By Paul Sonne and Ivan Nechepurenko

MOSCOW – The widow of Alexei Navalnaya said on Monday (19) that she would carry on her husband’s work to challenge Russian President Vladimir Putin’s autocratic rule, presenting herself for the first time as a political force and calling on his followers to rally alongside her.

Navalny’s sudden death in prison, which was announced by Russian authorities on Friday (16), left a vacuum in a decimated Russian opposition. His supporters had wondered whether his wife, Yulia Navalnaya — who long shunned the spotlight — might step in to fill the void, a move fraught with difficulties.

In a video released Monday, Navalnaya, 47, signalled that she would. She said she was appearing on her husband’s YouTube channel for the first time to tell his followers that the most important thing that they could do to honour his legacy was “to fight more desperately and furiously than before”.

“I am going to continue the work of Alexei Navalny and continue to fight for our country,” Navalnaya said. “I call on you to stand beside me, to share not only in the grief and endless pain that has enveloped us and won’t let go. I ask you to share my rage — to share my rage, anger and hatred of those who have dared to kill our future.”

The nearly 9-minute video, which showed Navalnaya seated with her hands folded on a marble surface under dramatic lighting, was crafted as an introduction of sorts to a new leader of the fractured pro-democracy movement against Putin. Long plagued by infighting and competing egos, the movement has withered under a crackdown in Russia that has left their most prominent leaders exiled, jailed or dead.

Navalnaya had often pushed back against suggestions that she enter politics, telling Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine last year that “I don’t think this is an idea I want to play with”.

On Monday, however, she presented a different face in trying to rally her husband’s followers, suggesting that she had no other choice.

“I know it feels impossible to do any more, but we have to — to come together in one strong fist and strike with it at this maddened regime, at Putin, at his friends and his bandits in uniform, at these thieves and killers who have crippled our country,” she said.

The challenges and dangers Navalny’s widow faces in trying to assume her husband’s mantle from outside Russia are significant.

The Russian government in 2021 disbanded Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation inside the country by declaring it an extremist organization, sending the group’s main investigators fleeing into exile, where they continue to work and try to reach Russian audiences. Cooperating with the organization from inside Russia has been made tantamount to abetting terrorism, limiting its ability to recruit the type of young, grassroots members who had electrified the Foundation’s past efforts.

And much of Navalny’s appeal to his followers was personal, thanks to his unyielding humour, muckraking zeal and infectious certainty about the capacity of individual Russians to change the country in the face of cynicism and repression.

Navalnaya, seething with anger, suggested on Monday that she had no choice but to try. The cause of Navalny’s death remains a mystery, but his family and team have accused Putin of killing him through a brutal incarceration.

“In killing Alexei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul,” Navalnaya said Monday. “But I have another half left, and it is telling me I have no right to give up.”

She echoed remarks from President Joe Biden last week blaming Putin for her husband’s death and suggested that her husband’s team was investigating the circumstances.

“We will name names and show faces,” she said.

She also directly addressed a question that many of Navalny’s followers have been asking after his death: Why did he return to Russia after his poisoning in 2020, knowing that he would almost certainly be killed?

In theory, she said, Navalny could have taken up a new life in exile and stopped speaking out against Russian corruption and fighting.

“But he couldn’t,” she said. “Alexei more than anything else on Earth loved Russia, loved our country and you all. He believed in us, in our power, in our future and that we deserved better. He didn’t believe it just in words but in deeds — so deeply and sincerely that he was ready to give his life for it.”

Navalnaya said that the strength of the movement would come from her husband’s memory and that she wanted their two children, ages 23 and 15, to live in a free Russia that she vowed to help build — the “only way for his unthinkable sacrifice not to be in vain.”

Her rousing message came as Navalny’s aides continued to demand access to his body. Navalny’s spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, said Monday that authorities had told his mother that the investigation into his death “has been extended” for an uncertain amount of time — and blocked her from seeing her son’s body.

“One of the lawyers was literally pushed out” from the morgue in the Arctic where Navalny’s body is believed to be, Yarmysh said in a post on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. She added in another post, “They lie, buy time for themselves and do not even hide it.”

Russian investigators initiated an inquiry into the causes of Navalny’s death shortly after it was reported, a procedural move that allows them to hold the body for longer than normal.

Ivan Zhdanov, the head of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said that the delay meant that Russian officials were “cleaning up traces of their crime.”

“They are waiting for the wave of hatred and rage toward them to calm down,” Zhdanov said in a post on Telegram, the messaging app.

The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, rejected any suggestion of impropriety Monday, saying that the investigation into Navalny’s death has been continuing “in accordance with the Russian law”.

More than 50,000 people have signed a petition to Russian investigators demanding the release of Navalny’s body, a campaign initiated by a Russia-based human rights group, OVD-Info.

Mourners have brought flowers to makeshift memorials across Russia, paying tribute to Navalny with an act of grief that has also served as a form of protest in a country where even the mildest dissent can risk detention.

Russian authorities have tried to tamp down the scale of public mourning over Navalny’s death. Flowers have been quickly removed from memorials and police have detained hundreds of people.

-New York Times