Read an exclusive interview with Alexei Navalny, Russia's imprisoned dissident
, resulting in a standoff drenched in Cold War revivalism. Envoys of the world’s two nuclear superpowers spent weeks trading threats and demands. The spectacle made Navalny cringe. “Time and again the West falls into Putin’s elementary traps,” he wrote me, in a letter that arrived Jan. 14. “It just takes my breath away, watching how Putin pulls this on the American establishment again and again.”
Rather than convening talks or offering concessions, Navalny wants the U.S. to pressure the Kremlin from without while Navalny and his supporters pressure it from within. The combination, he believes, will split the elites around Putin, ushering in what Navalny’s followers like to call “the beautiful Russia of the future,” one that is free, democratic, at peace with its neighbors and the West.
On social media, the foundation became famous for exposing the garish wealth of these elites. Its reports were often based on forensic accounting and bank records. Some used drone footage of Italian villas owned by Putin’s underlings. Others plucked evidence from photos that these officials or their relatives posted online, flaunting a yacht or luxury watches. One technocrat had a habit of flying his pet corgis to dog shows on a private jet.
A few months later, prosecutors filed new charges, accusing Navalny and his brother Oleg of stealing from two companies. Both men were sentenced to three and a half years in a case that the European Court of Human Rights would later describe as “arbitrary and unfair.” Oleg served much of that term in solitary confinement, becoming what his brother called a hostage of the Russian state. Alexei Navalny got off easier; the court suspended his sentence.
When he came out of a coma, Navalny had trouble recognizing his wife and children. The poison had attacked his nervous system, affecting his memory and motor functions. His wife later told me about the delirium and hallucinations that caused him to rip the IV tubes from his veins, spraying the bedsheets with blood. Weeks passed before he relearned how to use a spoon, to write, to walk and to wash himself.
The Kremlin’s response was fierce. Thousands of protesters were arrested, and dozens of independent journalists and news outlets were later put on a state blacklist of “foreign agents.” Anyone associated with Navalny, including his lawyers, found themselves in legal jeopardy. The elderly father of one of his allies was sent to jail above the Arctic Circle.
for trying to kill Navalny with a chemical weapon. Most of those identified in Navalny’s investigation were on the list. Yet he was disappointed in the American response. “These are just the agents of Putin’s will,” he wrote me. “We’re all tired of rolling our eyes, watching the U.S. impose sanctions on some colonels and generals, who don’t even have any money abroad.” It would be far more effective, he says, to go after Putin’s own fortune and the bagmen who keep it for him in Western banks.
The group now openly calls for political backing from foreign governments and solicits money from private donors. When we met over dinner in November, Volkov was in Washington to speak before Congress on Navalny’s behalf and drum up support. A few days later, he held the movement’s first official fundraiser in New York City, inviting wealthy Russian expats to back their cause. Hundreds showed up, snapping selfies with Navalny’s surrogates like they were celebrities.
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