Navalny’s heirs are seeking a political future in Russia

Aleksei A. Navalny built Russia’s largest opposition force in his image and embodied a freer and fairer Russia for millions of people. His exiled team now faces the daunting task of steering his political movement without him.

The movement has found a leader in Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who has presented herself as the new face of the opposition to President Vladimir V. Putin. Ms Navalnaya, 47, is assisted by a close-knit team of her husband’s lieutenants, who took over Mr Navalny’s political network after his 2021 imprisonment.

It will be a challenge to maintain political momentum. Few dissident movements in modern history have managed to remain relevant, let alone seize power, after the death of a leader who personified it. And so far, Mr. Navalny’s team has made little effort to unite Russia’s divided opposition groups and win new allies by adapting its insular, tightly controlled modus operandi.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Navalny’s team, Kira Yarmysh, did not respond to questions or interview requests; and so did a number of Mr Navalny’s aides.

In their public statements, Navalny’s top aides have said their movement will have to change to continue confronting Putin without his leader, although it is unclear what the new strategy might be.

Even from prison, Mr. Navalny “managed to support us, infect us with optimism, come up with projects, come up with cool political ideas,” Leonid Volkov, Mr. Navalny’s main political organizer, said in a video published on social media last month. “Without Aleksei, things will not be as they were before.”

But, Mr. Volkov added, he had “no concrete action plan.”

Images of thousands of Russians paying their respects to Mr Navalny at the cemetery last week despite the threat of repression have given Ms Navalnaya political momentum. Her ability to channel this momentum into lasting political force will be tested in Russia’s presidential election this month.

It is almost certain that Putin will win his fourth six-year term, in a vote in which there are no real competitors. But to disrupt the government’s narrative of broad support, Mrs. Navalnaya has taken an initiative first supported by her husband. It calls on voters to go to the polling stations at noon on March 17, the last day of the three-day voting.

What voters choose to do once they go to the polls is less important, the initiative’s supporters say, than protesting sham elections by their mere presence.

“We can show that there are many of us and that we are strong,” Ms. Navalnaya said in a video published Wednesday.

By framing the initiative, called Midday Against Putin, as a tribute to Mr Navalny, Ms Navalnaya has presented herself as his political successor.

But betting the political capital of Navalny’s movement on a risky, hard-to-measure display of civil disobedience could also expose the limits of Ms. Navalnaya’s reach.

“If no one comes out, it will change my perception of the country,” said one of the initiative’s authors, Maxim Reznik, a former regional lawmaker from St. Petersburg who lives in exile. “Are people so afraid that this is all so hopeless now?”

After long shunning the public spotlight, Ms. Navalnaya has begun to build her political persona in sharply produced, pointed monologues presented in short YouTube videos, as well as through moving public speeches to Western policymakers.

But she avoided giving interviews to news media or going off script at other public events.

She is supported by a team that includes Mr Volkov and about four other people who were senior aides to Mr Navalny. Most are in their 30s and have worked with Mr Navalny for years as he challenged the government.

After the government labeled Mr. Navalny’s movement as an extremist in 2021, his team moved its operations to Vilnius, Lithuania, due to its proximity to Russia and physical security. At least seven people who stayed behind and had worked for Mr Navalny as activists or lawyers have since been jailed in Russia.

In Vilnius, Mr. Navalny’s team has set up a warren of offices, conference rooms and broadcasting studios in a central office building as the headquarters of his political organization. the Anti-Corruption Foundation.

The team oversees dozens of researchers, activists, and media professionals who promote various political initiatives within Russia, investigate corruption within the Russian government, and broadcast YouTube videos that attract millions of viewers in Russia every month. The movement also claims to have thousands of underground volunteers in Russia.

In Vilnius, Navalny’s supporters have largely isolated themselves from a broader community of Russian dissidents who moved to the Lithuanian capital after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

They also maintain a close relationship with Lithuania’s government, which staunchly opposes Mr. Putin but views the citizens of Russia, a former occupying power, with some suspicion, according to two Lithuanian officials who discussed the policy on condition of anonymity.

Mr. Navalny’s team has not asked the Lithuanian state for financial support and has kept its distance from the country’s security services, the officials said. They explained this attitude as their desire to maintain their independence and protect themselves from the Russian government.

Mr Navalny’s team does not disclose how it pays for its activities. The last financial report, published in 2021, showed that their movement covered three-quarters of its expenses that year with money from individual donations.

For Navalny’s supporters, his aides’ emphasis on self-sufficiency stems from years of politicking in a repressive state bent on destroying them. They combined the latest internet technologies with local shoe leather activism, resulting in a movement that combines elements of a tech start-up with a 19th-century revolutionary cell.

But even some of their associates privately admit that the Navalny team’s insularity, confidence in their technical capabilities and certainty in their actions could cost them a unique opportunity to build a broader, more inclusive political movement building that outlives the founder.

Mr Navalny has long towered over the rest of the Russian opposition. He received 27 percent of the vote when he ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013, the only election in which he was allowed to participate. That result, his supporters say, was enough to prompt the government to accelerate a campaign against Mr. Navalny that culminated in his death in prison on February 16.

Mr Navalny’s team has long avoided the news media, preferring to broadcast its message through social media channels, including television-style news programmes.

After Mr. Navalny’s death, some of his aides gave interviews to Russian journalists seen as sympathetic to their cause, but they have avoided speaking to the international news media.

The limits of the team’s go-it-alone strategy were on display in Vilnius at a rally outside the Russian embassy to commemorate Mr Navalny’s death. Other opposition activists in the city said Mr. Navalny’s aides did not externally publicize the meeting, and that it attracted a few dozen people.

Mr. Navalny, and later his team, long justified his aversion to political alliances by saying his time and effort would be better spent on political activism. His unparalleled political network within Russia has meant that his team needs such alliances far less than the rest of the country’s opposition.

An outpouring of condolences to Mr Navalny from across Russia’s opposition had raised hopes that his successors would try a more inclusive approach. Still, Navalny’s team quickly resumed bickering with his critics.

“Just leave,” a director of Mr Navalny’s investigation team, Ivan Zhdanov, said wrote to a prominent opposition blogger, Maxim Katz, last week in a heated exchange of messages on social media about Mr. Navalny’s funeral.

Ms. Navalnaya attacked an opposition politician, Boris B. Nadezhdin, after he suggested that people can have different, even negative views of Mr. Navalny but still support his right to a dignified burial.

“Aleksei was a hero,” Ms. Navalnaya wrote in response to Mr. Nadezhdin, who was barred from running against Mr. Putin in the March election. “I will not allow you to ‘have different opinions about him’.”

Alina Lobzina And Tomas Dapkus contributed reporting from Vilnius, and Neil MacFarquhar From New York.