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Your faithful writer,
Dr. Daniel Smith

The Death of Alexei Navalny sounds like the name of a Tolstoy novel, but it is a sad reality. Navalny, who was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most well-known critic within Russia, died in a Siberian prison on Friday.

Navalny is best-known for criticizing Putin’s United Russia party and the oligarchs that have plundered Russia’s wealth over the past thirty years.

He survived an assassination attempt in 2020, only to be imprisoned on political charges in the years that followed.

With his death, he joins a long list of martyrs who fought and died fighting against corruption in Russia.

Who was Alexei Navalny?

Navalny was born to Ukrainian-Russian parents in Moscow in 1976. He became a lawyer in 1998 and got involved in politics in 2000.

Navalny first rose to prominence outside of Russia for his blog and YouTube channel, which investigated corruption among Russian business and government figures.

In 2011, he started the Anti-Corruption Foundation to write reports on corruption by government officials in Russia.

The group published a report on then-Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in 2016 that accused Medvedev of indirectly owning a massive summer estate (known as a dacha in Russia) through a fake charity foundation linked to his family.

The estate, which had three helipads and a house built for ducks to live in, became a symbol of the extreme wealth inequality that characterizes Putin’s Russia.

The report also highlighted that this kind of corruption was essentially happening in the open, with the active support of the Russian government:

After the report’s publication, Russians who were fed up with corruption adopted the duck as a symbol of resistance to Putinism during anti-government protests.

Poison and Prison: How Putin Pressured Navalny

In 2020, Navalny fell sick during a flight in Russia. He was flown to Germany for medical treatment, and the German government announced that Navalny had been poisoned by a Novichok nerve agent.

A similar type of nerve agent was used in assassination attempt on former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skirpal in London in 2018. The British government later concluded that Russia was responsible for the poisoning.

After returning to Russia in January 2021, Navalny was immediately imprisoned. Around the same time, his Anti-Corruption Foundation released a documentary called Putin's Palace that focused on a massive estate allegedly being built for the Russian leader with Russian government funds.

Navalny's arrest and the release of the documentary led Russians to hold protests in 198 towns and cities across the country.

Navalny was ultimately sentenced to a 19-year prison term. Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, said that Putin's government was subjecting Navalny to torture and inhumane conditions.

This morning, Russian authorities reported that he died in a prison in the Arctic Circle. He was 47 years old.

After her husband's death was reported on Friday morning, Navalny's wife Yulia Navalnaya spoke at the Munich Security Conference. She said:

Russia’s Martyrs

Navalny joins a long line of Putin’s critics who have been assassinated or who have died under mysterious circumstances. Last week I ordered the book Putin’s Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy by Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist and human rights activist.

The book details the rampant corruption of Russia in the late 1990s and early 2000s, arguing that the country was effectively being run by Mafia-like corporations, the oligarchs that own them, and their allies in the military and intelligence services.

Politkovskaya was assassinated in 2006 in her apartment in what was widely believed to be retaliation for her critical reporting on the Putin regime.

Let’s hope that the efforts of her, Navalny, and others to call out corruption in Putin’s Russia will not be in vain.

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Yours,
Dan