The 2022 Oscar-winning documentary on Russian dissident Alexei Navalny opens on a prescient note: In the event of his incarceration or death, what message would President Vladimir Putin’s biggest opponent leave for his country. Navalny’s answer comes towards the end of the movie. “We don’t realise how strong we actually are. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. So don’t be inactive,” he says.
On Friday, the death of the 47-year-old in a penal colony in the remote Arctic Circle where he was serving a 19-year jail term on charges of extremism, was reported by Russian prison authorities. Amid global outrage and censure over Kremlin’s purported role in the event, Navalny’s death also raises an important question: What happens to the fractured Russian opposition — especially given that the presidential election in Russia is scheduled to be held between March 15 and 17, and that the war with Ukraine shows no sign of abating?
A trenchant critic of the Putin administration since the early 2000s, it was an attempt on his life in 2020 that galvanised global support behind Navalny, despite Russia’s dismissal of him as a CIA agent tasked to foment trouble in the country.
The increasing authoritarianism of Putin has meant that the space for dissent in Russia has shrunk abysmally in recent years, with severe clampdowns on civil liberties that brook no opposition.
A former lawyer, Navalny was, in a way, the perfect antagonist to Putin and the unofficial leader of Russia’s opposition, scattered across ideologies, and with its most prominent members such as Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, incarcerated or in exile in the West.
Cold, hard political analysis will say that Navalny’s resistance will rest as a footnote in Putin’s scheme of political aggrandisement, that there is little that stands in the way of the Russian President winning another term in office. Yet, Navalny’s story is crucial in that it speaks both of the loneliness of dissent and its absolute necessity.