Yulia Navalnaya fought to save her husband’s life after he was poisoned by the Kremlin—now, she’s fighting for the life of Russia’s opposition movement.
As midnight closed in on Omsk, Alexey Venediktov, editor in chief of the liberal Ekho Moskvy radio station, went on the air in Moscow. He telegraphed to Navalnaya what needed to be done. “Until Yulia makes a public declaration, until she makes a request to the Russian government to transport Alexey Navalny out of the country,” Venediktov said, no transfer would be possible. “We’re waiting.
Navalnaya quickly shut down the speculation. “I think it’s much more interesting to be the wife of a politician,” she told Russianin January, one of only a handful of interviews she’s ever given. “Then again what I do is, to a certain extent, also politics.” We were sitting in her tiny kitchen in the tiny apartment she and Navalny rented in Maryino, a remote, lower-middle-class Moscow neighborhood. As Navalny stepped up his investigations into corruption at the highest levels of the Russian government, the FSB moved in. They bought an apartment across the way so they could monitor the couple around the clock. Agents began tailing not just Navalny but Navalnaya and her children.
Navalnaya is also a careful and astute political observer. “She feels everything very keenly and observes everyone around her,” says Albats. “I honestly think that she likes being the shadow politician.” Navalny once joked that his wife is even more radical than he is, but she has been careful to never make her positions known on the one subject that has dogged him: nationalism.
When doctors brought him out of his coma, it seemed the old Navalny was gone. This new Navalny just sat there and stared. Everything was erased: Yulia, his children, how to walk, how to write, what a spoon was. At one point, he tried to rip out every cord and line that was keeping him alive, including the tracheostomy tube protruding from the hole in his throat. The doctors and nurses managed to wrestle him back down. Eventually, Navalnaya’s children arrived.
In mid-December, Navalny and Bellingcat published the results of their investigation. The Russian authorities responded by announcing that Navalny had violated his parole for an old, politically motivated conviction: He had failed to check in in person with his parole officer while he was in Germany recovering from the Kremlin’s attempt on his life. If he didn’t return to Russia, he would be a fugitive from the law. If he came back, he would be arrested for violating it.
The idea of a revolutionary first lady began and ended with Krupskaya. For the next century, Russia’s first wives were of a far more traditional mold. Joseph Stalin constantly tried to keep his wife from working and, after a tempestuous marriage, she died by suicide in 1932. Stalin never remarried. “Whatever pleasures Stalin occasionally took,” wrote historian Stephen Kotkin, “he was married to Soviet state power.
When asked about Tikhonova at a 2015 press conference, Putin said, “I’ve read about Ekaterina Tikhonova and my other supposed relatives on the internet.” Then he grew angry. “I never discuss questions regarding my family…. I’ve never spoken about where specifically my daughters work and what they do and don’t plan to because of many different considerations, including security.
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