Alexei Navalny

Russian political activist, lawyer, anti-corruption activist, and political prisoner, claimed by The Wall Street Journal in 2012 as "the man Vladimir Putin fears most". Navalny's death in 2024 left Russia without an opposition leader.

Since 2009, he gained prominence within Russia, and notably within the Russian media, as a critic of corruption in Russia, and especially of Russian leader Vladimir Putin. He used his LiveJournal blog to organize large-scale demonstrations to address these issues. He also regularly wrote articles in several Russian publications, such as Forbes Russia. In a 2011 interview with Reuters, he claimed that Putin's political system was so weakened by corruption that Russia could face an Arab Spring-style revolt within five years. Navalny was a Russian Opposition Coordination Council member and informal leader of unregistered Russian political party People's Alliance. He was an officially registered candidate (supported by the RPR-PARNAS party) in the election for Mayor of Moscow to be held on 8 September 2013.

Navalny was named "Person of the Year 2009" by Russian business newspaper Vedomosti. In 2010, with the recommendation of Garry Kasparov, Yevgenia Albats, Sergei Guriev and Oleg Tsyvinski, Navalny enrolled in Yale University's six-month "Yale World Fellows" training program. In 2011, the BBC described Navalny as "arguably the only major opposition figure to emerge in Russia in the past five years". He was the only Russian to be named in Time magazine's 2012 list of the world's 100 most influential people.

But also in 2012, a cumulative three embezzlement and fraud accusations were brought against Navalny by Russian federal authorities. All three were vigorously denied by Navalny. On 18 July 2013, he was sentenced to five years in a corrective labor colony for embezzlement. Russian Memorial Human Rights Center recognized Alexei Navalny as a political prisoner.