Melbourne:
Alexei Navalny was a major figure in Russian politics. No other individual could rival the threat he posed to the Putin regime. His death in an Arctic labor camp is a blow to all who dreamed of him becoming the leader of a future democratic Russia.
What made Navalny so important was his decision to become a crusader against corruption in 2008. Using shareholder activism and his popular blog, he spotlighted corruption schemes that allowed officials to steal billions from state-owned companies.
His breakthrough came in 2011, when he proposed the strategy of voting for every party in the Duma (parliament) elections except President Vladimir Putin's “party of thieves and thieves.” Faced with a collapse in support, the regime resorted to widespread electoral fraud. The result was months of pro-democracy protests.
Putin regained control through a mix of concessions and repression, but the crisis marked Navalny's rise as the dominant figure in Russia's democratic movement.
Despite being convicted on trumped-up embezzlement charges, he was allowed to run in Moscow's 2013 mayoral elections. In a patently unfair contest that included police harassment and hostile media coverage, he won 27% of the vote.
Perseverance despite increasingly worse attacks
The authorities have learned from this mistake. Never again would Navalny be allowed to participate in elections. What the Kremlin could not stop was the creation of a national movement around the Foundation for the Fight Against Corruption (FBK), which he founded in 2011 with a team of brilliant young activists.
Over the next decade, FBK transformed our understanding of the nature of Putin's kleptocracy. The open-source investigations destroyed the reputations of countless regime officials, security officials and regime propagandists.
Among the most significant was a 2017 expose of the network of charities that financed then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev's palaces and yachts. It was viewed 46 million times on YouTube and sparked protests across Russia.
No less important was Navalny's contribution to the methods of pro-democratic activism. To exploit the regime's dependence on heavily manipulated elections, he developed a strategy called “intelligent voting.” The basic idea was to encourage people to vote for the candidates who had the best chance of defeating Putin's United Russia party. The result was a series of setbacks for United Russia in the 2019 regional elections.
One measure of Navalny's impact was the intensification of repression against him. As prosecutors tried to cripple him with a series of unlikely criminal charges, they also hounded his family. His younger brother Oleg spent three and a half years in a labor camp on false charges.
This legal persecution was exacerbated by the violence of the regime's henchmen. Two months after exposing Medvedev's corruption, Navalny was nearly blinded by a Kremlin-backed gang of vigilantes, who sprayed his face with a noxious mixture of chemicals.
More serious was the deployment of a death squad from Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), which Navalny had overseen since 2017. The use of the nerve agent Novichok to poison Navalny during a trip to the Siberian city of Tomsk in August 2020 was clearly intended to end his challenge to Putin's rule.
Instead, it led to the “Navalny crisis,” a series of events that shook the foundations of the regime. The story of Navalny's survival – and confirmation that he had been poisoned with Novichok – drew international attention to the criminality of the Putin regime.
Any lingering doubts about the state's involvement in his poisoning were dispelled by Navalny's collaboration with Bellingcat, an investigative journalism organization, to identify the suspects and trick one of them into revealing how they poisoned him.
The damage was compounded by Navalny's decision to confront Putin's personal corruption. In a powerful two-hour documentary, A Palace for Putin, Navalny captured the obsessive greed that turned an obscure KGB officer into one of the world's most notorious kleptocrats.
With over 129 million views on YouTube alone, the film shattered the dictator's carefully constructed image as the incarnation of traditional virtues.
'We will fill the prisons and police vans'
It is difficult to exaggerate the impact of the “Navalny crisis” on Putin, a dictator terrified by the prospect of a popular revolution. He was no longer courted by Western leaders. US President Joe Biden began his term in 2021 by endorsing an interviewer's description of Putin as a “killer”.
To contain the domestic fallout, Putin unleashed a crackdown that began with Navalny's arrest in 2021 as he returned to Moscow from Germany, where he was recovering from the Novichok poisoning. On the international stage, Putin secured a summit with Biden through a massive deployment of military force on the Ukrainian border, a rehearsal for the invasion the following year.
The Kremlin's troll factories also tried to destroy Navalny's reputation with a smear campaign. Within weeks of Navalny's imprisonment, Amnesty International revoked his “prisoner of conscience” status based on allegations of hate speech. The proof of this was a number of ugly statements that Navalny, as an inexperienced politician, made in the mid-2000s, when he tried to build an anti-Putin alliance of democrats and nationalists.
What his opponents ignored was Navalny's own evolution into a critic of ethnonationalist prejudices. In a speech to a nationalist rally in 2011, he had challenged his audience to empathize with people in the Muslim-majority republics of Russia's North Caucasus.
This deviation from the nationalist mainstream was accentuated by Putin's conflict with Ukraine. After the invasion of Crimea in March 2014, Navalny denounced the “imperialist annexation” as a cynical attempt to distract the masses from corruption.
Eight years later, while languishing in prison, he condemned Putin's large-scale invasion of Ukraine and urged his compatriots to take to the streets, saying:
If, to prevent war, we have to fill the prisons and police vans, we will fill the prisons and police vans.
Later that year, he argued that a post-Putin Russia should end the concentration of power in the Kremlin and establish a parliamentary republic as “the only way to stop the endless cycle of imperial authoritarianism.”
Navalny's tragedy is that he never had the chance to translate the moral authority he amassed over the years as a dissident into political power. Like Charles de Gaulle in France and Nelson Mandela in South Africa, he could have become a redemptive leader, leading his people from war and tyranny to the promised land of a freer society.
Instead, he left his countrymen the example of a courageous, principled and thoughtful man who sacrificed his life for the cause of democracy and peace. That is his lasting legacy.
(Author: Robert Horvath received funding from the Australian Research Council.)
(This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article)
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)