How Alexei Navalny defied Putin
ended on February 16th. Mr Navalny’s death was blamed by Russian prison authorities on a blood clot—though his doctor said he suffered from no condition which made that likely. Whatever ends up on his death certificate, he was killed by Vladimir Putin.
Russia’s president locked him up; in his name Mr Navalny was subjected to a regime of forced labour and solitary confinement. Mr Navalny will be celebrated as a man of remarkable courage. His life will be remembered for what it says about Mr Putin, what it portends for Russia and what it demands of the world.
A man of formidable intelligence, Mr Navalny identified the two foundations on which Mr Putin has built his power: fear and greed. In Mr Putin’s world everyone can be bribed or threatened. Not only did Mr Navalny understand those impulses, he struck at them in devastating ways.
His insight was that corruption was not just a side hustle but the moral rot at the heart of Mr Putin’s state. His anti-corruption crusade formed a new genre of immaculately documented and thriller-like films that displayed the yachts, villas and planes of Russia’s rulers. These videos, posted on YouTube, culminated in an exposé of Mr Putin’s billion-dollar palace on the Black Sea coast that has been watched 130m times.
Despite the palace’s iron gates, adorned with a two-headed imperial eagle, Mr Navalny portrayed its owner not as a tsar so much as a tasteless mafia boss. Mr Navalny also understood fear and how to defeat it. Mr Putin’s first attempt to kill him was in 2020, when he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok smeared inside his underwear.
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