Alexei Navalny’s Death Is the Passing of More than Just One Man

He didn’t have to go. In August 2020, Russian dissident Alexei Navalny had been poisoned, probably at the direction of Russian president Vladimir Putin, who saw in Navalny one of the vanishingly few legitimate threats to his reign.

Navalny went to Germany to recuperate. While there, he managed to confirm that the poisoning had been carried out by Russian security services by calling one of his would-be executioners and pretending to be a fellow Kremlin goon. Mother Russia wanted one of her own sons dead.

So why return? “It was never a question of whether to return or not,” he wrote in a social media post in Jan. 2021. Several days later, he landed at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, where he was greeted by admirers.