As “Navalny” opens, 42-year-old lawyer-turned-opposition-leader-turned-office-seeker Alexei Navalny is asked by director Daniel Roher to tell the audience what to do if he should die before this film is released. Without missing a beat, Navalny scoffs and half-laughs, then responds by telling Roher that he can plan on making another movie about him after he dies.
This is coming from a man who only months earlier was poisoned nearly to death just prior to boarding a plane from Tomsk to Moscow. The toxin was a powdered poison called Novichok, which is generally transmitted through clothing and, upon the victim’s death, it dissipates after a few days, leaving no trace. It was the same substance used to poison (but not kill) former Russian double agent Sergei Skripel and his daughter in the UK in 2018.
Hide the Evidence
Had the plane carrying Navalny not made an emergency landing in Omsk allowing him to receive immediate medical attention, he would have certainly perished, but through sheer will he survived. Russian officials wanted to keep him in the hospital (to allow time for the poison to dissipate) yet were thwarted by Navalny’s tenacious wife Yulia who made enough noise and racket to get him transferred to Germany where the drug was positively identified.All of the above takes place in the first 15 minutes of the film and you initially get the impression that Roher is using up all of his A-material too soon, but he and Navalny are just getting started.
It was during the following two months that Navalny, his wife and two children, media advisors, and the Bulgarian-born gadfly Christo Grozev (the lead Russian journalist for the Netherlands-based investigative group Bellingcat) hunkered down in the Black Forest region of Germany to figure out what to do next.
Punked
During a stretch worthy of inclusion on broadcasts of “The Jerky Boys” or “Imus in the Morning,” Grozev and Navalny phone the suspects, all of whom but one figure out what’s going on and hang up. In less than 30 seconds, the lone dim bulb spills all of the beans, confirming what everyone had suspected: The closest immediate operatives working for Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the failed hit.In retrospect, this wasn’t all that difficult to figure out as Novichok is produced at a single laboratory in Russia and, according to Grozev, using it in two attacks of known Putin enemies was tantamount to leaving a business card at the scene of the crime. One of the top brass, when notified that his password (Moscow1) was hacked, changed the password to “Moscow2,” then “Moscow3” and so forth. These weren’t exactly Mensa members operating in the top tier of the Kremlin.
Tempting fate more than he should have, Navalny posted a video of the embarrassing and telling event on his YouTube.com page which had over 13 million subscribers at the time. This was not a good idea.
Don’t Tempt the Beast
As appealing and magnetic as Navalny is as a possible alternative leader, he woefully (and to his detriment) underestimated the wrath he would incur by speaking out. Had this same sort of thing been done in Russia prior to the dismantling of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, those behaving like Navalny would have quickly been transformed into unrecognizable grease spots.
Times have changed in Russia since, but not enough for someone to openly oppose the vice-grip regime without dire consequences. Navalny is still among the land of the living but not in a way he would have ever expected or wanted. To label him as a martyr would technically be accurate, yet he would summarily dismiss that fallback moniker.
Navalny has succeeded in forever waking up the Russian people and the world regarding Putin and for that, he should and will go down in history as a revolutionary game-changer, not unlike the way we view our own Founding Fathers. He can and should hold his head forever high.
