Navalny's wife Yulia takes up Alexei's mantle.

More than 650 dissidents are imprisoned in Russia. Among them is Washington Post columnist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who's been poisoned twice.

“A free, peaceful, happy Russia, a beautiful Russia of the future, which my husband dreamed of so much — that is what we need,” Navalnaya said. “I want to live in this Russia. I want our children to live in it. I want to build it with you.” Navalnaya believes Putin had Navalny killed, but tried to kill far more. “Putin did not only murder the person, Alexei Navalny. He wanted, along with him, to kill out hope, our freedom, our future,” she said.

Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, 69, has not been allowed to see Navalny’s body, which is, reportedly, bruised. Yulia believes Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, as he was several years ago, and that they Russian government is stalling to allow the nerve agent to degrade and disappear from his body before they release it. The Polar Wolf prison is denying they have the body at all, and perhaps they do not. Navalny’s body was at the morgue in Salekhard, the regional capital, when Navalny’s mother and his lawyers went to retrieve it early Monday morning. They were denied access.

Writes Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s press secretary on X:

“They were not allowed to go in. One of the lawyers was literally pushed out. When the staff was asked if Alexei’s body was there, they did not answer.”

Writes the Washington Post:

Amid fears that the real cause of death may never be known, Yarmysh said officials from Russia’s Investigative Committee, which handles major crimes, had extended their inquiry into the matter. On Saturday, Lyudmila Navalnaya was initially told by prison officials that her son died of “sudden death syndrome,” with Investigative Committee officials later offering contradictory accounts, stating that the cause was unknown.

He’s not the only one. There are 676 people already in jail for dissident activities, and, as protests against Putin’s attack of Ukraine mount, authorities have arrested 300 more. The Washington Post reports:

The scope of political repression extends far beyond the vocal democratic opposition. According to OVD-Info, a Russian nongovernmental organization that tracks detentions, more than 8,500 administrative cases have been initiated under Article 20.3.3 on “discrediting the armed forces.” This includes Alexei Moskalyov, a single father who was sentenced to two years in jail for discrediting the Russian army after his then 13-year-old daughter drew an antiwar picture in school.

But, as Russian dissident (now Israeli politician) Natan Sharansky, who spent nine years in a Russian prison as a refusnik, and National Endowment for Democracy founder David Gershman write for the Washington Post, no case of a living person is worse that of Washington post columnist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was a pall-bearer at John McCain’s funeral. Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years for treason for anti-war protests. In Russia, the maximum sentence for rape and murder is 15 years, making Kara-Murza’s sentence one of the longest in the present regime’s history. During his sentencing, Kara-Murza minced no words.

Kara-Murza compared his case to show trials from the Stalin era. In his closing speech before the court, he said: “I know that the day will come when the darkness over our country will be gone. When the war [in Ukraine] will be called a war, and the usurper [in the Kremlin] will be called a usurper; when those who have ignited this war will be called criminals instead of those who tried to stop it... And then our people will open their eyes and shudder at the sight of the horrific crimes committed in their names.” Following his conviction, Kara-Murza was transferred from Moscow to IK-6, a maximum security prison in Siberia, and was immediately placed in a “punishment cell.”

On January 29, 2024, it was reported that Kara-Murza had disappeared after prison authorities informed his lawyers that he was no longer held at IK-6. British foreign secretary David Cameron demanded that Russia account for Kara-Murza's whereabouts. It later emerged that Kara-Murza had been transferred to solitary confinement at a harsher facility, IK-7, for supposed breaches of prison rules. In a letter disclosed to the media, Kara-Murza suggested that his transfer was because he had become “too comfortable” at IK-6.

Evgenia Kara-Murza, Vladimir’s wife, is afraid that her husband will meet the same fate as Alexei Navalny. ABC News Australia reports her as saying:

“I have been fearing for my husband's life every single day since at least his first poisoning in 2015. I have been sleeping with my phone by my pillow all these years, just knowing that any moment of any day of my life, the phone call might come.”

She feels that lives of many other Russian political prisoners held behind bars in Putin's prisons are also in danger, as are the lives of Ukrainian civilian hostages and war prisoners held in Russian prisons, as well as dissidents who oppose Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus.

Meanwhile, the death—likely the murder—of Alexei Navalny comes before the March presidential election, from which Putin has already barred dissident candidates. Putin critic Bill Browder sees in it a consolidation of Putin’s power, as Browder told CBS Canada:

What everyone needs to understand is that Putin, his power doesn't come from people loving him. His power comes from people being scared of him. And if somebody like Alexei Navalny says, ‘I'm not scared of Vladimir Putin. I'm ready to call him out for his crimes.’ Then it gives people that confidence to do it themselves … He's got to basically set an example, which is if he kills the most prominent critic, then very few other people will have the guts to be a critic as well. 

That’s what Putin is counting on. Time, and only time, will tell if he is right.