Russia’s superstar dissident Alexei Navalny, who returned to Moscow last week and was promptly arrested, wasn’t joking when said that his life had become a “trashy thriller” straight out of a “James Bond movie.”
The dashing 44-year-old Russian opposition leader with the blond hair, ice-blue eyes and rugged gaze, has approached superhero status in his life-and-death battle with arch-enemy, Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Their war continued Saturday, as more than 1,000 people were detained in Moscow and St. Petersburg, including Navalny’s wife, Yulia, at protests in support of Navalny.
Not only has Navalny survived years of persecution by the Kremlin and recovered from a recent near-fatal nerve agent poisoning, he also managed to track down his assassins and continues to troll Putin from behind bars, humiliating him with viral videos about state corruption.
He’s done all this while managing to maintain a family life straight out of a Gap ad in a small apartment in Moscow with the equally photogenic Yulia, 44; their daughter, Daria, 20, now a student at Stanford, and son Zakhar, 12.
Navalny’s exploits reached a crescendo Jan. 17 when the plane carrying him and Yulia back from Berlin, where he spent five months being nursed back to health after being poisoned in Siberia in August, was abruptly diverted from Vnukovo, where crowds awaited him, to Sheremetyevo airport.
Navalny was immediately taken into custody where he faces four legal cases that he says were trumped up, just some of the numerous criminal charges he has been hit with over the years. A parole board could reverse an earlier sentence and send him to a penal colony as early as the end of January.
He gave Yulia, who he credits with saving his life after his poisoning, a romantic kiss goodbye.
Navalny’s return to the motherland was seen as a symbol of defiance. He’s said he does not want to play a passive role in exile.
“They are afraid,” he said in a video recorded last week from a temporary courtroom as he’s kept in 30-day pretrial detention.
“They are afraid of those people who can stop staying silent and realize their own strength … I call on you to stop being silent, resist and take to the street,” he told his supporters. “There are so many of us.”
In another video that dropped just hours after Navalny was taken away by police, he delivered a devastating 113-minute exposé on camera of what he said was Putin’s “secret palace,” a massive $1 billion compound on the Black Sea. It was paid for with shady money, according to Navalny, who called the mega-mansion “the world’s largest bribe.”
The video had more than 65 million views as of Saturday.
“We agreed we would release it when I returned home, to Russia, to Moscow,” Navalny said in the video, “because we do not want the main character of this film to think that we are afraid of him and that I will tell about his worst secret while abroad.”
Up until now, such savvy macho posturing has been the province of the 68-year-old Putin, not some inconsequential upstart, which is how the Kremlin portrays Navalny. Russian officials never identify Navalny by his name.
Putin’s stock in trade is showcasing himself, often shirtless while on a horse, as the country’s premiere alpha male. But he’s been eclipsed and embarrassed, observers say, by a guy hotter, younger, and braver than him.
“If Dr. Frankenstein himself created the perfect human in a lab to go up against Putin, he couldn’t have done better than Navalny,” Mark Galeotti, the London-based director of Mayak Intelligence and author of “We Need to Talk About Putin,” told The Post.
“For all his macho persona, Putin is actually risk-averse. He only takes chances when he knows he can get away with it. Remember when he fired at that Siberian tiger? His team was so concerned it might not go off well that they drugged the tiger beforehand.”
Navalny was born on June 4, 1976, near Moscow to a Ukrainian father and Russian mother. His parents have run a basket-weaving factory near Moscow for many years. He has a brother, Oleg, 38.
Navalny graduated from the Peoples Friendship University of Russia in 1998 with a law degree. He met his wife, an economic major, that same year while in school and they married in 2000. Yulia has been a constant in his life and increasingly visible in recent months. While Navalny was fighting for his life in a coma in Berlin, Yulia, usually sporting dark sunglasses, regularly kept reporters informed of his condition.
In 2010, Navalny received a Yale World Fellows training scholarship and spent six months studying what the university calls “global problems of our society.” One of his fellow students recalled picking apples with him on their time off from school.
When he returned to Russia, Navalny rose to power by exposing Russian politicians and their corruption in dozens of shocking blog posts. He joined the Russian United Democratic Party and both started and led a number of youth movements. Later, he mobilized mass demonstrations against the ruling party United Russia and encouraged so-called “smart voting,” a strategy aimed at loosening Putin’s iron grip on the country by voting for any candidates against him.
His legions of young fans — he has more than 3 million Instagram followers — are a direct result of Navalny’s appeal to Russia’s up-and-coming generation and his leverage of social media to galvanize them.
Over the years, Navalny has endured multiple stints in jail. He was poisoned in his cell; weathered an attack in which someone threw toxic liquid in his face, damaging his eyes; saw his brother serve three years in prison, and watched both his parents and kids get harassed.
Last March, Navalny told the Washington Post that because he and his Anti-Corruption Foundation were under attack and had been accused of money laundering, authorities had frozen the bank accounts of his kids and his mother.
But the biggest risk to Navalny’s life by far came in August when he claimed a military-grade nerve agent was applied to his underpants by Federal Security Service (FSB) agents while he was visiting the Siberian city of Tomsk.
Navalny got violently sick on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow on Aug. 20. Other passengers reported that they heard him howling in pain on the floor of the airplane. He was treated by Siberian paramedics and then evacuated to Berlin’s Charité Hospital in a medically-induced coma where he remained for 30 days.
Experts from several western countries, including doctors in Berlin as well as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, say they determined conclusively that Navalny was poisoned by Novichok, a Soviet-developed nerve agent.
The Kremlin, along with some western observers, say Navalny concocted the poisoning story, and has been working with U.S. and British intelligence to embarrass Putin and weaken his influence.
But once again, Navalny turned the tables on his enemies.
In an astonishing sting operation, Navalny unmasked one of his alleged poisoners by duping him into detailing the attack in a phone call on Dec. 14. While impersonating an official in Russia’s National Security Council, Navalny called Konstantin Kudryavtsev, a member of the FSB’s elite toxins team, to debrief him on the assassination attempt.
Kudryavtsev detailed how the nerve agent was placed on a pair of Navalny’s underpants.
Navalny asked: “What item of clothing was the emphasis on? What is the most risky piece of clothing?
Kudryavtsev said: “Underpants.” Navalny then asked exactly where the Novichok was applied — the inside or outside seams.
“The insides, the crotch,” replied Kudryavtsev.
The video of the 20-minute call has more than 25 million views.
As impressive as the undercover op was, Navalny wasn’t done taunting his rival, even after being taken into custody at the airport.
Last week Navalny’s team dug up and published photos as well as the Instagram account of the strongman’s alleged 17-year-old love child, Elizaveta, his daughter with a former cleaner named Svetlana Krivonogikh. Krovonogikh is now worth upwards of $100 million and lives in a posh area of St. Petersburg.
“Navalny has brought out the big guns,” John Hardie, a Russian expert with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told The Post. “He’s escalating things for sure. And yes he really is that brave. His life has been in danger before but I think he believes more in the cause than in his life.”
Which is not to say that Navalny has any real chance of toppling the Putin machine. He’s in some ways more popular in the West where his incredible story — and good looks —have captured the public imagination. His nationalist leanings and earlier penchant for making racist remarks about non-Slavic Russians are less well known outside of his home country.
“But his influence in Russia is still huge,” Hardie said. “What makes him most dangerous to Putin is that he gives the people hope. Hope that there’s another option. Hope that democracy is possible.”
His great show of love for Yulia has gained attention, but less-known to westerners are the “legions of groupies,” says one insider. “I’m not sure what goes on behind closed doors but the women love Alexei. Let’s just say what happens in Tomsk stays in Tomsk.”
Even though he’s behind bars again, Navalny is not backing down on what he has called Putin’s “party of crooks and thieves.”
He posted a message on his Instagram page Friday with the help of his lawyer, hours before planned protests in support of him were to take place in Moscow.
“Just in case, I am announcing that I don’t plan to either hang myself on a window grill or cut my veins or throat open with a sharpened spoon,” the post said.
“I use the staircase very carefully. They measure my blood pressure every day and it’s like a cosmonaut’s, so a sudden heart attack is ruled out. I know for a fact that there are many good people outside my prison and that help will come.”
