On Thursday, as the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny was returning to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk, where he had been meeting with opposition candidates ahead of local elections, he began to feel ill. A heart-rending video was later posted online — one of the passengers on the plane had managed to capture Mr. Navalny’s groans and cries of pain. They sounded like the screams of a dying man.
Almost immediately, it appared that Mr. Navalny had been slipped a strong poison. The airplane was forced to make an emergency landing in the Siberian city of Omsk. Mr. Navalny was transported to the hospital and fell into a coma.
The Russian authorities initially seemed prepared to facilitate Mr. Navalny’s transfer to a specialist clinic in Germany. But they now appear to have changed their minds: According to Mr. Navalny’s spokeswoman, doctors at the hospital where he is being treated are refusing to allow him to board the waiting plane. He remains unconscious.
In recent years, Mr. Navalny’s undeniable leadership of the Russian opposition has also become a kind of sign of President Vladimir V. Putin’s stability. The unchanging leader of the regime is Vladimir Putin; the unchanging leader of the opposition is Aleksei Navalny. It was hard to imagine him being arrested or killed. But everything changes.
If the Russian government has now decided to get rid of Mr. Navalny, that suggests it is constructing some new political configuration in which there is no longer a need for any kind of an opposition.
Mr. Navalny is no stranger to toxins. Three years ago, Kremlin loyalists threw a triarylmethane dye on his face, temporarily staining him green and permanently damaging his vision in one eye. At the time, Mr. Putin’s chief of staff, Anton Vaino, personally signed a document allowing Mr. Navalny to travel to Spain for treatment. (Mr. Navalny, who had been convicted of embezzlement, among other crimes, was legally prohibited from leaving Russia.) This was a humane act on the part of the Kremlin, although it would have been more humane to restrict the activities of the pro-Kremlin activists who regularly attack opposition figures.
But there is a difference between spraying someone with poison dye and a classic political murder. The most notorious of the latter, in recent years, was the 2015 killing of the opposition politician Boris Y. Nemtsov. Mr. Nemtsov was gunned down in the center of Moscow. A group of Russian policemen from Chechnya were charged with his murder, but the court — improbably — named the driver of a Chechen military officer as the one who ordered the killing.
After Mr. Nemtsov’s killing, Mr. Navalny found himself in the role of the sole and most important leader of the Russian opposition. Even the Kremlin acknowledged his special status. In the most grotesque sign of this acknowledgment, Mr. Putin and his people never refer to Mr. Navalny by his name, preferring the faceless “that person.” They don’t like “that person”: He has been tried and convicted in a number of politically motivated criminal cases. But he has never received a real prison sentence or faced other unpleasant punishments that would exclude him from participating in politics.
Today, breathless updates on Mr. Navalny’s health dominate the headlines in Russia and my social media feeds. If he dies, Mr. Putin will lose his leading opponent and the system will lose its balance. But peace and stability are no longer the values that the Kremlin holds above all else. In January, Mr. Putin introduced constitutional amendments that essentially change the structure of the state and allow him to be president for life. The Russian authorities often warn of the dangers of oppositionist extremism, but Russia’s chief extremist is Mr. Putin himself, with his willingness and ability to radically change the rules of the game.
We may not know what happened to Mr. Navalny, but we do know that immediately following his hospitalization, pro-Kremlin bloggers and media outlets began claiming that his sickness may have been caused by drinking bad home-brewed liquor. This is a lie: His doctors have refuted the presence of alcohol in his system and, as someone who has been friends with Mr. Navalny for many years, I can personally attest that he has never been much of a drinker.
The eagerness with which the pro-Kremlin press is denying it being an attack suggests the authorities are interested in concealing the true perpetrators. This can be read as a public confession that Mr. Navalny was indeed poisoned by people working for the government.
As in the case of Sergei Skripal, a Russian intelligence officer who defected to Britain and was poisoned with a nerve agent in 2018, the authorities will now surely cover their tracks so noisily and clumsily that they will leave no doubt of their involvement. There is really no version of the story that doesn’t involve the Kremlin. After all, the Putin era of Russian politics has been governed by the laws of a secret service operation.
Mr. Navalny has truly held an important place in the political system for many years with his unique monopoly over the segment of the opposition that refuses to compromise with the Kremlin. But the new reality of Mr. Putin’s lifelong rule demands new conditions. A critic of the regime must now acknowledge that he is not risking a seat in Parliament or even his freedom — but his very life.
The problem is that the system in which you’re either for Mr. Putin or you die seems much more unstable than what came before it. Political terror precludes the possibility of political stability. The person least comfortable in a Navalny-free Russia is bound to be Mr. Putin himself.
Oleg Kashin (@kshn) is the author of “Fardwor, Russia! A Fantastical Tale of Life Under Putin.” This essay was translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich.
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