Aleksei A. Navalny constructed Russia’s largest opposition pressure in his picture, embodying a freer, fairer Russia for thousands and thousands. His exiled workforce now faces the daunting job of steering his political motion with out him.
The motion has discovered a pacesetter in Mr. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who has offered herself as the brand new face of the opposition to President Vladimir V. Putin. Ms. Navalnaya, 47, is aided by a close-knit workforce of her husband’s lieutenants, who took over working Mr. Navalny’s political community after his imprisonment in 2021.
Sustaining political momentum might be a problem. Few dissident actions in trendy historical past have managed to remain related, not to mention take energy, after the loss of life of a pacesetter who personified it. And up to now, Mr. Navalny’s workforce has made little try and unite Russia’s fractured opposition teams and win new allies by adjusting its insular, tightly managed methods.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Navalny’s workforce, Kira Yarmysh, didn’t reply to questions or interview requests; nor did a number of of Mr. Navalny’s aides.
Of their public statements, Mr. Navalny’s prime aides have mentioned their motion must change to proceed confronting Mr. Putin with out its chief, although it’s unclear what the brand new technique is perhaps.
Even from jail, Mr. Navalny had “managed to help us, to contaminate us with optimism, to give you tasks, give you cool political concepts,” Leonid Volkov, Mr. Navalny’s chief political organizer, mentioned in a video printed on social media final month. “With out Aleksei, issues is not going to be as earlier than.”
However, Mr. Volkov added, he did “not have a concrete plan of motion.”
Photos of 1000’s of Russians who paid respect to Mr. Navalny on the cemetery final week regardless of the specter of repression have supplied Ms. Navalnaya with political momentum. Her capacity to channel this impulse into a long-lasting political pressure might be examined throughout Russia’s presidential elections this month.
Mr. Putin is all however sure to win his fourth six-year time period in a vote that lacks actual rivals. However to disrupt the federal government’s narrative of widespread help, Ms. Navalnaya has taken up an initiative first supported by her husband. It calls on voters to go to voting stations at 12 p.m. on March 17, the final day of the three-day vote.
What voters select to do as soon as they’re on the polls is much less vital, the initiative’s supporters say, than registering protest towards a sham election with their mere presence.
“We are able to present that we’re many, and that we’re sturdy,” Ms. Navalnaya mentioned in a video printed on Wednesday.
By framing the initiative, referred to as Noon Towards Putin, as a tribute to Mr. Navalny, Ms. Navalnaya has offered herself as his political successor.
However staking the political capital of Mr. Navalny’s motion on a dangerous, hard-to-measure expression of civil disobedience might additionally expose the bounds of Ms. Navalnaya’s attain.
“If nobody comes out, it should change my notion of the nation,” mentioned one of many initiative’s authors, Maxim Reznik, a former regional lawmaker from St. Petersburg residing in exile. “Are individuals afraid to such an extent that that is now all so hopeless?”
After lengthy shunning the general public highlight, Ms. Navalnaya has begun constructing her political persona in sharply produced, centered monologues offered in brief YouTube movies, in addition to by poignant public speeches to Western policymakers.
However she has averted giving interviews to information media or going off-script in different public occasions.
She is supported by a workforce made up of Mr. Volkov and about 4 different individuals who had been senior aides to Mr. Navalny. Most are of their 30s and spent years working with Mr. Navalny as he challenged the federal government.
After the federal government labeled Mr. Navalny’s motion extremist in 2021, his workforce moved operations to Vilnius, Lithuania, due to its proximity to Russia and bodily security. No less than seven individuals who remained behind and had labored for Mr. Navalny as activists or attorneys have since been imprisoned in Russia.
In Vilnius, Mr. Navalny’s workforce has geared up a warren of workplaces, convention rooms and broadcast studios in a central workplace constructing because the headquarters of its political group, the Anti-Corruption Basis.
The workforce oversees scores of researchers, activists and media professionals who promote numerous political initiatives inside Russia, examine corruption within the Russian authorities and broadcast YouTube movies that entice thousands and thousands of viewers in Russia each month. The motion additionally claims to have 1000’s of underground volunteers inside Russia.
In Vilnius, Navalny’s supporters have largely remoted themselves from a broader neighborhood of Russian dissidents who moved to the Lithuanian capital after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
They’ve additionally maintained an arms-length relationship with the federal government of Lithuania, which staunchly opposes Mr. Putin however views residents of Russia, a former occupying energy, with a level of suspicion, based on two Lithuanian officers who mentioned coverage on the situation of anonymity.
Mr. Navalny’s workforce has not requested the Lithuanian state for monetary help, and it has saved its distance from the nation’s safety companies, the officers mentioned. They defined this posture as their need to keep up their independence and shield themselves from the Russian authorities.
Mr. Navalny’s workforce doesn’t disclose the way it pays for its operations. Its final monetary report, printed in 2021, confirmed that their motion coated three-quarters of its bills that yr with cash from particular person donations.
To Mr. Navalny’s supporters, his aides’ emphasis on self-sufficiency stems from years of conducting politics in a repressive state bent on destroying them. They mixed the most recent web applied sciences with shoe leather-based native activism, leading to a motion that meshes components of a tech start-up with a Nineteenth-century revolutionary cell.
However even a few of their collaborators admit in non-public that the Navalny workforce’s insularity, confidence of their technical talents and certainty of their plan of action might price them a singular alternative to construct a broader, extra inclusive political motion that outlives its founder.
Mr. Navalny had lengthy towered above the remainder of the Russian opposition. He acquired 27 p.c of the vote when he ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013, the one election during which he was allowed to take part. That end result, his supporters say, was sufficient to trigger the federal government to speed up a marketing campaign towards Mr. Navalny, which culminated in his loss of life in jail on Feb. 16.
Mr. Navalny’s workforce has lengthy shunned the information media, preferring as a substitute to broadcast its message by its social media channels, which embody television-style information applications.
After Mr. Navalny’s loss of life, a few of his aides have given interviews to Russian journalists seen as sympathetic to their trigger, however they’ve averted chatting with the worldwide information media.
The bounds of the workforce’s go-it-alone technique had been on show in Vilnius throughout a rally referred to as exterior the Russian Embassy to commemorate Mr. Navalny’s loss of life. Different opposition activists within the metropolis mentioned Mr. Navalny’s aides didn’t publicize the rally externally, and it drew a few dozen individuals.
Mr. Navalny, and later his workforce, lengthy justified his aversion to political alliances by saying that his effort and time could be higher spent on political activism. His unmatched political community inside Russia has meant that his workforce wants such alliances far lower than the remainder of the nation’s opposition.
An outpouring of condolences for Mr. Navalny from throughout the Russian opposition had raised hope that his successors would attempt a extra inclusive method. But, the Navalny workforce shortly resumed bickering with its critics.
“Simply scuttle off,” a director of Mr. Navalny’s investigative workforce, Ivan Zhdanov, wrote to a outstanding opposition blogger, Maxim Katz, final week, in a heated change of messages on social media over Mr. Navalny’s burial.
Ms. Navalnaya attacked an opposition politician, Boris B. Nadezhdin, after he advised that individuals might have totally different, even adverse views of Mr. Navalny, however nonetheless help his proper to a dignified burial.
“Aleksei was a hero,” Ms. Navalnaya wrote in reply to Mr. Nadezhdin, who was barred from working towards Mr. Putin within the March elections. “I can’t permit you to ‘have numerous opinions about him.’”
Alina Lobzina and Tomas Dapkus contributed reporting from Vilnius, and Neil MacFarquhar from New York.
