“I have no right to Give Up”- Yulia Navalnaya
In August 2020, Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of Russia’s most famous opposition leader went through the battered corridors of the hospital searching for his husband, Aleksei A. Navalny, who was in a coma in a Russian hospital after being given a near-fatal dose of the nerve agent Novichok. She was blocked by some threatening policemen from moving around the hospital, searching for her husband.
In a scene featured in the Oscar-winning documentary “Navalny”, she calmly demanded the immediate release of her husband, because there were more police and government agents than doctors in the hospital. On a Monday, she faced a camera three days after the Russian government announced that her husband had died in a brutal Arctic maximum-security penal colony. She blamed President Vladimir V. Putin for the death of her husband and announced that she was taking up her husband’s cause, calling on Russians to join her.
In a pre-recorded short speech, she said, “In killing Aleksei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul. But I have another half left, and it is telling me I have no right to give up.”
The Change in Yulia Navalnaya
For over two decades, Ms. Navalnaya has avoided any political role for herself, saying that her purpose in life was to support her husband and protect their two children. But, that changed on Monday. Ms. Navalnaya faces a distinct challenge in trying to rally a disheartened opposition movement from abroad, with hundreds of thousands of its supporters driven into exile by an increasingly repressive Kremlin that has harshly sentenced anyone who criticises its invasion of Ukraine two years ago. Her husband’s political movement and his foundation, which exposed corruption in high places, were declared extremist organisations in 2021 and barred from operating in Russia.
Friends and associates believe that Ms. Navalnaya has a shot at succeeding through her combination of intelligence, poise, steely determination, resilience, pragmatism, and star power. She is also a prominent female figure in a country where well-known women in politics are a rarity, despite their many accomplishments in other fields. Aside from the broad moral authority she has attained through her husband’s death, analysts said, she may benefit from a generational gap in Russia, where younger, post-Soviet Russians are more accepting of gender equality.
Soon after this declaration on Monday, the Russian state propaganda got into action and tried to frame her as a tool of Western intelligence agencies and someone who frequented resorts and celebrity parties.
Personal Life Of Yulia Navalnaya
Ms. Navalnaya was born in Moscow into a middle-class family. Her parents divorced early, and her father died when she was 18. She received a degree in international relations and worked in a bank before meeting Aleksei in 1998 and marrying him in 2000. They have a daughter, Daria, born in 2001, now a student in California, and a son, Zakhar, born in 2008, who attends school in Germany, where Ms. Navalnaya lives.
The Bond Between Yulia Navalny And Her Husband
Ms. Navalnaya always stood by her husband’s side, during his 2013 campaign for mayor of Moscow, and in 2017, when an attack with a green, chemical dye nearly blinded him in one eye, and even at demonstrations and during his many court cases and jail sentences.
When Mr. Navalny was poisoned, in 2020, she publicly demanded of Mr. Putin that her husband be evacuated by air ambulance to Germany. Through his 18 days in a coma, she stayed by his side, talking to him and playing his favourite songs. He wrote, “Yulia, you saved me,” on social media after he regained consciousness.
In a 2021 YouTube interview, Ms Navalnaya emphasised the importance of maintaining composure in public, despite occasional tears, to avoid causing Russian government officials satisfaction. She was described as the protector of Mr Navalny, his sounding board, the shoulder he cried on and his closest adviser. Yevgenia Albats and Mikhail Zygar, popular Russian journalists, described Aleksei Navalny and Yulia Navalnaya as a strong Hollywood couple, tall, attractive, and evident in public.
Yulia Navalnaya – A Wife Who Stood For Her Husband’s Dream
Yulia Navalnaya has been compared to other women who have picked up political battle flags from slain or imprisoned husbands, such as Corazon Aquino, who defeated the entrenched, despotic President Ferdinand Marcos, and Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who led the opposition in the 2020 presidential election in Russia’s neighbour Belarus after her husband was imprisoned.
Ultimately, analysts suggested that a “normal person” with moral authority might succeed where a professional politician could not. Sergei Guriev, a prominent Russian economist, said, “She wants to accomplish the task that Alexei has tragically left incomplete: make Russia a free, democratic, peaceful, and prosperous country. She is also going to show to Putin that removing Aleksei will not destroy his cause”.
