Wife, protector and now political heir: Yulia Navalnaya calls out the Russians

It was August 2020, and Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of Russia's most famous opposition leader, strode through the battered, gloomy corridors of a Russian provincial hospital, searching for the room where her husband lay in a coma.

Aleksei A. Navalny had collapsed after receiving what German medical examiners would later declare was a near-fatal dose of the nerve agent Novichok, and his wife, blocked from moving around the hospital by menacing police officers, turned to a mobile phone camera held by one of them. of his assistants.

“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 Mrs. Navalnaya stood in front of the camera, under even more tragic circumstances, three days after the Russian government announced that her husband had died in a brutal, high-security penal colony in the Arctic. His widow blamed President Vladimir V. Putin for the death and announced that she was taking up her husband's cause and calling on Russians to join her.

“By killing Aleksei, Putin has killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul,” Ms Navalnaya said in a short, pre-recorded speech on social media. “But I still have half left – and that tells me I have no right to give up.”

For more than two decades, Ms. Navalnaya has shunned any overt political role for herself. She says her purpose in life is to support her husband and protect their two children. “I see that my task is that nothing changes in our family: the children were children and the house is a home,” she said in 2021 in a rare interview with the Russian edition of Harper's Bazaar.

That changed on Monday.

Ms Navalnaya faces a clear challenge in rallying a dispirited opposition movement from abroad, with hundreds of thousands of supporters driven into exile by an increasingly repressive Kremlin that has responded to any criticism of its invasion of Ukraine two years ago with harsh prison sentences. phrases. Her husband's political movement and his foundation, which exposed corruption in high positions, were declared extremist organizations in 2021 and banned from operating in Russia.

While not dismissing the difficulties, friends and colleagues believe Ms. Navalnaya, 47, has a chance to succeed because of what they call her combination of intelligence, poise, steely determination, resilience, pragmatism and star power.

She is also – unusually – a prominent female figure in a country where well-known women in politics are a rarity, despite their many achievements in other fields. Beyond the broad moral authority she gained from her husband's death, analysts say, she could benefit from a generational divide in Russia, where younger, post-Soviet Russians are more accepting of gender equality.

As soon as Ms Navalnaya made her statement on Monday, Russia's state propaganda machine sprang into action, trying to portray her as a tool of Western intelligence services and as someone who frequented celebrity resorts and parties.

Ms. Navalnaya was born in Moscow to a middle-class family; her mother worked for a ministry while her father worked at a research institute. Her parents divorced early and her father died when she was 18. She earned a degree in international relations, then worked briefly at a bank before meeting Aleksei in 1998 and marrying him in 2000. Both were Russian Orthodox Christians.

A daughter, Daria, now a student in California, was born in 2001 and a son, Zakhar, in 2008. He attends school in Germany, where Ms. Navalnaya lives.

Even though she was not openly political, Mrs. Navalnaya was always at her husband's side. She was with him at demonstrations and during his many trials and prison sentences. She was with him again during his campaign for mayor of Moscow in 2013, and in 2017, when an attack with a green chemical dye nearly blinded him in one eye.

In 2020, when Mr Navalny was poisoned, she publicly demanded from Mr Putin that her husband be evacuated to Germany by air ambulance, and during his 18 days in a coma she stayed by his side, talking to him and playing favorite songs. like Duran Duran's 'Perfect Day'. “Yulia, you saved me,” he wrote on social media after regaining consciousness.

Ms. Navalnaya herself suffered a poisoning attempt in Kaliningrad a few months earlier that was certainly intended for him, friends said, but she did not think about it.

Although she had many occasions to cry, Ms Navalnaya said in a 2021 interview with a popular YouTube channel that she always struggled to maintain her composure in public, not least to avoid giving Russian government officials the satisfaction . “It shouldn't let us down,” she said. “They want it to bring us down.”

Friends and associates described her as Mr. Navalny's protector, his sounding board, the shoulder he cried on and his closest adviser.

“The politician Aleksei Navalny was actually always two people: Yulia and Aleksei,” says Yevgenia Albats, a prominent Russian journalist now at Harvard University. Tall, attractive and with their strong bond clearly visible in public, “they always looked like a Hollywood couple,” says Mikhail Zygar, a Russian journalist and historian.

Mr Navalny was known for his public spats with politicians, journalists and others, and his wife is known to have sharply reprimanded those who attacked him. But overall, she has much less political baggage and so has a better chance of cooperating with Russia's notoriously fractious opposition, Mr. Zygar said.

Ms Navalnaya has been compared to other women who have picked up political battle flags from slain or imprisoned husbands. They include Corazon Aquino, whose husband was shot as he disembarked from exile in the Philippines in 1983; She then defeated the entrenched, despotic President Ferdinand Marcos. There is also Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who led the opposition in the 2020 presidential election in Russia's neighboring Belarus after her husband was imprisoned. She herself was forced into exile.

Ultimately, analysts suggested that a “normal person” with moral authority could succeed where a professional politician could not.

“She wants to complete the task that Alexei tragically left unfinished: to make Russia a free, democratic, peaceful and prosperous country,” said Sergei Guriev, a family friend and a prominent Russian economist who is provost of the Paris Institute for Political Studies . . “She will also show Putin that removing Aleksei will not destroy his cause.”

Milana Mazaeva And Alina Lobzina reporting contributed.