Putin’s opposition in exile shows signs of weakness a year after Alexei Navalny’s death

Thousands of Russians flocked to Moscow’s Borisovo cemetery on Sunday to pay tribute to dissident Alexei Navalny, who died in February 2024 in an Arctic prison under suspicious circumstances. His name still troubles the Kremlin. The opposition leader remains on the government’s list of “extremists” and the criminal cases against him have not been closed. However, the sacrifice he made in trying to maintain his fight against Russian leader Vladimir Putin from prison has been overshadowed by the internal battles of the opposition in exile. At a key moment for the war in Ukraine, with the prospect that U.S. President Donald Trump will negotiate the conditions for a hypothetical end to the conflict with Putin, Navalny’s followers are no longer hiding their weariness over the accusations between opposition figures and their disconnection from the reality in the country.

“It has been a difficult year, people have lost hope,” says a 52-year-old woman in front of Navalny’s grave, the first in the cemetery. Speaking anonymously — you never know who is listening — she says that no one has yet taken up the mantle of the opposition leader and that the vast majority of the remaining dissidents, including members of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK in Russian), which Navalny founded, “act like bloggers, not politicians.”

“Navalny gave us all hope, he united us. Now people are unhappy with these fights. I have the feeling that the dissident movement is dying without him,” adds another woman in her thirties, Polina. Alexei, of the same age, tries to play down the accusations while queuing in front of the grave: “There have always been disputes, discussion is important,” he says before stressing that “Navalny was unique, but we should not look for a successor for him, every oppositionist is different.”

The Kremlin is still pursuing anything related to Navalny. Three of the dissident’s lawyers have been sentenced to between three and five and a half years in prison for helping him maintain contact with the outside world while he was incarcerated; several Russian journalists from the Reuters, AP and Sota news agencies are on trial for their coverage of Navalny’s trials; and Russian police are still investigating donations received by the FBK after it was declared an extremist organisation in 2021.

A year after the death of Putin’s great rival, a fifth of Russians still actively support the president, another fifth reject him, and the rest passively support his decisions, according to the Levada sociological research center. In this context, Putin’s most highly regarded rivals among Russians are not dissidents, but politicians from within the system. Thus, according to another recent Levada survey, the most highly regarded is Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, who at 80 years of age has a 43% approval rating among Russians after more than three decades at the head of a party that has never dared to challenge Putin for power.

Meanwhile, the founder of the Yabloko party, Grigory Yavlinsky, has 13% support, while 43% of Russians reject him. Yavlinsky’s party is the only opposition group to survive in the country, keeping a low profile, but this does not prevent the arrest of its members.

In exile is the businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is approved of by 7% and rejected by 46% of Russians; Yulia Navalnaya, considered in the West to be her husband’s successor, is supported by only 6% of Russians, while 53% reject her.

In exile and relegated to oblivion

Last year, the Kremlin and the West exchanged political prisoners for Russian spies. When they were released, the dissidents were forgotten; opposition from overseas is not easy. “They are bewildered, they don’t know what to do with their lives. Their activism inside Russia made sense, they set an example, we were interested in their letters from prison. Now, outside the country, nothing matters,” a source close to several released dissidents told this newspaper.

The opposition has also displayed its lack of unity. The list of disputes between Putin’s rivals in the past year is endless. Navalny’s former aide, Maxim Katz, has accused the Anti-Corruption Foundation of having a banker on its board who defrauded his clients and donated money to the organization. Navalny’s team has accused Katz’s wife of owning an image company that works with influencers on the Kremlin’s alternative to Facebook, vKontakte.

On the other hand, the FBK blames Khodorkovsky and his former associate Leonid Nevzlin for the attack on Navalny’s aide, Leonid Volkov, in Lithuania in March 2024. At the same time, Nevzlin and his Sota news channel are at odds with the Free Russia Foundation, with which Khodorkovsky collaborates.

Added to these disputes is the difficulty of defending a Russian point of view in the context of the war in Ukraine. Ilya Yashin, an associate of Boris Nemtsov, who was killed in 2015 for his opposition to the war in Donbas (eastern Ukraine), was one of the politicians exchanged last year. In his first public appearance, he called for negotiations to resolve the “bloody impasse” for both sides in Ukraine, which irritated Ukrainians, victims of the invasion. A day later he qualified his words, which angered many Russians.

Russians are also wary of Western financial support for dissidents. According to the independent daily Meduza, the Free Russia Foundation, founded by Russian emigrants in the United States in 2014, “is a major distributor of American money” to activists in exile. However, Khodorkovsky told Meduza that some American foundations decided to disassociate themselves from his projects when he openly supported the Wagner Group mercenaries’ rebellion against Putin in 2023: “Talking about regime change is forbidden in Washington.”

Lawyer and human rights activist Mikhail Benyash has sparked controversy among the Russian opposition by recommending on Facebook that they “get a job” and stop depending on foreign subsidies. “It is possible to oppose Putin, but in a different format, without interfering with the fate of others,” he told this newspaper by telephone.

Benyash has retrained as a plumber in Lithuania and says he earns more money this way than as a subsidized activist. “I want to use the money I earn to fight Putin the way I want, without receiving aid that will be rubbed in your face,” he emphasizes. “In Russia I defended 95% of people for free thanks to what I earned as a lawyer, although some organizations gave me a little help to increase their KPIs,” he says from exile.

“I have lost a lot,” says Benyash. “Now I am busy rebuilding my life and my hatred towards the regime has not disappeared, but I do not want to collaborate with these people who call themselves opposition leaders, I do not trust them,” he adds, before warning that “trust is the most important thing: it is very difficult to gain it and very easy to lose it. That is why I believed in Alexei [Navalny].”

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