HE WAS JUST an ordinary fellow. Nothing remarkable about him. He was Everyman, every Russian; one of the hundreds of thousands whose voices were usually stifled and whose very existence the Kremlin ignored. When he made a speech, he didn’t fill it with literary quotes or references to history. He liked to sit down with people and talk about what worried them: health care, schools, potholed roads, the price of bread. He was no philosopher, just a jobbing lawyer, turned obsessive blogger, turned leading opponent of Vladimir Putin and his regime of crooks and thieves. Or rather, crooks, thieves and murderers. He resisted everything they stood for: corruption, cronyism, greed, moral rot. For that opposition he knew he would be endlessly harassed, imprisoned and silenced. Killed, possibly. But Alexei Navalny was not afraid of death. He often talked as if he had died already, and got over it.

He almost had. In August 2020, on a campaign flight in Siberia, he fell into a coma when his clothes were smeared with Novichok, a nerve agent developed by the Russian army. The regional hospital could not treat him so he was flown to Berlin. When, after five months, he recovered and flew home, he was immediately arrested and sent to jail on ludicrous charges. But he got his revenge on “Vladimir the Poisoner of Underpants”. Two days after his arrest his team released a two-hour film of Putin’s secret palace on the Black Sea, with its helipads, domed private church, gold loo-brushes and pole-dancing stage. He didn’t need to make a speech about it. The film said it all.

The palace had been filmed by a drone launched from an inflatable boat, like something in a thriller movie. Hollywood’s dramas regularly seemed to reflect his own. He learned a lot from films and TV series: everything he knew about politics, for example, came from watching “The Wire” and “The West Wing”. His own career was one big reality show, in which fighting the authorities was fun. And it was science fiction, his great love, with unpredictable thugs in a weird, menacing universe. His poisoning was like that bit in “Alien”, the Putin-monster revealing its true horror as it sprang out of the egg. In detention afterwards, posting busily on Instagram with the help of his lawyers, he fancied himself in the cabin of a spaceship voyaging to some new world. His android guards might stop him, or asteroids might blast the ship entirely, but there was a good chance he could hop briskly through.

Through to where? To the wonderful Russia of the future: free, democratic, not threatening anyone, capitalist without the crap. And, yes, happy. He had supported Boris Yeltsin’s mass privatisations, but the rise of the oligarchs so discredited both capitalism and liberalism that he felt his dream had died. Persuading ordinary Russians to want them again—to realise that they had never actually known them—was hard. He persevered because he was proud of Russia and what he believed it could be. He even supported the Chechen war because he thought it would bring order, and wanted to rescue patriotism from fascists and ultra-radicals. At base he just hoped his nation could be normal, like other European countries, not run by kleptocrats, yet different and special for its culture, its history and its weight in the world. That balance would take some fighting for.

He had not always been such a fighter. The failings and malevolence of the Soviet system had dawned on him only slowly. As a child he queued endlessly for milk and dreamed of chewing gum. Summers were spent with his grandparents on the outskirts of Chernobyl; after the nuclear accident, local people were ordered to dig up potatoes from the radioactive dust to promote the government lie that everything was under control. Some of his relatives died. Later, he liked a punk band called Civil Defence; their lead singer, who sang of furious rebellion, was sent by the KGB to a psychiatric clinic. His brief dream of liberalism when the Soviet regime fell was soon hijacked by gangsters. Still he lingered on the sidelines until, in 2000, Putin became president. Recognising cynicism and contempt when he saw them, he went eagerly into politics to campaign against the draining of his country.

He joined Yabloko, the oldest liberal party, but soon found he was an outsider, in part due to his nationalist streak. He participated in marches that also attracted nasty ultranationalists, and made ill-advised xenophobic videos (that he later came to regret). But he also began to work at the regional grassroots, mobilising voiceless citizens, chipping at corruption and injustice in a hundred little ways. He bought shares in some of Russia’s largest state-run companies, then went to their AGMs and grilled the thieving management. Through a clutch of anti-corruption websites, later brought together as his main political machine, he encouraged people to demand road repairs (“Russian Pothole”), monitor public procurement (“Russian Kickbacks”) and report election violations.

He set up 40 offices across the country’s 11 time zones, from Kaliningrad on the Baltic to Khabarovsk on the Chinese frontier. His ceaseless blogging revealed the graft that underpinned the government. NavalnyLive streamed his doings on YouTube. On social media he sent out ringing calls to people of all persuasions—Martians even—to come out and protest. From the rigged election of 2011 onwards, in ever-bigger numbers, they did. The regime mocked him as an internet hamster; so he was. He ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013, picking up 27% of the vote despite facing trumped-up embezzlement charges at the same time. Fearing his growing power, in 2017 the Kremlin barred him from running for the presidency, but through his YouTube presence he controlled the political narrative. The internet hamster would bite the throats of those bastards.

After his homecoming-arrest in 2021 there was a swift rigged trial, held in a police station. He was found guilty, of course, but at least he could address the court. He relived the climax of one of his favourite films, “Brat 2” (Brother 2), in which the charismatic hero Danila, a veteran of the Chechen war, confronted an American racketeer who had caused the death of his friend. “Tell me,” he shouted, “where does power lie? I believe that power lies in the truth.” Ordinary as this prisoner looked, unassuming, the words rang through the court as if he was addressing a fired-up multitude. He knew he was.

From his cell he called on Russians to take to the streets after Putin openly invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Deep down, he believed a version of the same story of Slavic brotherhood as Putin: that Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians are one people. He was himself, after all, the son of a Ukrainian father and a Russian mother. After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 he had infuriated Ukrainians by saying he would not return the peninsula as president, despite the blatant illegality of the annexation. “Is Crimea a bologna sandwich, or something, to be passed back and forth?” he answered an interviewer. “I don’t think so.” Yet that never meant countenancing war, much less a war of aggression, as he put it, “built on lies.”

Putin’s goons invented more cases against him, tacking on another 19 years to his sentence for “extremism”. They sent him to a modern-day gulag. In December his lawyers lost contact with him for several weeks, only to find him at a remote facility in Yamal-Nenets, above the Arctic Circle.

Even the isolation chambers of such frigid prisons could not silence him or sap his strength. In letters he joked with his beloved wife, Yulia. At court appearances he appeared by video link and needled judges, prosecutors and prison guards. During one session this month he urged them to vote against Putin in Russia’s upcoming elections. In social-media posts he made light of conditions designed to break him. His winter walks in the Yamal prison yard, he quipped, reminded him of Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Revenant” hiding inside a dead horse. “Here you need an elephant,” he wrote. “A hot or even roasted elephant.”

He never regretted his decision to return, though his cellmates and guards asked about it constantly. He told them he had convictions: he would not give up on his ideas or his country. He told his supporters not to give up either. “The Putinist state cannot last,” he wrote in January, on the third anniversary of his return to Russia. “One day we’ll look over, and he will be gone.” ■