Even in Death, the Kremlin Views Navalny as an Enduring Threat

New York Times

15-02-2025

Six months after the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny died in a Russian prison above the Arctic Circle, Konstantin A. Kotov woke up to find his Moscow apartment under siege.
After breaking down the door, Russian officers set about confiscating everything to do with Mr. Navalny, down to a campaign button from the activist's 2018 presidential run and a book written by his brother. Then, they arrested Mr. Kotov and took him away.
His alleged crime: donating approximately $30 three years earlier to Mr. Navalny's Anti-Corruption Fund, which the Kremlin considers an extremist group.
The death one year ago of Mr. Navalny, who once led tens of thousands of Russians against the Kremlin on the streets of Moscow, dealt a serious blow to Russia's already beleaguered opposition. Much of that movement has fled abroad amid a crackdown on dissent that began before President Vladimir V. Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but escalated with the war.
Even with Mr. Navalny dead and his movement in tatters, the authorities have been going after people with links to him and his organization inside Russia. Some see the continued prosecutions as a repressive Russian machine operating on autopilot. Others see a Moscow that views the opposition figure's legacy as an enduring threat.
'They seem to be doing it more out of habit, rather than as a new campaign,' said Sergei S. Smirnov, the editor in chief of the exiled media outlet Mediazona.
But there are also senior officers in the F.S.B., Russia's domestic intelligence service, who see themselves as strangling a political underground that presents the same risk to the Kremlin that the Bolsheviks posed before Russia's monarchy was toppled in 1917, said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian author and expert on the security establishment.
'The comparison to the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution is embedded in those people's heads,' Mr. Soldatov said by phone from London. 'Czarist Russia crumbled because of a big war and a major political party operating underground.'
The authorities have focused on a wide range of targets.
Last year, they went after journalists who remained in Russia and continued to cover Mr. Navalny's ordeal, accusing them of cooperating with his organization.
Antonina Favorskaya, a reporter for the Sota Vision media outlet, was arrested last March on charges of 'participating in an extremist organization.' She was accused of filming footage later used by Mr. Navalny's associates on their media platforms.
A rare reporter to attend court hearings for Mr. Navalny shortly before his death, Ms. Favorskaya shot the last known video of him addressing the court via a video link from his Arctic prison colony the day before he died.
Russian authorities later arrested three more journalists and put them all on trial together. Artyom Kriger, one of the defendants, said he and others stood accused of filming interviews on the street in Russia for Mr. Navalny's YouTube channel.
There has yet to be a verdict.
Moscow also pursued charges against Mr. Navalny's lawyers.
A court some 80 miles east of Moscow last month sentenced three lawyers for Mr. Navalny to as much as five and a half years in prison for passing correspondence from the incarcerated politician to his allies. The court ruled that it was tantamount to 'participating' in Mr. Navalny's illegal movement.
Mr. Navalny's lawyers insisted they were being tried for routine legal work that includes passing on communications on behalf of imprisoned clients.
Cases seeking to punish ordinary Russians for making donations to Mr. Navalny's team, some of them as paltry as $3, have also cropped up in courts.
Russian authorities have prosecuted at least 15 people on charges of funding an extremist organization for sending donations to Mr. Navalny's Anti-Corruption Fund. In the past few months, local media reported such charges against a physician from Biysk, an IT engineer from a St. Petersburg suburb and a political activist from Ufa.
'These are simply people who maybe just transferred 500 rubles a long time ago to the Anti-Corruption Fund,' Mr. Kotov, a wiry 39-year-old activist who works for a human rights organization, said, referring to a sum that is a little over $5.
By the time a donation case was opened against him, Mr. Kotov had long been on the radar of Russian authorities for rallying against Kremlin abuses.
In 2019, he was one of the first people to be arrested under a new Russian law restricting freedom of assembly at 'unsanctioned protests.' (The law laid the groundwork for a near total protest ban that later helped pacify wartime Russia.)
He spent 18 months in prison, most of it at a harsh facility in Russia's Vladimir region, about 60 miles east of Moscow.
Shortly after Mr. Kotov's release, Mr. Navalny returned to Russia, having recovered abroad in Germany from a near-fatal poisoning. Within weeks, Mr. Navalny would end up in the same prison where Mr. Kotov had been jailed.
That year, a Russian court outlawed and liquidated Mr. Navalny's Anti-Corruption Fund, labeling it extremist. The ruling criminalized fund-raising from ordinary Russians that for years had kept the group afloat.
Mr. Navalny's top aides took to YouTube and made an urgent plea for donations to keep the organization alive, saying they had worked out a secure system for supporters to transfer funds to a bank account outside Russia.
Mr. Kotov saw how Mr. Navalny had landed in the same prison where he had suffered, and felt a personal connection. He signed up to give a 500 ruble donation per month, believing the new platform was secure.
'It was my gesture to show that I didn't agree with the liquidation of the Anti-Corruption Fund and that I supported Aleksei Navalny, who was in prison,' Mr. Kotov said. 'I wanted his activities to continue.'
Half a year later, in January 2022, Mr. Kotov got nervous and stopped the donations. But by then, it was too late. Some of the transactions had revealed the Anti-Corruption Fund's foreign bank information to Russian authorities by including a reference to the group's name in the transfer data. The donations had not been secure.
The following month, Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine, prompting Mr. Kotov to go out in the streets of Moscow and protest the war. He was quickly arrested and spent the next month in jail. Two and a half years later, the authorities came to his apartment and arrested him for the six 500 ruble donations he made to the Mr. Navalny's fund. He pleaded guilty.
A court released him under house arrest. At first, he thought he would stay in Russia. Other donors charged with the same crime had gotten away with fines.
But then, in December, a court in Moscow found Ivan S. Tishchenko, a 46-year-old heart surgeon, guilty for sending 3,500 rubles in donations to Mr. Navalny's foundation. His sentence: four years in prison.
Dr. Tishchenko had subscribed to recurring donations to the Anti-Corruption Fund well before Russian authorities outlawed it as extremist in 2021.
Dr. Tishchenko's lawyer, Natalya Tikhonova, described the verdict as 'too harsh for a person who saved thousands of lives and definitely never intended to cause any harm to Russia's constitutional order.'
Mr. Kotov, wary of a return to Russian prison, fled to Lithuania this year.
In an interview from there, Mr. Kotov described how Mr. Navalny had represented hope 'that Putin isn't immortal, that at some point this regime will come to an end.'
'Aleksei Navalny was the symbol of a beautiful Russia of the future, a happy Russia of the future,' he said. 'When that symbol was gone, I started to feel much worse.'
'But we're still living,' he added. 'We can't give up.'