After Alexei’s death, there was talk that Yulia would take over his role as leader of the movement. Photo: STEPHANIE LECOCQ/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
On Valentine's Day, jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny asked his lawyers to convey a message to his wife Yulia. “Baby, everything is like a song between us: cities between us, airport take-off lights, blue snowstorms and thousands of kilometers,” he wrote. “But every second I feel that you are near, and I love you with all my might.”
Two days later, Navalny died. The news reached Julia while she was attending the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of some of the world's most powerful political figures. Instead of immediately rushing to her orphaned children, Julia asked the conference organizers to clear her schedule so she could speak to the delegates.
«I want Putin and everyone around him — all Putin's friends, his government — to know that they will be held accountable for what they did to our country, to my family and to my husband,» Yulia said, standing up as ramrod. straight, strong voice. “I would like to call on the entire international community, everyone in this room and people around the world to come together to defeat this… this horrific regime.”
Yulia Navalnaya's dignity and unshakable faith in her husband and his mission have always been her calling card. And, as friends of the couple say, it was her support and loyalty that allowed Navalny to continue his unequal struggle against the huge repressive machine of Vladimir Putin's security state.
“Yulia is the rock on which Alexey stands,” Vladimir Ashurkov, one of Navalny’s closest aides, said at the time of his latest arrest in 2021. «She'll have his back.» According to Evgenia Albats, a longtime friend and political ally, “Navalny the politician is two people: Yulia and Alexey.”
I saw the couple together several times in Moscow. At a mass protest against Putin's return to power on Moscow's Sakharov Avenue in December 2011 (arguably the high point of open opposition to the regime), Navalny gave a scathing speech to a crowd of 80,000, denouncing Putin and his «party of thieves and swindlers.» . Stormy applause constantly interrupted him. After he left the stage, he high-fived Yulia, who hugged him. Both were understandably beaming — at that moment it seemed that Russian history might take a different turn, driven by Navalny's vision of democracy and justice.
A few months later, after hundreds of protesters at subsequent rallies had been arrested and dozens of heads smashed with the batons of paramilitary riot police, I went to a private dinner with the Navalnys at the home of a journalist friend. Navalny continued to insist that his dream was not dead and instead spoke animatedly about his plans to run in the upcoming Moscow mayoral election. His enthusiasm, defying doubts that the authorities would allow him to run, was infectious. “Iron optimism,” Yulia commented ironically. «You'll never convince him that it's time to give up.» Her manner was charming but reserved, her intelligence and protective attitude towards her husband were obvious. But Julia could also be witty. When the conversation turned to the former opposition journalist who joined the state propaganda channel Russia Today, she was uncompromising in her condemnation. “He’s taking the Kremlin’s money,” she said. “What else can I say?”
The Navalnys met on vacation in Turkey in 1998, when Alexey was a young real estate lawyer from a military family in the Moscow region and was just beginning to get involved in opposition politics. Both were 22 years old (Yulia is six weeks older than Alexey). Julia also came from a middle-income Moscow family. Her father Boris Abrosimov was a scientist, her stepfather was a mid-level apparatchik in the USSR State Planning Committee. She studied international economic relations at Moscow's prestigious Plekhanov Academy of Economics, received a master's degree, and worked in a bank. “He immediately felt that I would be his wife,” Yulia said in one of her rare interviews with the Russian edition of Harper’s Bazaar. They got married in 2000, and the following year Yulia quit her job to raise their first child, Daria. Their son Zakhar was born in 2008.
From the very beginning of her husband's political career, Julia was always a practical partner in his political activities. For many years she acted as Alexei's press secretary and gatekeeper, editing his articles and speeches. However, in public she always insisted that she saw her main role as a housewife. “My main task is to make sure that, no matter what, nothing changes in our family,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “So that children remain children, and the house remains a home.”
Navalny's family life has become part of his political brand. Unlike Putin, who divorced his wife Lyudmila in 2013 and was rumored to be in a relationship with gymnast Alina Kabaeva, Navalny was happily married and often posted informal selfie photos of himself and Yulia on social media. Putin, like the tsar, sought to position himself as the embodiment of the power of the state. Navalny and Yulia were an ordinary, middle-class, loving couple.
Alexey shared this family photo on Instagram
But Yulia's humble role as a wife and mother was actually a titanic struggle to maintain a semblance of a normal life while Federal Security Service agents hounded her, her husband and their children. The FSB set up an observation station across from their modest Moscow apartment. As Navalny's profile began to rise, so did his regular arrests on charges of hooliganism and organizing illegal protests.
It was Putin's attempt to kill Navalny with a nerve agent in August 2020 that reluctantly brought attention to Yulia. Ignoring the advice of her husband's assistants, she rushed to his hospital in Omsk, where his plane made an emergency landing. She found the hospital filled with plainclothes FSB officers and frightened doctors who tried to keep her away from her dying husband, making ridiculous demands to see the original marriage certificate and even insisting that Alexei, then in a deep coma, had to give his permission .
Yulia regularly briefed the world press outside the hospital, and when philanthropists sent a medical evacuation plane from Germany, she shamed the Kremlin into allowing Navalny to leave Russia. “Mr. President, I formally appeal to you with a request for permission to transport Alexei Navalny,” she wrote in an open letter to Putin, which she read to the press. Even though her husband's life was at stake, Yulia refused to ask or request anything from Putin, but insisted on the «demand.»
Alexey and Yulia in a hospital in Berlin after the assassination attempt Photo: Navalny’s Instagram via AP
There is no doubt that Julia's actions in placing him under the care of experienced neurologists at Berlin's Charité hospital saved her husband's life. But Yulia’s tragedy is that she was unable – and perhaps unwilling – to prevent Navalny from returning to Russia after his recovery in January 2021. It was a fatal miscalculation that resulted in his imprisonment and eventual death.
The terrible contradiction between supporting her husband in his dangerous game with Putin and wanting to keep her family together was always at the forefront of her thoughts. In 2013, a television interviewer asked Yulia if she had ever thought about asking Alexey to stop his activism for the sake of their family. “No, I have never said anything like that to my husband in my life, because I understand that he is not doing this for himself, he is doing this for my children and for everyone else,” she replied. She wasn’t worried about her children Dasha and Zakhar, because “he fights for them.” In 2021, Navalny insisted that he would have to return because he would lose the respect of his supporters if he remained in comfortable exile abroad. Privately, one of his top aides told me he strongly disagreed and tried to dissuade him. But Yulia, at least in discussions in her immediate circle, “never said a word against his decision,” the assistant recalled.
After Navalny's death, there was talk that Yulia would take over his role as leader of the movement. Until now, she had always rejected such talk. “I think it’s more interesting to be a politician’s wife,” Julia told Harper’s Bazaar before correcting herself. “However, what I do is also political to a certain extent.”
Yulia Photo: FREDERICK J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, wife of the jailed leader of the Belarusian opposition, achieved just such a role after exile in Vilnius, Lithuania – and before Navalny returned to Russia, urged Yulia to “start a political career.” According to political scientist Konstantin Kalachev, “from being the wife of a politician, [Yulia] becomes a politician herself… she has charisma and charm and can easily replace her husband.” Political strategist Abbas Gallyamov compared Navalnaya to Corazon Aquino, the wife of the main opposition leader in the Philippines, who led protests against the regime of Ferdinand Marcos and eventually came to power as his successor.
For the moment, Yulia Navalnaya has not made it clear , is she ready to take the place of her murdered husband. But judging by her long-standing strength and unwavering commitment to the cause of freedom in Russia, she is ready if she chooses to do so.
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