The man Putin fears triumphs in Hollywood

It seemed to many a suicide, both real and political, that in January 2021 Alexéi Navalni decided to return to Russia after spending months in Germany recovering from poisoning.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
13 March 2023 Monday 22:26
16 Reads
The man Putin fears triumphs in Hollywood

It seemed to many a suicide, both real and political, that in January 2021 Alexéi Navalni decided to return to Russia after spending months in Germany recovering from poisoning. The police arrested him at the same passport control at the Sheremetevo airport, in front of his wife Yulia. Since then, the only opponent who has shaken the foundations of Putin's managed democracy has not been released from prison.

Navalny, the film that won the Oscar for best documentary this Sunday in Los Angeles (United States), follows these two episodes of the busy biography of the Russian opponent.

The tape by Canadian director Daniel Roher describes the investigation of the Navalni team and the Bellingcat investigation group to discover a group of FSB agents who in 2020 tried to kill the opponent with a nerve agent.

The Kremlin has always denied any involvement in this matter. And yesterday Monday its spokesman, Dimitri Peskov, assured that sometimes Hollywood does not avoid "politicizing its work."

"I dare to assume that there are elements of politicization of this issue here," Peskov told the media. "I cannot speak of the cinematographic merits, because I have not seen the tape."

The anti-Kremlin protests of 2011 and 2012 gave rise to perhaps the only major opposition figure the political system led by Vladimir Putin has encountered. Alexei Navalni, a young lawyer and anti-corruption blogger who had previously been part of the liberal Yabloko party and had been active in nationalist movements, became the freshest face of Russia's fractured opposition.

The reason for these demonstrations, the most important since Putin came to power in 2000, were the parliamentary elections in December 2011, but above all his return to the Kremlin after spending four years as prime minister.

With his youth and charisma, Navalni had managed to get disgruntled Russians to stop complaining to friends in the kitchen and take to the streets to protest.

However, the political elites still did not see him as a real threat. Perhaps that is why he was allowed to stand in the Moscow mayoral elections in September 2013.

He did not win, but he was about to force a runoff against the man from the Kremlin, the current councilor Sergei Sobyanin. Without access to traditional media, he resorted to social media and a neighborhood-to-neighborhood campaign that proved capable of punching a hole in the vertical system that Kremlin theorists had been building for years.

Since then, the history of the politician Navalni has been an obstacle course, plagued by administrative arrests for organizing unauthorized demonstrations and a conviction for fraud that the judicial authorities have suspended.

All that changed in 2020, the year of the coronavirus pandemic and the year in which Russia reformed the Constitution so that Putin would remain in power beyond the year 2024. The opponent was poisoned during a trip to Siberia. According to three Western laboratories, they had tried to kill him with a Novichok-type nerve agent, created for military purposes in Soviet times.

The Kremlin allowed him to be sent to Berlin, where they manage to save his life and he spends months recovering.

During his stay, the judicial authorities issue an arrest warrant against him for having violated the probation of his sentence for fraud. Knowing that this could mean that he was going to be arrested as soon as he set foot on Russian territory, Navalni decides to return in January 2021.

“Alexéi, I dream of the day when you are free and our country is free. Be strong, my love, ”said his wife Yulia Naválnaya, who participated with the couple's two children, Daria and Zajar, in the Oscar delivery ceremony.

When receiving the Roher prize, he dedicated it to "all the political prisoners in the world", turning Navalni into a global example. “Alexei, the world has not forgotten your vital message to all of us. We should not be afraid to oppose dictatorships and authoritarianism wherever it rears its head”, the filmmaker pointed out.

That message will hardly reach its addressee, who is serving a total of 11.5 years in prison for two fraud sentences in a maximum security penal colony about 250 kilometers from Moscow, in Mélejovo, in the Vladimir Oblast.

Navalni's return to Russia, in January 2021, sparked a wave of protests reminiscent of those of 2012. But this time, the police went full force at a time when Moscow was accelerating the repression against critical voices.

In the following months, the Anti-Corruption Foundation and the offices of Navalni's political movement were outlawed and banned in Russia. Most of his collaborators ended up leaving the country.

Despite finding himself behind bars, his fight is not over. In an appeal session against one of his sentences, Navalni last year presented Putin as a crazy man who had started "a stupid war" against Ukraine and in which innocent people from both countries are massacred.

The prison authorities have sent him to a punishment or confinement cell a dozen times, which, according to his followers, is deteriorating his health. Last January some 500 doctors signed an open letter to President Putin asking him to stop these "abuses".

"Do not stop fighting for democracy and freedom throughout the world, we are going to get my father out and we are going to continue fighting," Daria Naválnaya said in Los Angeles. Like father Like Son. At the end of the documentary, Navalni is asked what his message to the Russian people would be if he died. He says firmly, "You can't give up."