Alexei Navalny

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexei Navalny boarded a flight from Tomsk to Moscow on the 20th of August 2020 having consumed, by his spokeswoman's account, nothing that morning but a cup of tea purchased at the airport. Within minutes he was screaming aboard the plane. Video footage showed crew members rushing toward him. Later, from a hospital bed, he clarified that he was not screaming from pain. He was screaming because he knew he was dying.

  Navalny was born on the 4th of June 1976 in Butyn, a small rural locality in the Moscow Oblast, and he died on the 16th of February 2024 in an Arctic Circle corrective colony. Between those two dates he built the most consequential opposition movement Russia had seen in a generation, exposed billions of rubles in alleged state corruption, stood for election, survived a Novichok poisoning, and was imprisoned on what Amnesty International called politically motivated charges. The questions this documentary will explore are not simply what he did, but how the Russian state responded to him at every turn, and what that response reveals about the country he set out to change.

• 2. Roots and Education

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  Anatoly Ivanovich Navalny, Alexei's father, was born in 1947 in Zalissia, a Ukrainian village near the Belarus-Ukraine border. The village was later relocated because of nuclear contamination caused by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Alexei spent his summers there with his paternal grandparents until the age of eight, acquiring proficiency in Ukrainian. Navalny identified as half Russian and half Ukrainian, and in his posthumously published memoir, Patriot, he described being asked which identity he felt more strongly as "like being asked who you loved more, your mother or your father."

  He grew up in Obninsk, in Kaluga Oblast, and graduated from Peoples' Friendship University of Russia in 1998 with a law degree. He then studied securities and exchanges at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, graduating in 2001. In 2010, upon recommendation from Garry Kasparov, Yevgeniya Albats, and Sergey Guriev, Navalny received a scholarship to the Yale World Fellows program, where he studied political science and world affairs. His parents, Anatoly and Lyudmila, privately own a basket-weaving factory in the village of Kobyakovo, Vologda Oblast, which they have run since 1994. That factory would later appear, in distorted form, in criminal charges that Navalny's supporters called a frame-up.

• 3. The Anti-Corruption Machine

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  In 2008, Navalny invested 300,000 rubles of his own money to become an activist shareholder in five Russian oil and gas companies, including Rosneft, Gazprom, and Lukoil. His stated goal was transparency, which Russian law required but which he argued company management was systematically resisting. That was only the beginning.

  In November 2010, Navalny published confidential documents about the auditing of Transneft, a state pipeline monopoly. His blog alleged that about four billion US dollars had been stolen by the company's leadership during the construction of the Eastern Siberia-Pacific Ocean oil pipeline. The following month he launched RosPil, a project that crowdsourced scrutiny of government procurement tenders, exploiting a law that required winning bids to be posted online. The name was a pun on the Russian slang term for embezzling state funds.

  In August 2011, he published papers about a real estate deal between the Hungarian and Russian governments. According to those documents, Hungary had sold a former embassy building in Moscow for 21 million US dollars to an offshore company belonging to Viktor Vekselberg, who immediately resold it to the Russian government for 116 million dollars. The property's estimated real value was 52 million dollars. Three Hungarian officials involved in the deal had been detained in February of that year.

  In March 2017, Navalny published an investigation titled He Is Not Dimon to You, accusing Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of corruption. Russian authorities either ignored the accusation or dismissed it as the work of a convicted criminal. On the 26th of March, Navalny organised rallies across Russia in response. In Moscow alone, the human-rights group OVD-Info reported that 1,030 people were detained, including Navalny himself, who was fined 20,000 rubles and jailed for 15 days.

  The investigation into what Navalny called the world's biggest bribe came in January 2021, two days after his detention on return to Russia. The FBK published findings accusing President Vladimir Putin of using fraudulently obtained funds to build an estate near Gelendzhik in Krasnodar Krai. Navalny described the estate as 39 times the size of Monaco, with the Federal Security Service owning 70 square kilometers of land around it and the cost of construction exceeding 100 billion rubles. The video garnered more than 20 million views on YouTube in less than a day, and over 92 million within a week.

• 4. The Politician

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  Navalny joined the Russian United Democratic Party Yabloko in 2000, after a new law raised the electoral threshold for State Duma elections in ways he saw as stacked against smaller parties. By April 2004 he had risen to Chief of Staff of the Moscow branch, a post he held until February 2007. He was expelled from the party in December 2007, after openly demanding the resignation of party chairman Grigory Yavlinsky and calling for at least 70 percent of the bureau to be re-elected. In a speech at the party bureau, he said "Yabloko has collapsed because it has turned itself to a sect."

  His 2013 run for Moscow mayor became an unlikely showcase of grassroots mobilisation. His campaign raised 103.4 million rubles in total, of which 97.3 million came from individuals across Russia, an amount described as unprecedented in Russian politics. Around 20,000 volunteers distributed leaflets and hung banners. The New Yorker called the campaign "a miracle." Navalny won 27.2 percent of the vote, far more than the 15-20 percent the major polling organisations had predicted, though the incumbent Sergey Sobyanin won with 51 percent.

  In 2016, Navalny announced his candidacy for the 2018 presidential election. Russia's Central Electoral Commission barred him in December 2017, citing his corruption conviction. The European Union said the removal cast serious doubt on the legitimacy of the election. Navalny called for a boycott, stating that millions of Russians were being denied their vote. His appeal to the Supreme Court was rejected on the 6th of January 2018. On the day of protests he organised in late January, OVD-Info reported that 257 people were arrested across the country.

• 5. Novichok

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  The plane that carried Navalny from Tomsk made an emergency landing in Omsk on the 20th of August 2020. He was taken to Emergency City Clinical Hospital No. 1, where physicians initially acknowledged he had probably been poisoned, then grew less forthcoming after numerous police personnel appeared outside his room. A German evacuation flight was eventually permitted, and on the 24th of August doctors at the Charité Hospital in Berlin confirmed he had been poisoned with a cholinesterase inhibitor.

  On the 2nd of September, the German government identified the substance as a Novichok nerve agent, from the same family used to poison Sergei Skripal and his daughter. On the 6th of October, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirmed the presence of a cholinesterase inhibitor from the Novichok group in Navalny's blood and urine samples. On the 17th of September, Navalny's team reported that traces of the nerve agent had been found on an empty water bottle from his hotel room in Tomsk, suggesting he was poisoned before he even boarded the plane.

  On the 14th of December, a joint investigation by The Insider and Bellingcat, in cooperation with CNN and Der Spiegel, identified agents from Russia's Federal Security Service as responsible. The investigation described a specialised FSB unit focused on chemical substances and found that Navalny had been under surveillance by a group of operatives from that unit for three years, with possible earlier poisoning attempts. In December 2020, Navalny released a video in which he impersonated a Russian security official and spoke by phone with a man identified as chemical weapons expert Konstantin Kudryavtsev. During the call, Kudryavtsev revealed that the poison had been applied to Navalny's clothing, specifically his underwear, and that Navalny survived only because of the plane's emergency landing and the speed of the ambulance response on the runway.

• 6. Imprisonment and Death

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  Navalny flew back to Russia from Germany on the 17th of January 2021 on Pobeda airlines flight DP936. The flight was scheduled to land at Vnukovo Airport but was diverted mid-flight to Sheremetyevo, where he was detained at passport control. A court on the 2nd of February replaced his three-and-a-half-year suspended sentence with a prison term in a corrective labour colony, crediting only a portion of his time under house arrest.

  At the Pokrov correctional colony in Vladimir Oblast, Navalny reported that guards woke him eight times a night to announce his presence on camera, which he described in a formal complaint as torture by sleep deprivation. His lawyers reported two spinal disc herniations and loss of sensation in his hands. Blood tests obtained by his lawyers showed potassium levels of 7.1 mmol per liter, above the threshold of 6.0 mmol per liter that usually requires immediate treatment, and sharply elevated creatinine, indicating impaired kidney function. On the 31st of March 2021, Navalny announced a hunger strike to demand proper medical treatment. His personal physician, Anastasia Vasilyeva, and a cardiologist named Yaroslav Ashikhmin stated on social media that "our patient can die any minute."

  In March 2022, he received an additional nine-year sentence on embezzlement and contempt of court charges that Amnesty International described as a sham trial. In August 2023, a court added another 19 years on extremism charges. In December 2023, Navalny went missing from the prison system for nearly three weeks before reappearing at a corrective colony in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, inside the Arctic Circle. On the 16th of February 2024, the Russian prison service reported that he had died. He was 47 years old. His memoir, Patriot, was published posthumously.

• 7. The Legal Machinery

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  The Kirovles case, first charged in 2012, accused Navalny of conspiring to steal timber from a state-owned company in Kirov Oblast while serving as an adviser to the regional governor. Investigators had previously closed a probe into the same allegations for lack of evidence. On the 18th of July 2013, judge Sergey Blinov sentenced Navalny to five years, identical in text to the prosecution's request except that Navalny received five years where the prosecution had sought six.

  On the 23rd of February 2016, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia had violated Navalny's right to a fair trial in the Kirovles case and ordered the government to pay him 56,000 euros in legal costs and damages. Russia's Supreme Court overturned the 2013 sentence, but in February 2017 the Leninsky district court of Kirov simply re-issued the same verdict with the same sentence, prompting Navalny to announce he would pursue its annulment.

  The Yves Rocher case arose from a commercial freight arrangement his brother Oleg had made with the Eastern European subsidiary of the French cosmetics company between 2008 and 2012. On the 30th of December 2014, both brothers were found guilty of fraud and money laundering. Alexei received a three-year suspended sentence. Oleg was sentenced to three years in prison and arrested immediately. In October 2017, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the conviction was based on an unforeseeable application of criminal law and that the proceedings were arbitrary and unfair, a finding the Grand Chamber upheld in November 2018. By April 2019, Navalny had won six complaints against Russian authorities in the ECHR for a total of 225,000 euros, a running tally that the Russian government showed no sign of treating as binding.