It Wasn’t Just “Courage” That Kept Alexei Navalny Fighting

Last Friday, Russia’s prison service announced that Alexei Navalny, a Russian anti-corruption activist and the country’s leading opposition figure, was dead. On Saturday, his team confirmed the news and said he had been murdered.

That Navalny is dead is, for Putin’s regime, a success in the place of previous failure: In 2020, Navalny had been poisoned, but survived. (He would go on to trick a Russian agent into exposing how the poisoning had been carried out.) Navalny was treated in Germany—and then decided to go back to Russia, knowing that doing so meant imprisonment and, possibly, assassination. Indeed, he was detained upon his arrival in Moscow. Prior to his death, Navalny had been in prison since 2021.

Explaining his decision to return in a January 2024 Facebook post, he wrote, “I don’t want to give up either my country or my beliefs. I cannot betray either the first or the second. If your beliefs are worth something, you must be willing to stand up for them. And if necessary, make some sacrifices.”

His decision, and his articulation for why he made it, exemplified not only what made him a unique figure, but that he was working in a similar vein as earlier Russian resistance. Navalny, like his predecessors, was acting not only out of courage, but conviction: the belief that the brave thing is the only thing that can be chosen, and then acting out that belief over and over again, even as the costs of the choice increase.

I never met or interviewed Navalny. But a decade ago, I researched and interviewed rights-based Soviet Russian dissidents, the small but salient group of individuals who, through underground writings and aboveground protests, tried to hold their government accountable to its own laws. One of the things that I tried to understand in those interviews was how they managed to do what they do. How they decided, when the cost of dissent was being sent to a labor camp or confined to psychiatric prison and the chance of changing the system so remote, to go out and protest anyway.

In a 2013 interview for the New York Times, Ellen Barry asked Navalny, “Soviet dissidents always seemed prepared to sacrifice themselves in order to fight the system, but you always seemed like an optimistic person who expected to win. Do you still feel confident, or has that been changing?” He responded, “The dissidents were spiritual titans. In the Soviet period, it was clear that if you went out to Red Square with a poster, you understood they would put you in prison and there was no other outcome. You might understand that the U.S.S.R. was going to fall apart sometime, but no one expected their concrete deeds to affect it … I see there is a large number of people who support me and I am sure we will win. I am absolutely sure. I consider that it will happen in some relatively short period of time. But on the other hand, O.K., if it happens in two years or 22 years, either way, we need to do it. To compare me to the Soviet dissidents would be a big exaggeration.”

A decade later, what is clear in a way that it couldn’t have been then is that, for all of the differences between the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia, and for all of the ways in which the dissidents then were dissimilar from Navalny, he was their spiritual successor. It is not only that he was brave like they were, though he was, and they were. It is that, like them, he spoke of what he was doing as the only option—even though other, safer choices existed.

Navalny was not the only person in Russia working in this tradition. Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is still in prison, named his foundation to support the families of political prisoners after the Day of Political Prisoners established by the Soviet dissidents.

Poet Natalia Gorbanevskaya was one of the people Navalny described to Barry. In 1968, she and several others stood out on Red Square to protest the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, holding a banner that read, “For your freedom and ours.” She was later arrested and underwent psychiatric torture.

“The second reason we protested for the Czechs and Slovaks was for them,” she told me in an interview in her Paris apartment in 2012. “The first was for ourselves.” A person, she told me in that interview, needs to be a person.

Similar sentiment was offered by Vladimir Dremlyuga, who was also at that Red Square protest, and who said of his decision, “All my conscious life I have wanted to be a citizen—that is, a person who proudly and calmly speaks his mind. For 10 minutes, I was a citizen, during the demonstration … I am glad that there proved to be others to express their protest together with me. Had there not been, I would have entered Red Square alone.”

“Did they do what they wanted to? No,” Ludmila Weil, widow of dissident Boris Weil told me in Copenhagen in 2013. “But they did what they could. What they thought they ought to.”

Navalny, in his interview with Barry, said that he could hope to change the system in a way that the Soviet dissidents could not. But in his writing and speaking, too, there is this sense of not just courage but obligation to one’s country and, beyond that, to one’s conscience.

In a 2013 article written for Russian-language outlet New Times and translated into English for the Guardian, Navalny wrote, “I value what I’ve done and will not change my position because jail is on the horizon. I chose this path, I took on certain responsibilities before people who trusted me, and I knew what I was in for.”

This same sentiment comes up over and over through the years in his writing and speeches, even as the chance of real political change—of real challenge to corruption, of real rule of law, let alone real democracy—in Russia seemed to recede further and further. It was there even in his answer to the question of what his supporters should do if he was killed. “You’re not allowed to give up,” he said. He described this as “very obvious.” It is, in fact, not obvious to millions of people. But it was to him. (In this same interview, Navalny said that all that was necessary for evil to win was for good people to do nothing. This, too, was the logic of the Soviet dissidents: When Aleksandr Esenin-Vol’pin, arguably the father of the rights-based dissidence movement, was told that nobody cared about whether the Soviet government followed its own laws, he replied, “That’s the problem … Nobody cares. We ourselves are to blame for not demanding fulfillment of our own laws.”)

None of this is to say that Navalny was perfect, or beyond criticism, morally or otherwise. His racist rhetoric was well documented; his more nationalistic impulses have been, too, even if his views may have evolved beyond both. (Nor, to be clear, were the Soviet dissidents themselves without fault. To take one dramatic example, Vladimir Bukovskii was a prominent dissident who similarly spoke of moral obligation, elegantly articulating, “everyone wanted to have the right to say to his descendants: ‘I did all I could. I was a citizen and I always demanded legality.’ ” At the age of 73, he was accused by a British court of downloading thousands of abusive images of children.)

It is to say that, on the matter of Soviet dissidents, Navalny was wrong. It is no great exaggeration to compare him to them. Like them, it was not that he did not understand intellectually that other choices existed, but rather that those choices were beyond the bounds of his political and human project.

I thought of the Soviet dissidents again on Monday, when Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, vowed to continue his work. Putin, in killing her husband, had killed half of her, she said. “But I still have the other half, and it tells me that I have no right to give up.”

This determination, after suffering as Navalnaya has, can sound almost beyond human. But for her and her predecessors, it seems closer to the truth to say that she is articulating what it takes to stay human. She sounded not unlike the spiritual titans who came before her—including her late husband.