Taken from the February 23, 2024 publication of The World Affairs Brief
Alexei Navalny was the most effective voice in Russia against the perpetual strong-man rule of Vladimir Putin. He didn’t have all the true free-market answers for Russia’s semi-controlled economy and facade of democracy, but he did recognize that Russia didn’t really have free elections. He was well spoken and openly challenged the corruption of Putin and his oligarchs, and was charismatic as well, with a rising popularity garnering tens of thousands at protest rallies. All of these things made him a formidable threat to Putin and his control over almost all the opposition parties, and that was precisely why Navalny was targeted for arrest and imprisonment where he died this week after being transferred to one of the worst gulag-style prisons in Siberia. Tucker Carlson again showed his ignorance (not treason) of the real Putin by defending him against charges that he had Navalny killed, and so I’ll take readers through the long list of persons Putin ordered killed since oligarch chief Boris Berezovsky brought Putin to Power in 2000. A few years later Berezovsky himself was exiled to London and later assassinated upon Putin’s orders but made to look like a suicide.
John Hayward of Breitbart News provided this biographical sketch of Navalny’s short life, even voluntarily coming back from exile to challenge Putin after already suffering a poison attack on his life.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died under murky circumstances in a brutal prison camp at the age of 47 on Friday, was a fierce critic of strongman Vladimir Putin and the corruption of the Russian elite.
Navalny was himself imprisoned on [false] corruption charges [which is how corrupt leaders in Russia always cover for their own crimes] he dismissed as false and supposedly died while taking a walk after surviving an attempt by the Putin regime to assassinate him with chemical weapons.
Navalny was the son of a Soviet military officer and an economist who spent much of his youth living in his father’s military garrison posts. He often visited his grandmother in Chernobyl and the government coverup of the horrific nuclear disaster there in 1986 seems to have been a formative experience for him.
Navalny grew up to become a lawyer. He also earned an economics degree three years later and, while studying for that degree, he joined a pro-democracy, pro-market political party called Yabloko [which means “apple” in Russian, but is actually an acronym for the 3 names of the original founders]. He was expelled from Yabloko in 2007, supposedly because he engaged in prohibited “nationalist activities,” but Navalny said it was a power play by a rival for party influence.
Navalny did take a more stridently nationalist tone during his early political career… He said in 2014 that he disapproved of annexing Crimea, but a post-Putin government could not simply give it back to the Ukrainians, a position that did not endear him to the Ukrainians.
Navalny’s exit from Yabloko was the first of many times he would claim to be accused of wrongdoing for political reasons. Such accusations came with increasing frequency as he reported on the corruption of the Russian elite and became a persistent critic of Vladimir Putin, who rose to power in 2000.
Navalny won some major victories over the past two decades. During a brief interregnum in Putin’s power when Dmitry Medvedev was president of Russia, Navalny’s persistent criticism forced Medvedev to admit corrupt officials were embezzling over $30 billion a year from the national treasury.
Putin was back in the saddle soon enough, rewriting the Russian constitution to effectively make himself president-for-life. Navalny founded an anti-corruption website that pulled a million visitors a month. He dubbed Putin’s United Russia the “party of crooks and thieves,” and it stuck.
Navalny was able to fill the streets of Russian cities with protesters on several occasions. The protests were broken up with mass arrests, one of which was invariably Alexei Navalny. He joked about his arrests in social media posts and media interviews… [until] he was sent to the Arctic penal colony where he died.
One of Navalny’s first big protest marches was against election fraud in 2011. Even though the vote was heavily rigged to keep Putin in power, Navalny managed to hold United Russia down to less than half the vote. He ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013 and was promptly sentenced to five years in prison for “embezzlement” in a politicized trial.
The Putin regime settled for suspending Navalny’s sentence, which allowed him to remain free but effectively barred him from running for office, maintaining a fiction of opposition that Putin’s regime called “managed democracy” or “competition without change.”
Putin would occasionally set up hapless punching-bag opponents to run against him in dubious elections he would “win” by gigantic margins, stuffing the ballot boxes as needed to ensure his margin of victory made headlines, while legally barring genuine opposition leaders like Navalny from contesting his power. When Navalny tried to run for president in 2018, his embezzlement conviction was invoked to disqualify him. [Shades of how the US Deep State in trying to disqualify Trump.]
Navalny intensified his anti-corruption activism as head of a non-profit agency called the Anti-Corruption Foundation [FBK]. Members of his …foundation tried to run for the Moscow city council in 2019 but were banned from the election, prompting more street protests. Navalny developed a strategy called “smart voting” that basically meant “vote for anyone except Putin’s United Russia party.” He used it several times over the years to dent United Russia’s power.
In August 2020, Navalny was flying back to Moscow after working with activists in Siberia when he became mysteriously ill, sweating profusely and losing consciousness. Navalny’s team immediately suspected he had been poisoned. His plane made an emergency landing in Siberia, where Navalny spent some time hospitalized and breathing through a ventilator.
Navalny’s friends and family insisted he was not safe in Russia, especially after Siberian doctors blithely insisted they could find no trace of toxins in his system. He was transferred to a German hospital, whose doctors quickly determined he had been poisoned with a lethal nerve agent called Novichok, the same poison Russia used on former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the United Kingdom in 2018. [Also done on Putin’s orders.]
Navalny survived and in December 2020 he claimed he was able to trick an agent of Russia’s FSB security service into admitting he was part of the unit assigned to shadow Navalny during his trip to Siberia and put Novichok in his underwear.
Navalny returned to Moscow from Germany in January 2021, fully aware he would be arrested upon arrival. The Russian government charged him with violating his probation from the 2013 embezzlement case and took him into custody at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow.
While imprisoned in January, Navlany’s investigative team released its most provocative corruption report to date, a video expose of the lavish “billion-dollar Putin palace” constructed in southern Russia, [in Sochi] allegedly by oligarchs who wanted to demonstrate their fealty to the authoritarian ruler. The palace was the size of a small city and included amenities to indulge all of Putin’s expensive hobbies including wine-making, ice-skating, tennis, and cinema. It even boasted a nightclub with a stripper pole.”
“Putin’s friends, who received from him the right to steal whatever they wanted in Russia, thanked him a lot. But they also chipped in, collected 100 billion rubles and built a palace for their boss with this money,” Navalny said.
The Putin regime was infuriated by the expose, bouncing Navalny into increasingly harsh prisons and heaping more charges and sentences on him.
When he was sentenced to nine more years in prison for embezzlement in March 2022, Navalny quoted from the American television show The Wire: “You only do two days. That’s the day you go in and the day you come out.”
Navalny disappeared for most of December 2023, to the great alarm of his friends and allies. He reappeared in the Arctic prison camp known as Polar Wolf near the end of the month, having been transferred in secret.
In January 2023, hundreds of Russian doctors signed a letter to Putin asking him to “stop abusing” Navalny, whose health was deteriorating in prison.
This pleading fell on deaf ears, and Navalny reportedly died in the Polar Wolf camp on Friday, supposedly collapsing soon after he complained of feeling unwell after an exercise walk. The prison claimed its medical team tried to resuscitate him and failed. Navalny was seen in good health, and in good cheer, in a video of his court appearance on Thursday.
So, he was fine the day before his death. Navalny’s friends suspect he was again being poisoned in prison, as happened to many others fighting against Putin. As evidence of this they cite Russia’s refusal to hand over his body for 14 days until “chemical examinations are complete,” which should never take that long. Yulia Navalnaya has accused the Russian authorities of hiding Navalny’s body in order to wait for traces of the nerve agent to disappear, as cited by the Daily Mail.
As you can see, the opposition in Russia sees the reality of what Putin is really like—a dictator, unlike the naive analysis of Tucker Carlson, who continues to dig himself deeper into a hole in his defense of Putin who completed snookered Carlson in his Kremlin interview.
The Gateway Pundit came out with a story today, trying to add to conservative’s misplaced defense of Putin, claiming that a Russian released video of a Navalny’s associate asking British intelligence for $10-20M in money to help fund a revolution against Putin, means “Navalny was working for the CIA.” But wouldn’t any of us living under a tyrannical state be asking for foreign financial help to break free? Does that make them an agent of the CIA or the Deep State? Hardly.
Even after Putin admitted that the Russian leadership ordered the collapse of the Soviet Union, (which Tucker completely missed) Putin lied about it as being a move to promote greater “peace and cooperation with the West.” As I documented in the past two weeks it was really done instead to gain more economic and technological aid and trade from the West as Russia was falling behind in the arms race.
In saying this, I’m not defending or trying to excuse the US Deep State and media who are equally as evil and deceptive, but rather to convince my readers that all three predators centers (Russia, China and the Western Globalists) are evil and trying to each gain control of a future world tyrannical government.