Vladimir Putin just doesn’t know what to do about Alexey Navalny. Putin’s regime generally knows how to perpetuate itself. It controls all state institutions—not only the executive branch but the courts and the parliament—insuring that Putin’s power remains unchecked. It dominates the information sphere, creating the illusion that no alternative to Putin exists. It has reduced elections to empty spectacles with preordained outcomes. These measures have kept the regime stable and largely undisturbed for more than twenty years. At times when protest has nonetheless erupted, as it did in 2006 and 2007 and again in 2011 and 2012, the Kremlin has responded with many detentions, a few long prison terms, and unrelenting harassment and threats against protest leaders. Many protest organizers, threatened with criminal prosecutions, left the country. Many of those who failed to stay away have been killed. And then there was Alexey Navalny.
Navalny has managed to subvert every one of the regime’s mechanisms of control. He began more than a decade ago with a one-man blog about bogus state tenders and outrageous government contracts. He has since built a media organization, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, that investigates corruption and abuse of power in Russia, producing extensive text and video reports that draw millions of readers and viewers. He has also created a network of field organizers who have outwitted the Kremlin’s system for election rigging; they’ve been successful in only a couple of local races so far, but the precedent they have established is terrifying for Putin. Navalny has been arrested repeatedly, detained for protesting, and convicted twice on trumped-up criminal charges, but none of these measures have succeeded in silencing him. He has inspired mass protests that compelled the authorities to release him in 2013, a day after he had been sentenced to five years in prison. Following his next conviction, he refused to comply with an illegal sentence of house arrest, and then took Russia to the European Court of Human Rights and won. When the state took Navalny’s brother Oleg hostage, sentencing him to three and a half years in prison, Alexey grew only louder and more effective. Finally, last year Putin’s secret police attempted to kill Navalny by poisoning him with the chemical agent Novichok. Navalny not only survived but co-authored an investigation of his own attempted murder. And he still refused to stay out of the country.
Navalny fell ill on August 20, 2020, on a plane from the remote Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, where Navalny spent four days in a coma before Russian authorities finally allowed him to be airlifted to Berlin; he remained in a coma for several more weeks. In early October, he gave his first media interviews after the poisoning. He told me then that he would return to Russia because becoming an exile would give Putin exactly what he wanted: to be rid of him.
For the next three months, Navalny worked with German doctors to bring his mind and body fully back to life—a job that had never been done before, for there had been no documented cases of people who survived poisoning with this particular agent. (The Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who were poisoned in England, in 2018, are believed to have been exposed to a different variety of Novichok.) At the same time, Navalny teamed up with the Russian independent publication The Insider and Christo Grozev, a member of the international investigative collective Bellingcat, to report on his own failed assassination. They were able to identify eight people, all of them affiliated with the Russian secret police, who had spent three years shadowing Navalny around the country. These agents appeared to have made two earlier unsuccessful attempts to kill Navalny and his wife, Yulia (who may or may not have been their target). Finally, Navalny got one of his unsuccessful assassins on the phone: Navalny pretended to be an assistant to a top Russian security official, and his interlocutor divulged details of the plot. This was how Navalny learned that the poison had been placed in his underwear, and that the secret police had twice dispatched a cleanup crew to Omsk to try to get traces of the chemical off boxer shorts that were supposed to be safeguarded as evidence. More than twenty-three million viewers have watched the video of Navalny’s conversation with his assassin—roughly the same number who watched the original exposé of the group of would-be murderers.
Last week, Navalny announced that he had fully recovered and was returning to Moscow. The Russian prison authority immediately threatened him with arrest, ostensibly because he had violated the terms of his suspended sentence—in an embezzlement case that the European Court of Human Rights has deemed politically motivated—because he failed to check in with his parole officer twice a month while he was in Germany recovering from the poisoning. Russia issues these sorts of threats against Putin’s enemies routinely, and they usually work to keep people from returning home from abroad. In 2003, the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky defied such a warning; he was arrested soon after returning to Russia, stripped of his wealth, and sent to prison for ten years. In 2014, the politician Boris Nemtsov defied a similar warning and was killed. Now Navalny refused to heed their lessons.
Navalny choreographed his return with characteristic precision and humor. On Sunday morning, Alexey and Yulia boarded a Berlin-Moscow plane, accompanied by Navalny’s lawyer Olga Mikhailova, his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh, and several journalists. Onboard the plane, Navalny took a selfie with the flight attendants, who appear to have requested it, and he and Yulia recorded a five-second video in which she says, “Garçon, bring us some vodka. We are going home!” Navalny told journalists that he would not be making any statements until he landed in Moscow. Meanwhile, people began to gather at Vnukovo, the airport where Navalny’s plane was scheduled to land, at 7:20 P.M. Moscow time. Authorities had announced a ban on protests at the airport, citing pandemic restrictions. At the same time, buses were bringing in hundreds of people who were ostensibly there to greet Olga Buzova, a popular entertainer—an apparent attempt to fill the arrivals hall before any Navalny supporters could enter. Prisoner transports encircled the airport. According to independent Russian reporting, more than two thousand people braved the police, the threats, and extremely cold weather to try to greet Navalny in Vnukovo. More than fifty of them were detained. (Altogether, more than seventy people were arrested in connection with Navalny on Sunday; all were released. On Monday, seventy-three people were detained for demonstrating in support of Navalny in five Russian cities; all were released by the end of the day.)
Many Russians, and some non-Russians, watching from home were glued to Flightradar24, a site that shows the movement of planes around the world in real time. A few minutes before Navalny’s plane was scheduled to touch down, observers began frantically posting on social media: the airplane appeared no longer to be headed to Vnukovo. In another few minutes, it became clear that the plane had been redirected to Sheremetyevo, an airport on the opposite side of Moscow, a good two-hour drive from Vnukovo even without taking into account interference from the police, who soon closed off the exits from Vnukovo and all but one lane of the highway on the approach to Sheremetyevo.
The plane landed in Sheremetyevo. The Navalnys, Mikhailova, Yarmysh, and a gaggle of journalists, several of them live-streaming video, disembarked and boarded a bus to the terminal. More than a million people were watching Navalny moving on Russian land, though he had not yet crossed the state border. Following what seemed like an interminable bus ride, the group entered Sheremetyevo Terminal D and walked down a wide, well-lit hall toward a giant, wall-size, backlit photograph of the Kremlin. Navalny stood in front of it, as though it were a backdrop positioned there especially for him to hold a press conference, and made a statement:
