Alexei Navalny’s death is a sign of how Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship has transformed
once told an interviewer, on one of the many occasions he was asked about being assassinated. The answer was vintage Navalny: ever hopeful in the face of existential terror. But now that it has happened, now that Mr Navalny has been pronounced dead in an arctic prison, it is Vladimir Putin,
For Russians opposed to Mr Putin’s regime, Mr Navalny represented hope. His death, although hardly unexpected, will make him a martyr. “Now Alexei Navalny will be with us for ever as an ideal role model,” wrote the author Mikhail Zygar. “There are so few unblemished heroes in Russian history—now we have one.” Crowds gathered to pay respect in cities as far flung as Los Angeles, London and Berlin. Makeshift memorials cropped up across Russia.
Mr Navalny’s first conviction on trumped-up charges of embezzlement in 2013 brought thousands to the streets in Moscow; the Russian authorities suspended his sentence and allowed him to take part in mayoral elections that year. After Mr Navalny survived a poisoning attempt and returned to Russia in 2021, his nationwide organisation was declared “extremist” and its network of offices uprooted. Since Mr Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the screws tightened even further.
Their first test will be to catalyse a show of opposition to Mr Putin at next month’s elections. Although the results are preordained, the vote remains a rare legal window to express dissent. That is one reason why Boris Nadezhdin, a little-known politician whose anti-war platform gathered signatures of support from tens of thousands of Russian citizens, was ultimately barred from running. In recent months Mr Navalny had been urging supporters from prison to vote “for anyone but Putin”.
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