It is almost a year since the death of Alexei Navalny. The Russian opposition leader sought to channel Russian nationalism as a challenge to Putin’s autocracy. He gave everything in the fight.
By Lucian Kim
January 2025
Perhaps the greatest paradox of Alexei Navalny was that although he called himself a Russian nationalist, supporters at home and abroad saw him as a liberal who would bring Russia closer to the West. The late Russian opposition leader envisioned Russia becoming a nation-state — rather than an expansionist empire — for the first time in its history. He assailed Vladimir Putin’s imperial ambitions and instead sought Russia’s national revival within its borders. But for all his fierce resistance to Putin’s tightening grip on power, Navalny was muted in his criticism when Putin first invaded Ukraine in 2014. Opposing Russia’s annexation of Crimea was hardly a way to gain popularity for a politician who dreamed of ousting Putin via the ballot box.
Navalny’s nationalism goes a long way in explaining the roots of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago. Navalny flatly rejected the Soviet past, including the idea that Russia should be the center of a great Eurasian land empire. But he was sensitive to Russians’ post-imperial traumas and careful not to inflame them. Putin, on the other hand, melded the triumphs of czarist Russia with those of the Soviet Union and demanded compensation for the traumas his generation endured following the Soviet collapse. For now, Putin’s imperial approach has prevailed, aided by a political regime that has crushed any form of opposition.
The legacy of Russian imperialism and Putin’s growing autocracy were the two main drivers of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Putin seethed in resentment for a lost empire that a growing number of Russians did not even know they were supposed to miss. Navalny represented that new generation, but they could not withstand Putin’s iron fist. Navalny’s arrest in January 2021 was a precondition for all-out war. Ultimately, his death in an Arctic prison camp in February 2024 was a result of it.
Following is an excerpt from Lucian Kim’s new book, Putin’s Revenge: Why Russia Invaded Ukraine (Columbia University Press, 2024).
Alexei Navalny never shied away from a fight, especially when his bona fides as a Russian nationalist were under attack. During the summer of 2017, the feisty anticorruption campaigner was building a nationwide network to run against Vladimir Putin in the upcoming presidential election. The gusto with which Navalny took on opponents was part of his appeal in a political field otherwise occupied by stuffed suits and automatons. When Igor Girkin, the former commander of the Donetsk separatists, challenged him to a debate, Navalny gleefully accepted.
After the Kremlin forced him to leave Donetsk in August 2014, Girkin found a niche for himself back in Moscow, organizing aid for the separatists and pillorying the Kremlin for abandoning the “Novorossiya” project. As Navalny ramped up his quixotic presidential campaign, Girkin proclaimed in a YouTube video that he could prove Navalny was neither a patriot, a nationalist, nor even a real opponent of Putin’s regime. Russian liberals assailed Navalny for agreeing to engage with Girkin, the prime suspect in the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. But Navalny, who had started his political career by organizing debates, saw an opportunity to recruit Girkin’s followers to help him oust Putin.
On July 20, 2017, Navalny and Girkin met across a wide table in the offices of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, located in a nondescript Moscow business center. The breezy opposition leader and the dour war veteran made an odd couple. What united them was their contempt for Putin and his entourage. Since both men were banned from state television, their showdown was broadcast online.
Girkin, who supported the reestablishment of an “autocratic monarchy,” claimed that after the collapse of the Soviet Union the West had established a “colonial administration” of oligarchs to control the flow of Russia’s natural resources. For more than three hundred years the West had been trying to keep Russia weak and divided, Girkin said. “The West is categorically against the reunification of the Russian people, which was torn to pieces in 1991 along the borders drawn by the Bolsheviks.” One-third of Russians ended up living in newly independent states, Girkin said, and once the process of “reunification” began with the annexation of Crimea, the West naturally opposed it.
Navalny, who viewed Europe’s parliamentary democracies as a model, responded that it was “a bit childish” to blame foreigners for Russia’s misfortunes and argued that Russians’ main enemy was not the West but their own avaricious leadership. The country could ill afford to fight a war in the Donbas when twenty million Russians lived in poverty at home, he said. Three years into the insurgency, the conflict had degenerated into a grinding, low-level war. Navalny said that it needed to end according to the Minsk II agreement, which foresaw the eventual return of the Donbas to Ukraine.
An hour into the debate, Girkin pronounced his verdict: “I’m drawing the conclusion that you never were a nationalist, and you’re definitely not one right now based on what you’ve said.” A few minutes later Girkin declared that Navalny was “much worse than Putin” because Putin was at least leaving open the possibility of the Donbas’s “reunification” with Russia, whereas Navalny would give it back, betraying the Russians who had died for it. And once the Donbas was returned to Ukraine, Girkin said, the next issue on the agenda would be the status of Crimea. Girkin’s words sounded like a curse: “There will be no reconciliation with Ukraine. War in one form or the other is inevitable.”
Sitting across from Girkin, the face of Russian nationalism run amok, Navalny struggled to prove that he, too, was worthy of being called a Russian nationalist. All those years that Girkin had obediently served in Putin’s FSB, Navalny had been penning nationalist manifestos and supporting nationalists persecuted by the government, he said. To Navalny, Girkin’s idea of patriotism was old-fashioned and unrealistic. “I’m a real person from the real world, and that’s why I plan to solve the problems that exist. I don’t want to live in the chimera that we need to unite with Belarus right away, occupy something over there, and annex it,” he said. “Helping people right now is not about war, but the fight against corruption and improving the economy.”
The debate was a flop. Political commentators called it boring and lackluster, and it was unlikely that Navalny gained anything other than a few days of online outrage. Girkin’s endorsement was wholly unimportant to Navalny as Girkin had a fringe following — and Navalny had no real chance of running for president. If the debate succeeded in doing anything, it was to highlight the importance of nationalism in any open discussion on Russia’s future.
The Navalny-Girkin debate barely touched on some basic issues. It was the online audience, not Navalny, that raised questions about Girkin’s role in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. Girkin robotically maintained that his fighters had not possessed the weapons capable of bringing down the plane and declined any further comment on the matter. When viewers wrote in to ask if he considered Girkin a war criminal, Navalny wriggled out of a clear answer by saying that only a court of law could determine that. Navalny wheeled out economic arguments for opposing the war in the Donbas but did not mention the political and moral problems of Russia attacking one of its closest neighbors. The fate of Crimea came up only fleetingly.
Navalny was walking a fine line. He wanted to demonstrate his credentials as a nationalist without scaring off his liberal base. Navalny obviously was not a Russian nationalist of Girkin’s ilk: bitter, fanatical, and ready to kill for the cause. But Navalny also did not shun the label of Russian nationalist. He actively courted it.
As a young man, Navalny had been drawn to Yabloko, one of post-Communist Russia’s oldest political parties with a liberal, pro-Western orientation. In Putin’s first two terms, Yabloko lost its representation in the Duma and gradually drifted into irrelevance. A number of liberals, including Navalny’s political mentor, the journalist Yevgenia Albats, believed that the Putin regime could only be brought down by forming a coalition with nationalists. Navalny split with Yabloko in 2007 and cofounded a group called NAROD, the Russian word for “people” and an acronym for National Russian Liberation Movement.
In their manifesto, the founders of NAROD warned that Russia risked disappearing from the map as the country’s parasitic leadership squandered the nation’s natural resources. They called for a “national rebirth,” democratic rights, and a unifying nationalism that would bring together all Russian citizens, regardless of ethnic origin. The 1,100-word paper was a jumble of ideas, some of them contradictory, that reflected the views of its eleven authors. At the time, the most prominent signatory was not Alexei Navalny but Zakhar Prilepin, a writer who would become an ardent supporter of the war in Ukraine. Among NAROD’s “principles” were individual gun rights, the reversal of the privatizations of the 1990s, and a “sensible migration policy.” The manifesto also called for recognizing the independence of Russia’s “historical allies,” such as the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but it did not advocate territorial expansion. Part vision and part fantasy, the NAROD manifesto was driven by the same rage against Putin that would motivate Navalny in the future.
In a 2011 interview with Albats — published five months before he became the leader of antigovernment protests in Moscow — Navalny mocked the debate over whether he was a nationalist. Navalny said that he was seeking the support of people from across the political spectrum, from Communists to democrats to nationalists. He said he wanted to take on the problems that concerned “85 percent” of Russians, including illegal migration and “ethnic violence.” Ignoring those issues only yielded the discussion on nationalism to the most aggressive, marginal elements, Navalny said. Although he acknowledged that NAROD had failed as a movement, Navalny said he stood by its original platform.
In his debate with Girkin, as in the NAROD manifesto, Navalny unapologetically referred to Russians as the “largest divided people” in Europe — a belief held not only by Girkin but also by Putin. In a 2005 address to the nation, Putin called the Soviet collapse the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century. “As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama,” Putin continued. “Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.”
Estonians, Georgians, and Ukrainians may finally have achieved self-determination and independence in 1991, but the new Russia that emerged was only a shadow of its former empire. If there was one thing that Navalny, Girkin, and Putin all could agree on, it was that Russians had suffered a great historical injustice when the Soviet Union fell apart. As different as the three men were in their outlook, postimperial trauma was at the root of their worldviews. Each of them saw himself as a nationalist and a savior of the long-suffering Russian people.
In 2008 Navalny cheered on Russia’s short, victorious war against Georgia that turned the separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia into Russian client statelets. He later apologized for calling Georgians “rodents” — the two words are alliterative in Russian — but he did not retract his support for the invasion as such. Less than six years later, as Russian troops fanned out over Crimea, Navalny took a much more nuanced position.
In a lengthy blog entry posted on the eve of Crimea’s “independence referendum,” Navalny argued against the peninsula’s impending annexation. Russia’s most important strategic advantage was not its natural resources or nuclear weapons, he wrote, but its close relations with its two fellow East Slavic neighbors. “With Ukrainians and Belarusians, we are like brothers living in different apartments and not simply neighbors,” Navalny said. Before Russia’s stealth occupation of Crimea began, most people in Ukraine and Belarus would probably have agreed with that statement. Now, Navalny warned, Putin was destroying that strategic advantage by seizing Crimea on the false pretext of defending Russians.
As an anticorruption campaigner and protest leader in Russia, Navalny welcomed the popular uprising in Kyiv that had ousted the corrupt Yanukovych regime. Navalny clearly stated that any change of borders by force was unacceptable, and that Russia should live up to its international obligations as a guarantor of Ukraine’s territorial integrity — even if the 1954 transfer of Crimea to Ukraine had been “wrong, unfair, and insulting to any normal Russian citizen.” Instead of annexing Crimea, Navalny said, Moscow should demand a number of concessions from Kyiv, including greater autonomy for the peninsula, a guarantee that Ukraine would not join NATO, and the indefinite, rent-free use of Crimean naval bases by the Russian Black Sea Fleet.
A little more than half a year later, Navalny appeared to accept the annexation of Crimea as a fait accompli. In an interview with the liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy, Navalny said that even if Crimea had been seized in violation of international law, it would de facto belong to Russia for the “foreseeable future.” Asked if he would return Crimea to Ukraine if he became president, Navalny replied: “What is Crimea — a ham sandwich that you can take and give back?” It would be only fair to conduct a “normal referendum,” even if the final result would likely not differ from that of the Kremlin’s fake plebiscite, he said.
Navalny took a controversial position and stuck to it. Years later he still insisted on the idea of a second referendum, disregarding the fact that the first one had been carried out in violation of Ukraine’s constitution and that Crimea’s population had changed significantly since the annexation, with pro-unity Ukrainians leaving and Russian citizens moving in. However, Navalny was right that pro-Russian sentiment in Crimea had always run high, and that returning it to Ukraine would be fraught with complications for the people living there. For Navalny, relations with Ukraine were a deeply personal issue. Like millions of other Russians, Navalny had roots in Ukraine; his father came from a village near Chernobyl, site of the 1986 nuclear disaster. Pressed in the Ekho Moskvy interview on whether he viewed Russians and Ukrainians as one people, Navalny responded that as a person who had spent a lot of time in Ukraine he saw “no difference” between them. His viewpoint was shared by many, if not most, Russians.
The seizure of Crimea was wildly popular in Russia, and Putin’s ratings showed it. In June 2014, 86 percent of Russians approved of Putin’s performance as president, while only 13 percent disapproved, according to the independent Levada Center. A year earlier Putin’s approval rating had been just 63 percent — a low number by Kremlin standards — with a record 36 percent of Russians disapproving of his performance. The annexation of Crimea sowed confusion among Putin’s domestic opponents. On Facebook, activists I had met at antigovernment protests two years earlier were rejoicing. In October 2014, when I traveled to Moscow for the first time after the Russian invasion, I met for beers with a former protest leader. She condemned Putin for the spiraling violence in eastern Ukraine, but she called the conflict a “civil war” and the Donbas “our land.” In Ukraine, people began to repeat the saying that “a Russian liberal ends where Ukraine begins.” In fact, few Russian opposition figures took a categorical, principled stance against the war. Boris Nemtsov was a notable exception, and he was assassinated in 2015.
Postimperial trauma permeated all of Russian society. In terms of territory, the Soviet Union had been a continuation of the Russian Empire, and when it fell apart in 1991, the colonizers were left unmoored and disoriented. For centuries, Russians had seen themselves as the civilizational center of a multiethnic land empire encompassing their neighbors. In the nineteenth century, most peoples of Europe experienced a national awakening and striving for their own nation-state. Russians did not. Their home was an empire, and it continued to be one for most of the twentieth century.
Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the term “Russian nationalist” was commonly used to describe someone who wanted to reestablish Russia’s control over its former colonies. Navalny tried to return the term to its original meaning — more in line with the nation-building, exclusionary nationalism of a nation-state than the hungry expansionism of the Russia of centuries past. “Imperialism is stupid and evil. It harms the interests of the Russian people,” Navalny warned as Putin’s “little green men” were occupying Crimea. Navalny said that Russians should focus on raising living standards inside their own country and turn it into a modern European democracy. “Russians’ main interest is not the seizure of land, but the normal management of the land we already have. Take a look at a map, there is quite a lot of it,” he wrote.
Putin probably would have agreed with Navalny at the beginning of his rule. In his first year in office, Putin set a goal for Russia to reach Portugal’s per capita GDP in fifteen years, which on the back of rapidly rising oil prices seemed completely realistic. Yet as Russia’s oil revenues grew, so did Putin’s nostalgia for the Soviet Union’s superpower status. By the time he began his third term in office, Putin had abandoned the idea of accommodating the West and instead set out to challenge it. When he annexed Crimea in 2014, Putin turbocharged ultranationalists like Girkin, who had been thirsting for the expansion of post-Communist Russia’s borders. Putin’s nationalism was morphing from a quest for national revival into a march to imperial restoration.
The biggest surprise of my return to Russia was not the hardening of Putin’s regime, but the appearance of a new generation of Russians ready to challenge it. Having grown up with open borders and the internet, these young people were unburdened by the inferiority complexes of Russia’s ruling class. They measured their quality of life by that of their peers abroad, not by the impoverishment following the fall of the Soviet Union. Their values were informed by what they saw in the West, and they did not understand why Russians should live any differently. For this new generation, Putin was not a hero but the head of a rotting, archaic political system built on cronyism and repression.
I found these young, free Russians not just in Moscow but everywhere I traveled. They listened to rebellious Russian rap, sported tattoos, and cut and colored their hair the way they wanted to. They questioned traditional gender roles and were outraged by their country’s glaring economic disparities. I started calling them “New Russians,” reappropriating a pejorative term once used to describe the gaudy nouveaux riches of the 1990s.
Navalny addressed young people directly in their language and on their social media. He also met them in person as he set up campaign offices in dozens of cities. In May 2017 I caught up with Navalny’s campaign in Tula, one hundred miles south of Moscow. A crowd of mostly twenty-something men greeted Navalny with cheers when he arrived at the new two-room campaign office. Navalny shook every volunteer’s hand, then gave a spirited stump speech before fielding questions on everything from the army draft — he would abolish it — to LGBTQ rights — people’s private lives were nobody else’s business.
Navalny reintroduced politics into Russian life. He was remarkable because he was doing something nobody had tried before in Putin’s Russia: create a nationwide political organization fueled by grassroots enthusiasm. Unlike other regime critics, Navalny did not limit his political activism to angry Facebook posts and the occasional protest rally. Instead, he broke out of the Moscow bubble and went out into Russia. Twenty-four years younger than Putin, Navalny was everything the aging Russian leader was not — informal and witty, unscripted and self-deprecating. Unlike Putin’s carefully stage-managed meetings with citizens, Navalny’s campaign stops were spontaneous and energizing. His vision was of a “wonderful Russia of the future” — a country that would protect civil liberties, uproot corruption, foster entrepreneurship, and not be in eternal conflict with the West. Putin, in contrast, focused on the past. He reminded voters of Russia’s troubles before his ascent to power and basked in the glory of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Now as then, Putin warned, Russia was surrounded by enemies and subverted by traitors.
Putin, who shunned email and smartphones, was slow to grasp the power of the internet. But the internet helped Navalny break the news monopoly of state television and bring together like-minded people from across Russia’s vastness. In April 2017, as his campaign was picking up steam, Navalny started a weekly news show that seemed to be inspired by the American comedian Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. Every Thursday evening, Navalny grilled Russia’s powers that be with righteous outrage and a sense of the absurd. Often attracting more than one million views per episode, the show was livestreamed, allowing Navalny to field questions in real time. Thanks to the internet, Navalny’s campaign was able to create a database of supporters, sign up tens of thousands of volunteers, and raise hundreds of millions of rubles in donations.
Having watched hours of his show and followed him on the campaign trail, I finally met Navalny in person in February 2018. Navalny had been officially barred from the presidential race because of his fraud conviction and was now calling for a boycott of the March election. I found Navalny in a cramped corner office at the headquarters of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, which police had raided just a few days before to search for an imaginary bomb. Even though I arrived early, Navalny did not make me wait. Just as in his videos, he was easygoing and funny, speaking to me almost twice as long as had been scheduled.
My first question was about what motivated him, as Navalny had been physically attacked and repeatedly jailed, and his brother, Oleg, was in prison on another fraud conviction. “I want to live in a normal country and refuse to accept any talk about Russia being doomed to being a bad, poor, or servile country,” Navalny said. “I want to live here, and I can’t tolerate the injustice that for many people has become routine.” His first priority if he came to power would be a complete overhaul of the judiciary, he said. The second priority would be to move closer to a European-style parliamentary system to dilute Russia’s overly powerful presidency. In foreign policy, Navalny viewed an end to the war in Ukraine as crucial to restoring relations with the West. His vision of Russia was as a leading European power that would join the European Union and cooperate closely with NATO. The strategic interests of the United States and Russia were largely aligned, he said. There was no doubt in his mind: “We’re a Western country.”
Navalny was fuzzy on his own political affiliation, saying Western labels did not translate well to Russia. A Russian Communist was more like a right-wing conservative in the U.S. context, whereas a liberal in Russia might be seen as a libertarian in America. Navalny said that political labels were meaningless in an authoritarian system. His idea was to form a broad coalition that could agree on basic democratic values and the common goal of ousting the regime. Navalny told me that the label of nationalist did not bother him, although he rejected the imperialist thinking behind Putin’s war in Ukraine.
Navalny refused to be viewed as “some kind of dissident.” He saw himself as a mainstream politician: “If you take any of my anticorruption investigations or any points from my political platform, I’m sure the majority of Russian citizens would support me — and that’s why I wasn’t allowed to run.” Other Putin opponents such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had spent ten years in prison, now found themselves in exile, and the 2015 assassination of Boris Nemtsov was still fresh in people’s minds. Yet Navalny was determined to stay in Russia. When I asked him if he believed that his life was in danger, Navalny said that he tried not to think about it: “If you think about it constantly, you won’t be able to do anything.”
Lucian Kim is a journalist who has covered Putin’s Russia since 2003. He is the author of Putin’s Revenge: Why Russia Invaded Ukraine (Columbia University Press, 2024).
Excerpted from Putin’s Revenge: Why Russia Invaded Ukraine by Lucian Kim. Copyright © 2024 Lucian Kim. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
Image credit: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
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FURTHER READING |
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The Legacy of a True Russian Patriot |
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