With the sudden death in prison of Aleksei Navalny on Friday, the atomized and diverse opposition in Russia lost its best-known and most charismatic leader. His relief may not be far off. His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, assured in a video published yesterday, Monday, that she is ready to enter politics and continue her husband’s fight against Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.
In a nine-minute recording released on the dead opponent’s YouTube channel, he accused the Russian president of ordering his death. From exile, Navalnaya assured that the Russian authorities are hiding the body of the dead activist while they wait for the Novichok nerve agent to disappear from his body. He did not provide evidence for this accusation, but promised that his team will release details soon.
His collaborators know “why exactly Putin decided to kill Aleksei (…) We will give the surnames and show the faces” of the people involved in his death, he assured.
Aleksei Navalni was poisoned with Novichok in 2020. He and his team directly blamed Putin, something the Kremlin denied. After the poisoning, he spent months recovering in Germany. But then he decided to return to Russia, convinced that he had to continue the fight against Putin from inside the country and not as an exiled leader. The police arrested him at the airport itself, just after landing, in January 2021, and he spent the next three years behind bars until his death.
“Putin killed my husband. In doing so, he killed half of me: half of my heart and half of my soul. But I still have the other half, and this one tells me that I have no right to leave him. I will continue the work of Aleksei Navalni, I will continue the fight for our country”, he announced.
Aleksei Navalny, who was 47 years old, the same as his wife, died suddenly in the IK-3 penal colony in the Arctic town of Kharp, 1,900 kilometers northeast of Moscow. The opponent was transferred there in December. The prison, built in the 1960s on a former gulag prison camp, is nicknamed the Polar Wolf because of its harsh living conditions. Especially climates. 30 degrees below zero were recorded in Kharp this weekend.
Russian penitentiary authorities in the Yamalia Autonomous District released a statement saying he had lost consciousness after a walk and was then unable to revive him.
The dissident, who in the past decade had become the most feared critical voice in power in Russia, was serving several sentences that added up to three decades of imprisonment on charges that his supporters have denounced as fabricated to – him from politics and punish him for his anti-corruption activism against Russian political elites.
Western governments have blamed Putin for Navalny’s death, which the Kremlin considers “unacceptable”. His spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, asked to wait for the results of the autopsy.
The opposition’s collaborators have repeatedly called this weekend for Russia to “immediately” hand over Navalni’s remains to his family. Yulia Navalnaya accused the Russian authorities of hiding the body and waiting for any trace of Novichok to disappear.
Navalnya had always been in the background, as an essential support for Navalny, especially during his poisoning and subsequent recovery in Germany. But he didn’t want to be in the front line of the fight. With the death of her husband everything has changed and she has decided to take a step forward.
“I was happy by his side and supporting him, but today I want to be with you, because you have lost no less than me”, he assured.
The decision announced yesterday is reminiscent of the one taken by neighboring Belarus Svetlana Tikhanovskaia, who in 2020 decided to run in the presidential elections against authoritarian President Aleksandr Lukashenko when the authorities in Minsk imprisoned her husband, Sergei Tikhanovski. He remains in prison and Svetlana Tikhanovskaia leads the Belarusian opposition in exile.
“I know it seems that it is no longer possible” to continue the fight, Iúlia Navàlnaia said in the video. “But we need to join together in a strong fist and strike a blow at this crazy regime.” And she called on her husband’s followers not to give up, to share with her “the sorrow, the pain that surrounds us”, but also “my rage, anger and hatred towards those who dared to kill our future “. And he asked them to continue fighting for a “free, peaceful and happy” Russia, which Navalny always dreamed of.
