"A Thieving Little Man in His Bunker": Lessons From the Life and Work of Navalny on Resisting Autocracy

Nemtsov inspired Navalny, and Navalny inspired others who one day will bring freedom to Russia.

This essay adapts and updates my analyses in Strongmen, which features Vladimir Putin as a protagonist. In the epilogue of the 2021 paperback edition, I identified Putin as facing challenges due to rising popular discontent, and feared that Alexei Navalny, Putin's chief political adversary, would become more vulnerable to state repression. I recorded an audio version, above, because I felt the need to have a more personal engagement with this searing material.

To understand Vladimir Putin's fixation with Alexei Navalny, his chief political adversary, we have to go back a decade, to the mass protests of 2011-2012, and we have to talk about Boris Nemtsov, Navalny's mentor, who was assassinated in 2015. When autocrats feel insecure, as Putin did in the winter of 2011-2012, they respond with repression. But the examples of courage and public dissent remain and have lasting effects on civil society.

The protests during the runup to the 2012 election were a watershed event, mobilizing up to 100,000 people in Moscow and tens of thousands in smaller centers. Putin had been serving as prime minister since 2008, and the protests for "honest elections" were an attempt to keep him from engineering his way back into the presidency.

Publicized on social media sites, the protests drew people from all social classes, including previously apolitical individuals. Kira Sokolova, a teacher from Chelyabinsk, near the Ural Mountains, was one of these. Sokolova watched the protests on television and read online about election fraud and Navalny’s anti-corruption work. She joined his movement and became an election monitor. For Sokolova, as for many others, the larger goal was changing Russian political culture so that “all of these lies, this filth, this vileness will diminish, and that some normal human values will triumph.”

Putin answered the waves of protest with more censorship and repression. He was particularly fearful at that time, having witnessed fellow tyrant Muammar Gaddafi meet a violent end at the hands of resisters during the Arab Spring —he watched the footage of Gaddafi’s violent death over and over, knowing that the Libyan leader’s fate could be his own.

So a new cycle of repression began when he returned to the presidency. Changes in the legal code made it easier to put demonstrators in prison or ship them off to penal colonies. But some persisted, and paid a heavy price. Opposition politician, former deputy prime minister, and anti-corruption researcher Boris Nemtsov was among them.

In 2011, Nemtsov, of the People’s Freedom Party, Olga Shorina, of Russian Solidarnost, and others published the report “Putin. Corruption,” which detailed how Putin stole public funds. In 2013 Nemtsov testified before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 2014, he denounced Putin’s embezzlement of up to $50 billion in funds approved for that year’s Sochi Olympics. In 2015, he was assassinated on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky bridge near the Kremlin, its cameras and patrols conveniently deactivated as he crossed. The very public murder sent a message that Putin would not tolerate investigations into his kleptocracy.

Boris Nemtsov at an unsanctioned rally protesting Putin held in Red Square, Moscow, April 8, 2012. Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images.

In the meantime, Navalny had emerged as a symbol of the new Russia that could come into being if Putin could be defeated. He had been allowed to run for mayor of Moscow in 2013, and got almost 30% of the vote, which the Kremlin did not expect. Over the next years, as he continued to campaign, he faced more violence and pressure, until he was banned in 2018 from the presidential ballot. Putin knew well he would have lost any free and fair contest against Navalny.

Putin’s need to game the field of political competition is telling. Even before his disastrous war on Ukraine, he had become an aging strongman whose charisma no longer worked its magic on the population. In 2019, the year another round of mass protests happened in Russia, his trust ratings declined to 33%, down from 70% from 2015.

By February 2021, a Levada poll found that 48% of respondents aged 18-24 felt that the country was going in the wrong direction. Amending the Russian Constitution to stay in office until 2036, as he did in 2020, was a sign of weakness rather than strength.

Following a classic autocratic logic, the more Putin has locked down his power formally, the more he makes recourse to violence against those who threaten him. His treatment of Navalny is a case in point. The anti-corruption crusader received a “warning” dose of poison while in prison during the 2019 anti-government protests. He had already spent over 3 months total in prisons and penal colonies in 2017-2018 on fabricated charges of financial crime. In August 2020, after being poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent, Navalny received permission to be transported to Germany for treatment.

Alexei Navalny, his wife Yulia, opposition politician Lyubov Sobol and others march in memory of Nemtsov, Moscow, Feb. 29, 2020. Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images

The Kremlin likely hoped he would just stay abroad. That was never an option for Navalny, an intense nationalist with a history of xenophobic remarks. When he returned to Russia in January 2021, he was immediately arrested and, in February, sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for breaking the terms of a 2014 suspended sentence. Poisoning someone, and then locking them up for not reporting to parole authorities while they are recovering from the poisoning sums up the operation of autocratic "justice."

The Artic prison in which Navalny died had been a Soviet gulag, and the ghosts of Communist repression haunt Putin’s carceral system. Its more than 869 penal colonies, 8 prisons and 315 remand centers bring the “Gulag Archipelago” mapped by writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn into the 21^st century. Being a state enemy in Putin’s Russia means cycling in and out of imprisonment, enduring journeys of up to a month in cattle-car-like conditions to reach remote captivity sites, and knowing that any sip of tea could be your last.

Putin may have killed Navalny, but just as Nemtsov's courageous exposure of Putin's thefts of state funds inspired Navalny, so does Navalny leave a legacy of actions that resonate with millions, from the video his anti-corruption foundation released that shows the latest fruits of Putin's system of kleptocracy —a Black Sea mansion that reportedly cost $1.3 billion to build— to his hunger strike in the IK-2 penal colony.

During his testimony at his 2021 Moscow sentencing, he described Putin as the "thieving little man in his bunker." I can think of no better description.

Putin may be in charge in Russia, but he is not free: he is a slave to his mania for money and power and control of everything and everyone. He will never defeat the memory of Navalny, who returned to Russia knowing he might be killed, but who also knew that his death, like Nemtsov's, would inspire others to step up and continue the fight. "If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong," he said in a 2022 documentary about his life.

That is not an exaggerated assessment. If the Republican party and its far-right allies around the world are doing everything possible to assist Putin in destroying Ukraine, it is because they understand that Putin's defeat in Ukraine would likely destabilize his regime further and create the conditions for change. We can honor Navalny by working to defeat Putin's partners before they manage to install a version of autocracy here, with another 'thieving little man in his bunker" at the helm. As Navalny knew well, once you lose freedom, it is incredibly difficult to regain it.