Alexey Navalny dead at 47

The last images of Alexei Navalny alive show him behind bars. He is a bit gaunt. His hair is shorter, missing its old sheen. Yet his eyes are the same as ever: They light up. In the video shot on Thursday, he jokes with a judge and a policeman. I’m running out of money, he says, a well-compensated judge should lend me some. His captors laugh. For a prisoner stuck in a camp above the Arctic Circle, he looks good — a strong man in whom you see the faintest of glimmers of optimism about his own and Russia’s future.

The other image that I dwelled on Friday shows Navalny and Boris Nemtsov. These two were the most prominent leaders of an inspired protest movement in the spring of 2012 that imagined a different kind of future for Russia. Borya is whispering impishly in Navalny’s ear, making him laugh. Both are handsome, tall, vigorous. The kind of men who turn heads.

Nemtsov was gunned down in February of 2015, at the foot of the Kremlin, a year into Vladimir Putin’s initial military assault on Ukraine. He was a youthful 55. Navalny died — no, let’s be honest here, was killed — on Friday, barely a week shy of the two-year anniversary of Putin’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine. He was 47.

They say authoritarians who survive have a talent for identifying and eliminating the greatest threats to themselves. To paraphrase Kremlin chump Tucker Carlson, Putin is a very talented man. He chose his prey well. In his time, Nemtsov was seen as a credible alternative — a reforming governor from Nizhny Novgorod who came to Moscow under the previous Russian leader, Boris Yeltsin. The taint of the chaos of the 1990s stuck to him; he was associated with the pain of the changes that had to be made and others that were avoided by Yeltsin, and that hindered him in the early 2000s. But Borya had different talents — a feel for people and retail politics and convictions — that Putin lacks. ...