There was a question Russians repeatedly asked opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, who died in a remote Arctic penal colony on Friday, and he confessed he found it a little embarrassing.
Why, after surviving a fatal poisoning attempt widely blamed on the Kremlin, had he returned to Russia from his prolonged recovery abroad to face certain imprisonment and possible death? Even his jailers, turning off their recorders, asked him why he came back, he said.
“I do not want to leave either my country or my beliefs,” Mr Navalny wrote in a Facebook post on January 17 to mark the third anniversary of his return and arrest in 2021. “I cannot betray either the first nor the second. If your beliefs are worth something, you should be willing to stand up for them. And if necessary, make some sacrifices.”
That was the immediate answer, but for many Russians, both those who knew him and those who did not, the issue was more complex. Some of them considered it almost a classic Greek tragedy: The hero, knowing he is doomed, returns home anyway because, if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be a hero.
Mr. Navalny’s motto was that there was no reason to fear the authoritarian government of President Vladimir V. Putin. He wanted to put it into practice, Russian commentators said, and as an activist who thrived on turmoil, he feared sinking into irrelevance in exile. The decision earned him new respect and followers as he continued to bash the Kremlin from his prison cell, but it also cost him his life.
“Navalny was all about action,” said Abbas Galiamov, a former Kremlin speech editor who has sometimes fallen out with Mr. Navalny over that job. “For him politics was action, not just democracy and theory as it is for many in the Russian opposition. They are quite content to sit outside, talking and talking and talking and doing nothing with their hands. For him this was unbearable.”
The return signaled both his unbridled emotional attachment to the cause and his deep honesty, Mr. Gallyamov added.
However, he caused widespread confusion and curiosity, not least because he had a wife and two teenage children who remained in exile.
“Many wrote during these three years: ‘Why did he come back, what kind of stupidity, what kind of senseless self-sacrifice?’ wrote Andrei Losak, a Russian journalist, in an op-ed published by Meduza, an independent news agency. . “For those who knew him, it was natural: You see him in life and you understand that a man cannot do otherwise.”
Mr Loshak said that after Mr Navalny’s return, he had posted a photo of the opposition leader with just one word for the caption: “Hero”. Before, he had thought of this kind of self-sacrifice as the stuff of movies. “He was a beacon in this darkness – here he sits somewhere in these terrible punishment cells and laughs at them,” he wrote. “It shows that this is possible.”
Some were wary of Mr Navalny. He started his political career in the nationalist camp and made some offensive comments about immigrants. He later described it as a temporary step needed to start building the opposition somewhere, because the nationalists were the only group then willing to take to the streets.
A 28-year-old man living in Belgorod, near Ukraine, said he was unsure of Mr. Navalny and had never considered him presidential material, but his return to Russia inspired new respect.
“Very dignified behavior and dignified acceptance of the inevitable,” the man wrote online in response to questions, declining to use his name while Russian authorities arrested some of those who mourned openly. “Alexei was a brave man, worthy of respect, an example for many.”
Mr Navalny himself expressed frustration that many Russians refused to take his decision to return at face value, suggesting at times that he had made some sort of deal with the Kremlin. Perhaps he failed to express himself clearly enough, he wrote in the January Facebook post.
There were some echoes of the story on the way back. In 1917, after years of exile in Europe, Lenin memorably rode into Finland Station in St. Petersburg by train, sparking riotous protests that eventually brought the Bolsheviks to power and gave birth to the Soviet Union.
Mr. Gallyamov said he sometimes regretted that Mr. Navalny had returned in mid-January, deep in the Russian winter and far from any elections, so the protests sparked by his immediate arrest at a Moscow airport did not translate into continued political reaction. .
Mr Putin often thought he had solved his problem with Navalny, notably by letting him go to Germany to recuperate after he was poisoned. The perception was that anyone in their right mind would not return, but Mr Navalny did.
Even in prison, Mr. Navalny has become an issue for the Kremlin with his ability to make his views heard, such as endorsing a call to all voters in the upcoming March 15-17 presidential election to go to the polls in noon on March 17 as a silent protest against the war in Ukraine.
“When Navalny came back, he was a nightmare for Putin. People said he was a survivor,” said Yevgenia Albats, a prominent Russian journalist now at Harvard University. Some went even further, he said, implying that he had risen from the dead.
In authoritarian regimes, such political challenges often result in a duel between two men to see who can outdo the other, and that is what happened in this case, Mr. Gallyamov said.
“Deep down, it’s a psychological battle between two characters about who is the more powerful person,” he said. “Since Navalny was a real challenger, a real fighter, that’s why he stayed on the agenda.”
The most common reaction to his death among those who saw Mr Navalny as the most viable opposition leader was that he had been murdered in prison, either outright or through three years of increasingly harsh conditions. The Kremlin, increasingly tolerant of any criticism amid its war effort in Ukraine, has silenced moderates and given hawks a free hand by condemning Mr. Navalny, they said.
Asked about Mr. Navalny’s death, Dmitry S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, told reporters that he had no information on the cause of death, but that it would be determined by doctors.
Ultimately, what drove Mr. Navalny to return to Russia was the fearlessness he believed could bring him enormous political power, said Kirill Rogov, a former adviser to the Russian government who now heads Re:Russia, a think tank with based in Vienna. “Navalny challenged them with his fearlessness,” he said. “They do not tolerate fearlessness.”
The South African example of Nelson Mandela, who emerged as a hero after decades in prison, troubled Mr. Putin, Mr. Rogoff added.
In 2021, on the plane back to Russia from Germany, Mr. Navalny sat next to his wife, Yulia, and together they watched “Rick and Morty,” an animated series featuring a mad scientist.
At his first trial a month later, he broadcast in court: “To live is to risk everything,” he said. “Otherwise, you’re just an inert piece of randomly assembled molecules drifting wherever the universe blows you.”
Milana Mazaeva contributed to the report.
