President Vladimir Putin never mentioned his name, but Alexei Navalny managed to captivate the Kremlin's master by establishing himself as his main opponent in Russia, where his political legacy has been dotted following his death in custody on February 16 lines is written down.
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“The citizen you mention,” “that person” or “that gentleman”: Over the last decade, the Russian president has used euphemisms to avoid pronouncing the last name of the man whose funeral will be celebrated under close surveillance in Moscow on Friday .
When asked by an American television channel in June 2021 about the possibility that Alexei Navalny could be released from prison in good health, the Russian president said he expected “the person you mentioned to be subjected to the same treatment (…). will be like others.” People in prison.
When the journalist mentioned Navalny's name, Vladimir Putin stopped: “You can call him whatever you want, he is one of the people in prison.”
The Russian president's reluctance to name this former anti-corruption blogger who became his main opponent betrayed the concern he caused in the Kremlin.
Navalny was the central figure in a wave of protests in 2011 and 2012 in which he declared that he could “conquer the Kremlin”; In the 2013 Moscow local elections – the only election in which he was allowed to run – he ran against the pro-Putin candidate and managed to build a network of supporters outside the capital.
Above all, he had multiplied the videos on the Internet, which always began with different sentences – “Privet, eto Navalny!” (“Hello, it's Navalny”) – and accused the Kremlin elite and Vladimir Putin himself of corruption.
The most famous of these, published in 2021, claimed that the Kremlin's master had secretly built a palace in southern Russia. That two-hour video, viewed 130 million times on YouTube, was broadcast shortly after Navalny's arrest in Russia, upon his return from exile in Germany, where he had been treated following a poisoning attempt attributed to the Kremlin.
“We agreed not to broadcast it until I returned to Moscow because we didn't want the main protagonist of this film (Vladimir Putin, editor's note) to think that we were afraid of him,” Navalny said in the statement Video.
Control of the Kremlin
In Russia, analysts say, the Kremlin's control over the media, civil society or politics would never have allowed Navalny to compete with Vladimir Putin in an election. But his charisma and desire to break taboos risked embarrassing the Kremlin.
“Incontrovertible evidence shows that Putin’s regime was intent on destroying Navalny, his team and his movement,” said Ben Noble, a specialist in Russian politics at University College London. “The Kremlin has become increasingly resistant to any alternative political vision and Navalny embodied such an alternative: a charismatic and fierce critic of Putin,” he told AFP.
Navalny led “the most devastating investigations the country has ever seen into the boundless cynicism and corruption of leaders,” Andrei Kolesnikov, an expert at the Carnegie Center for Russia and Eurasia, told AFP.
However, there were signs that Navalny's nationwide limited popularity was declining at the time of his death, in part due to the suppression of discordant voices in the wake of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
According to a survey by the independent institute Levada Center, 9% of respondents agreed with his action in January 2023, compared to 20% in September 2020.
But it is difficult to determine his true level of prominence in a Russia transformed by the war in Ukraine and which bears little resemblance to the country of the 2010s, when Navalny could openly lead anti-corruption demonstrations.
“It seems that, for all its courage and bravery, the regime is getting stronger” and that the institutions built by civil society “have been successfully dismantled,” notes Maria Snegovaya of the Strategic Center for International Studies (CSIS).
Alexei Navalny remained inflexible until the end, predicting the end of the current regime in messages that he sent from prison and that his team spread on social networks.
“It will collapse and fall apart. “Putin's state is not viable,” he hoped in January and described his camp's “victory” as “inevitable.”