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

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

Alexei Navalny he had fainted after receiving what German medical researchers would later say was a near-fatal dose of the nerve agent Novichokand his wife, who was prevented from moving around the hospital by threatening police officers, turned to a cellphone camera held by one of his assistants.

“We demand Alexei’s immediate release, because right now there are more police and government agents than doctors in this hospital,” he said calmly in a fascinating moment that was later included in an Oscar-winning documentary, ““Navalny”.

There was another such moment on Monday, when in even more tragic circumstances, Navalnaya found herself in front of a camera three days after the Russian government announced that her husband had died in a brutal maximum security penal colony in the Arctic.

Responsible

His widow blamed the president Vladimir Putin of death and announced that she would support her husband’s cause, asking the Russians to join her.

“By killing Alexei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul,” Navalnaya said in a short pre-recorded speech posted on social media.

“But I have another half left, and that tells me I have no right to give up.”

For more than two decades, Navalnaya has avoided any overt political role for herself, saying her purpose in life was to support her husband and protect her two children.

“My task is that nothing changes in our family: children are children, and the house is a home,” he said in a rare 2021 interview with the Russian edition of Harper’s Bazaar.

The situation changed on Monday.

Navalnaya faces the challenge of trying to mobilize an opposition movement from abroad heartbrokenwith hundreds of thousands of his followers forced into exile by an increasingly repressive Kremlin that responded to any criticism of its invasion of Ukraine two years ago with harsh prison sentences.

Her husband’s political movement and his foundation, which denounced corruption in high places, was declared extremist organizations in 2021 and was banned from operating in Russia.

While they don’t rule out challenges, her friends and associates believe Navalnaya, 47, has a chance to succeed thanks to what they call her combination of intelligence, poise, steely determination, resilience, pragmatism and star power.

Furthermore, she is a prominent female figure in a country where famous women in politics are a rarity, despite her many successes in other fields.

Aside from the broad moral authority she achieved after her husband’s death, analysts say, she may benefit from a generation gap in Russia, where younger post-Soviet Russians are more accepting of the situation. gender equality.

Propaganda

As soon as Navalnaya released her statement on Monday, Russia’s state propaganda machine went into overdrive, trying to paint her as a tool of Western intelligence agencies and as someone who frequented resorts and celebrity parties.

Navalnaya was born in Moscow into a middle-class family: her mother worked in a ministry and her father in a research institute.

Her parents soon divorced and her father died when she was 18.

She majored in international relations and worked briefly in a bank before meeting Navalny in 1998 and marrying him in 2000.

Both were Russian Orthodox Christians.

A daughter, Daria, now studying in California, was born in 2001, and a son, Zakhar, was born in 2008. Zakhar is studying in Germany, where Navalnaya lives.

Although she was not overtly political, Navalnaya was always at her husband’s side.

She was with him at demonstrations and during his numerous court trials and prison sentences.

She was with him again during his campaign for Moscow mayor in 2013, and in 2017, when a green chemical dye attack left him nearly blind in one eye.

In 2020, when Navalny was poisoned, she publicly asked Putin to have her husband evacuated by air ambulance to Germany, and during his 18 days in a coma she remained by his side, talking to him and playing his favorite songs such as ““Perfect day” by Duran Duran.

“Yulia, you saved me,” he wrote on social media after regaining consciousness.

Navalnaya suffered a batting average of poisoning attempt in Kaliningrad a couple of months earlier it was probably addressed to him, her friends said, but she thought nothing of it.

Although she has had many opportunities to cry, Navalnaya said in an interview with a popular YouTube channel in 2021 that she has always struggled to maintain calm in public, among other things to avoid pleasing Russian government officials.

“It shouldn’t depress us,” he said.

“They want us to be depressed.”

Role

Friends and aides have described her as Navalny’s protector, his sounding board, the shoulder he cried on and his closest advisor.

“Politician Alexei Navalny has always been actually two people:

Yulia and Alexei,” said Yevgenia Albats, a prominent Russian journalist now working at Harvard University. Tall, attractive and with their strong bond clearly evident in public, “they always looked like a Hollywood couple,” she said. said Mikhail Zygar, journalist and Russian historian.

Navalny was known for his public disputes with politicians, journalists and others, and his wife was known to harshly rebuke those who attacked him.

But overall, he comes with much less political baggage and therefore has a better chance of overcoming the notoriously fractious Russian opposition. working together, Zygar said.

Navalnaya has been compared to other women who have picked up the political battle flags of their murdered or imprisoned husbands.

Among these there is Aquinas Heart, whose husband was shot and killed as he stepped off the plane from exile in the Philippines in 1983; she managed to defeat the entrenched and despotic president Ferdinand Marco.

It is also Sviatlana Cikhanouskayawho led the opposition in the 2020 presidential election in Belarus, Russia’s neighbor, after her husband’s imprisonment.

She herself was forced into exile.

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

“He wants to complete the task that Alexei left tragically incomplete: to make Russia a free, democratic, peaceful and prosperous country,” said family friend and prominent Russian economist Sergei Guriev, dean of the Institute of Political Studies of Paris.

“It will also demonstrate to Putin that removing Alexei will not destroy his cause.”

c.2024 The New York Times Company