Alexei Navalny’s last words to his wife came in a social media post on Valentine’s Day. “Babe, we have love like in a song; cities between us, airport runway lights, blue blizzards and thousands of kilometres. But I feel you are near me every second, and I love you more and more.”
Two days later Alexei, the figurehead of opposition to Russian president Vladimir Putin, was dead. He was 47 and serving a 19-year sentence for “extremism” in a remote Arctic penal colony known as Polar Wolf.
In his long – ultimately fatal – fight against the Putin regime, Alexei had tried as best he could to protect his wife, Yulia, and their two children from the brutal paybacks of the state. While he campaigned she remained mostly on the sidelines, the pair often forcibly separated by jail terms and spells of exile. Not anymore.
Days after Alexei’s death, 47-year-old Yulia Navalnaya, her face etched grey with grief and anger, took to Alexei’s internet channel to tell his millions of supporters around the world: “Putin has killed my husband. With him, Putin wanted to kill our hopes, our freedom, our futures. But I will continue the fight. I will continue my husband’s work. I am not afraid.”
The Navalny’s came as a formidable package. Alexei frequently spoke of how important his wife was in his fight for democracy in Russia, and liked to joke that Yulia’s views were “even more dangerous than my own”. Yet the real strength of their relationship was the intense love story that underpinned it; one so rich in passion, tragedy and resolve it could have come from Tolstoy.
He was the dashing, idealistic young lawyer; she the smart, cool, Grace Kelly-esque economist who would reassure their often-anxious supporters: “We are not afraid. Nothing is impossible when you are in love.”
“Yulia is the only person capable of taking over.”
– Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya
Right up to the grim ending of Alexei’s life, there was no sign of their passion waning. In a speech at last year’s Oscar ceremony, where the film Navalny won the award for Best Documentary, Yulia – holding back tears – addressed her husband directly: “Alexei, I am dreaming of the day when you will be free and our country will be free. Stay strong, my love.”
The audience, perhaps more accustomed to the glutinous puffery and self-congratulation that can occur, practically rose to its feet.
As she emerges as the new leader of the fight for Russian democracy, Yulia will face enormous challenges. But she will not be alone.
Increasingly prominent at her side is Dasha, the Navalny’s 23-year-old daughter, a final-year university student in California.
Further support comes from Alexei’s redoubtable mother, Lyudmila, who furiously faced down the Russian authorities in the days after her son’s death in a battle for possession of his body.
The potent Navalny “brand” – and in a sense the best remaining hope for
a more democratic Russia – now rests with these three women.
Yulia has long
been prepared for this moment. “Alexei once told me, ‘You’re not allowed to give up’,” she reveals in the documentary. “‘If they decide to kill me it means we are incredibly strong, and you will need to use this power’.”
At the time of his death – supposedly from a blood clot, though many feel it was more likely at the hands of Russia’s ruthless Federal Security Service (FSB) – Yulia hadn’t seen her husband for two years. She was denied visiting rights on the grounds of his insubordination which saw him repeatedly placed in solitary confinement. Their only means of communication was by messages relayed through Alexei’s lawyers.
Officially designated IK-3, the prison was one of the harshest in the Russian penal system. In the winter temperatures would fall below -20°C, while in summer vast clouds of mosquitoes made outdoor life unbearable. Punishments were brutal and included being forced to stand for extended periods in the frozen exercise yard without a coat. If an inmate moved they would earn a soaking in cold water.
After the announcement of Alexei’s death Lyudmila flew in person to the camp, about 1900kms north-east of Moscow, determined to prevent her son from being buried secretly within the prison grounds as the authorities intended. After a lengthy stand-off the Kremlin backed down and she was allowed to take his body to Moscow, where thousands of supporters gathered for a funeral that several churches were too frightened to hold.
Standing beside the tomb Lyudmila poignantly held hands with Yulia’s mother, Alla Abrosimova. The photographs of the pair sent a powerful image of solidarity around the world.
For the Navalny women, now at the sharp end of the struggle, the odds are dauntingly stacked. Newly re-elected and with the whole repressive machinery of the Russian state at his fingertips, Putin has the means and the motivation to crush anyone in his way.
“I’ve no doubts Yulia is the only person really capable of taking over,” says her friend, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, whose own husband was jailed on trumped-up political charges in Russia’s closely allied neighbour, Belarus. “But what she faces will be very difficult and very risky. They will use everything they can to deter and demoralise her. She will be threatened, lied about, portrayed as a Western stooge, and they will go after her friends and relatives.”
As the highest profile female figure in Russian politics for at least three decades, Yulia is also up against an ingrained culture of patriarchal dominance. Putin’s last female challenger, Irina Khakamada, ran against him in 2004. She won only four per cent of the vote and faded into obscurity. Two other women active in opposition circles were murdered. One of them on Putin’s birthday. Others have been bullied or harassed out of public life.
Women’s groups have nevertheless pledged support for Yulia, with the fast-growing Feminist Anti-War Resistance (FAR) making a public declaration of loyalty.
“The transformation of Yulia Navalnaya from wife and mother, which she previously insisted on, to political figure will be very inspiring to many women in Russia,” wrote FAR’s founder Daria Serenko.
Not everything in Russia runs Putin’s way. After 24 years of virtual dictatorship, and with the country bogged down in a costly war with neighbouring Ukraine, there is evidence of growing internal dissatisfaction.
“There is definitely a demand for an alternative,” says Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian analyst at London’s Royal Institute of International Affairs.
“People are unhappy about many things – the war, or at least how the war is being conducted, the high cost of living, the lack of personal freedoms. But these people tend to be scattered and unorganised and the big question is who can bring them together?”
For Yulia, the difficulties are heightened by her well-founded fear of actually setting foot in Russia. Even now that she is in the spotlight her movements are hard to track. She spends considerable time in Germany where the Navalnys have a strong network of support, and regularly visits the US where she and Dasha were received by President Joe Biden immediately after Alexei’s death. But in many ways she is forced to operate as a fugitive, cut off from her homeland and constantly aware of the deadly reach of the FSB.
The story of Alexei and Yulia began far from the spotlight. Far, in fact, from any expectation of the life they would come to lead.
They first met on a beach holiday in Turkey in the summer of 1998. The Soviet Union had collapsed only seven years earlier, and out of it emerged a new Russia, seemingly ready to take its place among the free nations of the world.
For young Russians, this was a time of excitement and optimism. As Alexei and Yulia fell in love under the Black Sea sun they dreamed of a better future and were determined to play their part.
He was a newly qualified lawyer, she an economics graduate working for a bank. Two years later they were married. At around the same time a relatively little-known former KGB agent, Vladimir Putin, took over the Russian presidency.
In the years that followed, Alexei’s work took him ever deeper into the corruption and venality that he discovered beneath Russia’s pseudo-democratic veneer. The more he dug, the more he and Yulia – now with two young children – began to attract the attention of the authorities. They were regularly followed, their mail intercepted and their flat ransacked.
In 2011 Alexei set up his Anti-Corruption Foundation, publishing a series of powerful reports and videos that exposed the greed and dishonesty of the new Russian elite. The level of harassment steadily rose, with arrests, interrogations, assaults and threats against his family.
In 2020 came the first attempt to kill him.
At some point as he was changing planes on his way from Siberia to Moscow, Alexei was poisoned with novichok, a deadly nerve agent used by the FSB for specialist assassinations. Deploying all her courage and resourcefulness, Yulia managed to get her husband to Germany where doctors narrowly saved his life.
When he returned to Moscow several months later, clearly still weak from the after-effects, it was to be re-arrested. Standing in the dock of the city courthouse he turned to Yulia, smiled, and made a heart sign with his outstretched fingers.
“Alexei once told me, ‘You’re not allowed to give up’.”
– Yulia Navalnaya
Tall and blonde, Dasha is expected to take a leading role at her mother’s side when she graduates from Stanford University later this year. Immersed in the struggle from an early age, she delivered a powerful tribute to her father last year as he passed 1000 days of imprisonment in Polar Wolf.
“I miss him every single day,” she told a conference in Atlanta, Georgia. “I’m scared that he won’t be able to come to my graduation ceremony or walk me down the aisle at my wedding. But if being my father’s daughter has taught me anything, it is to never succumb to fear or sadness.”
In a scathing takedown of the excesses of the Russian regime she declared: “Putin and his associates, they live lavishly. They own condos in Miami and penthouses in Manhattan. They own vineyards in France and villas on Lake Como. They buy enormous yachts and country houses with gold toilets.
“An investigation found that Russia’s deputy prime minister owned an undeclared private jet worth $60 million which he used primarily to send his dogs to international competitions. All this while most ordinary Russian citizens live on wages of less than $200 a month.”
Dasha has told university friends how she grew up being followed around Moscow by FSB “goons” dressed in black while going shopping or to the cinema.
“I always wanted to go to the demonstrations with my dad,” she remembers, “but he would say, ‘No, best not to, we don’t want two Navalnys in jail.’”
“She’s quite Americanised now,” says a Stanford friend. “You’d think she was the full California package, but she knows her future is in Russia and she’s very serious about the road ahead.”
That it will be a long, hard, perilous one is not in doubt. By the time 71-year-old Putin’s latest term expires, he will have been running Russia longer than anyone since Joseph Stalin (1922-52) and has no intention of having his record disrupted by what the regime calls “rogue elements”.
But as practiced despots know, eliminating opponents tends to create new ones, often in greater numbers and with more support. Instead of one Navalny, the man in the Kremlin now faces three, and they are not inclined to back down.
On the day of Putin’s re-election – just a month after Alexei’s death – Yulia was in Berlin shuffling through the snow in a long, snaking queue to vote at the Russian embassy. When she emerged three hours later reporters asked who she had cast her ballot for.
“Navalny, of course,” she said.
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