One of Putin’s Biggest Critics Has Died in a Penal Colony. Here’s What He Wanted for Russia.

This article was originally featured in Foreign Policy, the magazine of global politics and ideas.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has reportedly died in a penal colony in the Arctic Circle, according to the Russian prison service. Navalny was serving a 19-year prison sentence in the penal colony on a range of charges that were widely regarded to be politically motivated. He was 47 years old.

In a short statement, the Yamalo-Nenets prison service said that Navalny felt unwell after a walk at the “Polar Wolf” penal colony and almost immediately lost consciousness. The cause of his death was not immediately clear. Navalny survived a previous attempt on his life in 2020, when he was poisoned with the potent Novichok nerve agent by operatives from the Russian security services. His death is likely to be seen as a political assassination, coming as it does just a month before Russian presidential elections are set to take place.

Navalny’s colleagues have yet to confirm his death. In a statement on X, his press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, said that the opposition leader’s lawyer was en route to the prison.

Charismatic, controversial, and unquestionably brave, Navalny and his team doggedly exposed corruption among the country’s political elite, including by Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. Navalny had a unique ability to speak to the concerns of Russians across the country and to mobilize them to take to the streets.

Hours after news of his death broke, Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, took to the stage at the Munich Security Conference in Germany to offer brief, unscheduled remarks.

“Upon hearing the horrible news, I didn’t know if I should have immediately flown to my family or speak out. But then I thought—‘What would Alexei do?’ and I’m sure he would be here,” said a somber Navalnaya.

“We cannot believe Putin’s government. They are lying constantly. But if this is the truth, I want Putin and all of those around him, his government, his friends, I want them to know that they will be punished for what they have done with our country, with my family and with my husband, they will be brought to justice,” she said.

For many, Navalny presented the most credible alternative to Putin, with his hopes of turning Russia into a “normal country,” as he once put it in an interview with ABC News. It was a vision that the Kremlin worked to ensure could never become a reality by steadily extinguishing dissent—and, it seems, eventually Navalny himself.

By all accounts, Navalny had an ordinary Soviet childhood. He was born in 1976 in a small town outside of Moscow, though accounts diverge on where exactly. His mother, Lyudmila, was an economist, and his father, Anatoly, was an officer in the Red Army. His mother has described the young Navalny as a strong-willed child. “It was impossible to discipline him,” she said in an interview with the Russian news site the New Times in 2013. “I remember once that his teacher scolded him for something, and the next day he refused to go to school. ‘I don’t want to be forced to study,’ ” she recalled him saying.

Summers were spent with his paternal grandparents in the small village of Zalyssia, Ukraine. But his idyllic childhood summers of swimming in the nearby Uzh River came to an abrupt end in 1986, when the nearby Chernobyl nuclear plant melted down, rendering Zalyssia and the wider area uninhabitable and sickening........

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