To many, it seemed like a suicide, both real and political, that in January 2021 Aleksei Navalni decided to return to Russia after spending months in Germany recovering from poisoning. The police arrested him at the same passport control at Sheremetyevo airport, in front of his wife Iulia. Since then, the only opponent who has shaken the foundations of Putin-led democracy has not been released from prison.
Navalny, the film that this Sunday won the Oscar for best documentary in Los Angeles (United States), follows these two episodes of the busy biography of the Russian opposition figure.
Canadian director Daniel Roher’s film describes the investigation of Navalni’s team and the Bellingcat research group to uncover a group of FSB agents who in 2020 tried to kill the opposition with a nerve agent.
The Kremlin has always denied any involvement in this matter. And yesterday its spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, assured that sometimes Hollywood does not avoid “politicizing its work”.
The anti-Kremlin protests of 2011 and 2012 produced perhaps the only major opposition figure that the political system led by Vladimir Putin has encountered. Aleksei Navalni, a young lawyer and anti-corruption blogger who had previously been part of the liberal Yabloko party and had been active in nationalist movements, became the freshest face of the fractured Russian opposition.
The reason for those mobilizations, the most important since Putin came to power in 2000, were the parliamentary elections of December 2011, but especially his in the Kremlin after spending four years as prime minister.
With his youth and charisma, Navalny had managed to get disgruntled Russians to stop grumbling with friends in the kitchen and take to the streets to protest.
However, the political elites still did not see him as a real threat. Perhaps that is why he was allowed to stand in the mayoral elections in Moscow in September 2013.
He didn’t win, but he was about to force a runoff against the man from the Kremlin, current councilor Sergey Sobyanin. With no access to traditional media, he turned to social media and a neighborhood-to-neighborhood campaign that proved capable of punching a hole in the vertical system Kremlin theorists had been building for years.
Since then, the history of the politician Navalni has been an obstacle course, filled with administrative arrests for organizing unauthorized demonstrations and a conviction for fraud that was left in abeyance by the judicial authorities.
That all changed in 2020, the year of the coronavirus pandemic and the year Russia reformed the Constitution to keep Putin in power beyond 2024. The opponent was poisoned during a trip to Siberia . According to three Western laboratories, they had tried to kill him with a nerve agent of the Novichok type, created for military purposes in Soviet times.
During his stay, judicial authorities issued a warrant for his arrest for violating parole on his fraud conviction. Knowing that this could mean he would be arrested as soon as he set foot on Russian territory, Navalny decided to return in January 2021.
“Aleksei, I dream of the day when you are free and our country is free. Be strong, my love”, said his wife Iulia Navà lnaia, who participated with the two children of the marriage, Dà ria and Zakhar, at the Oscars ceremony.
When collecting the award, Roher dedicated it to “all political prisoners in the world”, making Navalni a global example. “ Aleksei, the world has not forgotten your vital message for all of us. We must not be afraid to oppose dictatorships and authoritarianism wherever it rears its head,” said the filmmaker.
That message will hardly reach its recipient, who is serving a total of 11.5 years in prison for two fraud convictions in a maximum security penal colony about 250 kilometers from Moscow, in Melekhovo, Vladimir Oblast .
But when it came to 2021, this time the police went all out at a time when Moscow was accelerating its crackdown on critical voices.
Over the following months, the Anti-Corruption Foundation and the offices of Navalny’s political movement were declared illegal and banned in Russia. Most of his collaborators ended up leaving the country.
Despite being behind bars, his fight is not over. In an appeal session against one of his sentences, Navalny last year presented Putin as a madman who had started “a stupid war” against Ukraine and in which innocent people from both countries are being massacred.
The prison authorities have sent him a dozen times to the punishment or confinement cell, which, according to his followers, is deteriorating his health. In January, around 500 doctors signed an open letter to President Putin asking him to stop these “abuses”.
“Don’t stop fighting for democracy and freedom around the world, we will take out my father and we will continue to fight”, said Daria Navà lnaia in Los Angeles. Pots are similar to pots. At the end of the documentary, Navalny is asked what his message would be to the Russian people if he dies. He says, firmly: “You can’t give up.”
