The Times Magazine 25party. He would soon grow disillusioned,
however, with what he saw as its unwillingness
to seriously challenge Putin.
“We were ambitious guys. We planned to
change our country,” says Yashin. “It’s great
that Navalny has managed to achieve such
worldwide recognition. I never doubted that
he had a big future ahead of him.”
Yulia Navalnaya, known as the opposition’s
“first lady”, shuns the spotlight and has
resisted calls to follow her husband into
politics. The couple met at a Turkish holiday
resort in 1998 and have an adult daughter,
Daria, and a teenage son, Zahar. They
appear to have a happy marriage, their bond
strengthened by trials and tribulations. The
family’s flat has been repeatedly raided by
police and Navalny almost lost the use of his
right eye when a pro-Kremlin activist threw
chemicals into his face in 2017. Their bank
accounts have also been frozen.
Navalnaya, also 45, insists that despite
the family’s problems, she has never tried to
persuade her husband to give up his long and
bitter fight to oust Putin. “He’s doing all this
for us, for me and my children,” she once said.
“I’ve never asked him to stop.”
In the mid-Noughties, Navalny flirted
briefly with nationalism, attending the far-
right Russian March in Moscow and recording
two xenophobic videos, one of which likened
illegal immigrants to tooth decay. The
controversy has haunted him down the years
and even led to Amnesty International briefly
withdrawing its support for him.
He finally apologised last year, telling
Time magazine in a letter from prison that he
regretted the “stupid” videos. There appears
to be little to link the nationalist-era Navalny
with today’s model. His current allies are all
liberal politicians and pro-democracy activists.
Some of his younger supporters are even
unaware of his nationalist past.
“He has evolved greatly. He came to
know Russia and Russians much better,” says
Vladimir Milov, a former Russian deputy
energy minister who is now one of Navalny’s
closest allies. “He has evolved into a person
who has a much broader vision about what
our country needs.”
Navalny’s life over the past two years often
seems to have been torn straight from the
pages of a far-fetched Hollywood script.
In August 2020 as he was flying home to
Moscow from Siberia where he had lent his
support to local activists, Navalny collapsed
in agony. Fearful for his life, the plane’s pilots
defied a hoax bomb warning to make an
emergency landing. He was rushed to hospital
in a critical condition.
Five days later, as Russian officials put
forward a swathe of dubious explanations to
account for his collapse, including overwork,
too much alcohol or a “simple lack of
breakfast”, Navalny was airlifted to Berlin
for medical treatment. After tests, German
doctors said he had been targeted with a form
of novichok, the same nerve agent that was
used against Sergei Skripal, the former
Russian agent, in Salisbury in 2018.
After months of recuperation in Berlin,
Navalny was back on his feet. And as soon as
he was, he set about taking revenge. With help
from Bellingcat, the investigative journalism
website, he managed to call one of the FSB
agents that had been tasked with killing
him in Siberia. Posing as an aide to a senior
Russian security official, Navalny demanded
an urgent debriefing of the botched operation.
The conversation, which lasted around
25 minutes, was as surreal as it was shocking.
Konstantin Kudryavtsev, the agent, revealed
that the would-be assassins had broken into
Navalny’s hotel room in Tomsk, a small
Siberian city, and smeared novichok onto his
underpants while he was out. “Where on the
pants?” Navalny asked. “The groin area,” came
the reply. “What colour were the pants?” A
brief pause as the unsuspecting FSB agent
racked his memory. “They were blue.”
Despite the assassination bid, Navalny
refused to put his personal safety above
political considerations, saying that it would
be “a gift” to Putin if he remained in exile. In
January 2021, still suffering from the effects
of his poisoning, Navalny and Yulia made a
dramatic return to a snowy Moscow, flying
in from Berlin on a flight packed with the
world’s media. As thousands of his supporters
gathered at an airport to meet him, the
plane was diverted at the last moment above
Moscow and he was arrested as soon as he
reached customs. He kissed his wife goodbye.
He has not been at liberty since.
Some opposition activists questioned his
decision to return to Russia so soon. Several
said he should have orchestrated resistance
from abroad, like a modern-day Bolshevik
revolutionary, while others claimed his arrival
would have had more impact if he had timed it
to coincide with last September’s parliamentary
elections. Among his inner circle, however,
Navalny’s determination to return as soon
as possible had quickly become apparent.
“When he regained consciousness,
I thought that it would be my duty to put
in his mind the idea that he doesn’t have
to return right away, that he can wait, that
he has options. That he could manage our
organisation from abroad, and so on,” says
Vladimir Ashurkov, a former banker whois now the head of Navalny’s FBK anti-
corruption group. “But when I started talking
to him, I realised that it didn’t make sense to
even speak to him about this.”As speculation rises that Russia’s disastrous
war in Ukraine could threaten Putin’s two-
decade-long grip on power, the level of
potential public support for Navalny is unclear.
Just 2 per cent of Russians say they would
vote for him, according to the Levada-Center,
an independent researcher. But his allies insist
that if he were allowed to campaign freely,
support would shoot up overnight. There is a
precedent for this – at Moscow’s 2013 mayoral
elections, the sole time that Navalny was
allowed to run for public office, he took
second place, with almost 30 per cent of the
vote, even though he was barred from national
television. Unsurprisingly, the Kremlin has not
allowed him to run for election since.
Despite Navalny’s emergence as Russia’s
best-known opposition figure, Putin
stubbornly refuses to say his name aloud,
referring to him as “that gentleman”, “the
person you mentioned” or, after his poisoning,
“the Berlin patient”.
“For Putin, this is his own personal
paranoia. There’s something semi-mystical
here, it seems. It’s almost like a ritual or a
superstition – you spit over your shoulder
three times, don’t cross the road if you see
a black cat. If I don’t say Navalny’s name out
loud then he isn’t so frightening,” says Yashin.
Navalny’s current prison camp, while strict,
has allowed him regular access to his lawyers,
who have passed on his defiant messages to
the outside world, as well as conjugal visits
by his wife. His new conviction and sentence
mean he will be sent to a maximum security
camp, possibly far from Moscow, where he
will be kept in a cell rather than a barracks.
He will also be entitled to fewer visits. His
supporters fear that his isolation will put his
life in even more danger. But, like Navalny,
they have a resolute faith that history will
eventually turn their way.
“The story of Navalny has the makings
of an epic. It’s almost biblical,” says Ashurkov.
“He’s a brave hero poisoned by his opponent,
the tsar, and he miraculously survives
assassination. He recuperates and he talks to
one of his assassins. And then despite all the
threats, he returns to his home country where
he is imprisoned but still sends his diatribes
from behind bars and from his trial. This is a
heroic story. And, you know, I don’t think we
are at the end of it yet.” nTHE AGENT SMEARED NOVICHOK ONTO NAVALNY’S
UNDERWEAR. WHERE ON HIS PANTS? ‘THE GROIN AREA’
PUTIN’S WAR