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In Munich, world leaders stood silent and stared blankly as the annual security conference suddenly turned into a wake. In London, demonstrators projected a giant statue of Alexei A. Navalny in front of the Russian embassy. In Washington, an angry President Biden held a press conference and declared: “Make no mistake: President Putin is responsible for Mr. Navalny’s death.”
Rarely does the death of a single person evoke such a cascade of grief, anger and demands for justice.
Many feared the worst for Navalny when he returned to Russia from Germany in early 2021 after recovering from a poisoning, but the news of his disappearance still came with a thunderclap. . Governments, no matter how cruel and repressive, often do not spare dissident figures just to avoid creating martyrs.
During his lifetime, Navalny was often compared to Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid leader who spent 27 years in prison before leading democratic South Africa. Navalny, who has since died, is now drawing comparisons to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a civil rights leader who fought for racial justice and whose assassination in 1968 was a major event for America.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether Navalny’s death will resonate as timelessly as King’s. Even the circumstances remain shrouded in mystery, with only mysterious reports from a remote penal colony in the Arctic Circle of a 47-year-old “prisoner” collapsing after a walk. His family did not claim his body, and his mother was told that he had died of “sudden death syndrome” without further explanation.
Much has changed since Navalny began his career as an opposition politician more than a decade ago. Mr. Navalny was a charismatic figure who used social media to appeal to Moscow’s restless middle-class residents and fight corruption in President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.
Mr. Putin’s troops are back on the march into neighboring Ukraine, emboldened by their victory in the key town of Avdiivka. Western leaders in Munich were concerned about the loss of support for Ukraine among some Republicans in the U.S. Congress. There was no immediate sign that Navalny’s death had changed the minds of those skeptical of military aid.
Efforts to build a true global coalition against Russia’s wars never got off the ground, and China, India, and Iran continue to do business with Russia. Last June, South Africa enthusiastically welcomed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at a meeting to discuss a new world order no longer dominated by the West.
Despite this, more than 400 people who tried to leave bouquets in the snow were detained by police as tributes poured in for Navalny and flowers were piled up at memorial sites around the world and in Russia. In response, Putin’s critics argued: Navalny’s death could be a galvanizing moment.
“Alexei Navalny is a globally recognized and beloved figure who was erased by a murderer,” said William F., an American-born British financier who has campaigned against human rights abuses in Russia. Browder said. “This is a classic good versus evil story. These kinds of symbols and stories have resonance far beyond the petty conflicts of the world we live in.”
Browder cited precedent. After his lawyer and auditor, Sergei L. Magnitsky, died under suspicious circumstances in a Moscow detention center, he campaigned for countries to pass laws blacklisting Russia for human rights abuses. He said the European Union was the most reluctant.
But anti-Russian sentiment has grown stronger since Navalny was fatally poisoned in 2020 with a nerve agent widely believed to have been carried out by Russian agents, Browder said. A few months later, the EU adopted the law.
Browder compared Navalny to Martin Luther King Jr. and said his death would make it politically unacceptable for U.S. lawmakers to be seen as conciliatory to Putin. He said it would also be difficult for at least some Republicans in Congress to withhold additional military aid to Ukraine in the short term.
Browder, in Munich for a conference, urged Western officials to urge Russia to release other Russian political prisoners, such as Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for treason last April. I worked hard. He acknowledged that it was not clear whether such allegations would sway Mr. Putin.
Michael A. McFaul, a friend of Mr. Navalny and a former U.S. ambassador to Russia who compared him to Mr. Mandela, said he believes the circumstances of Mr. Navalny’s death will change the tone of the debate on Ukraine on Capitol Hill. He said he believed it. . He also walked the halls in Munich over the weekend and said the impact was palpable.
“In my interactions with members of Congress, former U.S. officials, and European officials, I have no doubt that Navalny’s tragic killing makes it even harder to ignore President Putin’s atrocities,” McFaul said. There was no room for that.”
In addition to pushing for military aid, McFaul and others are pleading with the West to use frozen Russian state funds to buy ammunition for Ukraine. Some argue that these funds, estimated at at least $300 billion, should be used to rebuild the country after the war ends.
McFaul said it was difficult to predict the long-term impact of Navalny’s death within Russia. Mr. Putin has faced less public resistance than Mr. Navalny when he entered politics, and operates in a world that generally does not hold dictators accountable. Mr McFaul said Mr Navalny had allies in government and business circles, but Mr Navalny’s defeat deprived Russia of a Mandela-like figure. Putin’s repressive police state will not make it easy to find a successor.
“His whole mission in life was to stay alive, to survive this moment,” McFall said. “Here you have to compare him to a martyr, but that’s an even harder story. He was a uniquely charismatic and popular opposition leader, but no one, except perhaps his wife, took that baton from him. There is no obvious person to take over.”
McFaul said she was with Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnaya the night before her husband’s death and discussed Navalny’s condition, but that she had no idea what Navalny was facing. Told. On Friday, she took to her podium in Munich, transfixing world leaders.
“I hold President Putin and those around him, his friends, and the people in his government accountable for what they have done to our country, to my family, to my husband. I want to have it,” said Navalnaya, who remained calm despite her grief. . “And this day is almost here.”
The fact that Russia did not keep Navalny alive surprised McFaul, a longtime Russia expert who teaches at Stanford University. He said he did not expect that, considering the regime’s previous poisoning attempts. Others said it meant a new world where even dissident figures with global recognition could be easily killed.
Mr. Navalny resisted the label of dissident, preferring to think of himself as an arena politician and even a future Russian president. That made him determined to return there, even though he was almost certain to be arrested.
In doing so, Navalny distinguished himself from Cold War dissidents like physicist Andrei Sakharov and politician Natan Sharansky. They faced persecution and, in Sharansky’s case, imprisonment, and became symbols of courageous resistance in the West.
Such figures often had an air of inviolability. But governments have been acting more ruthlessly in recent years, in part because the United States and other Western countries have taken on the burden of their own political struggles, much like they did in the 1970s and 1980s. Analysts say this is because China no longer presents a united front of pressure.
“This is an indicator of how the world has changed,” said Philip Sands, a British human rights lawyer and author. “Governments used to keep people like this alive, sometimes locked up for years, but never knocked down. Now they just abolish them.”
“The countries that are doing this are confident in their ability to do this,” Sands added.
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