Navalny’s Death Shocked the World, but Will It Galvanize Opposition to Putin?
His death united world leaders and demonstrators in grief, but it also left Russia without a charismatic counterweight to its leader’s increasingly repressive policies.
In Munich, world leaders were left hushed and hollow-eyed, their annual security conference suddenly transformed into a wake. In London, demonstrators projected a giant image of Aleksei A. Navalny on to the facade of the Russian embassy. In Washington, an angry President Biden called a news conference to declare, “Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death.”
Rarely has the death of a single man summoned such a cascade of grief, anger and demands for justice.
While many feared the worst for Mr. Navalny when he returned to Russia in early 2021 from Germany, where he had recovered from being poisoned, the news that he was gone still landed with a thunderclap. Governments, however cruel and repressive, often spare dissident figures, if only to avoid creating martyrs.
In life, Mr. Navalny was often compared to Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid leader who languished in prison for 27 years before emerging to lead a democratic South Africa. In death, Mr. Navalny now draws comparisons to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader who fought for racial justice and whose assassination in 1968 was a catalytic event in America.
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Michael A. McFaul, a former American ambassador to Russia who was a friend of Mr. Navalny’s and has compared him to Mandela, said he, too, believed that the circumstances of his death would change the tone of the debate over Ukraine on Capitol Hill. He also walked the halls in Munich over the weekend and said the shock was palpable.
