Alexei Navalny Is Dead. Is His Movement Gone With Him?
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Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 19 February 2024
⏱️ 23 minutes
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Summary
Alexei Navalny died last week at age 47 in the prison where he was serving a 19-year sentence for extremism. With just one month left before a presidential election in which Putin is nearly guaranteed to win, the pro-democracy opposition movement in Russia is more beleaguered than ever.
Guest: Joshua Yaffa, contributing writer at The New Yorker and the author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia.
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme and Rob Gunther.
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Transcript
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| 0:16.3 | Last Thursday a singular video came out of a man behind bars. He was on a TV screen addressing some court officers via a video connection. A rare sign of life from the Russian dissident Alexi Navalny. Nervallny. |
| 0:23.0 | Vashto, I'm proud of the number of the little bit. |
| 0:26.0 | So, we're going to grow, |
| 0:28.0 | with the world. |
| 0:30.0 | Nervaldi had been serving a decades long prison sentence in a grueling penal |
| 0:37.0 | colony above the Arctic Circle after Putin's regime charged him with extremism and embezzlement. The New Yorkers Joshua |
| 0:46.1 | Yafa watched that video of Navalny and the man he saw looked surprisingly good given the circumstances. |
| 0:54.0 | Full of humor, cracking jokes, even managed to get a smile out of the judge presiding in the case. |
| 1:00.0 | And he didn't seem like someone who was deathly ill or... the all sorts of questions, the obvious ones, about what actually happened to Navalny on February 16th in this prison colony. |
| 1:19.0 | What happened is that Friday morning, Navalny was pronounced dead by Russian authorities. |
| 1:25.2 | The official story is that he fell ill suddenly while taking a walk and collapsed, |
| 1:31.3 | and efforts to resuscitate him were unsuccessful. |
| 1:34.4 | But Joshua says there's no way to know what really happened. |
| 1:39.2 | Either Nivalny was driven to his death through banal sadism and cruelty that mounted over time, |
| 1:52.0 | or he was killed outright in a fashion that we may never truly |
| 1:58.2 | learn the details of but either, the Russian state is wholly responsible for what's happened to Navalny. |
| 2:09.7 | As I heard repeated among a lot of Russian friends, they were killing Navalny and then they killed him. |
| 2:16.9 | Now when the news broke, did we see Navalny's supporters take to the streets? |
| 2:23.0 | No, though, there were and are some impromptu memorials in cities across Russia. |
| 2:30.0 | There are people bringing flowers lighting candles in Moscow, but we have to remember what this moment is like inside Russia in terms of political and civic freedoms or rather the total lack thereof. |
| 2:45.0 | I saw footage, for example, of a brave young woman from the city of Murmansk in northern Russia near the Arctic Circle who went out |
| 2:56.2 | with a sign in anguish over Navalny's death arrested within seconds and so in |
... |
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