The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Russian Activist Maria Pevchikh on the Fate of Alexey Navalny, and the Future of Russia

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

Well before launching the horrifying campaign against Ukraine a year ago, Vladimir Putin had been undermining Russia as well: normalizing corruption on a massive scale, and suppressing dissent and democracy.  One of the darkest moments on that trajectory was the poisoning of the opposition leader Alexey Navalny with the nerve agent novichok.  Navalny and a team of investigators had illustrated the corruption of Putin and his circle in startling detail, and Navalny began travelling the country to launch a bid for the Presidency.  “Every time when I heard Navalny giving an interview, I don’t think there was one interview where he wasn’t asked, ‘How come you’re still alive? How come they still haven’t they killed you?,’ ” recalls the Russian activist Maria Pevchikh, the head of investigations and media for Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. “And Navalny is rolling his eyes saying, ‘I don’t know, I’m tired of this question, stop asking. I don’t know why I’m still alive and why they haven’t tried to assassinate me.’ ”  Pevchikh was travelling with Navalny when he was poisoned, and helped uncover the involvement of the F.S.B. security services.  After surviving the assassination and recuperating abroad, Navalny returned to Russia only to be arrested and then detained in a penal colony. “I think Putin wants him to suffer a lot and then die in prison,” Pevchikh tells David Remnick. Still, she maintains hope. “The situation is so chaotic, specifically because of the war,” she says. “Is the likelihood of Navalny being released when the war ends high? I think it is almost certain.” Pevchikh also served as an executive producer of the documentary “Navalny,” which is nominated for an Academy Award. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. A couple of weeks ago on the program, I was talking about the anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, along with the historian Stephen Kotkin. And he said something that really struck me, that Vladimir Putin is destroying both countries, Ukraine and Russia. The horrifying campaign against Ukraine began a year ago. But for quite a long time, Putin had been dismantling Russia's civil society and with it, its international reputation, and really its long-term economic prospects. One of the darkest moments along this path came in 2020 with the poisoning, the attempted murder of Alexei Navalny. Navalny is a prominent dissident and opposition leader, and he and a team of investigators illustrated in startling detail.

the corruption of Putin himself and his circle of AIDS and oligarchs. For his efforts, Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent called Novichuk, which was almost certainly done by the FSB, the security services. He survived the attack, and he's now being held in a Russian penal colony. If Russia has a future after this disastrous time, Alexei Navalny may well be pivotal to it. One of his closest colleagues is Maria Pevchik, Pevchuk helps to run his anti-corruption foundation, and she's the head of investigations and media.

She also served as an executive producer of the documentary called Navalny, which is nominated for an Academy Award. So, Maria, as anyone who has seen the documentary film Navalny knows, you are a very close comrade in arms with Alexei Navalny. You're an investigator. You speak to the public. You're an advisor. I'd like to begin simply by asking, you were a sociology student at Moscow State University. You were working in what you once described as the most boring job in the world, both in Moscow and London for a tobacco company. How did you meet Navalny and why did you decide to join an enterprise like this, which is part journalistic, part activist, part political? Well, I studied politics at London School of Economics. So from very early Putin's years from his first term, it was very, very visible to me that something is going awfully wrong.

So I was looking for an outlet. I was looking for some sort of force that I could join and help this force along the way to move forward. And Navalny seemed like a great option, who is most like. likely to be able to deliver change. So what did Navalny represent to you in terms of political ideology or opportunity? Navalny represented a real person in politics. It was so new and so fresh back in the day because we were brainwashed from, as long as I can remember myself, we were brainwashed at the university and school levels that there is no

politics, you shouldn't be involved. Your vote doesn't change anything. You're not deciding anything. Leave this for the, you know, big guys or another one. Politics is dirty. The only way to be political, you can be some sort of political strategists and make big money out of political campaigns. So political participation back then wasn't cool. It was great and cool to be apolitical. People were almost bragging about it. But that was also what politics depended on. In other words, that's what Putin depended on. The deal of society was you can pursue this new shining possible prosperity,

at least if you were lucky enough to be in Moscow, St. Petersburg, in a few other places and not in the provinces. But stay the hell out of politics. And if you entered politics, trouble will come your way, as so many journalists and budding politicians, to their peril. Correct. And then there was Navalny, who was young, who was so good at putting complex things in

simple words, the way that he wrote about corruption, about financial crimes. Now, this is a rather boring topic, isn't it? But the way that he was phrasing things, the way that he was framing that debate was so attractive. He could interest anybody in the topic which normally isn't really interesting, but Navalny's charisma, Navalny's conviction, and just his ability to organize people around him, that definitely worked. It's magic. And we saw it on a larger scale just two years later in 2013 when he ran for a mayor of Moscow. So essentially what worked for me back. in 2011 was displayed on a larger scale in 2013 when we saw thousands and thousands of

Moscovites, like leaving their day jobs, good day jobs, to go and stand in front of a Navalny branded poster that said vote for them Navalny is a mayor of Moscow. Those guys had, I don't know, they worked and built big international consulting firms and investment banks, but in the evening they would show up at our headquarters. and sort out leaflets, like in four separate piles. Like, that would be their assignment and they would spend their evening volunteering with the most basic tasks at our headquarters.

And the regime was tolerating this. There was still some allowance for dissent, at least for a while. Correct. But I think that what infuriated Putin and what eventually led Putin to the decision to kill Navalny is the fact that whatever Navalny did, being investigations or political activity or like running a campaign,

that it's worked and it attracted an audience that Putin assumed was his. Navalny's weight has changed a lot in 2017 when he started touring around Russia for campaigning to be allowed to run for the presidential elections in 2018. And this was when the biggest myth about Navalny was bust. that Navalny is for Moscovites, that Navalny is for this middle-class, upper-middle-class guys well-off people from St. Petersburg, Moscow. And then Navalny started traveling the country, organizing those rallies in, I don't know, 80, 90 different cities and tiny little towns.

Sometimes we would only be allowed to have this rally organized, like on the outskirts, like literally in the middle of a forest next to a cemetery and people still showed up and whoever is responsible for internal politics in Kremlin they realized shit even the people who we thought are the core Putin voters they like Navalny they show up they go in the middle of the winter

when it's minus 35 degree they're going just to listen to the guys speaking from this stage I'm talking with Russian activist and investigator Maria Pievchik, who's also an executive producer of the documentary Navalny. More in a moment. What point did Navalny and your team get the sense that they would no longer be tolerated and Navalny's life was in danger? Every time when I've heard Navalny giving an interview,

I was sat right outside of his office and I could overhear. main journalist coming in and out. And I don't think there was one interview where he wasn't asked, how come you still alive? How come they still haven't killed you? And I clearly still remember his Navalny's face, rolling his eyes, saying like, guys, like, I don't know. I'm tired of this question.

Stop asking. I don't know why I'm still alive and why they haven't tried to assassinate me. I don't know why they have decided to do this when they did it in August 20, 2020. We know from our investigation, together with Balinket, that they started planning this when Navalny started to travel Russia for the presidential campaign. So this is when the surveillance started. This is when the FSB operatives, together with the chemists and doctors, started to follow Navalny. Have they tried to do something before?

Have they tried to poison him earlier? Maybe. Maybe it just didn't work. I have to say, and I hope, I don't mean this in any way derogatory. The attempt on Navalny's life, it brought to mine in an almost perverse way, a James Bond movie where you're watching the movie. And instead of shooting James Bond very simply, they do things like dip him slowly into a pool of piranhas or something, just for the sake of the movie, obviously. Why go to all this crazy trouble of poisoning his underwear? It's not like anybody was going to be deceived on who was behind this killing.

Well, the plan was that they poison Navalny. He gets on the plane. The flight is rather long from Tomp to Moscow, around five hours, probably more. That would be enough for him to pass out. And if the plane didn't do an emergency landing, he would have been dead in the next 45 minutes to an hour. forever and ever this would have remained a mysterious death.

They've had, by the time Navalny collapsed and by the time he was hospitalized in Oamsk, they already had a pre-made theory of what has happened. They were starting to say every state-owned channel, every state-owned newspaper,

they would say, oh, Navalny drank a lot the night before. Navalny partied a lot a night before. Alcohol, drugs, you name it. And within hours of the poisoning, they had a theory that it's either Navalny's health or it was me who poisoned him. And that was a big alternative plot as well, hugely promoted by the... Tell me about that. What was the story about you trying to poison Navalny? That is that's actually now when the whole alcohol and drugs thing didn't really check out at all and nobody really believed it. Now according to the Russian propaganda, the main theory that they share on for the Russian audiences that I poisoned him. I have a very clear association with the foreign states. I lived in the UK for most of my life and I nobody really knew what I'm doing, who I am.

I was there on the trip. And also, as Belenka found out recently, the group of FSB operatives and the poisoners, they have separately followed me on the days when they didn't follow Navalny. I found pictures of myself from surveillance taken on the morning when I left Moscow to go to the airport to fly to Siberia. They were following me and not other members of our team. In the beginning of the trip, they weren't following Navalny, but they were following me. They sell data shows that they showed up at my hotel two days before they're poisoning. So he gets to Germany, and viewers will see this in the really remarkable documentary film, Navalny.

And he recovers, physically recovers, which is not easy, and then decides, and there seems to be no question about it, to return to Moscow. And I want to hear the calculation of returning to Moscow. He had to know that his arrest upon arrival was almost a sure thing. So talk to me about that discussion of returning to Moscow. There was never a discussion. There was never a process of choosing and, you know, waiting scenarios. and, you know, deliberating on that, one of the first things that Navalny said

when he woke up from coma is that he is going home. He is a Russian politician. He has built his career and he gained his popularity by telling people that they shouldn't be afraid. How hypocritical would that be if you ask people to be brave

to be courageous and then yourself, you make not the most courageous choice, right? So our only deliberations were around the topics of how to run the foundation, the inter-corruption foundation without Navalny. We spent days and days discussing every scenario in case, I don't know, what happens if he's under house arrest, what happens if he is in prison for a couple of years, what happens if he's in prison forever, What happens if he gets killed? What happens if nothing happens if Navalny is just free and goes peacefully and home directly from the airport?

Was the most likely scenario that he would land at the airport and be arrested? Yes, it was most likely, yes. It wasn't for sure, though. I'm surprised from time to time talking to people who are well connected to him that he's able somehow from a prison colony to kill. communicate to the world through Twitter that there is, that there are fairly reliable reports on the condition that he's in and the conditions in which he lives. Tell me how that works. Navalny is currently being investigated. Well, actually, you know, he's already in the process

in the legal process of the next court case. So that legal status allows him to see and communicate with his lawyers who, you know, can meet him and discuss anything from the defense strategy to the content of the actual case. So his lawyers are able to visit him regularly. And this is how we know how well he's doing. We know his general, you know, state of health. Which is what? We know whether he's... What's a state of health?

Well, it's not good. He has been poisoned by a nerve agent by a chemical. weapon, the consequences of such poisoning are not known. Not many people survived. The long-term consequences of the Novichika. Yes, because your entire system, your entire nerve system just shuts down completely and entirely. And then, thanks to the German doctors, they managed to restarted. He managed to come back to a sort of, you know, a decent state of health. He was, um, exercising, he was doing his daily walks and sort of that, but nobody knows how this actually

affects a person long term. On top of this, I'm not sure how it's, whether it's related to Norwich or poisoning, but perhaps, because it's only started after that. Navalya started to have severe back problems, severe, to an extent that at some point during the first months of his imprisonment, he stopped being able to walk. Do you think Putin wants him to To die in jail and sooner the better? Oh, I think Putin wants him to suffer a lot first and then die in prison. Of course, he wants that. In your late at night when you're thinking about this, do you imagine for him that end or the opposite?

The end of the resolution of Nelson Mandela, who's released into the light and comes into political life. It took him a couple of years to be released. So, no, I'm not dreaming about Nelson Mandela's scenario either. It took them a little bit too long. What do you think? You've been very accurate in some of your predictions over the period of time that we've been talking about. How do you see this playing out?

I try to convince myself just not to think through this scenario of Navalny being poisoned and killed in whatever way in prison. I think this is a self-defense mechanism, I'll be honest, David. I've lived through him dying in front of me once, and I didn't like that experience at all, and I don't want to come back to it. And I know exactly how it felt.

I remember these days during his poisoning very vividly, and this were the scariest days of my life by far. So I don't see much points and just sitting there, dwelling and looking into darkness and saying like, oh, what would I do when he gets killed?

What would I do? Can he be killed tomorrow? Yes. For what I know, he might be dead right now. We don't have a way of finding out until the next morning. But this is not how I operate.

I like to operate in a different assumptions. I genuinely think it is possible to get him out. How do you see that happening? Considering the war in Ukraine, the mobilization of society, the militarization of Russian society, what possible motive would there be, I hate to say it, for Putin to make that decision? All of this can play both of an advantage and a disadvantage for Navalny. The situation is so chaotic, specifically because of the war.

as the likelihood of Navalny being released when the war ends high, I think it's almost certain. I'm almost certain as well that any next president after Putin, even if it's the worst one you can imagine, even if it's pre-Goshen from the Wagner group, but I'm sure that the next president would release Navalny. I'm sure that they release... Because it's a symbolic...

It's an easy win, you know? It could be a condition, a mass release of political prisoners, could be a condition for lifting some sanctions. Could be a part of any sort of, you know, peace talks and reparation talks and all of that process, post-war process that is inevitable. There are many, many scenarios. Maria, in Soviet times, there were a whole tribe of people in Moscow but beyond, who eventually became known as the, people of the 60s, 60s and they played an odd game.

They were both in the establishment and also saw themselves as, you know, children of the secret speech by Nikita Khrushchev in the post-Stalin era and hoping for reform. Think of them what you will.

They became the pillars of a top-down revolution. What's happened now is a lot of people, hundreds of thousands of people who are in many ways the best and the brightest have left the country. You've lived in the UK a long time. And the exile now has been enormous. And these are people who are the potential liberal forces and intelligentsia of not only Moscow, but many other places. First of all, will they return? And how do you feel a

about people that in your mind have compromised on the margins of their activity? Well, there are two two separate questions. With regards to those people who left, I feel, you know, in a long term, I feel sad that they left because I'm being realistic. I understand that not all of them will come back, even when Russia is free of Putin and when Russia is in its post-war. period. I think some of them well, probably most of them will return, but we will lose a good 20% of brightest, smartest people who have managed to quickly, you know, restart their lives abroad, find new jobs, start new businesses and, you know, just start their life from, from scratch. I'm being realistic, yes, they probably won't return. I will be personally convincing

them. I will be asking them and I will be trying to make them return home and contribute to building the beautiful rush of the future, right? But so I understand that perhaps I'm not convincing enough, and some people will choose their new life. And as for the second part of your question, the people who compromised, I tried not to judge, I would be too rude or just too judgmental here.

I'm sure that you can guess what I actually think about compromising with Putin's power, about being ignorant, about closing their eyes to, you know, to the fact, to what was happening to us, to the opposition and just, you know, continuing to, like, run your theatre or cultural centre or something like that.

Or radio station. All I'm saying, yeah, all I'm saying here is that let's now all gather and draw a very simple conclusion. This strategy didn't work. They've lost the radio stations, the TV channels, and whatever they were trying to save, they lost. And along the way, they've lost the integrity and the honesty.

And I hate to go from the extremely serious to the seemingly banal. Your film is up for an award, an Oscar. I think it may well win. I'd like to see it win, quite frankly. Oh, me too, me too. And there will be a moment with the biggest audience imaginable with a couple of minutes. You thank your agent, you know, the usual thing. What do you want the world to know in the broadest sense?

From day one of Navalny's imprisonment, my main job alongside investigations is to climb on the highest mountain and scream. and scream and shout from the mountain top. Navalny, Navalny, free Navalny. That's literally the most important thing I can do. That's my way of trying to save his life. The Dolby Theatre stage in Los Angeles, the venue where the Oscars are being held, that is the stage that the entire world will be watching.

during that evening. And it really doesn't matter whether you get to say something from the actual stage holding the little golden man or off the stage during the press conference. The attention is still there. And it is literally my job to grab that attention and to point it, not at myself, Navalny. Maria Pevchik is a Russian activist and investigator. She's an executive producer of the documentary Navalny about, the jailed opposition leader, which is nominated for an Academy Award, and it's streaming right now

on HBO Max. I'm David Remnick. That's our program for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbes of Tune Arts with additional music by Louis Mitchell.

This episode was produced by Max Balton, Brita Green, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Ingofen in Putabwele, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Harrison Keithline and Meher Batia. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.