Change-makers and News-shakers: Alexei Navalny

by Lizzy Hermosilla ‘23

“The man Vladimir Putin fears the most” according to the Wall Street Journal is Alexei Navalny. What could a husband and a father of two have on the President of Russia? And without giving away much, the answer is a lot. Not only has Navalny alleged Putin to be behind his poisoning in August of 2020, but if Navalny was not a convicted criminal he would have posed a threat to Putin’s re-election in 2018 and maybe even be a potential candidate in the upcoming election in 2024.

Navalny is a highly educated Russian anti-corruption activist, and many even call him the head of the Russian Opposition Party. He attended the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, the Finance Academy Under the Government of the Russian Federation, and attended the Yale World Fellows program in Hartford. He is, in simple terms, a lawyer, an economist, and most importantly a political activist.

Navalny came into the public eye years ago in 2011 and 2012 during a time of major street protests against the Kremlin. Since then he has been in jail more than ten times as well as spent hundreds of days under house arrest and been on two suspended prison sentences overlapping from late 2013-2019. Some of his days in custody occurred because of cutting off an ankle bracelet to purchase milk while under house arrest. Many of his convictions were due to fabrications of criminal cases, and the European Court of Human Rights has recognized that countless times.

In 2011 Navalny created the organization RosPil, which includes a staff of around 30 people working to expose corruption, illicit enrichment, and prepare documents of legal action against corrupt Russian officials. In a more recent project of Navalny’s, he created a campaign, in 2017, accusing the Prime Minister of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, of corruption, titling the report “He is not Dimon to you”. Despite the accuracy of Navalny’s claims, many officials refused to acknowledge the report, and the ones that did attempted to discredit Navalny with his past criminal convictions. 

Most recently Navalny was victim to poisoning with a Soviet-era nerve agent called Novichok. He was on a plane that departed from Tomsk, Siberia, and was set to land in Moscow before an emergency landing was made in Omsk. 

“I leave the toilet, turn to the steward — and instead of asking for help, I say, to my own surprise: ‘I’ve been poisoned. I’m dying.’ And then I lay down on the ground in front of him to die. He’s the last thing I see — a face that looks at me with slight astonishment and a light smile,”  according to an interview done by the German magazine, Der Spiegel.

After a few days spent in a hospital in Omsk, Navalny was finally able to be airlifted to a hospital in Berlin which is where he was placed in a medically induced coma. 

According to NPR News “While he was hospitalized, a German military lab found traces of Novichok in his biomedical samples. Further tests by labs in Sweden and France backed up those findings, fueling suspicions that Navalny’s poisoning was related to his opposition efforts.” Navalny claimed that the use of the nerve agent, Novichok, shows a possible orchestration with Russian intelligence agencies. And in Navalny’s words they “cannot make a decision like that without benign instructed by Putin. They report to him.”

After Navalny’s claim in the German magazine, according to NPR “the Kremlin angrily denied the accusation. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, called it groundless and deeply offensive. He also accused Navalny of working for the CIA and following the U.S. spy agency’s instructions.”

Navalny has since woken up from his medically induced coma and is doing much better. Even after the attempt on his life allegedly by orders of Putin, Navalny refused to back down. When asked about if he would return to Russia by Der Spiegel he said “Not going back would mean that Putin has won and achieved his goal. And my job now is to remain the guy who isn’t afraid. And I’m not afraid … I would not give Putin the gift of not returning to Russia.”