Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Alexei Navalny, undeterred in anti-Putin mission, despite Russian arrest warrant
The death of Alexei Navalny in a Russian prison in the Arctic this February sparked an outcry around the world. He was compared to Nelson Mandela as a prisoner of conscience. While behind bars, he completed a memoir, documenting his three-year battle to survive the unspeakable prison conditions.
This is our third story on Navalny – the first in 2017 when he stood up to Vladimir Putin by running against him for president of Russia. When he was arrested in 2021, Navalny's popularity as the most prominent leader of the Putin opposition was growing.
Alexei Navalny speaking in Russian (English translation): Putin is a thief and the head of the entire corrupt system!
He was defiant, brave for taking on the all-powerful Vladimir Putin out in the open, denouncing him as a gangster. He refused to back down and paid the ultimate price: three years in Russian prisons and then this year, death at age 47.
His wife Yulia, once her husband's silent partner, is now the leader of his opposition movement. She says Alexei's memoir, "Patriot," represents his final act of defiance.
Yulia Navalnaya: It was his life. It was his every-minute job to fight with Putin's regime.
Lesley Stahl: And now he's fighting from the grave.
Yulia Navalnaya: I would prefer he would fight not from the grave. And of course, it's very tough to-- for me to say like this. But we can say so.
Over the summer, a Russian court issued an arrest warrant for her.
Lesley Stahl: It's a dangerous place to be.
Yulia Navalnaya: I don't care at all.
Lesley Stahl: You're not afraid?
Yulia Navalnaya: No, not really. Why should I be infra-- afraid?
Lesley Stahl: They could kidnap you. They could try to poison you.
Yulia Navalnaya: They could. But I don't want to live my life and to spend my life everyday thinking about if they kidnap me today or tomorrow, if they are going to poison me today or tomorrow. I'm not thinking about poisoning--
Lesley Stahl: You know who you sound like? You sound like Alexei. (laugh) He would say the same thing.
Yulia Navalnaya: Of course! I've been living with him more than 25 years.
In that time, Alexei, trained as a lawyer, became Russia's most famous anti-corruption activist and investigator, posting his findings online about bribes and kickbacks and evidence of the wealth Putin and his cronies had — as Navalny said — stolen from the Russian people.
Lesley Stahl (in 2017): I mean, you're goading them.
Alexei Navalny (in 2017): These are people who are trying to steal my country and I'm strongly disagree with it. I'm not going to be, you know, a kind of speechless person right now. I'm not going to keep silent.
He called Putin "a madman" who was "sucking the blood out of Russia," and more insults as he built a pro-democracy movement, opening offices all across Russia.
It was a time when other Putin opponents were dying in suspicious suicides, a car bombing, dissident Boris Nemtsov was shot out in the open near the Kremlin. And Navalny himself was subjected to multiple arrests and beatings, an attack with green dye laced with a caustic chemical, and in 2020, an assassination attempt that he recounts in the beginning of his book.
He writes that shortly before he boarded a plane in Siberia, he was poisoned with a Soviet-era, military-grade nerve agent.
He collapsed, moaning in agony, as his body began to shut down. While he was in a coma at a Russian hospital, Yulia waged a campaign to pressure Putin to release Alexei so he could fly to Germany for treatment.
We met them in Berlin about two months after the attack.
Lesley Stahl (in 2020): You have said you think that Mr. Putin's responsible.
Alexei Navalny (in 2020): I don't think. I'm sure that he is responsible.
He spent five months recovering in Germany -- that's when he started writing the memoir. Then, in January of 2021, the Navalnys returned to Russia.
When they landed, they were met by Russian police.
He was arrested, said goodbye to his wife, and was led away.
Lesley Stahl: This is a question you're going to be asked over and over and over, but it's, it's almost the essential question: Why did you decide to go back, the two of you? You knew the danger for sure. And do you regret it now?
Yulia Navalnaya: You ask me about our decision like we were sitting together and discussing if he needs to go back, or he doesn't need to go back. It, it didn't work like this. From the first day of when I realized that he could recover after this poisoning, I knew that he would go back as soon as possible.
Lesley Stahl: So, it wasn't even a debate.
Yulia Navalnaya: No.
Lesley Stahl: It was just "when do we go back?" as opposed to if.
Yulia Navalnaya: We never had any debates and of course, I would love to live all my life with my husband. But at that moment, I knew that there is just one decision which he could take. And it was his decision. And I knew how important it was for him. And I knew that he wouldn't be happy to live in exile.
His arrest sparked protests across Russia. But far from disappearing in prison, Navalny managed to maintain a presence on social media. How – we've been asked not to say - but it enabled him to keep up his attacks on Putin.
Meanwhile, his team of investigators released drone footage of what they said was Putin's billion dollar palace on the Black Sea. it was viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube.
Lesley Stahl: It must've driven Putin insane that he, he locked him up and he's still getting the anti-Putin message out.
Yulia Navalnaya: That's why he con— his conditions were worse way— from month to month.
Those conditions, Navalny wrote in his diaries, included "sleep deprivation," "punitive solitary confinement," almost no medical care. And when none of that broke him, he was sent repeatedly to "a concrete black hole" called the "punishment cell," where he would remain for up to 15 days at a time.
Lesley Stahl: Here's how he described it: he said it was a doghouse and this is the place where prisoners were sent to be tortured, and raped, and sometimes murdered. I wondered how you read those passages. I was thinking of you when I read it and thought, 'What is she feeling? What is-- how are you reading this?'
Yulia Navalnaya: It's very tough moment to think about all this torturing place and torturing conditions, and about him, how he was laughing at these people, even while he was there.
Navalny thought of his life in prison as his work, surviving and staying positive, his job.
"I know one thing for sure…" he wrote: "…that I'm among the happiest 1 percent of people on the planet—those who absolutely adore their work… I have enormous support from the people. And I met a woman with whom I share not only love but … [who] is just as opposed as I am to what is going on. Maybe we won't succeed … But we have to try."
Lesley Stahl: He wrote much of this book while he was in prison. He was under constant surveillance, cameras on him all the time and he managed to get the pages out.
Yulia Navalnaya: Alexei was very smart-- smart, very inventive. (LAUGH)
Lesley Stahl: Let me read you what he says in the book, okay, about this--
Yulia Navalnaya: Okay.
Lesley Stahl: He says, "I had to devise a whole clandestine operation to bamboozle the guards, involving the substitution of identical notebooks." And after that, "[we went to court] where I was able physically to pass items to someone."
Yulia Navalnaya: It was very difficult. That's why we have diaries from the first year, much less from the second year, and not from the third year because it wasn't possible.
These are some of the diaries he smuggled out when he went to court, which was often, as he was tried and convicted several times on various pretexts. After each verdict, he was moved to a different prison with harsher conditions.
Last December, he was transferred to this penal colony north of the Arctic Circle.
This would be his final court appearance. He looked healthy and in good spirits, sharing a laugh with court officials. The very next day, Feb. 16, 2024, he was dead. Russian officials announced later that the cause was, quote, "not criminal in nature" and due to "combined diseases."
Lesley Stahl: It was at the time that, that the negotiations over a prisoner swap were underway and Alexei might be one of the prisoners who was to be released.
Yulia Navalnaya: Putin realized that Alexei is so big that he's-- he could be the new leader of Russia. He could encourage people to stand against Putin. And all the things just brought Putin to this understanding that it's not possible to let Navalny be, be free.
Lesley Stahl: You posted a message shortly after his death. You said, bravely I thought, "[Vladimir] Putin killed my husband. By killing Alexei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart, and half of my soul."
Yulia Navalnaya: That's true. I can say now the same, nothing has changed.
Lesley Stahl: Here's something else you said. You posted this on X: "Please do not forget… Vladimir Putin is a murderer and a war criminal. His place is in prison, and not somewhere in The Hague in a cozy cell with a TV, but in Russia in the same… two-by-three-meter cell in which he killed Alexei."
Yulia Navalnaya: For me, it's very important. I think that for Vladimir Putin, he needs to be in Russian con-- prison to feel everything, what not just my husband, but all the prisoners in Russia.
His political network inside Russia has been crushed. Yulia and their two children have been forced to live in exile. Many of his old team now operate out of here in Vilnius, Lithuania, and three of his lawyers are on trial in Russia.
And Yulia is constantly on the road, lobbying Western leaders to stand up to Putin.
Lesley Stahl: So, the question is inevitable. Painful but inevitable. Has Putin won? Has he shut down the opposition to such an extent that it's over?
Yulia Navalnaya: But it's not finished. We continue our fight. He still has millions of supporters, we can see it by how many people go still every day to his grave, how many flowers on his grave.
Produced by Richard Bonin. Associate producer, Mirella Brussani. Broadcast associate, Aria Een. Edited by Matthew Lev.
