The urgent documentary Navalny gives us a look inside the dangerous life of a fearless dissident targeted for assassination.
The urgent documentary Navalny gives us a look inside the dangerous life of a fearless dissident targeted for assassination.
A lexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s cleverest and most courageous antagonist, says that he assumed that once he became famous years ago, “It will be problematic for them just to kill me.” Pause. “Yes, I was very wrong.”
In August of 2020, the journalist-comic-dissident-politician noted how strange it was not to be hassled by police while campaigning in Siberia. He would find out why he received such gentle treatment on the way home, when he became violently ill. On the long flight from Siberia to Moscow, he would have died had the pilot not made an emergency landing and arranged for emergency life-saving measures at the nearest hospital. When his wife managed to get him to a hospital that wasn’t overrun with Russian agents, in Berlin, doctors declared that Navalny had been poisoned with Putin’s signature murder weapon: Novichok, a lethal chemical that can infect merely by touching the skin. Putin might as well have left a signed autograph on a knife before plunging it into Navalny’s back. “Murder,” says Navalny, “is a terrific way to solve problems. But once you’ve started killing, it’s hard to stop.”
Navalny, an exciting and urgent documentary by Daniel Roher that has just debuted at the Sundance Film Festival ahead of showing on CNN Films and HBO Max later this year, doesn’t really answer the question we ache to hear answered: How can a man with a wife and two kids justify continuing to stick his head into places where Putin might chop it off? Nevertheless, this cinematic portrait of the bravest man on earth will burnish Navalny’s profile and slightly increase the pressure on Putin to let Navalny go free, or at least to let him live. Navalny is currently and indefinitely a guest of Pokrov Penal Colony No. 2, locked up on spurious charges. He is the world’s leading political prisoner.
In the documentary, which mainly covers the last couple of years of Navalny’s breathless existence, the dissident handles each hair-raising development with panache and wit. He has a shorthand for the blundering stupidity of Vladimir Putin’s henchmen: Moscow4. He tells us that Putin’s intelligence chief’s email password, until he got hacked, was Moscow1. He changed it to Moscow2, and got hacked again. Then Moscow3, then. . . .
At its most fascinating, Navalny takes us through the detective work of a Bulgarian ally named Christo Grozev, a data miner who blandly describes how he goes about obtaining flight manifests from a travel agent to whom he paid only 25 bucks’ worth of cryptocurrency. By gobbling up mountains of such data, Grozev was able to figure out the identities of the members of the assassination squad who traveled from Moscow to Siberia when Navalny did, and to run down their phone numbers. After he recovered from his murder attempt, Navalny began methodically calling each man in the crew to confront them about what they’d done: “I was hoping you could tell me why you wanted to kill me,” he’d ask, getting a dial tone in reply.
More fruitfully, we watch as Navalny assumes a fake identity as an intelligence bureaucrat and calls one of the scientists involved in producing the Novichok to get him to discuss how the chemical was planted on Navalny: in his underwear, at the crotch. “We did it just as planned,” pleads the scientist, Konstantin Kudryavtsev. “The way we rehearsed it many times.” Whenever Kudryavtsev avers that it isn’t appropriate to discuss such matters on a non-secure phone, Navalny keeps him talking anyway: Moscow4.
After Navalny published this call on the Internet, Putin made light of the whole situation at a press conference, answering questions about why there was no criminal investigation into the attempt on Navalny’s life with claims that his antagonist is a CIA asset, adding with a chuckle, “Who cares about him? If that was the intent, they would have finished him off.” Kudryavtsev, though, subsequently disappeared, indicating that the inadvertent confession to the attack was indeed important to Putin.
Navalny, who was in a coma for five weeks after the murder attempt, decided as soon as he woke up that he’d return to Russia and take whatever punishment Putin could dream up. The documentary vibrates with tense images of his nervy flight home, during which he was accompanied by a mob of journalists. We watch as Navalny strolls through the airport and up to the passport controllers — at which point we lose sight of him when the police say, “Come with us.”
Brief interviews with Navalny’s wife and college-aged daughter make it clear that the family respects and honors his wishes to continue fighting to liberate Russia from Putin’s grip, but you would think at some point, someone would convince Navalny that he won’t be able to make any kind of stand against Putin if he gets killed. After having been attacked with chemicals three times by the regime, Navalny might be wise to stop proving his courage and think more strategically.
Instead, he seems perfectly prepared to become a martyr. Should Navalny emerge from prison to continue the fight, it’ll be a glorious day in Russian history. But all of his allies fear that reprehensible conditions in prison will simply end his life without Putin having to resort directly to murder. There are many ways to kill a prisoner without looking like an executioner.
Asked for a parting declaration to the world in the event of the worst, Navalny says, “My message for the situation when I am killed is very simple: not give up.” He adds, “If they decided to kill me, it means that we were incredibly strong.”