Yulia Navalnaya: wife of a captive leader or new face of the Russian opposition?

Yulia B. Navalnaya, wife of opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, knows how to deal with her husband’s frequent arrests by the Russian authorities.

In 2018, a Russian general wearing a huge green military cap and a flamboyant string of medals released a video recording with a frank threat to make “ a delicious juicy ground beef ” with Navalny. So Navalnaya, when he couldn’t do this because he was imprisoned, came up with the answer in the typical Navalny family style of humor. In an Instagram post, he mocked his cartoonish hat, saying he looked like a cheap dictator.

With her husband facing a two-year jail term – his first extended sentence – many in the opposition are wondering whether the woman sometimes referred to as the first lady of the opposition will play a more prominent role or whether she has her own right in the politics.

Already with a much higher profile than the traditional Russian political husband, Navalnaya has inspired admirers in Russia and other countries who have supported her husband’s rise and who look in amazement at the extraordinary risks he faces. Along the way, she has attracted sexist attacks from the state media, portraying her as a dominant woman.

She came into the spotlight last August after Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent, an attack he and Western leaders say was carried out on orders from the Kremlin. With a series of public demands, she managed to free him from the clutches of Russian officials so that he could be flown in for treatment in Germany in an induced coma.

“I understood that in this situation I am the person closest to him”, she said later in an interview.I am the woman. If I collapse, everyone else will collapse in turn. So I got stronger ”.

He continued to raise his voice after Navalny’s arrest last month after returning to Moscow. “I am not afraid and I ask all of you not to be afraid,” she told a group of her husband’s followers.

Navalny’s condemnation on February 2 sparked major street protests across the country that revitalized the Russian opposition, consolidated Navalny’s position as President Vladimir V. Putin’s main opponent and raised expectations that Navalnaya will play a very prominent role to get.

The couple met on a beach in Turkey 23 years ago and before last summer’s poisoning, they lived in a Moscow apartment in an ordeal of oppression and surveillance. Navalnaya, 44, has a degree in economics, worked in a bank before the birth of the first of her two children, and has spent the past ten years at home.

“Our family has lived for years in a way where searches, arrests and threats are common,” he wrote on Instagram in 2018.

And while it remains to be seen whether she will decide to take charge while Navalny is in prison, she has shown her friends and supporters that she has what it takes.

“Yulia Navalnaya is a unique flower,” Anna Narinskaya wrote in an essay on the role she has taken on in recent months in an otherwise bored cast of Russian political women. “Not because she’s the wife of an opposition politician,” Narinskaya noted, but because has thus naturally united two elements that are difficult to combine: the position of the wife of an excellent man and of a woman who determines her destiny ”.

In general, women are on the margins of Russian politics: they occupy 16 percent of the lower house of parliament and only a handful of senior positions outside of the positions considered appropriate for women in Russian political culture, such as in the ministries . of health or education.

Even the political opposition in the post-Soviet era was dominated by men, despite moral clarity on other human rights issues, said Alena Popova, co-founder of You Are Not Alone, a women’s rights organization in Moscow.

Russia has one of the greatest gender inequalities in the world: although men rule politics, the country has 11 million more women than men due to the high mortality rate among men. As a result, many things that are important to women have been left unattended.

“Yulia now fits beautifully into our country’s agenda,” said Popova, who said she would like to see her speak. “She’s a mother, she’s the wife of a imprisoned husband and she has the story of the woman who didn’t want to go into politics until some rotten system forced her to.”

Navalny herself has been accused of sexism. But he said the accusation stemmed from a misunderstanding after referring to his wife as a “maid” in an online post and saying it was an expression of affection. He defended himself by clarifying that he hired more women than men in his organization.

Interestingly, the Russian state media was among those who have promoted the idea of ​​Navalnaya taking over the leadership of the opposition, as happened last year in neighboring Belarus when Svetlana Tikhanovskaya ran for president instead of being imprisoned. man.

But media discussions about his possible role have been rejected by high-profile personalities in Navalny’s organization, who see it as a trap to divert Navalny’s attention while in prison and stifle calls for his release. At the same time, it shows him as the restrained puppet of a dominant woman.

“Yulia Borisovna’s masculine character has influenced the distribution of power in the family,” reported NTV, a pro-government channel, referring to Navalnaya with her patronymic. “She educates the boys and like a tyrant she checks everything at home.”

As ridiculous as the Russian propaganda line is, Navalny, for example, is convinced of his wife’s powers and says she saved his life.

In the Berlin hospital, he came out of a coma and was unable to recognize faces and hallucinated that doctors claimed they would replace his legs with prostheses. “It was like Panic and Madness in Las Vegas,” he said in an interview with Yury Dud on a popular YouTube channel.

“Eventually I felt, I understood it was Yulia coming up to me, adjusting my pillow and this was important to me,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for her the whole time.”

He added, “I am incredibly grateful.”

* Andrew E. Kramer is a reporter for the Moscow office. He was part of a team that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for a series of investigations into the secret projection of Russian power. @AndrewKramerNYT

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