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--:-- Noel King: People sometimes speculated about whether the Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, was crazy brave or just crazy. He was heroically brave. I mean, insanely brave. Vladimir Putin had Navalny poisoned, disappeared, imprisoned. And today, the Russian authorities declared him dead at the age of 47.
--:-- Luke Harding: He was a patriot of a democratic Russia, of a free Russia, of a Russia that actually doesn't exist. and I don't think will be existing anytime soon. It was that patriotism, ultimately, that really cost him his life.
--:-- Noel King: Navalny's life was so dangerous that one time he was asked what he'd say to Russians from beyond the grave. For the situation when I'm killed, it's very simple. Not give up. Do me a favor, answer this one in Russian. And here I have an obvious thing. Don't give up.
--:-- [Sound effects: A quick clip of a Russian phrase]
--:-- Noel King: The life and afterlife of Vladimir Putin's bravest adversary. Coming up on Today Explained. Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
--:-- Luke Harding: Didn't know that. While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business. And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most.
--:-- Noel King: I've never met an AI agent. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at ServiceNow.com.
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--:-- Noel King: Support for this show comes from Strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place? Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying. But are they actually just excuses for not leaving?
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--:-- Noel King: Сегодня и что оно означает. This is Today Explained. Luke Harding is the senior international correspondent for The Guardian. He's also written several books about Russia, including Mafia State.
--:-- Luke Harding: I asked Luke, what does he think happened to Alexei Navalny?
--:-- Luke Harding: Well, I think Alexei Navalny was murdered by the Kremlin, almost certainly with the personal authorization of Vladimir Putin, Russia's president.
--:-- Noel King: Why do you think this happened now, Luke?
--:-- Luke Harding: I think for two reasons. One is that there are elections coming up in Russia. Whenever you say the word elections, you have to do little airmarks, inverted commas, around it, because obviously it's not a real competitive vote. It's a sort of coronation.
--:-- Luke Harding: But what you have to understand is that the Kremlin, Putin and the people around him, are notoriously paranoid, and they have long regarded Alexei Navalny as a threat and an irritant.
--:-- Noel King: And so for them, this is sort of tidying up ahead of elections. And as Stalin famously said, no man, no problem.
--:-- Luke Harding: Now, Navalny has gone, there is no problem for Putin in terms of possible opposition protests against him. And at the same time, I think the big reason, the most compelling reason is what's happening internationally, in particular in the US.
--:-- Luke Harding: And what's happening is that Putin looks across to America and he sees weakness and division. He sees Donald Trump saying very loudly, very clearly that if he's reelected as president, he will not come to the aid of NATO's allies.
--:-- Luke Harding: No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.
--:-- Luke Harding: He sees Republicans in Congress blocking vital aid to Ukraine, which is allowing Russian troops to push forward as we speak on the battlefield, I think the wind is in his sails.
--:-- Luke Harding: He thinks things are going in his direction, that he can prevail in Ukraine, that the West is pretty feeble, and that America in particular is paralysed.
--:-- Luke Harding: And so, in a sense, he's doing this because he can do this. He knows there'll be words of outrage, condemnation, and so on. And those guys that are the top of Russian power, they take some pleasure from that. They enjoy discomforting the Kremlin's enemies and they enjoy sticking it to America.
--:-- Luke Harding: Let's talk about Navalny himself. What made Alexei Navalny so significant, so important?
--:-- Luke Harding: I think what made Navalny so important and significant was the fact that he actually could talk to people. I mean, he was the nearest thing that Russia had to a really strong politician, genuine politician, as opposed to a kind of Soviet-style apparatchik or bureaucrat.
--:-- Luke Harding: He could stir people up. He could denounce the Kremlin. And he was brilliant on social media. His video investigations into Putin's personal corruption and those around him clocked up millions of views.
--:-- Luke Harding: In 2017, after announcing his intentions to run for president, Navalny was attacked with green dye. Twice. Maybe the Kremlin thinks that I will not record videos with a green face, he said, but now even more people will watch.
--:-- Luke Harding: So he was a genuine threat despite being barred from state television, despite having no access to conventional media resources. He got a profile. He got a following. In any democratic situation, he would have been Russia's president. And now, of course, that's never going to happen.
--:-- Luke Harding: Tell us about Alexei Navalny's early life and how he came to be where he was.
--:-- Luke Harding: Well, he was a lawyer initially. He was quite a successful lawyer in the 1990s from kind of European Russia, grew up there.
--:-- Luke Harding: And I think what was interesting was that around about the beginning of Putin's presidential term, he started becoming what you might call an activist shareholder. In other words, he decided to investigate corruption by the state and by big state companies like the oil and gas giant, Gazprom, and other corporate behemoths.
--:-- Luke Harding: In 2011, he started the Anti-Corruption Foundation, which exposed the extravagant wealth of Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin.
--:-- Luke Harding: Essentially, during Vladimir Putin's Russia, two things have been going on. One is this big, noisy, terrible nationalist project or imperialist project that we see at the moment unfolding in Ukraine.
--:-- Luke Harding: But the other is simple theft by people close to Putin who are now all billionaires. They stolen billions and billions of dollars. And Navalny exposed that.
--:-- Luke Harding: He was a nationalist. Some of his views were quite right, I think controversially. And he got more and more of a following.
--:-- Luke Harding: And initially, when I was in Moscow between 2007 and 2011, when I met him, he was pretty well-known in Russia, not so much known abroad for investigations and for campaigns.
--:-- Luke Harding: And I remember seeing him, and he was a bit like a sort teacher, like a clever and gifted teacher. And we were discussing corruption in a particular firm, and he was sketching on a whiteboard various schemes going to top Kremlin officials.
--:-- Luke Harding: And there was something sort of infectious about his enthusiasm. And he got more and more of a profile. He stood to be mayor of Moscow. And obviously, he was never going to win, but he did surprisingly well.
--:-- Luke Harding: And then, of course, the Kremlin barred him from formal politics. So he took to the streets, set up his own political party, and challenged and vexed the Kremlin.
--:-- Luke Harding: By 2020, Alexei Navalny is the most prominent voice of the Russian opposition. And then something very striking happens. He's poisoned.
--:-- Luke Harding: He was dramatically poisoned. What is striking about the Kremlin and the Putin regime is that they've got a taste for the theatrical, the flamboyant, the demonstrative.
--:-- Luke Harding: And Navalny was campaigning in southern Russia. And we now know a team of agents from the FSB, that's Putin's domestic intelligence agency, successor to the KGB, were following him around, actually for several years, but finally moved in for the kill.
--:-- Luke Harding: And one of them, applied poison, Novichok, a deadly nerve agent to Navalny's underpants. I mean, it's almost a dark farce.
--:-- Luke Harding: And Navalny went to the airport to fly back to Moscow. And about half an hour after takeoff, he collapsed. And there's really terrible footage of him howling and screaming.
--:-- Luke Harding: He's taken off the plane. And incredibly, the doctors who don't know what has happened treat him with atropine, which is actually a kind of antidote to Novichok.
--:-- Luke Harding: And he survives. And he's medevaced to Germany, where he recovers. It takes him about six months. And then he goes back to Russia.
--:-- Luke Harding: But this is the same substance, this toxic substance, which was used a couple of years earlier in England in a town called Salisbury against a Russian defector called Sergei Skripal.
--:-- Luke Harding: And we know, of course, that it's only Russian spy agencies that have access to it. And just the final twist in this extraordinary story is that that when he's recuperating, he works with the investigative online outfit Bellingcat and calls up one of his poisoners and tricks his poisoner to confessing everything.
--:-- Luke Harding: Navalny stayed in character for 49 minutes and kept bullying the poor guy to give him more information and more information. Unbelievable. Poor guy. Poor guy. They will kill him. They will kill him. They will kill him, literally.
--:-- Luke Harding: I think he'll be president, seriously, after this. They will definitely kill me. It's astonishing. I mean, he was brave, he was daring, he was extraordinary. And boy, we're going to miss him now he's gone.
--:-- Luke Harding: What happened after he returned to Russia from Germany? Tell us about his last few years.
--:-- Luke Harding: I mean, I was watching in real time as he flew back on the plane from Berlin to Moscow. It was full of journalists. Mr. Navalny from Israeli television, aren't you afraid? Mr. Navalny.
--:-- Luke Harding: He, in classic Navalny style, spent half the flight watching Rick and Morty cartoons. He was a big fan of the show.
--:-- Luke Harding: And then he gave a press conference basically telling the world that he was going back, that he wasn't afraid. And he goes to passport control. And of course, he's arrested.
--:-- Luke Harding: He's detained by uniformed Putin officers who take him away. And what's sort of sad, really, is thinking back about those images, there's a kind of hug for his wife, Julia, that they have a brief embrace and they kiss each other on the lips and that's it, off he goes.
--:-- Luke Harding: And he doesn't emerge. I mean, from that point onwards, you hear from him occasionally either directly, sometimes via social media, via Twitter, X, and sometimes through his lawyers, but he disappears into this dark, unaccountable prison gulag system in Russia.
--:-- Luke Harding: And he's sort of bounced from place to place. So sometimes he surfaces and then he goes missing for a couple of weeks. And his last base he was incarcerated was in this grim prison 2,000 miles away from Moscow near the Arctic Circle, which is traditionally where Stalin sent his enemies to the frozen north.
--:-- Luke Harding: And there, of course, far away from journalists, far away from international observers, I think he was murdered. If your suspicion is correct, and we should say it's the suspicion of a lot of people. An autocratic world leader has murdered a popular opposition leader. This is a very big deal.
--:-- Luke Harding: What would Vladimir Putin have been thinking? Well, I mean, first of all, Vladimir Putin doesn't care about human life. It's a matter of complete and breezy indifference to him.
--:-- Luke Harding: He doesn't care about killing people, but he is very keen on symbolism and I think um the timing of of navalny's death is is to do with u.s weakness uh the fact that the congress uh under republican leadership won't won't pass aid packages to ukraine it's to do with upcoming presidential elections of russia which he will win of course minimizing risk there and it's also to do with the munich security conference which opened today in germany and i think what was what's interesting about that is the munich security conference, a lot of people have forgotten.
--:-- Luke Harding: But in 2007, in his second presidential term, Putin denounced US hegemony, or as he put it, kind of the unipolar world. In other words, the current kind of political system dominated by Washington.
--:-- Luke Harding: And he made it clear that he intended to disrupt it, that Russia had been cheated, was being encircled, taken for granted, its voice was being ignored in international affairs, and he would no longer play by the White House's rules.
--:-- Luke Harding: One state, and of course, first and foremost, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. It imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?
--:-- Luke Harding: That was a statement of intent back then. And of course, now, as Russia's enemies, as he would see it, gather in Munich, they are all talking about one thing, which is Navalny's death.
--:-- Noel King: Coming up Luke Harding will be back with us on the fate of the Russian opposition without Alexei Navalny.
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--:-- Noel King: Support for Today Explained comes from Chime. Nobody likes fees and complicated banking, says Chime. And Chime gets that, says Chime.
--:-- Luke Harding: Chime is a financial technology company that says they understand that every dollar counts. So when you set up direct deposit through Chime, they say you get access to fee-free features such as free overdraft coverage, getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit, so much more.
--:-- Luke Harding: Chime says with qualifying direct deposits, you can be eligible for free overdraft up to $200 on debit card purchases and cash withdrawals. Plus, they say you don't need to worry about monthly fees or maintenance fees.
--:-- Luke Harding: You can work on your financial goals through Chime today. You can open an account in two minutes at Chime.com slash explained.
--:-- Noel King: That's chime.com slash explained. Chime feels like progress. Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank.
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--:-- Luke Harding: Bank ranking and number of ATMs according to U.S. News and World Report 2023. Chime checking account required.
--:-- Noel King: Support for this show comes from Macy's. It's almost fall, and that means it's time to cycle your wardrobe to the cold setting.
--:-- Luke Harding: Because while everyone loves a breezy summer outfit, let's be real, layering is even more fun. That's why Macy's Fall Fashion Guide has everything you need to piece together the perfect look for you.
--:-- Luke Harding: It's your one-stop shop for fall's latest trends and must-haves, curated by their experts. Add a statement shoe to your collection, like the calf hair loafers from Steve Madden.
--:-- Luke Harding: Or tap into your romantic side with flowy dresses from Cece and sheer pieces from INC. You can even throw in some textural layers for contrast, like a faux fur bomber jacket from Karl Lagerfeld Paris.
--:-- Luke Harding: Whether your old favorite sweater or coat is on its last threads, or you're just craving a new vibe to switch things up, Macy's has got you covered this season.
--:-- Noel King: Find the perfect layering pieces for you by exploring the Macy's Fall Fashion Style Guide. Shop in-store or online at Macy's.com.
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--:-- Noel King: Support for Today Explained comes from Upwork. If you run a business, you know that scaling your business requires the right expertise at the right time.
--:-- Luke Harding: I sometimes wonder how many of you are running businesses out there. I would love to know. Please email me, noelle at king dot com.
--:-- Luke Harding: With Upwork, you can find specialized freelancers in IT, web development, AI, design, admin support, marketing, and more. Experts who they say are ready to help you take your business to the next level.
--:-- Luke Harding: With more than two decades of experience, Upwork has a simple and ambitious goal to pioneer a better way of working. Companies at every stage turn to Upwork to get things done and find more flexibility in the way they staff key projects and initiatives by accessing a global marketplace full of top talent.
--:-- Luke Harding: Plus, Upwork makes posting your job easy with no cost to join. You can register, browse freelancer profiles, get help drafting a job post, or even book a consultation.
--:-- Noel King: You can visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That is Upwork.com to post your job for free and connect with top towns ready to help your business grow.
--:-- Luke Harding: That's U-P-W-O-R-K dot com, Upwork dot com.
--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained. We're back with Luke Harding. He's The Guardian's senior international correspondent.
--:-- Luke Harding: How are Russians reacting today to Alexei Navalny's death?
--:-- Luke Harding: Russians are being relatively muted. I mean, the ones inside the country, of course, there hasn't been a kind of huge or vocal condemnation, but you wouldn't expect that because you post something on Twitter critical of Putin or against the war, and you're pretty quickly kind of rounded up by the police and very often sentenced to jail terms of seven, eight, nine years.
--:-- Luke Harding: What we have been seeing are very clear responses from political allies of Navalny living outside the country in the Baltic states in Europe or in London or elsewhere. They all say the same thing, that Navalny was murdered. The Kremlin murdered Navalny. Putin personally murdered Navalny.
--:-- Luke Harding: And I've just been watching Navalny's wife, Yulia, who's at the Munich Security Conference, giving such a moving and powerful speech.
--:-- Luke Harding: I guess you all have already seen this horrible news coming from Russia. I was thinking for a long time, what should I do? Should I go here, or should I fly straight to see my kids?
--:-- Luke Harding: But then I thought, what would Alexei do if he was here? And I'm sure that he would have chosen to be here, to come to this stage.
--:-- Luke Harding: And she then essentially says that she holds Putin in his circle personally responsible for everything that has happened to Russia, her country, to her family and to her beloved husband.
--:-- Luke Harding: But if it is true, I want Putin and all his allies, all his friends, his government, I want them all to know that they would be held responsible for what they have done with our country, with my family, with my husband.
--:-- Luke Harding: She speaks for about three minutes. It's incredibly moving. It's so sad. And she's right. It's what Navalny would have wanted. He would have wanted people to carry on, to fight, to kind of continue with his legacy.
--:-- Luke Harding: Has the Kremlin said anything today?
--:-- Luke Harding: Well, the Kremlin is doing what it always does, which is hide behind bureaucratic obfuscation. There was a statement from the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service saying Mr. Navalny collapsed, our doctors did everything they could to revive him, but very sadly, after half an hour, he was pronounced dead.
--:-- Luke Harding: Which is bewildering. Navalny appeared yesterday on a video looking gaunt and thin, but also cheerful and essentially himself joking and laughing with prison staff in a brief court appearance.
--:-- Luke Harding: So he goes from that to being dead. And clearly something happened to him between yesterday and today.
--:-- Luke Harding: I sort of think that it's going to be a long time before we know the full truth about what happened to Navalny.
--:-- Luke Harding: What's the status of the opposition in Russia now without Navalny? Who else sticks in Putin's craw? Who else threatens him politically?
--:-- Luke Harding: I think there is no opposition to Vladimir Putin or not much. I mean, in terms of formal opposition, there hasn't been any for a long time.
--:-- Luke Harding: There is what you might call system opposition in the shape of the communists, who kind of formally opposed Vladimir Putin, but in reality have been co-opted by the Russian government and posed no real threat.
--:-- Luke Harding: But they're a sort of outlet for discontent. And then there the kind of liberal opposition the non opposition which Navalny led very successfully And they been pretty much wiped out as Russia has lurched from authoritarian country to totalitarian state which more and more resembles something out of George Orwell in 1984, where up is down and black is white and war is peace and freedom is slavery or slavery is freedom.
--:-- Luke Harding: There was a kind of token opposition candidate who was supposed to be on the ballot paper for March's presidential election. And he's recently been disqualified. So it's a dictatorship.
--:-- Luke Harding: Luke, sometimes in a case like this, you have an opposition leader who's killed and the people that are left behind, the opposition that are left behind, they capitalize on it by getting people angry and out into the streets and protesting.
--:-- Luke Harding: This is a move that should infuriate some percentage of Russians, right? But it sounds like what you're saying is there is no leader to take the baton from Navalny.
--:-- Luke Harding: There is nobody who can successfully call a million people out into the streets in protest of this. I mean, there were leaders. There was someone called Boris Nemtsov, former deputy prime minister in the 1990s, who was actually quite similar to Navalny.
--:-- Luke Harding: He was ruggedly good-looking. He was charismatic, popular. The problem was that he was also murdered. He was shot dead outside the Kremlin.
--:-- Luke Harding: Nemtsov has gone. Navalny has gone. A whole host of other critics where I am in London have also been murdered, such as Alexander Livonenko, who was a FSB whistleblower working for Putin's security services who denounced Putin.
--:-- Luke Harding: And also Livonenko's patron, a Russian oligarch called Boris Berezovsky, who was found mysteriously hanged at his ex-wife's home in the British home counties.
--:-- Luke Harding: And so this is the problem, is that anyone who really has stood up to Putin in a sort of serious way has met with a murky end.
--:-- Luke Harding: Russia is very different from the US or indeed any other democratic society where in America, for all of the bitter partisan divisions, there is a conversation, quite a noisy, shouty conversation.
--:-- Luke Harding: In Russia, there is no conversation. What there is is 24-7 propaganda, which extols the regime and its leaders and Putin, but also peddles myths and dark fairy tales that America wants to destroy and occupy Russia, that the Europeans are decadent and corrupt and effeminate.
--:-- Luke Harding: And what I also find kind of quite bewildering is that there are a few kind of prominent Americans, I shan't name them, but you know who I'm talking about.
--:-- Luke Harding: I sure do. who seem to love Vladimir Putin and think that he is a kind of good example of what America should become, which I find quite chilling.
--:-- Luke Harding: It would be funny, were it not for the fact that actually this project to make America into a kind of Russia or a Russia-lite appears to be in full swing.
--:-- Luke Harding: Vladimir Putin's anger, as you've described it, is in part that he thinks the West is interfering in his Russia. How is the West responding today to Alexei Navalny's death?
--:-- Luke Harding: Well, I mean, the West is responding with predictable outrage and condemnation and shock and sorrow. Make no mistake. Putin is responsible for Navalny's death. Putin is responsible.
--:-- Luke Harding: What has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin's brutality. A lot of European leaders have met Navalny personally. They've seen him. He's spoken to the European Parliament when he was poisoned.
--:-- Luke Harding: One of the people at his bedside was the former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. And they're not mincing words.
--:-- Luke Harding: I mean, the Lavians have said that Putin murdered Navalny. David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary, has said that he holds the kind of Russian state responsible for what has befallen Navalny.
--:-- Luke Harding: And there's a lot of condemnation. But you can see Putin kind of laughing at all of this. The more discomfort his enemies feel, the better it is for him.
--:-- Luke Harding: He's also made a public appearance and seems in a tremendously good mood today. I mean, the question is, what could the Europeans do?
--:-- Luke Harding: Well, they're already arming Ukraine. they're already trying to boost defense production and to make more artillery shells, which the Ukrainians desperately need.
--:-- Luke Harding: I think really all eyes turn to America and to Mike Johnson and to the Republicans. I mean, will this kind of shift them out of their opposition to Ukraine and sort of support or quasi-support for Russia?
--:-- Luke Harding: Or will they just kind of ignore it and say, well, dictators kill people. That's the price of doing effective politics. So I don't know, but I think it's a kind of big moral test for those people.
--:-- Luke Harding: And let's see if they pass it.
--:-- Luke Harding: What do you think Alexei Navalny's legacy will be?
--:-- Luke Harding: I think Navalny's legacy is the idea, and for now it is an idea, it's not being realized, that Russia can be a normal, successful, democratic country where there are genuine elections, where leaders can campaign, they can make promises, they can be held to account, where there is rule of law, where institutions like the police or the security services work for the people rather than against the people.
--:-- Luke Harding: That sounds almost like a utopian vision, but I think it's important because there is an argument which says Russia is so vast, such a big country, so sprawling, that it can never be a democracy, that it's impossible.
--:-- Luke Harding: The weight of history is too great. And Navalny was saying, hey guys, that's not true. We live in a modern world. where people have smartphones, where there are VPN connections, where there is internet, where you can make a video exposing corruption and 5 million people will watch it and like it.
--:-- Luke Harding: He was saying that Russia doesn't have to be that sort of horrendous Soviet creature, that it could turn into something kind of brighter and better.
--:-- Luke Harding: And I don't know if that's going to happen. I would wish it to happen. But he has opened up that possibility that there's an alternative vector for Russia with the right leadership, with the right international support, and with the right politicians in Washington.
--:-- Luke Harding: And so I think that's a tremendous legacy. And it's just a really sad day and awful that he had to pay so heavy a price to make that point.
--:-- Noel King: That was The Guardian's Luke Harding. Luke's most recent book is Invasion. It's about Russia's war in Ukraine. It's very good.
--:-- Noel King: Today's episode was produced by Miles Bryan and Jesse Alejandro Cottrell. Our editor is Matthew Collette. We had fact-checking from Laura Bullard, Amanda Llewellyn, and Avishai Artsy.
--:-- Noel King: Rob Byers is our engineer. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.
