He telegraphed to Navalnaya what needed to be done. “If I were scared, it would be difficult to live with him.”Īs midnight closed in on Omsk, Alexey Venediktov, editor in chief of the liberal Ekho Moskvy radio station, went on the air in Moscow. “And there are some people for whom she is Navalny without the downsides of Navalny: her self-sacrifice, her single-mindedness, her opposition to Putin.” “People who like Navalny automatically like her,” says journalist Serguei Parkhomenko, a friend of the couple. Through Navalnaya, all of her husband’s sins-his prickliness and perceived authoritarianism, his propensity to pick fights with the liberal Moscow intelligentsia and independent journalists, his past flirtations with nationalism-were suddenly expiated. Journalist Anna Mongayt added, “Russia has never had a queen like Yulia.” But it was more than a fairy tale. “It is a story of biblical proportions,” says Guriev. In a culture that intuitively understands redemption through suffering, in a society that believes women are by nature maternal nurturers, Navalnaya was immediately understandable. And yet she was strong, she was stoic, she didn’t crumble under pressure and, through the sheer force of her will and the strength of her love, she got the dragon to release her man. The country saw her living out the worst moment of her life-live. That is an understatement Navalnaya was a revelation. And she would never, ever lose control of her emotions again. She would have to demand, over and over, that the Omsk hospital release her husband and allow him to be loaded onto the plane and taken to Berlin, the only way, everyone knew, of possibly saving his life. (She wouldn’t know until days later that this was the result of a military-grade nerve agent in the Novichok family.) She would have to fight with doctors and hospital administrators to see the results of her husband’s lab work, to give impromptu press conferences on the hospital steps, to sneak around the city to find the German doctors who had arrived with a private medevac plane and whom the authorities had barred her from seeing. She would finally break through to see him, his body sprouting tubes and cords like vines, writhing in near-constant seizures. She would stare them down, out-argue them, and bend their will to hers, all while a gathering swarm of journalists trained their cameras and microphones and smartphones on her. To enter his room, she would need to present a marriage certificate, they said, and secure verbal consent from Navalny, who was still unconscious and on life support. They were reinforced-or kept in line-by a small battalion of plainclothes federal security officers, all intent on keeping her from seeing her husband. At the hospital in Omsk, Navalnaya would encounter a wall of doctors who seemed more scared of their civilian superiors than they were of losing their patient. Her husband, she learned, hadn’t died, but the hardest was yet to come. “The most important thing is not to relax,” she felt, “to not show weakness.” It would stay with her for weeks. She had been preparing for this moment for a decade, and now it was finally here, pouring in with the sun on this warm summer morning. If the plane carrying her husband had to make an emergency landing 1,700 miles from its intended destination, Alexey’s life must have been in imminent danger. “Alexey has been poisoned, the plane landed in Omsk.” Navalnaya said “okay” and hung up. It was Kira Yarmysh, her husband’s press secretary, who was supposed to be midflight with Alexey. She wasn’t normally up that early, but she was preparing to go to the airport to meet her husband, Alexey Navalny, the sole remaining leader of the Russian opposition, whose flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk was scheduled to arrive in Moscow at eight that morning. It was 6:40 on the morning of Augwhen Yulia Navalnaya’s phone rang.
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