35violence in Russia, and whether he sees
it as the price of change after 21 years
under the rule of one man. “Our path,”
he wrote, “was never strewn with roses.”NavalNy was borN and raised in garri-
son towns, moving from one to another
with his father, a Soviet officer who did
not have much faith in the system he
served. That system fell apart when
Navalny was a teenager. After studying
law, he got his first taste of politics as a
member of the Yabloko party, a group of
milquetoast liberals that his mother, an
economist, supported. “We lived well,”
she once told a Russian magazine about
Navalny’s youth. “That is, we were poor.
Like everybody else.”
I first met Navalny in Moscow 12
years ago. Tall and stooped, with a slight
paunch and ice blue eyes, he stood out as
the only dissident organized and popu-
lar enough to pose even a distant threat
to Putin’s rule. His headquarters back
then were a cheaply furnished office inMoscow with low ceilings and a heavy
metal door. Hunched over laptops in
its dim rooms sat the staff of the Anti-
Corruption Foundation, Navalny’s ac-
tivist group. He founded it in 2011 to
exploit the main weakness he saw in Pu-
tin’s system: the insatiable greed of its
courtiers.
On social media, the foundation be-
came famous for exposing the garish
wealth of these elites. Its reports were
often based on forensic accounting and
bank records. Some used drone footage
of Italian villas owned by Putin’s under-
lings. Others plucked evidence from
photos that these officials or their rel-
atives posted online, flaunting a yacht
or luxury watches. One technocrat had
a habit of flying his pet corgis to dog
shows on a private jet. In his videos,
Navalny delivered these findings in anirreverent style, like a wisecracking de-
tective for the YouTube generation.
In late 2011, when a massive wave of
street protests broke out to call for fair
elections, Navalny was well- positioned
to lead them. His blog had a massive fol-
lowing, and he had earned a reputation
for incendiary speeches in the streets.
“I’ll chew through the throats of those
animals,” he told one crowd in Moscow
that winter , gesturing at what he called
the “crooks and thieves” in the Kremlin.
His rhetoric turned many people off.
Russian liberals were alarmed by Naval-
ny’s early flirtation with the far right, in-
cluding a pair of videos he released in
2007, one calling for the deportation of
migrants, another comparing Islamist
militants to cockroaches. The Yabloko
party expelled him for such talk and
other “nationalist activities.” Putin’s
allies cast him as a right-wing radical,
even a fascist.
In the early years of Navalny’s ca-
reer, we spent hours discussing his△
Riot police clash with demonstrators
on Jan. 23, 2021, during a protest
against Navalny’s jailingPREVIOUS SPREAD: EVGENY FELDMAN—MEDUZA/AP; SERGEY PONOMAREV—THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX