“The cause of death is being investigated,” Russia’s prison authorities announced after Alexei Navalny died in Penal Colony No. 3 just above the Arctic Circle on Friday.
But whichever way you look at it, it’s already clear what killed him: Vladimir Putin’s enmity.
For years, Navalny and the Russian president have been locked in a brutal battle royal that was unlikely to end without the death of one them.
That somewhat macabre prognosis turned into a commonplace adage among many Russians — even among Navalny’s own supporters.
And now it has finally happened. Only a day after he was filmed at a court hearing — cracking jokes and seemingly in high spirits — it was announced the 47-year-old collapsed suddenly on a walk in prison, and died after an attempt by an ambulance crew to revive him.
Navalny’s entire message to the world and to Russians in particular, was that he was absolutely not their last hope and that he represented the minds and hearts of the quiet majority
That was literally in his message he recorded before he went back to Russia:
You all realize there’s more than one opposition movement within Russia right? Navalny was just the most well known outside of Russia.
This is not someone to be celebrated. Use his death as an expose on the silencing of dissent in Russia but as nothing more.
He was a Russian fascist with well documented association with the neo-Nazis in the early 2000s then turned into a pro-Western liberal who opposes Putin.
Edit: 2011 NY Times profile about Navalny (CW: racism):
Liberals, meanwhile, have deep reservations about him, because he espouses Russian nationalist views. He has appeared as a speaker alongside neo-Nazis and skinheads, and once starred in a video that compares dark-skinned Caucasus militants to cockroaches. While cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he says that in the case of humans, “I recommend a pistol.”
Not to mention he voluntarily went back to Russia after believing they tried to have him killed. I don’t know what he expected
Also the video of him being racist is still up on his personal YouTube channel to be clear. It is not a position he ever distanced himself from.
