize some meetings. Just like a fright-
ened schoolboy who’s been bullied by
an upperclassman.”
What Putin truly fears is what Na-
valny’s movement seeks—a change of
power in Russia, followed by cashiering
its corrupt clan of oligarchs and spies.
It isn’t NATO that keeps Putin up at
night; it’s the space for democratic dis-
sent that NATO opens up along his bor-
der. This fear, Navalny argues, is what
drives all the conflicts Russia wages with
the West. “To consolidate the country
and the elites,” he writes, “Putin con-
stantly needs all these extreme mea-
sures, all these wars—real ones, virtual
ones, hybrid ones or just confrontations
at the edge of war, as we’re seeing now.”
Rather than convening talks or offer-
ing concessions, Navalny wants the U.S.
to pressure the Kremlin from without
while Navalny and his supporters pres-
sure it from within. The combination,
he believes, will split the elites around
Putin, ushering in what Navalny’s fol-
lowers like to call “the beautiful Russia
of the future,” one that is free, demo-
cratic, at peace with its neighbors and
the West.
But that slogan elides the ugliness of
how dictatorships often fall. Russians
need not look far for examples. In early
January, protests swept through neigh-
boring Kazakhstan, an oil-rich autocracy
to Russia’s south. Government buildings
were set ablaze. Scores of police and pro-
testers were killed. Kazakhstan’s Presi-
dent issued a shoot-to-kill order to his
security forces and called for assistance
from Russia and its allies. Within hours,
Putin dispatched thousands of troops to
help put down the uprising. The crack-
down worked. The protests subsided.
In our exchange of letters, I asked
Navalny about the prospect of suchWORLD
traveling back in time. Coming off the
highway from Russia’s high-tech cap-
ital, the roads became rutted. Apart-
ment blocks gave way to wooden huts,
and old ladies appeared near the road-
side in heavy coats, selling vegetables
from their gardens.
At the prison gates, Navalny’s wife
and parents carried a few bags of gro-
ceries into a waiting room, where an
ancient telephone allowed them to an-
nounce their visit to the guards. Before
long, the inmate was led out to meet
them. He looked skinny, his head shorn,
a broad smile framed by a prison-issue
hat. Ten months had passed since Naval-
ny’s incarceration, and more than a year
since he was nearly poisoned to death
with a chemical weapon. Its effects on
his nervous system no longer showed;
his hands had stopped trembling. “He
looked good,” his wife Yulia Navalnaya
later told me. “Unchanged.”
It had been Navalny’s decision to be
there. Not in this specific prison, with its
silent guards and its windows papered
over to create the feeling, Navalny says,
of living inside a shoebox. But he did
make a choice to return to Russia, fully
aware of what the state would likely do
to him. From his temporary exile, he de-
cided almost exactly a year ago to sub-
mit to the custody of the regime that
stood accused of trying to murder him.
The poison had failed to kill Navalny. It
hadn’t even really changed him.
From the confines of his barracks,
he still runs a network of dissidents
devoted to ousting President Vladimir
Putin. Its top leaders are fugitives from
Russian law, though they were not hard
for me to find while reporting this story.
Some met me while they were fund-
raising in New York City or lobbying in
Washington. Others showed me the TV