by Marco Imarisio
Navalny reportedly felt sick after a walk. Peskov: “Putin was informed about the death. There will be medical tests.”
Alexei Navalny died in the Arctic penal colony of Charp, 2,000 kilometers from Moscow, where he was imprisoned: the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service announced this, saying that an investigation into the causes of death was underway. President Putin's most famous opponent was 47 years old. According to the Russian news agency Tass and according to the correctional service, Navalny “almost immediately fainted” after a walk, although “all the necessary resuscitation measures were carried out and did not produce any positive results”.
Vladimir Putin was informed of the death. Kira Yarmish, Navalny's lawyer, travels to Kharp: “As soon as we have more information about his death, we will disclose it.” On Wednesday, the Putin opponent was placed in solitary confinement for the 27th time since his incarceration began, a record for that too repressive Russian penal system. On the 11th, another ten-day isolation period had just ended. In total, Navalny has spent 308 days in solitary confinement since his detention began in January 2021. Here are the reactions to the news of his death. Below is the portrait of Marco Imarisio.
However, it was still scary.
Imprisoned in a penal colony in the remote Russian Arctic, where he was found after three weeks with no news from his lawyers; unable to communicate with the outside world; isolated, far away from everything. Locked in a two by three meter cell from which, as it happened, he would probably never get out.
Navalny was in the hands of his arch-enemies, who had tried to eliminate him at least a few times. He could have stayed abroad, where he would have been celebrated as the strongest voice against the power vertical that has ruled Russia for over twenty years. He had chosen to return, knowing that his fate would be prison and knowing that death might await him.
Navalny was first sentenced to five years in prison in July 2013 for embezzling state assets from the Kirovles joint stock company. Mysterious accusations, documents that were never made public. From 2011 to 2018, he was sentenced to administrative detention ten more times, mainly for the crime of seditious assembly.
In January 2021, immediately after returning from Germany, he was stopped for “breaking the rules.” He did not show up at the police station on the scheduled dates. He had a good reason for not being there. He was between life and death in hospital after being poisoned by agents from a special unit of the Russian secret service FSB. In March 2022, he was found guilty of aggravated fraud and sentenced to 9 years in prison. At the end of May of that year he was accused of having created “an extremist community”.
An indictment in 196 volumes
On April 26, 2023, he was given ten days to read the 196 volumes of the new case against him. On August 4, he was sentenced to an additional 19 years in prison. The Duma had passed a law that seemed tailor-made for him – to convert that sentence into life imprisonment. It didn't help.
The reason for the anger of a man buried alive or almost alive was not due to the journalistic research of his working group, which also brought to light the incredible wealth of the men in the Kremlin who preach frugality to their people while accumulating villas and yachts in exclusive places in the world . This is now over, there is no longer even the need to claim to be Franciscan, as there is no longer any opposition.
The truth is much simpler. For years, Vladimir Putin feared comparison with him, with his popularity, with his ability to reach an audience that was inaccessible to him, that of young people.
An unacceptable presence for Putin
This fear remained until his death. Because Navalny's presence continued to loom over the Kremlin.
The memory of what he was capable of lingered in the collective memory and in that of Putin, who had recognized his nemesis in an ex-boyfriend who became the first Russian 2.0 politician, armed only with an iPhone and his social channels.
When he was poisoned on August 20, 2020, he was returning to Moscow from an election trip to Tomsk and Novosibirsk, the two university cities in Siberia, where the winds of dissent were blowing as hard as possible. Shortly thereafter, local elections would take place, another test of the “smart voting” strategy, his most important invention: the concentration of opposition preferences on the candidate with the best chance of making it, regardless of his political stripe.
In the 2011 parliamentary elections, when his career as the Kremlin's public enemy number one was just beginning, he prevented United Russia from reaching the desired fifty percent.
It was this transversality that made Navalny what he was until the end.
Grew up in a military garrison
Born in 1976 as the son of a soldier and raised in a garrison, he had become a representative of voters who have a vague memory of the Soviet Union and, above all, do not regret it, do not live in the myth of lost power. With his sharp slogans – how can we forget the definition of Putin's “grandfather in the bunker” – he took with him liberals, communists, even nationalists, everyone who was against today's power.
He made memes like crazy. He had toilet brushes bought from discount stores brought to the demonstration to commemorate the luxury brushes found in Putin's villa in Sochi. It's been spreading on YouTube for years. Become a kind of brand. He was the boy next door who, during the brief season of mass rallies against the Medvedev-Putin squadron, urged passers-by to join the procession: “Don’t stand still like mouflons.”
He married traditionally young and lived with his wife and two children in an apartment block in Maryno, on the outskirts of Moscow. He was not a veteran of the USSR, he was not an intellectual, not an oligarch. It had no labels.
A few months before the attack of which he was the victim, his dangerousness was confirmed by another ad personam law that banned people residing abroad from running for president. And this is where the problems began. Especially ours.
Let's tell the truth. Shortly before his poisoning, Navalny was viewed with a certain disdain by the international media. Because if you interpret him by Western standards, Navalny was a populist, someone who took everyone along, who didn't make any distinctions. Who was always accused of the youthful sin of Great Russian nationalism and the statements about Crimea, which “should not be returned to Ukraine, because it is not a ham sandwich that you first take and then bring back.” Added to this is his studies at Yale as a selected member of the Greenberg World Fellows Program, a program launched in 2002 for which only 16 people are selected each year at a global level with characteristics that make them global leaders. And here are the finger-wagging and distrust towards him, fueled by the Kremlin's propaganda, which portrayed him as an ambiguous character and a foreign agent on behalf of Uncle Sam, which many international media outlets fell for for a long time.
Only to change his mind in the face of a heroic gesture like deciding to return to his homeland, even though he knew exactly what awaited him.
That's the difference from everyone else. He was not a luxury exile like Gerry Kasparov or other compatriots living abroad. He was a protagonist of Russian politics to the end, the only strong voice of dissidence while those “outside” were divided over the possibility of a meaningful vote, the only idea that emerged from an opposition at once annihilated and barren.
He didn't just talk. He always got results. The 2020 elections in Siberia were a triumph. Earlier this year, Ksenya Fadeeva, her movement's coordinator in Tomsk, was sentenced to nine years in prison for “extremism.” Despite prison and an increasingly weaker voice, Navalny was still frightening.
Article is being updated…
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February 16, 2024 (changed February 16, 2024 | 1:45 p.m.)
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