It was August 2020, and Yulia Navalnaya, wife of Russia’s most famous opposition leader, was walking through the battered, dark corridors of a provincial Russian hospital, looking for the room where her husband lay in a coma.
Aleksei A. Navalny had collapsed after being given what German medical investigators would later say was a near-fatal dose of the Novichok nerve agent, and his wife, who prevented threatening police from moving into the hospital, turned to a cellphone camera held by one of his assistants.
“We demand the immediate release of Alexei, because right now in this hospital there are more police and government agents than doctors,” he said calmly in a riveting moment that was later included in an Oscar-winning documentary, “Navalny.”
There was another such moment on Monday when, in even more tragic circumstances, Ms Navalnya faced the camera three days after the Russian government said her husband had died in a brutal high-security Arctic prison colony. His widow blamed President Vladimir V. Putin for the death and announced she was taking up her husband’s cause, calling on Russians to join her.
“By killing Alexei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul,” Ms Navalnaya said in a short, pre-recorded speech posted on social media. “But I have another half to go – and that tells me I have no right to give up.”
For more than two decades, Ms Navalnaya has avoided any overt political role for herself, saying her purpose in life was to support her husband and protect their two children. “I see my task as not changing anything in our family: The children were children and the house is a house,” he said in a rare interview in 2021 with the Russian edition of Harper’s Bazaar.
That changed on Monday.
Ms Navalnaya faces a distinct challenge in trying to rally a demoralized opposition movement from abroad, with hundreds of thousands of its supporters driven into exile by an increasingly repressive Kremlin that has responded to criticism of its invasion of Ukraine before two years with hard prison sentences. Her husband’s political movement and his foundation, which exposed high-level corruption, were declared extremist organizations in 2021 and banned from operating in Russia.
While they do not discount the difficulties, friends and associates believe that Ms. Navalnaya, 47, has what it takes to succeed through what they call a combination of intelligence, poise, steely determination, resilience, pragmatism and stardom.
She is also – unusually – a prominent female figure in a country where prominent women in politics are a rarity, despite their many achievements in other fields. In addition to the broad moral authority she gained through her husband’s death, analysts said, she may benefit from a generation gap in Russia, where younger, post-Soviet Russians are more accepting of gender equality.
As soon as Ms Navalnaya made her statement on Monday, Russia’s state propaganda machine swung into action, trying to portray her as a tool of Western intelligence services and as someone who frequented celebrity resorts and parties.
Ms. Navalnaya was born in Moscow to a middle-class family — her mother worked in a government ministry and her father worked at a research institute. Her parents divorced early and her father died when she was 18. She earned a degree in international relations, then worked in a bank for a while before meeting Aleksei in 1998 and marrying him in 2000. Both were Russian Orthodox Christians.
A daughter, Daria, now a student in California, was born in 2001 and a son, Zakhar, in 2008. He attends school in Germany, where Ms. Navalnaya lives.
Even if not overtly political, Mrs Navalnaya has always appeared at her husband’s side. She was with him in protests and many court cases and prison sentences. She was with him again during his Moscow mayoral campaign in 2013 and 2017, when an attack with a green, chemical dye nearly blinded him in one eye.
In 2020, when Mr Navalny was poisoned, she publicly pleaded with Putin to have her husband taken by ambulance to Germany, and during his 18 days in a coma, she stayed by his side, talking to him and playing favorite songs. like Duran Duran’s “Perfect Day.” “Yulia, you saved me,” he wrote on social media after regaining consciousness.
Ms. Navalnaya herself endured a poisoning attempt in Kaliningrad a few months earlier that was surely meant for him, friends said, but she didn’t dwell on it.
Although she often cried, Ms Navalaya said in an interview on a popular YouTube channel in 2021 that she always struggled to keep her cool in public, mainly to avoid giving satisfaction to Russian government officials. “It must not disappoint us, he said. “They want to bring us down.”
Friends and associates described her as Mr. Navalny’s protector, his sounding board, his shoulder to cry on and his closest adviser.
“The politician Alexei Navalny has always been two people: Yulia and Alexei,” said Yevgenia Albats, a prominent Russian journalist now at Harvard University. Tall, attractive and with their strong bond in public view, they “always looked like a Hollywood couple,” said Mikhail Zygar, a Russian journalist and historian.
Mr Navalny was famous for his public spats with politicians, journalists and others, and his wife is known to have sharply rebuked those who attacked him. But overall, it comes with much less political baggage and thus has a better chance of getting Russia’s notoriously divided opposition to cooperate, Mr. Zigar said.
Ms Navalnya has been compared to other women who have raised political battle flags from slain or imprisoned husbands. They include Corazon Aquino, whose husband was assassinated as he stepped off a plane from exile in the Philippines in 1983. She went on to defeat entrenched, despotic President Ferdinand Marcos. There is also Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who led the opposition in the 2020 presidential election in Russia’s neighbor Belarus after her husband was jailed. She herself was forced into exile.
Ultimately, analysts suggested that a “normal person” with moral authority could succeed where a professional politician could not.
“He wants to complete the task that Alexei left tragically unfinished: to make Russia a free, democratic, peaceful and prosperous country,” said Sergei Guriev, a family friend and a prominent Russian economist who is the patron at the Paris Institute of Political Studies . . “It will also show Putin that removing Alexei will not destroy his case.”
Milana Mazaeva and Alina Lombzina contributed to the report.
