MOSCOW (Reuters) – According to the Russian prison service, Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, died on Friday after collapsing and losing consciousness at the penal colony north of the Arctic Circle where he was serving a long jail term.
OPPOSITION LEADER
Navalny, 47, was considered the leading figure among Russia’s splintered opposition.
He was often compared to South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and was admired in Russian opposition circles for voluntarily returning to Russia in 2021 from Germany, where he underwent treatment for what Western laboratory tests showed was an attempt to poison him with a nerve agent in Siberia.
RISE TO PROMINENCE
A former lawyer, Navalny rose to prominence with blogs which exposed what he said was vast corruption across the Russian elite, describing Russia as ruled by “crooks and thieves”.
He was also known for participating in Russian nationalist marches in the 2000s.
He was also known for his criticism of President Vladimir Putin’s elite and his exposure of the opulence of the lifestyles of senior officials, using the internet and even drones to illustrate what he described as their vast holdings and luxury property.
When protests against Putin erupted in December 2011, after an election mired in fraud accusations, he was one of the first protest leaders arrested.
Navalny had long warned that Russia could face political turmoil, including revolution, due to what he described as a brittle system of personal rule reliant on sycophancy and corruption.
WHAT DOES THE KREMLIN SAY?
The Kremlin said Putin had been informed of his death, but dismissed Navalny’s allegations of corruption and Putin’s personal wealth. Navalny’s movement is outlawed and most of his senior allies have fled Russia and now live in Europe.
Russian officials cast Navalny as an extremist who was a puppet of the U.S. CIA intelligence agency.
Navalny was detained numerous times and faced prosecution on charges including corruption, embezzlement, and fraud, which he said were politically motivated.
POISONING
In August 2020, Navalny fell ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. He was treated in Berlin for the effects of a neurotoxin that German military tests showed to be Novichok, a poison developed in the Soviet Union.
Putin dismissed a joint media investigation that said it had identified a team of assassins from Russia’s FSB security service. “If someone had wanted to poison him, they would have finished him off,” he said.
FAMILY
Navalny’s wife is Yulia. Their daughter is called Darya, and their son is called Zakhar.
KEY NAVALNY QUOTES:
ON THE UKRAINE WAR:
“This is a stupid war which your Putin started,” Navalny told an appeal court in Moscow via video link from a corrective penal colony in 2022. “This war was built on lies.”
ON PUTIN:
“Corruption is the foundation of contemporary Russia, it is the foundation of Mr Putin’s political power,” Navalny told Reuters in an interview in 2011.
ON RUSSIA:
“Once the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy described the structure of power in Russia: ‘the villains who robbed their own people got together, recruited soldiers and judges to guard their orgy, and now they’re having a feast’. This brilliant phrase precisely describes what is happening in our country.”
ON FEAR AND AMBITION:
“Why should I be afraid?” he said in 2011 when asked about the dangers of challenging the Kremlin.
“I would like to be president, but there are no elections in Russia.”
ON DEATH:
“If they decide to kill me then it means we are incredibly strong and we need to use that power and not give up,” he once told CNN. “We don’t realise how strong we actually are.”
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
