With Prison Certain and Death Likely, Why Did Navalny Return?

There was one question that Russians repeatedly asked opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in a remote Arctic penal colony Friday, and he confessed that he found it a little annoying.

Why, after surviving a fatal poisoning attempt widely blamed on the Kremlin, had he returned to Russia from his extended convalescence abroad to face certain imprisonment and possible death?

“I don’t want to give up either my country or my beliefs,” Navalny wrote in a Jan. 17 Facebook post to mark the third anniversary of his return and arrest in 2021. “I cannot betray either the first or the second. If your beliefs are worth something, you must be willing to stand up for them. And if necessary, make some sacrifices.”

That was the direct 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 classical Greek tragedy: The hero, knowing that he is doomed, returns home anyway because, well, if he didn’t, he would not be the hero.

Navalny’s motto was that there was no reason to fear the authoritarian government of President Vladimir Putin. He wanted to put that into practice, Russian commentators said, and as an activist who thrived on agitation, he feared sinking into irrelevancy in exile. The decision won him new respect and followers as he continued to lambaste the Kremlin from his prison cell, but it also cost him his life.

“Navalny was about action,” said Abbas Gallyamov, a former Kremlin speechwriter who sometimes had differences with Navalny over that job. “For him politics was action, not just democracy and theory like it is for many in the Russian opposition. They are quite content to sit abroad, speaking and speaking and speaking without doing anything with their hands. For him that was unbearable.”

Still, it prompted extensive bafflement and curiosity, not least because he had a wife and two adolescent children who stayed in exile.

“Many have written throughout these three years: ‘Why did he come back, what kind of idiocy, what kind of senseless self-sacrifice?’” Andrey Loshak, a Russian journalist, wrote in a tribute published by Meduza, an independent news agency. “For those who knew him, it was natural: You see him in life and understand that a person cannot do otherwise.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .