Navalny's death shocked the world, but will it fuel opposition to Putin?

In Munich, world leaders were left hollow-eyed and their annual security conference suddenly turned into a vigil. In London, demonstrators projected a giant image of Aleksei A. Navalny onto the facade of the Russian embassy. In Washington, an angry President Biden called a press conference to declare: “Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny's death.”

Rarely has the death of a single man caused such a cascade of grief, anger and demands for justice.

While many feared the worst for Mr Navalny when he returned to Russia from Germany in early 2021, where he had recovered from his poisoning, the news that he was gone still came with a thunderclap. Governments, no matter how cruel and repressive they may be, often spare dissidents, if only to avoid creating martyrs.

During his lifetime, Mr. Navalny was often compared to Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid leader who languished in prison for 27 years before emerging to lead a democratic South Africa. After his death, Mr. Navalny now draws comparisons to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader who fought for racial justice and whose assassination in 1968 was a catalyst for America.

Whether Mr. Navalny's death will reverberate through the centuries like Dr. King, is of course not yet clear. Even the circumstances are still shrouded in mystery, with only a cryptic report from a remote Arctic penal colony saying the 47-year-old 'prisoner' had collapsed after a walk. His family did not receive his body and his mother was told that he had died of 'sudden death syndrome' without further explanation.

Much has changed since Mr. Navalny began his career more than a decade ago as an opposition politician, a charismatic figure who appealed to Moscow's restless middle-class residents and used social media to expose corruption in President Vladimir V.'s Russia. to counter Putin.

Putin's troops are back on the march in neighboring Ukraine, buoyed by their victory in the key city of Avdiivka. Western leaders in Munich worried about the loss of support for Ukraine among some Republicans in the US Congress. There was no immediate sign that Navalny's death had converted skeptics of military aid.

Efforts to build a truly global coalition against Russia's war never got off the ground, while China, India and Iran continued to do business with Moscow. Last June, South Africa eagerly welcomed Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to a meeting to discuss a new world order no longer dominated by the West.

And yet, as tributes to Mr. Navalny poured in and flowers piled up at memorial sites around the world and in Russia, where police arrested more than 400 people who dared to leave bouquets in the snow, critics of Mr. Putin that Mr Navalny's death could be an exciting moment.

“Aleksei Navalny is a globally recognized and beloved figure who was exterminated by a murderer,” said William F. Browder, an American-born British financier who has campaigned against human rights abuses in Russia. “This is a classic good versus evil story. These kinds of symbols and stories have a resonance that goes far beyond the petty squabbles of the world we live in.”

Mr. Browder cited precedent. After Sergei L. Magnitsky, his lawyer and auditor, died under suspicious circumstances in a Moscow prison cell, he campaigned for countries to pass laws that would blacklist Russia for human rights abuses. The European Union, he said, was among the most reluctant.

But after Mr. Navalny suffered the near-fatal poisoning with a nerve agent in 2020, widely believed to have been carried out by Russian agents, Mr. Browder said sentiment against Moscow hardened. A few months later, the EU adopted the legislation.

Mr. Browder, who compared Mr. Navalny to Dr. King, said he believed his death would make it politically untenable for American lawmakers to be seen as accommodating to Mr. Putin. In the short term, he said, it would also make it harder for at least some Republicans in Congress to block additional military aid to Ukraine.

In Munich, Mr. Browder lobbied Western officials before the conference to pressure Russia for the release of other Russian political prisoners, such as Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was sentenced to 25 years for treason last April. Whether such calls would sway Putin, he acknowledged, was far from clear.

Michael A. McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia who was a friend of Mr. Navalny and has compared him to Mandela, said he too believed the circumstances of his death would change the tone of the debate over Ukraine on Capitol Hill. . He also walked the halls of Munich this past weekend and said the shock was palpable.

“In my interactions with members of Congress, former US officials and European officials, there was no doubt that Navalny's gruesome murder made it that much harder to ignore Putin's brutality,” Mr McFaul said.

In addition to pushing for military aid, Mr. McFaul and others are campaigning for Western governments to use frozen Russian state funds to buy ammunition for Ukraine. Others have said that these funds, estimated at at least $300 billion, should be used to reconstruct the country after the war is over.

Inside Russia, Mr. McFaul said, it was harder to predict the long-term effect of Mr. Navalny's death. Mr. Putin faces less popular resistance than when he started in politics, and he operates in a world that generally does not hold autocrats accountable. Although Mr. Navalny had sympathizers in government and business, Mr. McFaul said, his loss deprives Russia of a Mandela-like figure. In Putin's repressive police state, he will not be easily replaced.

“His whole mission in life was to stay alive, to survive this moment,” Mr McFaul said. 'Now you have to compare him to martyrs, and that is a more difficult story. He was a uniquely charismatic, popular leader of the opposition, but there is no obvious person to take over from him, except perhaps his wife.”

Mr McFaul was with Mr Navalny's widow, Yulia Navalnaya, the night before her husband's death and said they discussed his condition but she had no idea what he was facing. On Friday she took the stage in Munich and conquered world leaders.

“I want Putin and everyone around him – Putin's friends, his government – ​​to know that they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family and to my husband,” said a sad but composed Ms. Navalnaya. . “And this day will come very soon.”

Russia's failure to keep Mr. Navalny alive surprised Mr. McFaul, a veteran Russia expert who teaches at Stanford University. He said he did not expect this, even given the regime's previous attempt to poison him. Others said it signified a new world in which even dissident figures with a global profile could be easily assassinated.

Mr Navalny resisted the label of dissident, preferring to see himself as a politician in the arena, even as a future president of Russia. That was the reason for his decision to return there, despite the near certainty that he would be arrested.

In doing so, Mr. Navalny distinguished himself from Cold War dissidents such as the physicist Andrei Sakharov or the politician Natan Sharansky, who faced persecution and, in Mr. Sharansky's case, imprisonment, and became symbols of courage resistance in the West.

Such figures often had an air of immunity. But today, governments behave with greater impunity, in part because the United States and other Western countries, burdened with their own political struggles, no longer present the united pressure front they did in the 1970s and 1980s.

“It's a marker that tells us how the world has changed,” says Philippe Sands, a British human rights lawyer and writer. “Governments allowed these types of individuals to live. Sometimes they locked them up for years, but they did not let them go. Now they're just getting rid of them.”

“The countries that are doing this,” Mr. Sands added, “are more confident in their ability to do this.”