'The Virus of Freedom': A window into Alexei Navalny’s mind before his death

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Alexei Navalny is dead. He was 47 years old. A dissident and leader of the opposition movement advocating for the defeat of Russian President Vladimir Putin's party of power, Navalny died on February 16th in a penal colony, IK-6 Melekhovo, dubbed "Polar Wolf," in the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous district in northwestern Siberia.

Russian intelligence, whose operatives attempted to assassinate Navalny in August 2020 by poisoning him with a military-grade nerve agent, were likely behind his untimely death.

While in the Russian Gulag, Navalny – who was serving a 19-year jail term on trumped-up charges of extremism – exchanged letters with a Soviet-era Jewish dissident, Natan Sharansky, who had spent almost nine years (1977–1986) in a forced labor camp, based on fabricated charges of treason and espionage. These handwritten letters between the two, which I had the honor to help translate from Russian into English, gave me a window into Navalny’s mind and the thinking of Russian dissidents like Navalny and Sharansky, and into the Russian Gulag system, established in the U.S.S.R. by the April 15, 1919, decree "On Forced Labor Camps."

What follows are my insights gleaned from this chilling correspondence.

ALEXEI NAVALNY’S WIFE SAYS 'PUTIN KILLED THE FATHER OF MY CHILDREN,' VOWS TO CONTINUE HIS ANTI-CORRUPTION WORK

Alexei Navalny, and Russian dissidents like him, were driven by what Natan Sharansky described "the virus freedom," a phrase Sharansky used in his seminal memoir called "Fear No Evil," which he wrote in 1986 after he was released from the Gulag, following an international campaign led by his wife Avital advocating his release. Navalny thanked Sharansky for writing the book, because