A dark, satiric sensibility is a basic qualification for anyone in the Russian opposition. Those leaders I knew in Moscow, before I left Russia in 2022, liked to crack jokes during interviews with journalists and to judges at court hearings.
Boris Nemtsov, though he had been arrested many times and knew he should worry for his life, would laugh at President Vladimir Putin’s Russia as the “gangster state of absurdity.” He told the story of the time pro-Putin activists had sent a prostitute to his vacation hotel in a bungled attempt to fabricate kompromat.
In 2015, Nemtsov was shot in his back as he strolled across a bridge near the Kremlin. Some of his associates thought that it was, in the end, his mockery of Putin that had marked him out as a target for assassination. (Nemtsov and I shared a name, but we were not related.)
When I learned of Alexei Navalny’s death in prison on Friday, I posted on social media a picture of him with Nemtsov: both with big, radiant smiles, standing shoulder to shoulder in front of a banner that advertised an opposition rally in that spring of 2015. “How beautiful these men are, unlike that miserable little greedy coward,” one Russian follower commented.
Beautiful, perhaps. Brave, certainly. When I think of the two of them, I will always remember the words written on a piece of paper that Navalny held at one of his court hearings: “I am not afraid and you should not be afraid.” Navalny was still smiling and laughing on the eve of his death, as a video of his appearance at a court hearing on Thursday attests. The next day, he reportedly fell ill and collapsed after a walk in the compound of the former Soviet Gulag prison in the Arctic Circle where he was sent last year.
“Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death,” President Joe Biden said at a White House news conference on Friday. Human-rights defenders who know Russia’s prison system agree. “Of course, he was murdered by a chain of actions ordered by Putin or by his men,” Sergei Davidis, the head of the political prisoners support program at the Memorial Human Rights Center, told me. “They were killing Navalny for a long time: First they poisoned him with Novichok, then arrested him illegally, then put him in solitary confinement for 300 days.”
Navalny was always angry at the corrupt and stupid public officials who, as he saw it, were robbing the Russian people. In one of several interviews I recorded with him, he referred to the Kremlin elite as an “idiotic regime.” But he was also critical of the “Western enablers,” the bankers, lawyers, and accountants who launder the oligarchs’ money abroad through real-estate deals in London, New York, and elsewhere.
Russia holds more than 500 political prisoners, according to the most recent tallies by Davidis’s group and U.S. officials. Deaths in prison are common. “Our group is monitoring the health of political prisoners; we are worried about at least four people who are in a critical condition,” he told me. Many wonder why Navalny returned to Russia from Germany, in 2021, after already suffering so much and in such open defiance of the opponent he called “Putin the thief.” “Navalny’s sacrifice will always be remembered,” Davidis said.
“I understand why Navalny returned to Russia, why Nemtsov came back,” Boris Vishnevsky, a member of the St. Petersburg city council, told me on Friday. He was mourning Navalny’s death, despite political differences they had had in the past. Vishnevsky’s opposition party, Yabloko, had previously criticized Navalny for participating in ultranationalist rallies. But Vishnevsky had since taken Navalny’s side. “As soon as Alexei returned to Russia and ended up behind bars, I immediately spoke against his arrest,” he said.
He understood the actions of Nemtsov and Navalny as very deliberate. “If you are a politician or an independent journalist in Russia today, you have to overcome fear,” he told me. “They made a decision to become martyrs.”
I remember a call I made to Nemtsov in September 2014, a few months before his death. I was reporting from a village in Dagestan with a sad name: Vremenny, or “temporary.” Russian security forces were demolishing houses there to punish the families of people accused of terrorism. I remember seeing the remains of children’s toys sticking up from the ground after the bulldozers had been through.
This was the year of Putin’s military intervention in the Donbas region of Ukraine, and of his annexation of Crimea. Nobody was paying much attention to human rights in a remote part of the North Caucasus. When I told Nemtsov something about my assignment in one of “the ’stans,” he laughed. When I explained where, he commented, “Dagestan will be always hot.” And then he said, “Listen, if I don’t joke, I will go nuts in our reality.” I spoke with him again, some weeks later, at his house in central Moscow. He told me that some of his friends were advising him to get out. “Why should I run?” he said. “Let Putin and his thugs run.”
That was my last interview with Nemtsov. When someone dies, you try to remember the last conversation you had with them. In 2020, I interviewed Navalny on camera for a documentary. I recall that he expressed a firm belief that, in 10 years’ time, we would speak again—and he would explain exactly how he’d won the war against corruption and for political freedom in Russia.
He was smiling. But this time, perhaps, he wasn’t joking.
