Alexei Navalny: the voice that moved Russia

On 16 February, the Russian authorities announced the death of Alexei Navalny, one of Vladimir Putin's most notorious opponents, a 47-year-old activist and blogger detained in prison since January 2021 on charges of financing and inciting 'extremism' and the 'rehabilitation of Nazi ideology'.

Who was Alexei Navalny

After graduating in law and specialising in finance, Navalny began his political activity within Jabloko, the main opposition party in post-Soviet Russia. Driven by a strong nationalist sentiment, and with the aim of exposing corruption within the regime, he left the party in 2011 to devote himself entirely to fighting corruption by founding the Anti-Corruption Foundation (known as FBK in Russian). Following the line of his blog, Navalny tried to mobilise dissent within Russian society by conducting investigations and publishing numerous reports exposing and documenting corruption among senior officials and prominent politicians and businessmen in Russia.

Between 2011 and 2012, Navalny took part in the largest protests organised by the Russian opposition against the Putin regime, which was accused of falsifying the results of the legislative and presidential elections in those years. It was in this context that Navalny began to emerge as an opposition leader along with chess champion Garry Kasparov and Boris Nemtsov, former prime minister killed in 2015 in Moscow under unclear circumstances. From those years Navalny organised opposition to all elections that took place in Russia but the political formations he ran with were made illegal and politically motivated by accusations of corruption, tax evasion, as well as extremism.

Poisonings and attempts on life

Over the past ten years, Navalny has been arrested numerous times on charges of fraud and participation in peaceful protests. In 2019, while in prison for one of his numerous arrests he developed an allergic reaction, probably to chemicals according to his doctors, which caused severe damage to his skin and eye.

Between 2019 and 2020, Navalny conducted a series of investigations ready to show the enormous riches that Putin and his allies possessed illegitimately and on 20 August 2020 while on the flight back from Tomsk, where he had met local activists, volunteers and would-be candidates, he collapsed and ended up in a coma. After initial checks in Russia which denied the presence of traces of poison in his body, Navalny was transferred to Germany, admitted to intensive care at the Charité hospital in Berlin in a pharmacological coma and in a very serious condition for 32 days. Following the examinations conducted by the German hospital, the government of then Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that the results of the tests showed that Navalny had been poisoned with a nerve agent of the novichok group, a substance developed in Russia in the 1980s and 1990s that had already been used in the past to poison Putin's opponents. It was later discovered that Navalny had been followed since 2017 by a group of chemical weapons experts.

This not only highlights the lack of proper investigation by the Russian authorities into the poisoning and represents a blatant violation of the right to life, but also shifts attention to the alleged failure of Russia to destroy the chemical weapons stockpile declared by Russia in 2017.

The arrest

At the end of his convalescence period in Germany Navalny decided to return to Russia, despite being aware that he would be arrested once he landed. According to the prison services, Navalny had violated the terms of his parole granted after a conviction dating back to December 2014, and in mid-January 2021 he was arrested on a charge of failing to appear for his parole hearing. The conviction dates back to when he was charged together with his brother Oleg for embezzling 26 million roubles from a subsidiary of French cosmetics company Yves Rocher.

Meanwhile, in 2021, the Anti-Corruption Foundation released an investigation directed against Putin in which it was reported that a palace surrounded by 7,000 hectares of land had been built on the shores of the Black Sea, allegedly costing 100 billion roubles (more than 1.1 billion euros) financed by men in key positions in the Russian Federation. Subsequently, the Russian authorities proceeded to dismantle the Anti-Corruption Foundation and the Foundation for the Protection of Citizens' Rights, founded by Navalny, closing their offices and banning them as extremist organisations.

During his imprisonment, Aleksei Navalny was charged with various offences, including extremism, promotion of terrorism and rehabilitation of Nazism. He suffered repeated punishments, including solitary confinement in a penal isolation cell with no possibility of communication with the outside world. This treatment was considered a violation of human rights and the absolute ban on torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. The extreme conditions of detention imposed on Aleksei Navalny were considered unjust, and the long periods of solitary confinement worsened his health. In December, he was transferred to an IK-3 maximum security prison, a former Soviet-era gulag located in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region in the Arctic Circle and known for its harsh conditions for inmates.

According to the reconstruction of the Russian prison guards, Alexei reportedly fell ill during a walk for which all attempts at resuscitation were in vain. Navalny's death has raised national and international concern and controversy. His death in prison highlights the difficult conditions for political activists in Russia and raises questions about the respect for human rights in the country. The Russian authorities have been criticised for a lack of transparency about what happened to Navalny and the prison conditions in which he was held. Initially, the Russian authorities scheduled a new histological examination with the results due the following week. Subsequently, the authorities stated that the examinations had been completed and that they had excluded the possibility of a death-related offence. The international community called for a full and impartial investigation into his death and the circumstances leading up to it.

Translated by Flora Stanziola

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