Navalny’s Heirs Search a Political Future in Russia

Aleksei A. Navalny constructed Russia’s largest opposition power in his picture, embodying a freer, fairer Russia for thousands and thousands. His exiled crew now faces the daunting process of steering his political motion with out him.

The motion has discovered a frontrunner in Mr. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who has introduced herself as the brand new face of the opposition to President Vladimir V. Putin. Ms. Navalnaya, 47, is aided by a close-knit crew 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 demise of a frontrunner who personified it. And to date, Mr. Navalny’s crew has made little try to unite Russia’s fractured opposition teams and win new allies by adjusting its insular, tightly managed methods.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Navalny’s crew, 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 high aides have mentioned their motion should change to proceed confronting Mr. Putin with out its chief, although it’s unclear what the brand new technique is likely to be.

Even from jail, Mr. Navalny had “managed to support us, to infect us with optimism, to come up with projects, come up with cool political ideas,” Leonid Volkov, Mr. Navalny’s chief political organizer, said in a video published on social media final month. “Without Aleksei, things will not be as before.”

However, Mr. Volkov added, he did “not have a concrete plan of action.”

Pictures of thousands 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 means to channel this impulse into an enduring political power 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 opponents. 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 move 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 necessary, the initiative’s supporters say, than registering protest in opposition to a sham election with their mere presence.

“We can show that we are many, and that we are strong,” Ms. Navalnaya mentioned in a video published on Wednesday.

By framing the initiative, referred to as Noon Towards Putin, as a tribute to Mr. Navalny, Ms. Navalnaya has introduced 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 no one comes out, it will change my perception of the country,” mentioned one of many initiative’s authors, Maxim Reznik, a former regional lawmaker from St. Petersburg residing in exile. “Are people afraid to such an extent that this 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 introduced in brief YouTube movies, in addition to by way of 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 crew made up of Mr. Volkov and about 4 different individuals who have 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 crew 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 legal professionals have since been imprisoned in Russia.

In Vilnius, Mr. Navalny’s crew 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 Foundation.

The crew 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 appeal to thousands and thousands of viewers in Russia each month. The motion additionally claims to have hundreds 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, in accordance with two Lithuanian officers who mentioned coverage on the situation of anonymity.

Mr. Navalny’s crew has not requested the Lithuanian state for monetary help, and it has stored its distance from the nation’s safety companies, the officers mentioned. They defined this posture as their need to take care of their independence and defend themselves from the Russian authorities.

Mr. Navalny’s crew doesn’t disclose the way it pays for its operations. Its final monetary report, printed in 2021, confirmed that their motion lined three-quarters of its bills that 12 months 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 newest 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 crew’s insularity, confidence of their technical skills 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 % of the vote when he ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013, the one election during which he was allowed to take part. That outcome, his supporters say, was sufficient to trigger the federal government to speed up a marketing campaign in opposition to Mr. Navalny, which culminated in his demise in jail on Feb. 16.

Mr. Navalny’s crew has lengthy shunned the information media, preferring as an alternative to broadcast its message by way of its social media channels, which embody television-style news programs.

After Mr. Navalny’s demise, a few of his aides have given interviews to Russian journalists seen as sympathetic to their trigger, however they’ve averted talking to the worldwide information media.

The boundaries of the crew’s go-it-alone technique have been on show in Vilnius throughout a rally referred to as exterior the Russian Embassy to commemorate Mr. Navalny’s demise. 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 crew, 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 crew 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 strive a extra inclusive strategy. But, the Navalny crew shortly resumed bickering with its critics.

“Just scuttle off,” a director of Mr. Navalny’s investigative crew, Ivan Zhdanov, wrote to a outstanding opposition blogger, Maxim Katz, final week, in a heated trade 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 completely different, even detrimental 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 in opposition to Mr. Putin within the March elections. “I will not allow you to ‘have diverse opinions about him.’”

Alina Lobzina and Tomas Dapkus contributed reporting from Vilnius, and Neil MacFarquhar from New York.