The fearless widow of Alexei Navalny, the anticorruption activist poisoned and murdered by the Kremlin, tells Decca Aitkenhead about their perilous family life and why she is continuing her husband’s fight to save their country.

Yulia Navalnaya probably could have stopped her husband from returning home in 2021, to his imprisonment and ultimately his death. Five months earlier the Russian opposition leader had been poisoned with novichok by President Putin’s secret agents in Siberia. Airlifted to Berlin, where doctors
saved his life, he spent weeks in a coma and many more relearning to talk, write and walk, with his wife by his side. She was still by his side when they boarded a plane together to Moscow. Both knew it might be Alexei Navalny’s final act as a free man — but never once did she consider persuading him not to.

“I could have. I could have made a quarrel, shouting and everything. And he would have listened. And then we would have been living in exile, unhappy.”

On landing he was arrested, locked up, and the following morning sentenced to prison, never to be released. Three years later, at a remote penal colony in the Arctic Circle in February, Navalny collapsed from another suspected poisoning. This time no one was there to save him.

“When he decided to return to Russia there was no reason to stop him, because his political life was based in internal Russian politics. He couldn’t be in exile. It was obvious Putin and his regime wanted him to be in exile. And that’s a terrible tragedy in my life. But I absolutely understood that you need to fight. It’s his life, it’s his choice, it’s his beliefs. To persuade him to stay in exile, I would feel much more guilty.”

Knowing what she knows now, if she could turn back the clock would she change their decision to return? After an agonised silence, she says softly: “It’s a difficult question. I am trying not to think about it.” With her gaze trained on the floor beside her feet, “Yeah, that makes sense if I want my beloved husband alive, for sure. If I want to share with him all the happiest days in life, to sit together with our grandchildren and read to them — yeah, of course. But I think so many things have happened in my life, I am trying not to look back. Otherwise it will bring me to a lot of difficult thoughts. And it will make my really difficult life even harder.”

It’s a measure of what Navalnaya’s life has become that I don’t even know from which country she has come to visit London. Since her husband’s murder she can’t risk living in Russia, nor disclose the location of her new home. Exile and bodyguards were the last things she wanted, but now “it’s a necessity”.

We meet in a room above a café in Kentish Town on a rainy October morning, eight months after she was widowed. The 48-year-old arrives feeling under the weather, her throat croaky and complexion pale, but looks disorientatingly young. Simultaneously striking and low-key, she is statuesque, with an air of stillness that conveys deep sadness and absolute steel. Press profiles mention her reputation as a “snow queen”, but there is nothing remotely aloof about her during our conversation. At several points her eyes well up, and at others fill with humour or affection for a memory. For all that she has lost, she reflects: “I spent more than 25 years with the man I loved.”

The authorities didn’t release her husband’s body to his mother for more than a week; his widow and allies believe they were waiting for traces of novichok to leave his system. Russian officials insisted Navalny died of natural causes, a position they maintain. Navalnaya issued a statement accusing Putin of murder. Hundreds of Russians were arrested for gathering across the country to pay their respects; flowers lain in his memory in cities across Russia were removed overnight. Thousands of supporters defied police to line the streets in Moscow for his funeral.

Murdered but not silenced, Navalny now speaks to us from the grave through Patriot, a memoir he began writing while recovering from novichok poisoning in Germany, and continued on scraps of paper and smuggled notebooks in one Russian prison cell after another. The final diary entry was written just 29 days before he died, yet charisma and courage still dazzle on every page. His voice is so vivid — fearless, playful, funny, clear-eyed — that while reading Patriot I kept finding myself forgetting he was dead.

His widow is now the public face of Russia’s opposition, chairwoman of the Anti-Corruption Foundation he founded, and travels the world lobbying leaders. She was appointed chairwoman of the US-based Human Rights Federation in July. But if Patriot is an excoriating political account of the couple’s fight against a corrupt totalitarian regime, it is also a love story.

“You just meet this guy — really almost a young boy — and you’re living this life together. And so you’re just moving with him to this direction, because you love him.”

The couple met in 1998, on a tourist bus on holiday in Turkey, on their way to go ten-pin bowling. He was newly graduated from law school in Moscow, working as a lawyer for a property company; she had studied international economics, and had recently started an internship at a business school in Copenhagen. He took one look, he writes, and thought, “This is the girl I will marry.”

“It wasn’t with me the same,” she says with a dry smile. “We were both 22. I didn’t think a lot about who would be my husband.” But he was barely home through his Moscow apartment door, he writes, when she phoned.

“Absolutely true.” She grins. “I decided not to be scared. Because all the time people meet each other, and they like each other, and then they’re too shy to call. I thought, I like this guy and I should be brave.”

They were such a good-looking couple, I was surprised to read his description of his early twentysomething self. “My social set was the nerds. I have always preferred the company of people excruciatingly ill at ease with the opposite sex, but who are spectacularly well read and prone to make, or attempt to make, abstruse jokes, rather than being with chic party animals who circulate effortlessly, glass in hand, laughing and coolly kissing the air near each other’s cheeks. To this day I fear these people and feel awkward around them.”

When I read it to her, she laughs. “I think a lot of people who didn’t know him had the opposite vision of him because he was tall, handsome and when we met absolutely blonde,” she says. “And of course it was obvious that girls liked him a lot. I think he liked that I was really interested in politics. I was not just a 22-year-old girl who cares about parties and so on.”

Both had grown up in politically engaged families, he in a succession of army towns, the son of a military liaison officer, she the daughter of a Moscow scientist and government worker. Coming of age during the era of perestroika, the Soviet economic restructuring programme to end stagnation, they met when President Boris Yeltsin was promising ever greater freedom.

“We were dreaming to build a strong family and to do whatever we like to do.”

But by the time they married in 2000, Putin was president and Russia’s future looked very different. “I knew,” Navalny writes, “I couldn’t believe a word Putin said. His appointment made me determined to resist.”

His activism began modestly with legal advice to Yabloko, a small liberal party. In 2004 he launched a social youth movement, Democratic Alternative!, and organised public debates that soon attracted aggressive attention from Putin’s henchmen. Censored on the airwaves and in print, in 2007 Navalny moved online, where he began to expose the regime’s gluttonous corruption. By the end of the decade he was a social media star in Russia and a dangerous thorn in Putin’s side.

The following decade brought multiple arrests, detention and Kafkaesque criminal charges, none of which deterred Navalny. In post-Soviet politics his magnetism, flair for social media and fluency in the street argot of younger Russians all singled him out. Strategically inventive, he galvanised public dissent by focusing on presidential corruption; Russians were stunned by the grotesque extravagance of plundered luxury his videos revealed.

The anti-Putin opposition could be fractious. Critics accused Navalny of ugly nationalism, and he angered Ukrainians with a less-than-full-throated condemnation of Putin’s annexation of Crimea. But popular support for Navalny and his Russia of the Future party continued to grow, despite his disbarment from elections.

Navalnaya cannot pinpoint a moment when she knew his life was imperilled. “It’s not like one day something happens and you go OK, now I understand that it’s dangerous and I need to take the decision if I support it or not.” Her husband’s “invisible helper”, she worked unwaveringly behind the scenes. “If you share these beliefs with him, you just understand that this man with whom you’re living is really doing the right thing.”

When out with their daughter, Dasha, born in 2001, and son, Zakhar, born in 2008, she would often be followed by secret agents. “I would play a game with the children — like, you know, to hide. I mean, it’s not fun. You hate it. You don’t want somebody following you while you’re walking in your own city with your children. But you need to deal with the situation and it’s better to deal with it in the right way, not to take it so seriously. It’s easier just not to be nervous every minute.” I ask if it felt more important for them to show other Russians, or Putin, they weren’t scared.

“We didn’t want to show we were not afraid,” she corrects me. “We were not afraid.”

In August 2020 she was getting ready to leave for the airport outside Moscow to meet Navalny off a flight from Siberia, where he had been election campaigning, when his press secretary called to say the plane had made an emergency landing in Omsk after he was suddenly taken ill. When Navalnaya reached the hospital, her husband was receiving primitive medical care and “all the doctors were hiding from me”. She told them she had a plane ready to airlift him to Berlin, “and they started to play this game — ‘Oh, probably not today. We would prefer to do it tomorrow.’ ” They told her that relatives weren’t allowed into the emergency ward, yet let police into his room. “You can feel everybody’s scared, and you can feel that half of these people are lying to you.”

Medical staff diagnosed a metabolic disorder, but one doctor took her aside in the corridor and whispered, “You need to take him away from this hospital.”

In Germany tests confirmed novichok poisoning. It feels scarcely plausible when Navalny writes, after all of this: “Not once have I ever heard a word of reproach from Yulia.” Can that really be true? “I never said it’s too much, for sure. That doesn’t make me a hero — you’re just living this life. To both of us it was quickly clear that, with Putin, if you show you are ready to negotiate he just puts much more pressure on. So it was obvious that if you decided to fight, you had to just follow your way.”

Navalny’s account of his return to Russia five months later, written from a police cell, is haunting. Having gamed out every possible scenario, he concludes: “Putin is nuts, but he’s not going to be crazy enough to create a major incident by arresting me at the airport.” When his chief of staff suggests that Putin might divert his plane from Moscow’s Vnukovo airport to one far from the supporters awaiting his return,

“I dismiss the idea out of hand,” he writes. “Come on, they’re never going to do that.” And yet a worm of doubt nags at him: “There are a thousand and one simple ways you can be killed in prison.”

The plane was crammed with journalists, jostling for a view of him, ignoring the cabin crew’s pleas to sit down. The couple watched Rick and Morty, a cartoon he loved and she did not, on his laptop. What was going through her mind during the flight?

“That I loved him a lot,” she says simply. “I was just happy to be with him. Of course, probably there were thoughts like, will he be imprisoned? But when I was close with him, I felt in any situation much more confident and much more calm. I am absolutely confident, even in a very difficult situation, when we are together.”

Coming in to land, the plane was abruptly diverted to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, about 50km away. At passport control he was led away, detained in a cell, and the next morning marched into a mocked-up courtroom inside a police station filled with “fake public and fake journalists”, where he was formally arrested and transferred to prison. Sentenced the following month to three and a half years in jail, he faced countless further kangaroo courts inside a string of different prisons, culminating in a 19-year sentence months before his death.

From the moment he was led away, did Navalnaya know she had lost him? “Oh, I never had the feeling that I lost him. As long as I was in Russia I felt close to him.”

After his poisoning in 2020 the family dispersed. They enrolled their son, now 16, at boarding school, where he remains studying. Their daughter, now 23, graduated from Stanford in California this summer — but for the first year of his incarceration Navalnaya and the children were able to visit him. His diaries from prison, where he was often held in solitary confinement and at one point went on hunger strike, sound less and less like the man who began writing the book. However, Navalnaya says he was “exactly” himself on her final visit in February 2022, when she was allowed to stay with him for three days.

“He was, like, ‘OK, I have a meeting with my wife, I want to spend the time with her. But still, I need to read.’ ” He had set himself a target of ten pages of foreign language fiction a day. “He was also doing exercises several times a day.” She chuckles affectionately. “All the time he was saying, ‘Of course I don’t want to do it. But if I skip it for three days, it will take me one week or a month to start it again. That’s why it’s better for me not to skip it even during these days.’ It shows his character a lot.”

Two years later, international negotiations for a prisoner swap to free Navalny came tantalisingly close to completion. On the evening of February 15, at the annual Munich Security Conference, Navalnaya was told they had been finalised. He would be free within a week. In her hotel room the following day his name flashed up on the news feed on her phone. The headline read: Alexei Navalny has died.

“I am very lucky that I tried to live the last 20 years in a situation where I don’t have very high expectations. That’s why I was a bit sceptical all the time [about the prisoner swap]. I know how it works when you negotiate with Putin. He all the time lies. That’s why I never thought it could happen tomorrow. I knew that we are pretty close — but I knew also that it could be ruined the same day. In this reason I’m very happy that I didn’t think about it a lot.”

I ask if she shares the widely held belief that Putin murdered Navalny to thwart the West’s insistence on his inclusion in any prisoner swap. “It could be a reason,” she agrees. “It could be a strong reason. But I hate to guess. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on these thoughts, because it’s not possible to realise what was in Putin’s mind.”

People often assume she must hate her president every bit as much as he appears to have loathed her husband. “A lot of people say to me — and they think I share these thoughts — ‘I hate him, I want him to die, I’ll drink to Putin’s death,’ and so on. But I don’t feel like this. I don’t hate him. I’m absolutely confident that I don’t wish Putin to die. I want him to be in a Russian prison, like my husband was.” She doesn’t want to see him on trial in the Hague. “I want him to go from being a kind of tsar of Russia to an ordinary prisoner in Russia.”

Does she want him to read Navalny’s book? She looks surprised and hesitates — the thought hasn’t occurred to her. Then, witheringly: “I’m not sure he reads books.”

The West is “still naive” both about the depths of Putin’s depravity, she believes, and the futility of its current sanctions programme. She keeps urging world leaders to target his corrupt inner circle, so I ask why she thinks they still aren’t listening. She offers a wan smile. “When you speak with any head of the state, you have nice conversations, and they look that they understand all your arguments. But they care firstly about being politicians in their own countries, not to do something in this unknown and strange Russia.”

She has never had any contact with Donald Trump. When the international prisoner swap did finally take place in August, the phone call she received was from Kamala Harris. “And I appreciate very much she called me.” The day was bittersweet for Navalnaya. “Of course I’m happy innocent people were released from prison, especially three from Alexei’s organisation. But at that moment you realise you’re a normal person. Thinking, it could have been my husband there.”

Nothing about her life is normal now. She doesn’t like having bodyguards, and admits: “Sometimes I try to escape from the security. Like, if I need to go to the dry cleaner, should I go with the guards? I don’t want to be such a person.”

Her decision to succeed Navalny as her country’s leading opposition figure and continue his work was taken within days of his death; the couple had never discussed it and she’s not entirely sure he would even approve. “I think he would love to keep me far from these political, dangerous things. But you just realise you don’t have a choice. Of course you could just keep silent. But it’s not me. I would never give up on Russia.”

She won’t set foot back on Russian soil until she knows she “won’t be imprisoned in an airport like Alexei”. How or when that will be, “nobody knows”.

Patriot by Alexei Navalny is on sale now.

Written by: Decca Aitkenhead

© The Times of London