36 Time January 31/February 7, 2022
views, issue by issue. On balance, his
agenda struck me as center-right: he
supported gun rights, strong borders,
less government spending—nothing
more radical than a typical Republi-
can in Texas, or a Christian Democrat
in Bavaria. But Navalny’s politics were
not driven by ideology. Above all, he
wanted democratic change.
The state took notice. It first tried to
put Navalny in a cell in 2012, when pros-
ecutors charged him with embezzling
timber. Navalny called the case “strange
and absurd,” but it gave police a pretext
for searching his apartment, his office,
even the workshop outside Moscow
where his parents made wicker baskets.
Soon after one of these raids, Navalny
invited me to his office. The founda-
tion’s staff had swept the place for bugs
and found a camera hidden in the wall,
pointed through a pinhole at Navalny’s
desk. He shrugged as he showed it to me.
“This is a war,” he said. “I also want to
take away everything these guys have.
So why be surprised that they want to
take everything from me?”
A few months later, prosecutors filed
new charges, accusing Navalny and his
brother Oleg of stealing from two com-
panies. Both men were sentenced to
three and a half years in a case that the
European Court of Human Rights would
later describe as “arbitrary and unfair.”
Oleg served much of that term in sol-
itary confinement, becoming what his
brother called a hostage of the Russian
state. Alexei Navalny got off easier; the
court suspended his sentence. As one
Kremlin-aligned newspaper noted, put-
ting Navalny behind bars “could turn
him into Russia’s version of Nelson
Mandela.” Yet setting him free brought
risks too. When Navalny ran for mayor
of Moscow in 2013, the official tally gave
him nearly 30% of the vote.
A few months later, the revolution
in Ukraine reminded Putin just how
quickly a regime can fall. Then Presi-
dent Viktor Yanukovych, his ally in Kyiv,
barely held out for two months before
fleeing the country in a helicopter, un-
able to quell a wave of demonstrations
against rampant corruption. Putin re-
sponded by sending troops to occupy
Crimea and start a separatist war in
eastern Ukraine. At home, he contin-
ued building defenses against a similar
revolt. Roughly 400,000 troops were
hired into a new police force, a praeto-
rian guard trained to put down popular
unrest. Its commander, a longtime Putin
bodyguard, later issued a personal warn-
ing to Navalny, announcing in a video
message that he would pound the dis-
sident “into a juicy slab of meat.”
Navalny was not deterred. In 2016, he
announced plans to run for President.
Authorities kept him off the ballot. But
his campaign still set up offices nation-
wide. Its activists then ran in local elec-
tions, exposed corruption among the re-
gional elites and spread the promise of a
democratic Russia. Navalny spent much
of his time visiting his regional offices
around the country, often drawing mas-
sive crowds.
It was during one trip to the prov-
inces that he fell violently ill. In Au-
gust 2020, Navalny went to Siberia to
shoot a video about corruption. On the
flight home to Moscow, he turned to
his press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, and
said he felt strange, unable to focus.
Within minutes, he was sprawled on
the floor of the plane, groaning in
agony and barely conscious. The pilot
made an emergency landing in Omsk,
where Navalny was rushed to a hos-
pital. It took two days of public pres-
sure before Putin allowed German doc-
tors to evacuate Navalny to Germany.
Blood tests there confirmed the cause
of his illness: he had been poisoned
with Novichok, a chemical weapon
first synthesized by Soviet scientists
and banned under international law.
Experts suspected the poison had
been smeared on Navalny’s clothes,
passing through his skin into the blood-
stream. When Putin was asked about the
crime at a press conference, he made a
joke of it. “Who needs him?” the Pres-
ident said of Navalny with a laugh. If
Russia had wanted to poison him, Putin
added, “we would probably have fin-
ished the job.”When he came out of a coma, Navalny
had trouble recognizing his wife and
children. The poison had attacked his
nervous system, affecting his memory
and motor functions. His wife later told
me about the delirium and hallucina-
tions that caused him to rip the IV tubes
from his veins, spraying the bedsheetswith blood. Weeks passed before he re-
learned how to use a spoon, to write, to
walk and to wash himself.
Several months after the poisoning,
Navalny felt well enough to resume his
activism. His team gathered in Germany
to investigate the attack. Using leaked
phone and travel records, they worked
with several news organizations and
with Bellingcat, a London-based in-
vestigative outlet, to identify the assail-
ants, mostly Russian security officers.
Navalny himself called one of them,
pretending to be a senior Kremlin of-
ficial, and demanded to know why the
attack had failed to kill its target. The
would-be assassin, apparently believing
he was on the phone with his superior,
discussed the crime in detail, explaining
that agents had sneaked into Navalny’s
hotel room in Siberia and smeared the
toxin on his underwear.
Russian authorities had warned Na-
valny that he would be arrested upon his
return to Russia, because he had failed
to check in with his parole officer while
he was in Germany. Yet on Jan. 17, 2021,
he and his wife flew back to Moscow. Na-
valny insists the choice was easy. “There
were no discussions with my friends, no
emotional talks with my wife,” he wrote
me. “From the moment I opened my
eyes, I knew I had to return.”
At passport control in Moscow, sev-
eral officers approached Navalny and led
him away from his wife. His allies had
clear instructions of what to do next.
Within two days of his arrest, they re-
leased a second investigation their team
had prepared while in Germany. It took
aim directly at Putin, linking him to a se-
cret palace on the Black Sea coast. Na-
valny’s team had used a drone to film
the property, which features an under-
ground ice rink, two helipads, an arbo-
retum, an amphitheater and a casino.
The film racked up 100 million views on
YouTube in a matter of days. Putin de-
nied owning the mansion; his childhood
friend from St. Petersburg, now a bil-
lionaire, claimed it belongs to him. Still,
the film inspired tens of thousands of
Russians to protest in the streets, chant-
ing, “Putin is a thief!” as they marched
through Moscow. Anti corruption rallies
broke out in more than 100 cities and
towns across Russia that weekend.
The Kremlin’s response was fierce.WORLD