According to Russian reports, Yulia Navalnaya’s husband and opponent of Putin, Alexei Navalny, passed away on Friday, February 16, in an Arctic jail. The most well-known opponent of the Kremlin was the 47-year-old.
Who was Alexei Navalny?
The most well-known opposition leader in Russia, Alexei Navalny, has been a thorn in President Vladimir Putin’s side for over ten years. He passed away on Friday in a harsh Arctic prison colony; according to jail authorities, he had fainted while out for a stroll.
The 47-year-old lawyer and married father of two had spearheaded a campaign against widespread corruption in Russia’s economic and political elite. They had used large-scale demonstrations that drew significant numbers of young people to challenge Putin’s iron grasp on power.
From a prominent leader of the Russian opposition to the most well-known political prisoner in the nation, Navalny’s journey was characterized by constant government persecution, a nearly fatal poisoning attempt that he attributed to the Kremlin and his voluntary return to his native country. In the end, he was imprisoned on an extremism conviction that carried a 19-year prison sentence.
Early Beginnings:
On June 4, 1976, Navalny was born in Butyn, which is around 25 miles outside Moscow. 1998, he graduated from People’s Friendship University with a law degree. He then pursued an economics degree and a fellowship at Yale.
Alexei Navalny’s Political Activism:
When Navalny joined the liberal opposition party Yabloko in 1999 as a young lawyer, he took his first step into politics. However, he was later expelled from the party for participating in nationalist marches and advocating for immigration restrictions.
Leading a campaign against rampant overdevelopment in Moscow in the early 2000s, Navalny gained national attention a few years after disclosing in blog entries what he alleged to be widespread wrongdoing at massive state-run enterprises such as Gazprom and Rosneft. Later, Navalny established the Foundation for Fighting Corruption to formalize his anti-corruption campaign and investigate fraud claims among Putin’s closest allies.
Navalny was detained and given a 15-day prison sentence after widespread protests against Putin broke out in December 2011, sparked by allegations of widespread vote-tampering in a parliamentary election.
Embezzlement Cases:
Between 2012 and 2014, Navalny was accused of and found guilty of embezzlement and fraud charges involving a state-run forestry company and a Russian affiliate of the French cosmetics giant Yves Rocher. He denounced the accusations as politically driven.
In the end, Navalny was given suspended sentences in both situations, a decision that the European Court of Human Rights condemned. Despite his legal troubles, Navalny and his allies persisted in their anti-corruption crusade, focusing on Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, among others.
Poisoning:
When Navalny became unwell in August 2020, he traveled domestically from Tomsk, Siberia, to Moscow. In Omsk, the pilot performed an emergency landing to save his life.
Then, after being covertly doped up with a nerve toxin, Navalny was evacuated to a hospital in Berlin, where he was treated for his injuries. According to German military testing, the poison was Novichok, which was created in the Soviet Union.
Putin said, very chillingly, at the time, “If someone had wanted to poison him, they would have finished him off.” The Kremlin angrily denied planning the attempted assassination by Russia’s FSB security force.
Return to Russia:
In early 2021, Navalny voluntarily returned to Russia after undergoing medical treatment in Germany for five months. Prosecutors claimed that his stay in Russia breached the terms of his suspended sentence in one of his embezzlement cases, and as a result, he was detained almost away.
Navalny was sentenced to nearly two years in jail for the parole breach, even though there were several protests against the way the government was treating him. He went on a three-week hunger strike to raise awareness of the inadequate medical attention and sleep deprivation experienced by prisoners; he only gave it up after his physicians warned him that he would not survive.
Imprisonment:
A month after Russia invaded Ukraine at the beginning of 2022, Navalny was found guilty of embezzlement and contempt of court, and he received an extra nine years in prison. He was sent to a maximum-security facility located in the Vladimir area.
Then, in August of last year, Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in jail for radical activities related to his political opposition to the Kremlin. After three years of continuous detention and 27 trips to solitary confinement, a court ordered his transfer to a “special regime” correctional colony in the Arctic Circle, around 1,200 miles from Moscow, where he died on Friday under mysterious circumstances.
Even though he was detained in some of the worst circumstances possible, Navalny never missed an opportunity to tease the Kremlin with his signature sarcasm and humor on social media.
On camera at his last court appearance on Thursday, a fit-looking Navalny laughed and joked with the judge about his growing financial difficulties.
“The Yamal prison decided to break Vladimir’s record of fawning and pleasing the Moscow authorities,” he wrote in his final post on X later that day, revealing that he had been awarded another 15-day sentence in a punishment cell.
Alexei Navalny’s Family Life:
Yulia Borisovna Navalnaya, Alexei’s wife, studied at Plekhanov Russian University of Economics. She spent some time working at a bank in Moscow. In 1998, she got to know Alexei Navalny, a lawyer. Their daughter Daria was born in 2001 after they got married in 2000. In 2008, their son Zahar was born.
Over the years, Yulia supported Alexei in all of his political pursuits. Daria, their daughter, is a Stanford University student right now. Still, it’s unclear exactly what she wants to achieve. Daria had stood up for Alexei and demanded his release from jail alongside her mother. She has also shared films on social media in which she demands justice for her father and raises awareness of his predicament.
At the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy in 2021, Daria gave a speech and collected the Moral Courage Award on Alexei’s behalf. Zahar, the son of Alexei and Yulia, is not well recognized. On behalf of his father, he accepted the Best Documentary Feature Film Oscar at the 2023 Oscars with his mother and sister.
Alexei Navalny’s Last Home:
Navalny’s last home was the so-called “Polar Wolf” prison colony, in the isolated village of Kharp, 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle and almost 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow.
According to the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets, the jail, formally known as the IK-3 penal colony, was established in the 1960s as a part of the infamous GULAG system of forced Soviet labor camps. Hardened offenders are primarily housed at what is regarded as one of Russia’s most brutal prisons.
The Yamal-Nenets area has harsh winters, with nighttime lows of frequently 15 degrees below zero. Navalny had laughed cynically about the conditions he worked under when he was initially relocated there in December.
He said on Telegram, “There’s nothing that quite invigorates you like a walk in Yamal at 6:30 in the morning.” “You can only walk for over thirty minutes at this temperature if you grow new fingers, ears, and nose.” He uploaded a photo of his tiny walking yard, three steps wide and eleven steps long, with concrete walls and metal bars on top.
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