 "Do not recognise these elections (Russia's presidential polls in March. A president who assassinated his main political opponent cannot be legitimate by definition, says Yulia Navalnaya, Wife of Aleksei Navalny")
By Neil MacFarquhar
It was August 2020, and Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of Russia’s most famous opposition leader, was striding through the battered, gloomy hallways of a provincial Russian hospital, looking for the room where her husband lay in a coma.
Aleksei A Navalny had collapsed after being given what German medical investigators would later declare was a near-fatal dose of the nerve agent Novichok, and his wife, blocked by menacing policemen from moving around the hospital, turned to a cellphone camera held by one of his aides.
“We demand the immediate release of Aleksei, because right now in this hospital there are more police and government agents than doctors,” she said calmly in a riveting moment later included in an Oscar-winning documentary, “Navalny.”
There was another such moment on Monday, when under even more tragic circumstances, Navalnaya faced a camera three days after the Russian government announced that her husband had died in a brutal Arctic maximum-security penal colony. His widow blamed President Vladimir V. Putin for the death and announced that she was taking up her husband’s cause, calling on Russians to join her.
“In killing Aleksei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul,” Navalnaya said in a short, prerecorded speech posted on social media. “But I have another half left — and it is telling me I have no right to give up.” For more than two decades, Navalnaya has shunned any open political role for herself, saying that her purpose in life was to support her husband and to protect their two children. “I see my task is that nothing changes in our family: The children were children, and the home is a home,” she said in a rare interview in 2021 with the Russian edition of Harper’s Bazaar. That changed on Monday.
Navalnaya faces a distinct challenge in trying to rally a disheartened opposition movement from abroad, with hundreds of thousands of its adherents driven into exile by an increasingly repressive Kremlin that has responded to any criticism of its invasion of Ukraine two years ago with harsh jail sentences. Her husband’s political movement and his foundation, which exposed corruption in high places, were declared extremist organisations in 2021 and barred from operating in Russia.
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While not dismissing the difficulties, friends and associates believe that Navalnaya, 47, has a shot at succeeding through what they call her combination of intelligence, poise, steely determination, resilience, pragmatism and star power.
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