BY MIKHAIL ZYGAR
DIED
ON JAN. 1, 2015, ALEXEI Navalny called me. “Well, you and us have no one else left but you and us. Let’s work together,” he said.
It was indeed a hard time for both him and me. I was editor in chief of the Dozhd TV channel at the time, and we were cut off from all cable and satellite operators. But Navalny, who died at 47 on Feb. 16 in a Siberian prison, faced much worse: the criminal case invented to force him to stop his political activities. That time, Alexei was given a suspended sentence, but his brother was imprisoned.
That year, I wrote a book called All the Kremlin’s Men. One chapter was about Alexei, and I described him as follows: “Navalny is a unique person who made a conscious choice. As yet he has no power, and may never have. But he has certainly sacrificed the chance to lead a normal life, although he describes it as an opportunity to change Russia for the better.”
I was naive at that time—all of us were. We would never believe that Vladimir Putin wanted him dead. Because we thought that he didn’t want Navalny to be a martyr. I always thought, “Alexei is very morally strong; he is a historical figure; he cannot die.”
About a week before his death, I received a letter from Alexei. It was, of course, incredibly funny and energetic. He wrote that he was sitting in a cell from which you can’t see a blade of grass or a leaf, and even to take a walk he was taken only to a neighboring cell, but he wrote it so cheerfully and dashingly that there was no doubt that everything was all right.
He also wrote about Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and Vysotsky. He was glad that in the new colony he was able to reread Crime and Punishment.
I THINK MANYof us thought he was a magician: at some point, he casts some sort of spell, Putin disappears, and Alexei becomes the Russian President. But it turns out it won’t be like that. He won��
