Alexey Navalny’s Fearless Return to Russia

Alexey Navalny wearing a green jacket and being escorted in handcuffs by police
The Russian dissident’s superpower is his ability to show people what they have always known about the Putin regime but had the option of pretending away.Photograph by Alexander Nemenov / AFP / Getty

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:

I would like to apologize to the other passengers on this flight. I understand that hundreds of people were inconvenienced by the closure of the Vnukovo Airport. Thousands of people got stuck because they blocked the road to Vnukovo. Here, too, traffic was limited. But this is just one more indication of what is going on in Russia, and one more indication that I was right to—I can’t say that this was my choice, it’s not like I was choosing to return home or not, that wasn’t even a question, not for one second—but it shows how we need to fight here. For God’s sake! This is a regime not only of some disgusting bunch of thieves, it is the regime of nonentities, who are engaged in some kind of nonsense. They actually jeopardized the air security of a huge wonderful city—for what? . . . I have returned, and I am so happy to be back. This is the best day of my life in five months, even though Germany is a wonderful country and I am very grateful to everyone, especially the doctors and nurses I met there. This is my home. I’m back. People keep asking me if I’m afraid. I am not afraid. I feel perfectly confident heading toward passport control. I’m going to go through, exit the airport, and go home. Because I know that I’m right. I know that the criminal charges against me are falsified. And all these efforts to scare me—I don’t just have the truth on my side, I have the courts on my side. They are threatening to arrest me in connection with a case on which the European Court has ruled in my favor. So I’m not afraid of anything, and you shouldn’t be afraid of anything, either. Thank you very much. Let’s go to passport control.

Navalny and his group walked to a passport-control booth, where a group of senior police officers presently appeared. They told Navalny to come with them. He objected, demanding to know if he was under arrest. A major kept repeating that Navalny had to come with the policemen. Navalny said that he would go only if accompanied by his lawyer. The major said that Mikhailova could not come because she had already crossed the border into Russia, and Navalny had not. Navalny, who is also a lawyer, and Mikhailova argued that the officers themselves had not legally left Russia in order to detain Navalny, so the issue of the border ought to be moot. The major threatened to use force. Navalny turned back to his wife and kissed her on the cheek, and appeared to whisper something in her ear. She did the same to him, then reached up to rub her lipstick off his cheek. Navalny turned back to the officer and argued a few seconds more. Alexey turned back to Yulia again, they kissed, and he left with the police.

More than a million people watched Yulia, Mikhailova, and Yarmysh descend the escalator down to the luggage area and sit down on a bench there. They sat for fifteen or twenty minutes. They looked at their phones. The penal authority, meanwhile, issued a statement confirming that Navalny had been detained. The women finally decided to leave the airport and cross the customs line into Russia. A slew of cameras followed them until they got into a car.

For the next several hours, no one but the Russian authorities knew where Navalny was. Navalny’s close friend and colleague Leonid Volkov posted on Telegram that Navalny had been kidnapped. Finally, Volkov wrote that Navalny was being held at a police station in Khimki, the town where the Sheremetyevo Airport is located. The lawyer for the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Vyacheslav Gimadi, wasn’t allowed inside to see Navalny: the police claimed that he was sleeping.

At half past noon on Monday, Navalny was brought into a room in the police station where he had spent the night for a most unusual proceeding: a court hearing held right there in the precinct. The Khimki courthouse is a ten-minute drive from the police station, but the authorities were evidently afraid of encountering protesters on the way. Protesters and journalists were now gathered outside the station—though the hearing was officially open to the public, only journalists from two Kremlin-controlled television channels were allowed in. “You have lost your minds,” Navalny said, addressing the judge, a blond woman in a black robe and starched white collar. He sounded baffled at first, then outraged. When he raised his voice, the judge reprimanded him.

“You want me to respect the court?” Navalny said. “But this is not a court! You are committing a crime, and you will one hundred per cent go to prison yourself. You are still a very young woman. Your Putin will die sooner than—”

Now the judge raised her voice at Navalny. “The court is reprimanding—”

“—and so you will go to prison,” Navalny continued. “Except there will be a regular court, and you will be tried.”

The rest of the proceeding was just as absurd. The head of the local police was petitioning the court to arrest Navalny for violating the terms of his parole—though the local police have nothing to do with enforcing his parole and Russian law does not provide for arresting a parolee whose whereabouts are known. Still, the so-called court ordered Navalny arrested for thirty days, and Navalny was moved to a Moscow jail known for its high security.

The world has recoiled from this predictable spectacle in equally predictable outrage. European countries, led by Germany, have demanded Navalny’s release. Even the U.S. State Department, which was embarrassingly slow to react to Navalny’s poisoning, issued a statement denouncing the arrest. Putin has been the object of similar outrage before. Still, he held Khodorkovsky for ten years, releasing him only in a last-minute bid to get President Obama and other world leaders to come to the Olympic Games in Sochi (it was too late). There is nothing to prevent him from ordering the indefinite arrest of Navalny. Putin is, likely, not as scared of mass protest as he once was: he has watched Alexander Lukashenka, in neighboring Belarus, remain in power as he cracked down on protests that were bigger and more sustained than Russia has ever seen.

But there is another lesson from Belarus that ought to haunt Putin. There, after Lukashenka arrested his leading opponents, the women, whom he had never taken seriously, became leaders. Belarusians united behind Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the wife of the jailed Presidential contender Siarhei Tsikhanouski. Yulia Navalnaya is already widely admired in Russia; many Russians remember seeing photographs of the Navalnys embracing in the summer of 2013, when Navalny was released after one day of his aborted prison sentence. Many more watched as Yulia Navalnaya fought to have her husband airlifted out of Russia and followed Alexey’s posts of gratitude on social media after he emerged from his coma. Millions have now seen the Navalnys kiss goodbye.

Navalny’s superpower has been his ability to show people what they had always known about the Putin regime but had the option of pretending away. He has shown the depth of the regime’s corruption. He has shown that Putin’s secret police carries out murders. With his return to Russia, he has shown the regime’s utter lack of imagination and inability to plan ahead. He has also shown that, contrary to the Kremlin’s assertions and to conventional wisdom among Western Russia-watchers, there is an alternative to Putin. Politically, Navalny was not a candidate who could have unified Russia a few years ago—he has a history of espousing nationalist views that made much of the intelligentsia wary of him. But he has shown that the alternative to Putin is courage, integrity, and love. The name of Russia’s next leader is almost certainly Navalny, or Navalnaya.