Who was Alexei Navalny, Putin’s fiercest political foe?
Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition figure who had been a thorn in President Vladimir Putin’s side for more than a decade, died in a brutal Arctic prison colony on Friday — with corrections officials claiming that he had collapsed while on a walk.
The 47-year-old married dad of two and lawyer had led a crusade against large-scale corruption within Russia’s political and business elite class and challenged Putin’s iron grip on power with mass protests that drew crowds of young people.
Navalny’s journey from a leading Russian opposition leader to the country’s most high-profile political prisoner was marked by relentless government persecution, a near-fatal poisoning attempt he blamed on the Kremlin and his voluntary return to his homeland — which ultimately landed him behind bars on an extremism conviction carrying 19 years in prison.
Here’s what to know about Navalny’s life, political activism and numerous legal troubles:
Early beginnings
Navalny was born on June 4, 1976, in the city of Butyn, about 25 miles outside Moscow. He earned a law degree from People’s Friendship University in 1998, followed by a degree in economics, and later did a fellowship at Yale.
Political activism
Navalny first dipped his toe into politics in 1999, when, as a young lawyer, he joined the liberal opposition party Yabloko, from which he was later booted from taking part in nationalist marches and calling for curbs on immigration.
In the early 2000s, Navalny led a movement against unchecked overdevelopment in Moscow, and a few years later saw his national profile rise after exposing in blog posts what he claimed to be large-scale corruption within mammoth state-run companies like Gazprom and Rosneft.
Navalny later formalized his anti-corruption crusade by starting the Foundation for Fighting Corruption dedicated to uncovering alleged graft among Putin’s closest cronies.
When mass demonstrations against Putin erupted in December 2011, fueled by reports of rampant vote-tampering in a parliamentary election, Navalny was arrested and sentenced to 15 days in jail.
Embezzlement cases
Between 2012 and 2014, Navalny had been charged with and convicted of embezzlement and fraud charges — which he dismissed as politically motivated — involving a state-run timber company and a Russian subsidiary of the French cosmetics firm Yves Rocher.
Navalny ultimately received suspended sentences in both cases, which were decried by the European Court of Human Rights.
Throughout his legal foibles, Navalny and his supporters continued pursuing their anti-corruption campaign, targeting, among others, then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.
Poisoning
In August 2020, Navalny was on a domestic flight from Tomsk, in Siberia, to Moscow, when he fell ill. The pilot made an emergency landing in Omsk, saving his life.
A comatose Navalny was then airlifted to a hospital in Berlin, where he was treated for the effects of a nerve agent that had been secretly applied to his underwear. German military tests determined the toxic substance to be Novichok — a poison developed in the Soviet Union.
The Kremlin vehemently denied orchestrating the attempted assassination by Russia’s FSB security service, with Putin chillingly remarking at the time: “If someone had wanted to poison him, they would have finished him off.”
Return to Russia
After spending five months in Germany receiving medical treatment, Navalny voluntarily returned to Russia in early 2021 and was immediately arrested, with prosecutors alleging that his stay aboard violated the terms of his suspended sentence in one of his embezzlement cases.
Despite widespread protests against his treatment by the government, Navalny was sentenced to more than two years in prison for the parole violation. He staged a three-week hunger strike to draw attention to a lack of medical care and sleep deprivation behind bars — and only ended it after his doctors warned him that he could die.
Imprisonment
In early 2022 — a month after Russia invaded Ukraine — Navalny was sentenced to an additional nine years in prison for embezzlement and contempt of court. He was shipped off to a maximum-security prison in the Vladimir region.
Then in August of last year, Navalny was slapped with a 19-year prison term on extremism charges for his political activity opposing the Kremlin. A court ordered his transfer to a “special regime” penal colony in the Arctic Circle, some 1,200 miles from Moscow, where he met his end under unexplained circumstances on Friday after three years of continual incarceration — and 27 trips to solitary confinement.
Despite being imprisoned in some of the harshest conditions imaginable, Navalny never missed a chance to needle the Kremlin in his social media posts crackling with his trademark humor and sarcasm.
During his final court appearance Thursday, which was recorded on video, a healthy-looking Navalny made jokes and shared a laugh about his dwindling funds with the judge.
In his final post on X later that day revealing that he had been handed yet another 15-day stint in a punishment cell, he wrote: “The Yamal prison decided to break Vladimir’s record of fawning and pleasing the Moscow authorities.”
Family life
Alexei met his beloved wife, Yulia, an economist by training, on vacation in 1998, and the two got married in 2000. They share two children — a daughter Daria, 23, and a son Zakhar, 15.
Yulia Navalnaya stood by her husband through all of his trials and tribulations until the very end.
Two days before his death, Navalny posted a heartwarming tribute to Yulia on X, writing: “Baby, everything is like a song with you: Between us, there are cities, the take-off light of airfields, blue snowstorms, and thousands of kilometers,” he wrote alongside a photo of them together. But I feel you are near every second, and I love you more and more.”
A shaken Navalnaya addressed the “horrific news” of her husband’s death during the Munich Security Conference on Friday — and called on the international community to hold Putin and his allies accountable for their “atrocities” in Russia.
Last home
Navalny’s final place of residence was the so-called “Polar Wolf” penal colony, located in the remote settlement of Kharp, 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle — and about 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow.
The prison, officially known as IK-3 penal colony, was founded in the 1960s as part of what was once the infamous GULAG system of forced Soviet labor camps, according to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper.
It is considered to be one of the harshest prisons in Russia and is mostly reserved for hardened criminals.
Winters in the Yamal-Nenets region are brutal, with temperatures routinely hovering around 15 degrees below zero at night.
When Navalny was first transferred there in December, he wryly joked about the conditions he was facing.
“Nothing quite invigorates you like a walk in Yamal at 6:30 in the morning,” he wrote on Telegram. “Even at this temperature, you can walk for more than half an hour only if you manage to grow a new nose, new ears and new fingers.”
He shared a picture of his cramped walking yard — concrete-walled, topped with metal bars, 11 steps long and three steps wide
