It’s been seven weeks since a local branch of Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service published a brief news post about the death of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. “He went for a walk, felt sick, collapsed unconscious, and couldn’t be resuscitated.” Russian officials would later insist that Navalny died of natural causes — his mother was told that he succumbed to “sudden death syndrome.” In mid-March, while celebrating his claim on a fifth presidential term, Vladimir Putin finally uttered Navalny’s name in public but only to dance on his grave, claiming that he was ready to trade him off to the West, provided he never came back. “But unfortunately, what happened happened. What can you do? That’s life,” said Putin.
This week, The Naked Pravda looks back at Navalny’s career in politics and ahead to the political future of his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, by speaking to two of the people most responsible for educating the English-speaking world about his work: filmmaker Daniel Roher, whose documentary on Navalny won an Oscar last year, and journalist Julia Ioffe, who was one of the first Western reporters to write about Navalny and who’s tracked him and his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, in numerous articles for more a decade, profiling them in stories for The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Ioffe is also the author of the forthcoming book “Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy,” now available for preorder.
Timestamps for this episode:
Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно
Returning to the talks that could have ended the war in Ukraine
How Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov dies
Migration and discrimination in Putin’s Russia
The evolution of the Russian FSB
How terrorism’s geopolitics brought tragedy to Moscow
Is Europe preparing for a wider Russian invasion?
Politico’s Alex Ward on Biden’s Russia and Ukraine policy
The Russian space nukes scare
Christopher Miller on how war came to Ukraine
The death of Alexey Navalny
Yandex’s restructuring and the future of Kremlin tech control
How Russia targets its critics abroad in wartime
How doomed presidential candidate Boris Nadezhdin rallied antiwar Russians
Why hasn’t the West seized Russia’s frozen sovereign assets?
The evolution of Russia’s combat recruitment
Memories of Russia
Growing up German in Soviet Kazakhstan, with Lena Wolf
How studying Russia became a paradox
Russia’s ban on the ‘LGBT movement’
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free