Russian dissident Alexei Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, announced Monday that she would take up her husband’s crusade against President Vladimir Putin following his death while in prison.
“I have no right to give up,” Navalnaya said in a video address Monday. “I will continue the work of Alexei Navalny. I will continue to fight for our country, and I urge you to stand next to me.”
Navalny campaigned against the Kremlin for more than a decade following widespread anger over Putin’s 2011 move to retake power. He was Putin’s most internationally known critic, and was the most recognizable to Russians, too, despite Putin’s refusal to say his name. In what amounts to an opposition in Russia, Navalny was essentially the only figure with broad name recognition.
Now, Navalnaya will take up that mantle, but it’s not clear how far the Navalnys’ fight for a free Russia can go under such brutal repression — and with its most charismatic leaders either dead or in exile.
Who is Yulia Navalnaya?
Because of her husband’s work, Navalnaya has been in the public eye for over a decade — not exactly as a political wife or first lady figure, but more as a quiet, stoic partner, although she was a critical part of Alexey’s political activism as his closest adviser. That was intentional on her part; she supported her husband’s activism but wanted to make sure their children were well-adjusted.
But that changed in 2020, after her husband was poisoned by the Kremlin.
While her husband was fighting for his life surrounded by government agents in a hospital in the city of Omsk, she stood up to Putin, issuing a public letter demanding Alexei’s release to travel to Germany for care. It helped establish her as a national figure in her own right, projecting stoicism, grace under pressure, and defiance of the Kremlin all at once.
“Russia is still a sexist country,” economist Sergei Guriev, a friend of the Navalny family and former adviser to Alexei,
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