He is also Vladimir Putin’s most politically powerful opponent — and he was in the middle of organizing a challenge to the Russian president’s political party’s hold on regional power in elections next month.
So, after he fell ill and lost consciousness during a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk on Thursday, it did not take long for the hunt for a culprit to begin.
“It is Putin,” tweeted Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh, saying Navalny had been poisoned. “Whether or not he personally gave the order, the responsibility is entirely on him.”
The accusation is unsurprising: Russia has a long history in which the health of the Kremlin’s critics suddenly takes a nosedive.
Navalny’s illness bears an eerie resemblance to what happened to journalist and Putin critic Anna Politkovskaya in 2004, when she suddenly fainted after boarding a plane on her way to mediate a hostage crisis. As in Navalny’s case, those close to Politkovskaya pointed to a cup of tea laced with a toxin as the presumable cause. (Politkovskaya survived that attack but was fatally shot in front of her home two years later.)
The headline-grabbing poisonings of the Russian defectors Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal are other examples — as is the case of opposition activist Pyotr Verzilov, who fell sick after attending a court hearing in 2018.
In Navalny’s long career as an opposition politician, he has faced constant harassment in the form of court cases and police raids. Sometimes, things got physical, such as when assailants threw a green antiseptic in his face in 2017 or when he suffered a mysterious “allergy attack” while in police custody last year. But somehow, he miraculously seemed to avoid landing in mortal peril — that is, until Thursday.
There’s no lack of powerful Russians who would be happy to see him gone. “This is a huge blow to Russia’s political system,” Alexei Venediktov, the editor of the Echo Moskvy radio station, said in a broadcast on Thursday. “But the beneficiaries are not difficult to find.”
The “beneficiaries” he and other commentators have pointed to are the rich and famous who have been targeted by Navalny’s corruption investigations and factions within the elite with ties to rival law enforcement structures vying for more influence.
But there’s also little denying that the timing of Navalny’s misfortune comes at a politically sensitive time for the Kremlin. In recent weeks, neighboring country Belarus has been rocked by large-scale street protests calling for the resignation of its longtime leader Alexander Lukashenko.
The uprising next door is exactly the kind of civic unrest that Putin, whose ratings are falling, considers an existential threat — and Navalny had been championing it on social media.
“The question playing out in front of our eyes in Belarus right now is: Can civil protest trump the strongmen with ties to the security forces?” said Abbas Gallyamov, a political analyst and former Kremlin speechwriter.
“If it succeeds in Belarus, then it’ll inspire the opposition here and demoralize Putin’s strongman backers. It could also push Putin to reconsider his own political strategy beyond 2024,” when his current term is set to end.
Earlier this summer, Putin — having declared the worst of the corona crisis over — organized and won a vote on constitutional reforms that pave the way for him to remain president until 2036.
Though Putin’s power grab was contested by the president’s critics, there were no large-scale protests against it.
This was in large part because Navalny — arguably the only political player capable of organizing a nationwide protest — called for a boycott of the vote but did little more. Instead, he urged his supporters to focus their energy on regional elections in September.
More specifically, he has promoted a “smart voting” strategy designed to squeeze out Kremlin-backed candidates by consolidating support behind their biggest rivals. This was used in city council elections in Moscow last year, that led to pro-government candidates losing almost half of their seats — a victory Navalny’s team was hoping to repeat this summer nationwide in the run-up to important State Duma elections in 2021.
When Navalny fell ill, he was on his way back from a campaign trip to Siberia that included a stop in Russia’s third-largest city Novosibirsk, where 34 opposition candidates are running for 50 seats in the city council.
It’s a contest in which the opposition feels it can make real headway, as it taps into widespread discontent and anti-establishment in the Russian periphery. Sergei Boiko, the head of Navalny’s regional campaign office in Novosibirsk, came second in mayoral elections last year.
“People are more self-sufficient here,” said Olga Kartavtseva, the head of Navalny’s campaign office in Omsk, the city where Navalny is being treated in hospital. “Siberia is far from the center. Moscow’s tentacles don’t reach here.”
In the city of Khabarovsk in Russia’s Far East, large-scale protests broke out last month after the arrest of a local governor. The protests quickly turned against Moscow and Putin himself.
“Protest sentiment is increasing,” said political analyst Gallyamov. “Khabarovsk is a perfect example. All it takes is a trigger — whether it’s an environmental, an economic or a political story, and any Russian region has the potential to blow up.”
With Navalny sidelined, his foes could be banking that protests such as that in Khabarovsk will remain isolated incidents.
His supporters, on the other hand, believe that the suspected poisoning itself could become a rallying cry for the opposition.
“Rather than weaken his support base, what’s happened to him will motivate people to speak up,” predicted Kartavtseva. “It’ll act as a catalyst for protest.”
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