When a Kremlin prisoner dies

Meduza answers key questions about Alexey Navalny’s death and what happens next

Alexey Navalny’s family members and associates are still awaiting independent confirmation that he has died in prison. Russian prison authorities in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug announced Navalny’s death in a statement on February 16, claiming that he “felt unwell after a walk and almost immediately lost consciousness,” and then could not be resuscitated. “Emergency medical personnel confirmed the death of the convict. The cause of death is being established,” the statement said.

In turn, Russian propaganda network RT claimed that the 47-year-old had died of a “detached blood clot.” Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, Navalny’s wife Yulia said that she didn’t know “whether to believe this terrible news we’re getting only from Russia’s state media sources.”

Ivan Zhdanov, who heads Navalny’s anti-corruption organization, later said on a livestream that the opposition politician was likely killed. But Navalny’s spokesperson Kira Yarmysh maintained that they are still awaiting confirmation from his lawyer, who is flying to the prison and should arrive there by Saturday morning local time. “We won’t have any confirmation until then. So we can’t formally confirm or deny the reports from all the Kremlin news agencies that Alexey Navalny has been killed,” Yarmysh said.

In the meantime, major questions remain about how the Russian authorities are handling Alexey Navalny’s death and what it means for his supporters inside Russia.

What happens in the event of a Russian prisoner’s death?

All available information about the circumstances surrounding Navalny’s death has so far come from Russian officials and state-controlled media. As such, it remains unclear whether he received adequate medical attention.

For example, the Interfax newswire reported that a team of paramedics from the Labytnangi City Hospital reached the prison in less than 10 minutes but were unable to resuscitate Navalny. However, lawyer Valeria Vetoshkina told Meduza that it’s extremely hard to imagine that a patient inside a maximum-security prison facility in the Russian Far North received medical care so quickly.

“When a prisoner dies, it’s in the interest of all Federal Penitentiary Service employees to cover for each other and they use various methods to do this. In the case of Alexey Navalny the [strict adherence] to protocols is suspicious. The information we have suggests that they’re cleaning up the records or perfected them in advance,” Vetoshkina said. “According to the Health Ministry’s decree, the travel time to a patient in emergency situations should not exceed 20 minutes — medical workers supposedly managed [to reach Navalny] even faster than that.”

Earlier, a doctor who advised Navalny’s associates told Meduza that a thromboembolism (the medical term for the obstruction of an artery by a dislodged blood clot) was an “unlikely” cause of death that would be impossible to confirm without an independent autopsy.

According to Eva Levenberg, a lawyer with the rights group OVD-Info, prison officials are supposed to notify a deceased prisoner’s emergency contacts within 24 hours. However, there have been no media reports about the Russian authorities officially notifying Navalny’s family members of his death at the time of this writing.

Another human rights activist, who spoke on condition of anonymity for safety reasons, said that prison officials transfer bodies to the morgue at the nearest state or municipal healthcare institution. As Levenberg explained, family members typically have seven to fourteen days to collect the body (depending on the circumstances) and unclaimed corpses are “buried by the correctional facility.”

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Will Navalny’s death be investigated? And what will happen to his body?

When a prisoner dies in official custody in Russia, the prison authorities are obligated to carry out an investigation in accordance with a corresponding Justice Ministry decree, Vetoshkina told Meduza. The results of the inquiry are then attached to the prisoner’s personal file.

In most cases, experts will also perform a pathoanatomical autopsy to establish the cause of death that will appear on the death certificate, Levenberg said. If the autopsy reveals that the person died a violent death, the body must undergo a forensic medical examination (to establish the circumstances that caused the death) and the authorities are obligated to open a criminal case.

According to Vetoshkina, however, the lawyers and relatives of deceased prisoners often have to fight to get Russian law enforcement to open criminal investigations, even when there are obvious signs of a violent death.

In the case of Navalny’s death, the Investigative Committee branch in Russia’s Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug announced that it had launched a “procedural check” almost immediately. According to Levenberg, this type of check is carried out separately from the prison authorities’ internal inquiry.

A prisoner’s family members are typically issued a death certificate with the official cause of death when they collect the body from the morgue. However, Levenberg noted that these certificates often contain incomplete information. “For example, [it will say] ‘general heart failure.’ This indicates what happened — the person’s heart stopped — but the reason it stopped may not be indicated,” she explained.

According to the human rights organization Public Verdict, the authorities cannot delay the release of a deceased prisoner’s body for more than two days after the cause of death is established. The prisoner’s family members are then free to decide where and how to conduct the funeral.

Is publicly mourning Navalny dangerous for people in Russia?

The Russian authorities outlawed Alexey Navalny’s anti-corruption and political organizations as “extremist” in 2021, and then added Navalny and a number of his close associates to a watchlist of “terrorists and extremists” in 2022. Later, in 2023, a Russian court convicted Navalny of “extremism” and sentenced him to 19 years in prison under a “special regime.”

Nevertheless, some people residing in Russia have expressed their grief over Navalny’s death publicly, by making comments online, bringing flowers to memorials for political prisoners, attending impromptu vigils, and even writing to Meduza. According to OVD-Info, Russian law enforcement arrested more than 100 people in at least eight Russian cities for attending vigils in honor of Navalny on February 16.

Whether those who mourn Navalny publicly could one day face criminal charges for “justifying extremism” remains to be seen. The Russian State Duma passed the first reading of a bill criminalizing the “promotion and justification of extremist ideology” in 2023. Though the Duma has yet to set a date for the bill’s second reading, it’s entirely possible that Russian MPs will outlaw expressions of sympathy for “extremists” in the near future.

If the bill is enacted, the Russian authorities may try to bring criminal charges against Navalny’s supporters retroactively.

Reporting by Petr Sapozhnikov and Meduza

Summary by Eilish Hart