In Munich, world leaders were silent and blank-eyed as the annual security conference suddenly turned into a wake-up call. In London, protesters displayed a giant effigy of Aleksei A. Navalny on the facade of the Russian embassy. In Washington, an angry President Biden called a press conference to declare: “Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death.”
Rarely has the death of a single man sparked such a cascade of grief, anger and demands for justice.
While many feared the worst for Mr Navalny when he returned to Russia in early 2021 from Germany, where he had been recovering from poisoning, the news that he was gone was still thundering. Governments, however harsh and repressive, often spare dissidents, if only to avoid creating martyrs.
In life, Mr Navalny was often compared to Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid leader who spent 27 years in prison before emerging to lead a democratic South Africa. In death, Mr. Navalny now draws comparisons with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader who fought for racial justice and whose assassination in 1968 was a catalyzing event in America.
Whether Mr. Navalny’s death will reverberate through the ages like Dr. King is still not clear, of course. Even the circumstances remain shrouded in mystery, with only a cryptic report from a remote Arctic penal colony that the 47-year-old “convict” had collapsed after a ride. His family has not received his body and his mother has been told he died of “sudden death syndrome”, with no further explanation.
Much has changed since Mr Navalny began his career as an opposition politician more than a decade ago, a charismatic figure who appealed to Moscow’s restless middle class and used social media to tackle corruption of President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.
Mr Putin’s troops are back on the march in neighboring Ukraine, buoyed by their victory in the key town of Avdiivka. Western leaders in Munich were concerned about the loss of support for Ukraine among some Republicans in the United States Congress. There was no immediate indication that Mr Navalny’s death had converted skeptics of military aid.
Efforts to build a truly global coalition against Russia’s war never got off the ground, with China, India and Iran continuing to work with Moscow. Last June, South Africa eagerly welcomed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to a meeting to discuss a new world order no longer dominated by the West.
And yet, as tributes to Mr Navalny poured in and flowers piled up at memorials around the world and in Russia, where police arrested more than 400 people who dared to leave bouquets in the snow, Mr Putin’s critics argued. that Mr Navalny’s death could be a galvanizing moment.
“Alexei Navalny is a world-renowned and beloved person who was suffocated by an assassin,” said William F. Browder, an American-born British financier who has campaigned against human rights abuses in Russia. “This is a classic story of good versus evil. These kinds of symbols and stories have a resonance that goes so far beyond the petty squabbles of the world we live in.”
Mr. Browder cited a precedent. After Sergei L. Magnitsky, his lawyer and auditor, died in a Moscow prison cell under suspicious circumstances, he campaigned for countries to pass laws that would blacklist Russia for human rights abuses. The European Union, he said, was among the most reluctant.
But after Mr Navalny suffered a near-fatal nerve agent poisoning in 2020, widely believed to have been carried out by Russian agents, Mr Browder said sentiment had hardened against Moscow. A few months later, the EU approved the legislation.
Mr. Browder, who likened Mr. Navalny to Dr. King, said he believed his death would make it politically untenable for American lawmakers to be seen as serving Mr. Putin. In the short term, he said, it would also be more difficult for at least some Republicans in Congress to suspend additional military aid to Ukraine.
In Munich for the conference, Mr Browder pressed Western officials to pressure Russia to release other Russian political prisoners, such as Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was sentenced to 25 years for treason last April. Whether such appeals would sway Mr. Putin, he acknowledged, was far from clear.
Michael A. McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia who was a friend of Mr. Navalny and has compared him to Mandela, said he too believed the circumstances of his death would change the tone of the Ukraine debate on Capitol Hill . He also walked the halls in Munich at the weekend and said the shock was palpable.
“There was no doubt in my interactions with members of Congress, former US officials and European officials that Navalny’s gruesome killing made it much harder to ignore Putin’s brutality,” Mr McFaul said.
As well as pushing for military aid, Mr McFaul and others are campaigning for Western governments to use frozen Russian state funds to buy ammunition for Ukraine. Others said these funds, estimated at at least $300 billion, should be used to rebuild the country after the war ends.
Inside Russia, Mr. McFaul said, the long-term impact of Mr. Navalny’s death was harder to predict. Mr. Putin faces less popular resistance than when Mr. Navalny entered politics, and he operates in a world that generally does not hold autocrats accountable. While Mr. Navalny had supporters in government and business, Mr. McFaul said, his loss deprives Russia of a Mandela-like figure. In Mr Putin’s repressive police state, he will not be easily replaced.
“His whole mission in life was to stay alive, to live longer in the moment,” Mr. McFall said. “Now you have to compare him with witnesses, and this is a more difficult story. He was a uniquely charismatic, popular leader of the opposition, but there is no obvious person to take that baton from him, except perhaps his wife.”
Mr McFaul was with Mr Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, the night before her husband’s death, and said they discussed his condition but had no idea what he was dealing with. On Friday, he took the podium in Munich and stunned world leaders.
“I want Putin and everyone around him — Putin’s friends, his government — to know that they will be held accountable for what they have done to our country, to my family and to my husband,” Ms Navalnya said with affliction. . “And that day will come very soon.”
The fact that Russia did not keep Mr. Navalny alive surprised Mr. McFaul, a longtime Russia expert who teaches at Stanford University. He said he didn’t expect that, even given the regime’s previous attempt to poison him. Others said it signified a new world, in which even dissidents with a global profile were easily killed.
Mr Navalny has resisted the dissident label, preferring to see himself as a politician in the arena, even as Russia’s future president. This led to his decision to return there, despite the near certainty that he would be arrested.
In this way, Mr. Navalny distinguished himself from Cold War-era dissidents such as the physicist Andrei Zakharov or the politician Natan Sharansky, who faced prosecution and, in Mr. Sharansky’s case, imprisonment, and became symbols of courageous resistance to West.
Such figures often had an air of inviolability. But these days, governments are acting with more impunity, in part, analysts say, because the United States and other Western countries, weighed down by their own political struggles, no longer present the united front of pressure they did in the 1970s and of 1980.
“It’s an indicator that tells us how the world has changed,” said Philippe Sands, a British human rights lawyer and writer. “Governments used to let these kinds of people live. Sometimes they were locked away for many years, but they were not torn down. Now they just abolish them.”
“Countries that do that,” Mr. Sands added, “are more confident in their ability to do that.”
