The politically minded blogger wore many hats over a career that spanned two decades
Alexey Navalny collapsed and died on Friday, in a prison colony north of the Arctic circle where he was serving a 19-year sentence for extremist activities. He was 47. In the West, he enjoyed the reputation of a Kremlin critic and Russian “opposition leader.” In Ukraine, he was denounced as a Russian nationalist. In Russia itself, his legacy is at best complicated.
Born in 1976, Navalny graduated from law school in 1998 and got a degree in finance in 2001. He would go on to dabble in law, investments and activism in search of a profitable career, but kept coming back to political agitation.
“I have always been obsessed with politics,” he told the outlet Kommersant-Money in 2009.
The nationalist phase
Between 2000 and 2007, Navalny was a member of the liberal Yabloko party, before co-founding an ethnic nationalist movement called ‘Narod.’ He appeared in two notorious YouTube videos for the movement, one advocating for gun rights to fight “flies and cockroaches” (while showing Muslims), and another comparing immigrants to tooth decay.
In August 2008, Navalny spoke approvingly of the Russian intervention against Georgia on behalf of the beleaguered South Ossetia. He went on to participate in three annual ‘Russian March’ rallies with advocates for ethnic nationalism. Activist Evgenia Albats later said she had urged Navalny to join the marches as a way to leverage ethnic nationalism against the Kremlin. In 2010, Albats would co-sponsor Navalny’s six-month stay in the US through the Yale World Fellows program.
The anti-corruption blogger
By that point, Navalny had already called on his finance expertise to launch an investment activist group called “Union of Minority Shareholders,” which tried to shake down major companies such as Rosneft, Gazprom, Lukoil, and others. His umbrella NGO network, the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), was registered in September 2011. Navalny would continue accusing the government in Moscow, regional governors and corporations of fraud, graft and corruption – often getting sued for defamation in the process.