Was Navalny Killed for Trolling Putin’s Rigged Election?
Was Navalny Killed for Trolling Putin’s Rigged Election?
And other questions still swirling while a defiant funeral gives Russia’s liberal opposition new hope.
BY MONDAY, THREE DAYS AFTER the burial of opposition leader Alexei Navalny at the Borisovsky Cemetery in southeastern Moscow, the mountain of flowers on the grave had grown almost six feet high—and people were still arriving to add to the pile. This display of solidarity and protest comes on the heels of extraordinary scenes at Navalny’s funeral on Friday, almost surreal after two years of draconian repressions: large crowds chanting “Russia will be free,” “No war,” “We are not afraid,” and even “Putin is a killer.”
Navalny, the 47-year-old anti-corruption blogger and political activist who emerged as Vladimir Putin’s principal opponent in the 2010s, died on February 16 in an Arctic penal colony, murdered either by three years of imprisonment in often sadistic conditions or, as many of his supporters believe, by even more immediate means. The Putin regime had labored to prevent Navalny’s memory from reigniting the protests they had ruthlessly extinguished. They failed—and a tragedy that looked like the end of hope to many Russian dissidents may have become the spark of a new hope.
The government’s efforts to disrupt the funeral were aggressive and obscene. First, the authorities refused for a week to turn Navalny’s body over to his mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, who traveled to the penal colony to bring her dead son back to Moscow. An investigator, she said, tried to pressure her into holding a secret, private funeral, and cruelly pointed out that “time is working against you, because the corpse is decomposing.” But toughness seems to be a family trait: the 69-year-old bereaved mother resisted the pressure, went public, and even filed a complaint (since dismissed) charging “abuse of a corpse.”
But the delay in obtaining Navalny’s earthly remains wasn’t the only obstacle the authorities put up for his family and friends. Renting a space in Moscow for a secular public farewell turned out to be impossible; even obtaining ordinary funeral services proved extremely difficult, with churches, funeral homes, and cemeteries reportedly subjected both to government pressure and to anonymous harassment and threats. Eventually the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God Soothe My Sorrows on the city’s outskirts, where Navalny himself had once been a parishioner and where one of his two children had been baptized, agreed to hold a funeral service—but limited it to twenty minutes, possibly on orders from the staunchly pro-Kremlin Moscow patriarchate. Security guards closed and moved the coffin while many people were still pleading to say goodbye.
Meanwhile, top officials from the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which controls regular police, were reportedly called in for meetings at the Kremlin to ensure that Navalny’s funeral remained under tight control. The authorities were apparently anxious to avoid a replay of the massive, resistance-galvanizing 1989 funeral of dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov. The street leading to the nearby cemetery was fenced off with metal barriers and swarming with police. Facial-recognition cameras were prominently installed for added intimidation. Students at several Moscow college and universities received warnings that attendance at the funeral could lead to expulsion.
And yet people came. The independent “White Counter” project, which calculates crowd size, estimated that at least 16,500 people walked from the church to the cemetery just in the ninety minutes after Navalny was taken to his final resting place. At one point the line stretched for more than a mile. The total number who visited the cemetery that day was clearly in the tens of thousands—and visitors have continued to flock.
One Navalny supporter in attendance, journalist Bozena Rynska (who now lives in Latvia and was deliberately cagey about the way she managed to get back into Russia and out again), told RAIN TV that she felt bitter because Navalny would have been alive and free if all the people who turned out for his funeral had come out to protest his imprisonment. Perhaps—but it is an unfair comparison. A funeral, even in Putin’s Russia, remains a legal event, and while one cannot put it past Putin’s henchmen to terrorize, manhandle, and arrest mourners, it would still be an exceptionally bad look even for a country that already looks exceptionally bad. Even many Kremlin-loyal Russians, particularly those who may have taken the regime’s diatribes about traditional values seriously, would likely be offended.
The people who came out for Navalny were still taking substantial risks, especially since it’s very likely that they were filmed both by surveillance cameras and by plainclothes agents in the crowd. But it was a far lesser risk than coming out to protest a dissident’s imprisonment.
THE QUESTIONS OF HOW AND WHY Navalny died persist. While the first official statement blamed his death on a blood clot—before an autopsy, which would have been the only reliable basis for such a conclusion—Lyudmila Navalnaya was later told that her son died of “sudden death syndrome” (not a recognized medical diagnosis). The death certificate cited only “natural causes.” One could ask whether death of any cause, including a blood clot or cardiac arrest, could be regarded as “natural” if it came after an attempted assassination with a chemical nerve agent, followed by three years of prison, privation, and torture. But the authorities’ vagueness about the cause of death suggests that maybe it wasn’t natural even in that limited sense. Bulgarian journalist Christo Grozev, who exposed Navalny’s 2020 poisoning by the FSB, is now looking into his death. Grozev has speculated that the dissident may have been killed with the same nerve agent used in the poisoning, novichok.
But there is another still-murky twist in the story of Navalny’s death: Grozev and others have claimed that negotiations were underway for a prisoner swap that would have seen Navalny and two Americans held in Russia—presumably Paul Whelan, a former Marine languishing in Russian prisons since 2018 on a spying charge, and Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter locked up for almost a year—exchanged for FSB colonel Vadim Krasikov, currently serving a life sentence in Germany for the 2019 murder of a Chechen dissident in Berlin. Grozev has said that he himself was at one point involved in these talks along with Navalny aide Maria Pevchikh, the current head of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. Meanwhile, Pevchikh has made an even more explosive claim: that the three-for-one deal, brokered by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and greenlit by the United States, Germany, and Russia, was finalized the day before Navalny’s death. Pevchikh also charges that Putin had Navalny murdered to thwart the deal.
All of the parties have refused to comment, although unnamed insider sources have confirmed to Reuters and to expatriate Russian journalists such as Yulia Latynina that a deal was indeed being negotiated. But the most important detail of Pevchikh’s dramatic account doesn’t seem to make sense: Why would Putin murder Navalny to scuttle such an exchange? The trade couldn’t have proceeded without Putin’s assent; he could simply have backed out, even at the last minute.
One possible explanation has been offered by Russian-American journalist Michael Nacke, who thinks that the reports of a deal being underway are credible but, also, that there’s no way Putin could have willingly let Navalny out of his clutches. Nacke’s theory is that the Russians were planning to pull a bait-and-switch: use Navalny to coax the Germans into agreeing to trade Krasikov, but then replace him with another dissident, such as Vladimir Kara-Murza, less dangerous because he has little popularity inside Russia. Navalny’s sudden death would obviously have provided the perfect excuse for such a switch; Nacke also believes that Putin was counting on the Biden administration, eager to bring American hostages home in an election year, to pressure the Germans into going through with the trade anyway. Given that we’re talking about Putin, the guy whose opponents keep having mysterious encounters with open windows and polonium-laced tea, this scenario is plausible.
There are other possibilities. Political scientist Vladimir Pastukhov, currently a visiting fellow at University College London, notes Navalny’s disruptive potential, even as a prisoner in the far north, in the run-up to this month’s “presidential election.” Despite the carefully rigged outcome, there is a lot of evidence (such as the disqualification on technicalities of liberal, antiwar candidate Boris Nadezhdin) that the regime is nervous about the election becoming a vehicle for dissent and an embarrassment to Putin. Two weeks before his death, Navalny (through intermediaries) posted a message to his Telegram channel backing an unusual protest proposed by other opposition activists: Everyone who opposes Putin is to show up at the polling stations at exactly noon on March 17, the last day of Russia’s three-day presidential election, and either vote for anyone but Putin or deface the ballot.
Thus, in spite of the pronouncements of self-styled Russia mavens such as venture capitalist David Sacks that Putin had no motive whatsoever to kill Navalny, motives abound.
WHAT DOES NAVALNY’S DEATH, and its aftermath, mean for the Ukraine-Russia war? It’s hardly a secret that many Ukrainians did not admire Navalny while he was alive, considering him a Russian imperialist in liberal’s clothing; today, some of them resent the focus on his death, which they see as distracting from the murder of thousands of Ukrainians in Putin’s war.
As always, this rivalry between Ukrainian patriots and Russian dissidents is pointless and misguided. For one thing, the horror and outrage at Navalny’s murder has almost certainly helped Ukraine by spurring new sanctions against Russia and boosting the resolve to help ensure its military defeat. Navalny’s widow Yulia, whom many Ukrainians had criticized for not saying enough about the war, undoubtedly had an impact when she told the European Parliament last week that “Putin is capable of anything and that you cannot negotiate with him. . . . You aren’t dealing with a politician but with a bloody mobster.”
Whether or not Navalnaya’s words will help heal the rift between anti-Putin Russians and Ukrainians, the outpouring of grief for Navalny in Russia may have moved the needle in that direction. Ukrainians who watched the coverage of the funeral saw Russians who chanted not only “No war” but “Ukrainians are good people,” and some of whom shouted out the Ukrainian motto, “Glory to the heroes.” (One Moscow woman caught in that act on a surveillance camera was arrested two days later, detained overnight, and fined 1,500 rubles for “propaganda of prohibited symbols.”) “Navalny’s funeral happened, and I think it demonstrated that a different Russia also exists,” commented Ukrainian journalist Natalia Vlashchenko. On a segment on Ukraine’s Channel 24, after host Anastasia Noritsyna noted the antiwar and pro-Ukraine chants at the funeral, the Russian journalist and prisoners’ rights activist Olga Romanova, replied,
You know, this is the first day in the two-plus years of this war, the full-scale war, that I can look you in the eye. That there are still people in Russia who dare to say this openly, unafraid of cameras, “No war,” “Putin is a killer”—that gives me some hope.
Even the exiled ex-Russian journalist Alexander Nevzorov (now a Ukrainian citizen), known for his caustic tirades against all things Russian, has recently moderated his tone when speaking of the people who came out to honor “Russia’s last romantic,” as Nevzorov has dubbed Navalny—people in whom he is willing to see Russia’s chance for redemption.
The chance to see a “different Russia” was a common theme among Russians who attended the funeral. For many of them, it was a chance to see that they are not alone. How much of an impact this will have, no one yet knows. After the failed attempts to stop Navalny’s public funeral, the regime did all it could to shroud it in silence: the state-controlled media were forbidden to mention it, let alone cover it, and the authorities apparently even throttled mobile phone signals in the neighborhood to make video transmission difficult. Even so, millions watched online.
One of the more remarkable chants at the Navalny funeral was, “You weren’t afraid, and we’re not afraid.” Nobody knows whether this mood will last or spread and whether, as some predict, the dead Navalny will become an even more formidable and unstoppable foe for Putin than the living Navalny was. But there’s a certain symbolism in the fact that this moment of collective defiance in Moscow happened on the first day of spring.