Aleksei A. Navalny, an anticorruption activist who for more than a decade led the political opposition in President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia while enduring arrests, assaults and a near-fatal poisoning, died on Friday in a Russian prison. He was 47.
His death was announced by Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service and a spokeswoman for Mr. Navalny.
The spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said on Saturday in a statement on X that Mr. Navalny’s mother had been officially notified of his death. Ms. Yarmysh said Russian investigators had transferred Mr. Navalny’s body from the penal colony in the Arctic where he has been held to a nearby town for examination. No cause of death has been specified.
Mr. Navalny had been serving multiple sentences that would most likely have kept him in prison until at least 2031 on charges that his supporters say were largely fabricated in an effort to muzzle him. Despite increasingly harsh conditions, including repeated stints in solitary confinement, he maintained a presence on social media, while members of his team continued to publish investigations into Russia’s corrupt elite from exile.
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Mr. Navalny was given a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence in February 2021 after returning to Russia from Germany, where he had been recovering from being poisoned the previous August. In March 2022, he received a nine-year sentence for embezzlement and fraud in a trial that international observers denounced as “politically motivated” and a “sham.” And in August 2023, he was sentenced to 19 years in prison for “extremism.”
Mr. Navalny had effectively returned from the dead after he was poisoned with a nerve agent in Siberia in 2020, and he conducted multiple hunger strikes to improve his treatment. During his detention, Mr. Navalny was repeatedly placed in solitary confinement and complained about severe illnesses. In December, he disappeared for three weeks during his transfer to the penal colony 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
Yet even from prison, Mr. Navalny remained an unflinching critic of Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer whom he accused of corruptly skimming the country’s oil profits to enrich his friends and entourage in the security services. Mr. Putin’s political party, he once said, was a party of “swindlers and thieves,” and he accused the president of trying to turn Russia into a “feudal state.”
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His own politics evolved as he sharpened his criticism of Mr. Putin. While Mr. Navalny did not outright condemn the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula by Russia in 2014, for example, he was unabashedly critical of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago.
In November 2022, Mr. Navalny called the invasion a “nightmare” that Russia had been pulled into by Mr. Putin, whom he labeled “a single crazy grandfather who lives in fantasies that he is a military leader, unusually popular in Ukraine.”
Mr. Navalny was known for his innovative tactics in fighting corruption and promoting democracy. Defying expectations, he cannily used street politics and social media to build a tenacious opposition movement, even after much of the independent news media in Russia was squelched and other critics were driven into exile or killed in unsolved murders. In the years before Russia invaded Ukraine, many of Mr. Navalny’s associates, and in some cases their relatives, were arrested or forced into exile.
At his death, he was the most prominent critic of Mr. Putin still standing in Russia at a time when the president has engineered a path to remain in power until at least 2036.
Mr. Navalny was thought to have been physically attacked multiple times: Even before his poisoning in 2020, he survived an earlier suspected poisoning attempt when he was in jail in 2019 and an assault in 2017 in which someone threw a green liquid in his face, nearly blinding him.
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He had spoken openly of the possibility that he might be assassinated.
“I’m trying not to think about it a lot,” he said in an interview with CBS News in 2017. “If you start to think about what kind of risks I have, you cannot do anything.”
The Death of Aleksei Navalny
The anticorruption activist, who led the political opposition in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, died in a Russian prison. He was 47.
- Filling the Void: Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s widow, said that she would carry on his work to bring about a democratic and free Russia, presenting herself for the first time as a political force.
- A Galvanizing Moment?: Navalny’s death united world leaders and demonstrators in grief, but it also left Russia without a charismatic counterweight to Putin’s increasingly repressive policies.
- Fears of a Crackdown: At least 366 people have been detained across Russia since Navalny was pronounced dead, leading to concern that the arrests could signal greater government repression ahead of the country’s elections in March.
- Prison Conditions: The cause of Navalny’s death has not been established, but Russia’s harshest penal colonies are known for hazardous conditions, and Navalny was singled out for particularly brutal treatment.
A Nerve Agent
On Aug. 20, 2020, Mr. Navalny became violently ill and fell into a coma shortly after boarding a flight from Siberia, where he had met with opposition candidates for local office.
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The flight made an emergency landing in the Russian city of Omsk, where doctors for two days resisted his wife’s pleas that he be transferred to Germany for treatment.
Mr. Navalny was eventually evacuated to Berlin on an air ambulance flight after a team of German doctors who had arrived in Omsk stated that it was safe for him to travel. A little more than a week later, the German government announced that he had been poisoned with a nerve agent from the highly potent Novichok family of toxins. The evidence, German officials said, was “unequivocal.”
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“Mr. Navalny has been the victim of a crime,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said at the time. “It raises very serious questions that only the Russian government can and must answer.”
Novichok, a Soviet-era weapon invented for military use, was used against Sergei V. Skripal, a former Soviet spy, and his daughter in a 2018 attack in Salisbury, England, that the British government attributed to Russia’s military intelligence arm, the G.R.U.
In December 2020, Mr. Navalny released a video of himself — posing as an aide to a senior Russian security official — extracting a confession from one of his would-be assassins, essentially confirming the involvement of the Russian secret services. He was told that the poison had been planted in his underwear at his hotel sometime before he boarded the plane.
The following month he flew back to Russia, facing an all-but-certain prison sentence. He was arrested at the airport, but his return breathed new life into the Russian opposition, and protests broke out across the country.
Within days of his return, his team released a report about a purported secret palace built for Mr. Putin that was viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube, helping to fuel the protests. At his 2021 sentencing, speaking from a Moscow courtroom, Mr. Navalny predicted that Russians would eventually rise and prevail against Mr. Putin, whom he called “a thieving little man.”
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Russian officials had previously deployed a low-level campaign of harassment against Mr. Navalny. He was frequently arrested and jailed for short spells, usually for minor offenses related to protesting without a parade permit.
Mr. Putin barely mentioned Mr. Navalny’s name, and the state news media steadfastly ignored him throughout his decade-long anticorruption campaign. Yet Mr. Navalny, a young, scrappy politician, found a base of support in the Russian middle class, and that clearly irritated the Kremlin.
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Dismissing him as an unpatriotic gadfly, the Kremlin at times seemed willing to overlook his criticisms to give Mr. Putin the veneer of running a government that tolerated dissent. The short detentions allowed the Russian authorities to keep Mr. Navalny out of sight for important events, like organized protests, while escaping criticism for harsh treatment that might make him a martyr.
‘I Hate These People’
Despite the attacks and the jail terms, Mr. Navalny persevered, he said, out of a desire to change the course of his country and not let down the people who worked with him. He was angry at what he called Mr. Putin’s self-dealing inner circle and the security services that protected it.
“I do this because I hate these people,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2011, before he rose to prominence.
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Still, he struggled to unite the feuding pro-democracy opposition parties, a fractured state of affairs that has plagued Russia’s politics since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Some were wary of his right-wing positions, like the Russian nationalism that characterized his early political activities, his support for gun rights and his anti-immigrant views.
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Aleksei Anatolievich Navalny, the son of a Red Army officer, was born on June 4, 1976, in Butyn, a village near Moscow, and grew up on far-flung military bases throughout the former Soviet Union.
Mr. Navalny studied law at the Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow and economics at the Finance Academy of the Russian Federation. He worked as a real estate lawyer before going into politics, first gaining recognition as the author of a blog for small investors that exposed signs of theft and abuse inside some of the country’s giant state-owned companies, like Gazprom and Rosneft.
While the blog’s purpose was financial — to advocate for minority shareholders — it was also politically daring, because it accused government insiders of abuse and Mr. Putin of tolerating that abuse.
Mr. Navalny’s support among the middle class — mostly in the capital, Moscow, where he ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2013 — brought a new type of politics to the country, one focused not on the woes of striking miners or the aloof intellectual class but on bread-and-butter issues of the new capitalist era, like protecting home equity and investments in stocks.
Social media outlets like Twitter, now rebranded as X, and Vkontakte, a Russian analogue to Facebook, propelled Mr. Navalny’s rise. A breakthrough came in 2011, when he used social networking sites to promote street protests opposed to Mr. Putin’s return to power for a third presidential term. The protests breathed new life into a beleaguered opposition, and he came to be seen as the movement’s leader.
Years of arrests and attacks followed.
Initially, prosecutors pressed charges of embezzlement — related to his work as an adviser to a regional governor years before — that were widely seen as politically motivated. Mr. Navalny received a five-year suspended sentence.
Mr. Navalny continued to speak out. Barred from running for office because of his criminal convictions, he promoted other opposition politicians and ran an anticorruption group that turned out devastating reports of high-level graft.
In one searing exposé in 2017, he laid out a web of foundations and shell companies, all connected to former President Dmitri A. Medvedev, whose mansions, country estates, 18th-century palace in St. Petersburg and vineyard in Tuscany were displayed in the video.
“The system has turned so rotten that it doesn’t have any healthy parts at all,” Mr. Navalny said.
Mr. Navalny was detained so many times that he once joked to a judge that he wouldn’t take up the court’s time with a final statement before sentencing, because he would surely have another chance to do so again.
“The last word of the accused should be a dramatic moment in his life,” he said. “But they opened so many cases against me that this will not be my last chance to have a last word.”
He is survived by his wife, Yulia Navalnaya; their daughter, Daria, and son, Zakhar; and his brother, Oleg Navalny. His parents, Anatoly and Lyudmila Navalny, are retired.
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Mr. Navalny met his wife on a beach in Turkey 23 years ago and, before the poisoning in 2020, the couple lived in a three-room apartment in an outlying district of Moscow. Ms. Navalnaya has an economics degree and worked at a bank before the birth of their children. She has over the past decade been a homemaker and, as pressure on Mr. Navalny increased, became more outspoken about his poor treatment.
Like her husband, Ms. Navalnaya and other members of his family have lived for years in a crucible of surveillance and police pressure. Oleg Navalny was sentenced to three and a half years in prison in 2014 on what were widely regarded as trumped-up fraud charges intended to halt his brother’s political activities. Mr. Navalny’s parents and grandparents have been “harassed and unlawfully prosecuted many times,” his daughter wrote in Time magazine in December 2022.
The family was often seen by observers as a foil for that of Mr. Putin, who is divorced and is rarely seen in public discussing his children. Mr. Navalny dedicated his final post on social media to his wife on Valentine’s Day.
“Darling, everything is like in the song with you: Between us there are cities, the lights of airfields, blue snowstorms and thousands of kilometers. But I feel that you are near every second, and I love you more and more,” he wrote on Telegram, ending his post with a heart emoji. The song he quoted, “Hope, My Earthly Compass,” is one of the best-known hits in Russia. Its refrain is “Hope is my compass, and success is a reward for courage.”
Who was Aleksei Navalny?
Starting as an anticorruption blogger, Mr. Navalny mobilized a generation of young Russians and rose to prominence for investigations into the country’s elite.
Aleksei A. Navalny, the outspoken activist who died in prison on Friday, was born on June 4, 1976, according to his website, and grew up outside Moscow to liberal parents who opposed Soviet rule.
Starting his political career as an anticorruption blogger who organized street protests, Mr. Navalny mobilized a generation of young Russians through social media and rose to prominence for investigations into Russia’s elite.
Here’s a look at Mr. Navalny’s career:
2000
Mr. Navalny, who had studied law and finance and worked as a real estate lawyer, joined the liberal Yabloko party the same year that Vladimir V. Putin was first elected president of Russia. Looking to organize grass-roots opposition to the Kremlin, he took aim at what he called lawless Moscow construction projects, moderated political debates, started a radio show and criticized pro-Putin tycoons on a widely read blog.
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2011
Mr. Navalny led protests of thousands of Russians who were outraged over reports of fraud in Russia’s parliamentary elections that year, drawing the largest anti-Kremlin demonstrations since Mr. Putin became president.
2013
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Mr. Navalny was barred from a presidential run after a Russian court convicted him on fraud charges. He organized nationwide protests and boycotts against Mr. Putin’s re-election and built up offices and investigative teams across the country to investigate Russia’s elite.
The Death of Aleksei Navalny
The anticorruption activist, who led the political opposition in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, died in a Russian prison. He was 47.
- Filling the Void: Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s widow, said that she would carry on his work to bring about a democratic and free Russia, presenting herself for the first time as a political force.
- A Galvanizing Moment?: Navalny’s death united world leaders and demonstrators in grief, but it also left Russia without a charismatic counterweight to Putin’s increasingly repressive policies.
- Fears of a Crackdown: At least 366 people have been detained across Russia since Navalny was pronounced dead, leading to concern that the arrests could signal greater government repression ahead of the country’s elections in March.
- Prison Conditions: The cause of Navalny’s death has not been established, but Russia’s harshest penal colonies are known for hazardous conditions, and Navalny was singled out for particularly brutal treatment.
The Russian authorities responded by jailing him, accusing him of money laundering and raiding the homes and offices of activists with whom he was affiliated.
August 2020
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While flying back to Moscow from Siberia, Mr. Navalny fell violently ill, forcing the plane to make an emergency landing. More than two days after he lost consciousness, Mr. Navalny was flown to Germany for treatment, after the flight was delayed by Russian doctors who blocked his transfer.
Weeks later, the German government said that Mr. Navalny had been poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent called Novichok, a class of chemical weapon developed by the Soviet Union. A similar weapon had been used in 2018 against Sergei V. Skripal, a former Soviet spy, and his daughter in an attack in England that the British government attributed to Russian military intelligence.
December 2020
Bellingcat, an open-source investigative outlet, published a report showing that Russian intelligence officers from the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., had trailed Mr. Navalny for years and were close by when he was exposed to Novichok. The Kremlin continued to deny any involvement in his poisoning.
Days later, Mr. Navalny posted a video on his YouTube channel that he said showed him calling a Russian intelligence officer and tricking him into confessing to a plot to kill Mr. Navalny by planting poison on his underwear.
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January 2021
Five months after he was poisoned, Mr. Navalny flew back to Moscow and was arrested upon arrival. Tens of thousands of protesters, mostly young Russians, took to the streets to demand his release in the biggest public showdown in years between the Kremlin and its critics.
Two months later, the Russian authorities ordered Mr. Navalny to serve a two-year prison sentence in a penal colony known for its abusive treatment of inmates, beginning a string of prison terms for charges that his supporters said were based on fabricated charges. He went on a weekslong hunger strike to protest the prison’s lack of proper medical treatment, causing his health to deteriorate.
January 2022
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“Navalny,” a documentary following the activist for months as he investigated his own poisoning, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. The film, by Canadian director Daniel Roher, received the Academy Award for best documentary feature the following year. Yulia Navalnaya, Mr. Navalny’s wife, said onstage at the ceremony that her husband had been imprisoned for “telling the truth” and “defending democracy.”
August 2023
A Russian court sentenced Mr. Navalny, who was still in prison, to an additional 19 years on charges of supporting “extremism.” The court ruled that the sentence was to be served concurrently with his existing ones, meaning he would probably have been locked up until 2031.
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December 2023
Mr. Navalny’s aides lost contact with him for 20 days. Finally, his spokeswoman said he had been found — the authorities had moved him to a Arctic penal colony officially known as IK-3 Polar Wolf, located in one of the most remote towns of Russia and known for its harsh conditions.
Feb. 15
He was last seen publicly on Thursday, when he appeared in via video link in a court hearing, standing in a prison cage and wearing a black robe.
The following day, the Russian authorities reported that he had lost consciousness and died after taking a walk at the prison.
Feb. 17
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