4 June 1976 — 16 February 2024

Alexei Navalny
would have turned 50

Today, 4 June 2026

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Alexei Anatolievich Navalny was a Russian opposition leader, anti-corruption activist, and lawyer who became the most prominent critic of Vladimir Putin's government. For more than a decade he documented the vast machinery of state corruption, built a nationwide movement of volunteers, and refused — again and again — to leave his country despite prison, poison, and the certainty of what awaited him.

He was murdered in an Arctic penal colony on 16 February 2024, aged 47, still fighting.

A meadow, a park, a shirt

Somewhere on the meadow in that park — the one glimpsed in the film below — he once changed his shirt. The sleeves of the new one, like every shirt before it, were immediately rolled up to the elbows: ready, as always, to keep working against evil, corruption, and tyranny. A small, wordless gesture that said everything about the man.

Starts at 29 : 15 — the park scene.