37Thousands of protesters were arrested,
and dozens of independent journalists
and news outlets were later put on a
state blacklist of “foreign agents.” Any-
one associated with Navalny, including
his lawyers, found themselves in legal
jeopardy. The elderly father of one of his
allies was sent to jail above the Arctic
Circle. One spring morning in 2021, a
military counterintelligence unit raided
the home and office of Ivan Pavlov, a
member of Navalny’s legal team, seiz-
ing case files and electronics. “Every-
thing linked to Navalny is now irradi-
ated with risk,” Pavlov told me by phone
from Tbilisi, Georgia, where he fled with
his family. “We’re talking about Putin’s
public enemy No. 1.”
Last June, a court in Moscow desig-
nated Navalny’s foundation an extrem-
ist group. Under Russian law, the ruling
made it a crime to work with or support
the organization, a legal status similar
to that of ISIS or al-Qaeda. The foun-
dation’s regional branches shut down.Security forces pursued its staff, charg-
ing some with extremism. Many others
fled Russia for fear of arrest.
Soon after, Navalny was summoned
to the warden’s office at Penal Colony
No. 2. Inside he found a group of officials
seated at a conference table. A portrait of
a youthful Putin hung on the wall behind
them. In a robotic patter, a guard read
a proposal to change Navalny’s status
at the prison. He would no longer be
treated as an inmate prone to attempting
escape. Instead he would be deemed
an extremist, aggressive and liable to
indoctrinate his peers. The change was
approved by unanimous vote.
Since then, a little plastic tile, resem-
bling a cheap Christmas ornament, has
been affixed to the foot of Navalny’s bed
with tape. It’s inscribed with the words
prone to crimes of a terroristnature , a label that infuriates Navalny.
Putin is the one “who ordered an act of
terrorism —to kill a political opponent,”
he writes in his letters. “But it’s my
bed that has the label terrorist.”Last august, on the first anniversary
of the poisoning, the U.S. sanctioned a
group of Russian security officers for
trying to kill Navalny with a chemical
weapon. Most of those identified in Na-
valny’s investigation were on the list.
Yet he was disappointed in the Ameri-
can response. “These are just the agents
of Putin’s will,” he wrote me. “We’re all
tired of rolling our eyes, watching the
U.S. impose sanctions on some colonels
and generals, who don’t even have any
money abroad.” It would be far more ef-
fective, he says, to go after Putin’s own
fortune and the bagmen who keep it for
him in Western banks. “It’s really sim-
ple,” Navalny writes. “You want to influ-
ence Putin, then influence his personal
wealth. It’s right under your backside.”△
Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s press
secretary, at his team’s office in
Vilnius on Jan. 13RAFAL MILACH—MAGNUM PHOTOS FOR TIME