A stunned Russian opposition in exile is considering a future without Navalny

The death of Alexei A. Navalny, Russia's main opposition leader, has stunned Russian dissidents. But it also raises some hope that the opposition to President Vladimir V. Putin will be able to unite like never before in this desperate moment.

That will be a challenge, given the often hands-off approach of Mr. Navalny's movement and the disparate gathering of other leading Russian opposition figures: almost all in exile, and none with his broad national appeal.

Among them is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oligarch who fell out with Putin, spent 10 years in prison and became one of his most prominent opponents in exile in London. Then there's Maxim Katz, a YouTube influencer and former poker champion who lives in Israel. There is also Ilya Yashin, a veteran liberal politician serving an eight-year prison sentence for exposing Russian atrocities in Ukraine.

In addition to these figures who seek to speak for all of Russia, there are a plethora of small anti-war groups that focus on particular Russian regions, social issues, or ethnic minorities. Some of their demands – such as a reckoning with Russia's imperial history – have clashed with the more conservative stance of Mr Navalny, who had flirted with Russian nationalism to gain a wider following.

Many operate their own YouTube channels, or use other social media such as Telegram and podcasts, to broadcast their messages to millions of viewers in Russia, even as the Kremlin has tightened its control over information.

But Mr. Navalny will loom over them all, even after his death Friday in a Russian prison. According to his team, Mr Navalny's family had still not been able to locate his body as of Sunday.

During his decades-long political career, Mr. Navalny built an unprecedented network of nationwide activist cells, social media outlets and international allies, making him the face of the opposition to Mr. Putin. A team of skilled lieutenants transplanted this exile network to Vilnius, Lithuania, following Mr. Navalny's capture in 2021.

“All of us in the opposition are not sure what to do next and how,” said 39-year-old Katz. “The entire life of the opposition has always revolved around Navalny, so now it is completely unclear what will happen. ”

Some of Mr. Navalny's lieutenants, mostly in their 30s, have become political players in their own right, with a chance to shape the future direction of the late leader's movement. There is Leonid Volkov, a skilled political organizer who had overseen Mr. Navalny's network abroad, and Kira Yarmysh, Mr. Navalny's press secretary.

Mr Navalny's death has also drawn attention to his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, 47. Her powerful speech to Western leaders in Munich after the news of her husband's death on Friday raised speculation that she too have a political future.

Navalny's team acknowledged Saturday that their sprawling organization would need to be restructured to adapt to the loss of their leader. But they gave little indication of the political direction they might take, beyond promising to continue Mr. Navalny's mission.

“We should undergo some changes,” Ms. Yarmysh, the spokeswoman, told an independent Russian news program on YouTube. “We are all very aware of that.”

Ms Yarmysh said she had no immediate comment for this article. Two other senior aides to Mr Navalny declined to comment.

Mr. Navalny and later his team have long justified their decision to go it alone by saying that the time and effort spent managing political alliances would be better spent confronting Mr. Putin directly.

“I will be direct: go to hell with your coalitions,” Mr Navalny said wrote last year in response to Mr. Katz's call for an electoral alliance on his website. “This is imitation of activity. A fake.”

Mr. Katz often sparred with Mr. Navalny's team on social media. Other dissidents said such arguments diluted the opposition's impact and kept it divided.

Now, after Mr. Navalny's death, his allies, as well as the broader Russian dissident movement, are looking for a new strategy to oppose Mr. Putin.

From Vilnius, Mr. Navalny's organization runs online news outlets, research channels and activist groups that continue to set the agenda for the broader opposition movement.

Their main tool is YouTube, the last major Western social media platform allowed into the country and the main source of information for millions of Russians.

Mr Navalny's main YouTube channel, maintained by his staff, has more than six million subscribers. The organization's news channel, Popular Politics, which was founded after the invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022 to counter government propaganda, has more than two million people. Last year, Popular Politics increased its broadcast count to about 30 hours per week and nearly doubled its staff to 130.

In general, Mr. Navalny's team's broadcasts attempt to walk the line between political campaigning and news, a format used by dozens of opposition politicians, civil society leaders and independent media groups trying to remain part of the conversation in Russia.

According to data from YouTube Analytics, a YouTube channel owned by Mr. Katz has attracted nearly 10 million unique visitors in the past three months. Nearly 60 percent of them came from Russia.

In turn, Khodorkovsky's greatly reduced wealth still allows him to sponsor a network of online news channels that target different sectors of the Russian public.

Mr. Katz said the success of a social media campaign launched from abroad to help an established anti-war candidate, Boris B. Nadezhdin, collect the required signatures for the March presidential election has shown that it is possible continues to create political impact. in Russia from exile. (The government-controlled election body later challenged some of those signatures, most likely ending Mr. Nadezhdin's election campaign.)

a last year's report by JX Fund, a research group focused on freedom of expression, estimated that Russian independent media reached 6 to 9 percent of Russia's adult population, a significant number given the pervasiveness of state propaganda and repression in the country.

Some figures in Russia's broader opposition movement expressed cautious hope for a more inclusive political alliance against Putin that would continue Navalny's legacy.

“I have always called for a coalition, partly because I knew how vulnerable individual opposition leaders are,” Khodorkovsky said. “A coalition is much more stable as a system, because when one person is gone, others remain and new ones appear.”

His views were echoed by Maxim Reznik, a former regional lawmaker from St. Petersburg, Russia, who continues to work on local politics from exile in Vilnius.

“I have always thought that their isolationist position is not the right one,” Mr. Reznik said of Mr. Navalny’s organization. “Aleksei cannot be replaced, but we need a cooperation mechanism.”

The opposition's initial reaction to Navalny's death points toward greater unity, at least for now. A unifying cause centered on a ballot initiative endorsed by Mr. Navalny on social media on February 1, in one of his last public statements.

The initiative, initially proposed by Mr Reznik, calls on Russian voters to go to the polls at noon on March 17, a vote Mr Putin will almost certainly win.

Mr Reznik said the initiative, which is essentially a political flash mob, is the safest way to express discontent in a country where any protest carries a prison sentence.

“We want to show that the emperor has no clothes,” Mr. Reznik said.

After Mr Navalny's death, almost all prominent opposition figures had expressed support for the afternoon vote.

'This dragon, this beast, has destroyed everyone – it has killed our Lancelot, our hero. The question now is only about us,” Mr Reznik said, referring to the Russian government. “Either we come out and show the world that Russians are not slaves to the regime, or we are not.”

“And I really fear the second scenario,” he added.

Ivan Nechepurenko, Neil MacFarquhar And Anton Trojanovsky reporting contributed. Oleg Matsnev research contributed.