The Times Magazine 23a fellow opposition politician who was one
of the last witnesses for the defence.
“But Navalny was incredibly upbeat. He
was smiling, laughing. He was in great spirits,”
says Yashin, who has known the Kremlin
critic for more than two decades. “He was
phenomenally optimistic, even in the absence
of any grounds for optimism. I came away
from the prison camp feeling inspired.”
Navalny’s determination to remain
positive in the face of the Kremlin’s merciless
crackdown on dissent is one of his defining
traits, says Lyubov Sobol, an anti-corruption
lawyer who began working with him in 2011.
“He is a very strong person. He doesn’t
want to show Putin any weakness or indication
that he is ready to give up in any way,” says
Sobol, 34, speaking from an undisclosed
location because of safety concerns. “Even
though he knows that Putin will try to keep
him in prison for as long as he can and that
his sentence can be extended at any time.”
Like most of Navalny’s allies, Sobol was
forced to flee Russia to avoid arrest afterMoscow added the opposition leader, the FBK
and his nationwide network of activists to its
official list of “extremists” and “terrorists”, a
designation that is usually reserved for Islamic
fighters and neo-Nazi groups. In 2016, Sobol’s
now ex-husband was attacked with a syringe
containing an unknown chemical that left him
briefly paralysed, while she has faced threats
and round-the-clock surveillance.
“Navalny realises that he is being watched
by the millions of Russians who support
him and he tries to set an example with his
strength of spirit, even in the tough conditions
of a Russian prison. He always said that the
closer we get to the collapse of Putin’s regime,
during its death throes, then the greater the
Kremlin’s repression will be. He warned that
there would be more attempts to eliminate us.
But Navalny always knew the fight against
Putin would be a marathon, not a sprint.”
So was he prepared for Putin’s furious
revenge? Sobol thinks for a moment before
replying. “Inasmuch as anyone could be
ready for an assassination attempt or to beimprisoned for an undetermined period. He
has always been aware that some kind of...
self-sacrifice would be necessary.”Navalny was born in 1976 into a military
family near Moscow, but spent summers
at his Ukrainian grandmother’s home near
Chernobyl. A virulent anti-Communist, his
grandmother once hopefully asked a relative
if he had “spat” on Vladimir Lenin’s embalmed
corpse after a visit to the Bolshevik
revolutionary’s tomb in Red Square.
He studied law in the late Nineties at
the same south Moscow university as Anna
Chapman, the Russian intelligence agent
deported from the United States in a high-
profile Cold War-type “spy swap” in 2010.
Unsurprisingly, the two were not friends.
After graduation, Navalny worked for
a while as a lawyer at a property firm, but
his interest in opposition politics had already
begun. In 2000, the year Putin won his
first term of office, Navalny, then 23, joined
Yabloko (“Apple”), Russia’s oldest liberal‘HE HAS ALWAYS BEEN AWARE THAT SOME KIND OF SELF-SACRIFICE WOULD BE NECESSARY’
On board the plane from Berlin, where he was treated
after the novichok attack, to Moscow, January 2021...Listening to the verdict at the end of his
trial inside Penal Colony No 2 in MarchKIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES, GETTY IMAGES, ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
...with his wife at Moscow’s
Sheremetyevo airport shortly
before he was detained by police......and outside a police station
the day after his returnPUTIN’S WAR