If you believe the Russian prison service – which I wouldn't necessarily advise – Alexei Navalny fell “sick” yesterday morning after a “walk” in his Arctic penal colony and “lost consciousness almost immediately.”
A medical team reportedly failed to revive him.
Authorities claimed that “the cause of death was being determined” – but no one should be in any doubt as to what – or rather who – killed the world's most famous dissident.
Navalny, who has dedicated his life to fighting the endemic corruption of his country's kleptocratic elite, is just the latest of many hundreds of thousands whose deaths have been caused by Vladimir Putin.
Persecuted, hunted through the courts, poisoned, tortured and imprisoned in cruel conditions, it is clear that whatever the immediate trigger, he was ultimately a victim of the unrelenting cruelties inflicted on him by the state and its dictator.
Let me be clear: This was murder.
The former lawyer, who was 47, was last seen Thursday in video footage of a court hearing in the IK-3 colony nicknamed “Arctic Wolf” that he called home: a purgatory death trap in the remote town of Kharp. about 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow.
After three years in increasingly grim gulags, Navalny should have been a broken man. Nevertheless, he was in a good mood as always. He even jokingly asked the judge for help in paying the fines he had been ordered to pay for alleged “misconduct” in prison.
In another video from January, his hands casually poked through the bars of his court cage as he joked about his prison garb and noted that since he was “pretty far away” from home, he still hadn't received any Christmas cards.
The 47-year-old Navalny was last seen on Thursday in video footage of a court hearing in the hellish colony “IK-3”.
In another video from January, his hands casually poked through the bars of his court cage as he joked about his prison garb and noted that he was “pretty far away” from home
Opposition leader Alexei Navalny is escorted from a police station on January 18, 2021
Polar Wolf, which no one has ever escaped, lies in an icy wasteland surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of tundra on one side and the mountains of the Urals on the other.
The guards deliberately do not offer the prisoners enough clothing for the freezing temperatures. Inmates were reportedly led to the showers and forced to undress before masked guards stormed in and beat them.
Navalny was serving a trumped-up 19-year prison sentence for a baroque list of alleged crimes, including “extremism,” “rehabilitating Nazism,” and “inciting children to commit dangerous acts.”
In fact, his trial in 2021 took place in another modern concentration camp, Penal Colony No. 6: a typically Putinist parody of justice.
His life in prison had been torture. Navalny was once punished for washing his hands minutes before he was “allowed” to do so; On another occasion his mistake was leaving the top button of his shirt undone.
Every morning, the guards moved his bed away so he couldn't lie down. He spent most of his time in solitary confinement, often in a 10-by-7-foot concrete “pencil” with a hole in the floor for a toilet.
When he was diagnosed with lung problems, his prison guards had a brainwave: They deliberately put a tramp with a contagious respiratory disease in his cell, then refused to treat him when he inevitably fell ill.
His endurance was amazing.
The lifelong activist, who amassed tens of millions of followers on social media — first through a blog and then through an influential YouTube channel and an anti-corruption foundation — has been by far the most effective opponent of the Putin regime.
His repeated revelations over many years, with his striking face, charismatic and articulate, with intelligent blue eyes full of eagerness, sparked street protests at home and the admiration of much of the democratic world. In 2017, for example, he exposed then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev's $1 billion real estate empire, including a lavish “duck house” that angered ordinary Russians who get by on an average annual salary of less than £12,000.
In 2021, already in prison, Navalny wrote as narrator and screenwriter a two-hour documentary called “Putin's Palace: The Story of the World's Biggest Bribery.” More than 100 million people watched as he unveiled the £1bn modern-day Xanadu that the dictator had built on the Black Sea: a grotesque imitation of a French castle.
Almost from the beginning of his career, he represented the vision of a different Russia.
Navalny's last message: The Kremlin critic posted a Valentine's Day message to his wife Julia (pictured) on Wednesday
Navalny walks to his seat on a Pobeda Airlines plane en route to Moscow before it takes off from Berlin Brandenburg Airport on January 17, 2021
After being poisoned, Navalny was evacuated to a hospital in Germany. The use of the nerve agent Novichok was later confirmed in a laboratory
Navalny, pictured with his wife Yulia, fought against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests – drawing the Kremlin's ire
Born in 1974 to a Red Army officer of Ukrainian descent and his devout communist wife, young Alexei is said to have been deeply affected by the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and what he saw as the Soviet Union's grotesque attempts to cover up the extent of it accident.
In 1993, he went to Moscow University to study law, graduating five years later – and witnessed how corruption had plagued even the academic world. (Students who inserted a $50 bill into their exam papers secured a passing score.)
He gained work experience at a real estate company and later said: “Working there taught me how things work on the inside, how intermediate companies are set up and how money is transported.”
He laid the foundation for his ideology.
A complex man, he began as an ultra-nationalist and made racist statements against many of Russia's non-Slavic minorities.
Despite his own ancestry, his stance on aspects of Ukraine angered many Ukrainians – although he was always clear in his general opinion on the war. Putin's invasion was “unleashed by a madman obsessed with some nonsense about geopolitics, history and the structure of the world,” he said. He began blogging in 2008, founded his anti-corruption foundation three years later and infamously described Putin's United Russia party as “crooks and thieves.”
This led the Kremlin to prosecute him, and in 2012 he was first convicted of embezzlement and received a five-year prison sentence, but was quickly released. (The European Court of Human Rights later ruled his trial was unfair.)
Despite being denied access to television cameras, he ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013 and came second: many suspected the vote was rigged and he would have won a fair election.
During his 2018 presidential campaign, thugs broke into his Moscow office and sprayed green antiseptic paint on his face. The attack cost Navalny 80 percent of the vision in his right eye.
But he stayed in the race, eventually forcing angry authorities to bar him from taking part out of fear of the possible outcome. His response was to call on Russians to boycott the election.
Soon the violence against him became even more blatant. In 2019, he was treated for apparent poisoning while in prison.
And in August 2020, the state finally snapped and tried to kill him. FSB agents sneaked into his hotel room in the Siberian city of Tomsk and smeared the nerve agent Novichok – used to such devastating effect in Salisbury two years earlier – into his boxer shorts.
On the flight back to Moscow he fell ill and the plane had to land in Siberia before being allowed to fly to Berlin, where he could be treated.
“So Putin decided to kill me after all,” Navalny remarked when he woke up from his coma. “I mortally insulted him by my survival,” he later said. “He is addicted to death, war and lies like a drug: he needs them to maintain his power.”
As expected, the Russian president denied any involvement in the assassination attempt. If the security services had wanted to poison Navalny, we probably would have done the job, grinned Putin.
As always, Navalny met the horror with humor: “We had that.” [Russian tsars] “Yaroslav the Wise and Alexander the Liberator,” he noted. “Now we have Vladimir, the underpants poisoner.”
Perhaps the most fateful decision of his life was to return to Russia in early 2021 to continue the election campaign rather than remain in political exile in Europe.
He knew he faced certain arrest, but he seemed to have expected that the authorities would not kill him or risk being made a martyr.
In fact, he was arrested upon his arrival and thrown into a “correctional colony.” Amnesty International accused Russia of slowly torturing him to death – and yesterday the organization was unfortunately proven right.
Navalny leaves behind his tireless wife Yulia, 47, who yesterday called on the world to “come together and defeat this evil regime,” and their children Daria, 22, and Zahar, 14.
On Valentine's Day this week, Navalny wrote to Yulia on social media: “Baby, I know that with you everything is like a song – between us there are cities, landing lights at the airport, blue blizzards and thousands of kilometers.” But I feel you every Second by my side and I love you even more.'
She has vowed to continue the work to which he dedicated his extraordinary life.