I.
“Since Soviet times, the safest place in Russia is the kitchen,” says Anna Biryukova, Head of Public Opinion Research and political polling at Russia’s largest democratic opposition group, the Anti-Corruption Foundation. Biryukova addressed an audience at Henry R. Luce Hall in October 2024. “In modern Russia, you cannot have a casual political conversation with a stranger at a bus stop. You cannot say you don’t like Putin. It’s simply not possible. 100 percent not possible.”
Repression in Russia has had a chilling effect, turning even ordinary conversations into liabilities as state media fabricates an overwhelming majority in support of those in power. “They want you to feel if you are not with them, you are nothing, you are all alone. And, if you object, there will be consequences,” Biryukova continued.
Following its dissolution by Vladimir Putin’s government in 2021, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, which is usually referred to by its Russian acronym FBK, now operates from Vilnius, Lithuania. With 135 employees, the FBK uses social media, investigative journalism, and grassroots organizing to expose corruption, counter state narratives, and build toward a democratic future for Russia. Engaging a predominantly young audience, their YouTube news channel—boasting 6.37 million subscribers and over 1.58 billion views—rivals live viewership of Russian state TV, making them one of the most influential independent voices against Putin’s Russia. From the FBK’s new headquarters in Lithuania, Biryukova continues to gauge public sentiment inside Russia, disguising calls with a local Russian number to elude state surveillance. Since Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the FBK has faced a grim reality: the opposition’s momentum had plateaued while the crackdown on dissent intensified. Associating with or donating to the FBK, which exists off of private donations and crowd-funding, can lead to charges of extremism, treason, or aiding an “anti-state” entity.
The FBK has operated leaderless since February 16, 2024, when its founder, Alexei Navalny, died in a Russian penal colony in the Arctic Circle wherein which he was serving a 19-year prison sentence. Until his death, Navalny, the most prominent Russian opposition leader, was Russia’s greatest promise of liberatory democracy. Even Putin refused to say his name, instead calling him “the prisoner,” “the character you mentioned,” and “this gentleman.”
As the war broke out, Navalny urged his team from prison to think long-term, and prepare for a democratic Russian future, albeit one kicked down the line. “He had an ongoing idea that education was the greatest value,” Biryukova recalled. “Not only for his kids, for everyone in his working and friend circle.”
For Navalny, the Yale World Fellows program, Yale’s global leadership initiative which he attended in the fall of 2010—a year before he founded the FBK—embodied this vision. The Yale World Fellows program is a semester-long residency for mid-career professionals. The program was established in the early 2000s, at the urging of former University President Richard Levin, who wanted to bring Yale to the forefront of post-Cold War global democracy efforts. Yale provided Navalny access to U.S. and global political networks and a platform to refine his anti-corruption strategy, elevating his profile internationally. Yet, the experience came at some cost. Back home, Kremlin propaganda smeared Navalny’s association with Yale as evidence of Western collusion.
Leonid Volkov—Biryukova’s husband, Navalny’s close ally and former chief of staff—and Biryukova both became World Fellows, in 2018 and 2024, respectively, following in Navalny’s footsteps. When they applied to the fellowship, Navalny provided them letters of recommendation. Their acceptance and participation in the program reflected a growing recognition of Navalny’s opposition movement by the University. Now, without their leader, the FBK pushes on–mobilizing a global network Navalny began to build at Yale.
II.
Alexei Navalny was born in 1976 in the small town of Butyn outside of Moscow to a modest family—his father, a former Soviet Army officer, and his mother, an economist. Raised in a series of military towns, Navalny spent summers with his paternal grandmother near Chernobyl, Ukraine. The 1986 nuclear disaster, coupled with the Soviet government’s deliberate attempt to downplay the scale of the catastrophe, would later shape his staunch anti-corruption stance. Navalny’s education in economics and law in Moscow laid the foundation for his future political activism. In 2000, he aligned himself with the liberal Yabloko party, which championed a free market economy and a strong civil society. In 2008, he launched a stakeholder activism campaign that targeted five state-owned Russian oil and gas companies. By purchasing small shares in these companies, he gained access to corporate meetings and internal documents detailing their financial assets. With this, he exposed widespread corruption within the companies. His findings, published on his widely-read LiveJournal blog beginning in 2008, quickly drew the attention of then-President Dmitry Medvedev, who, three years later, caved to public and governmental pressure to acknowledge the staggering embezzlement happening within state-controlled industries. Navalny’s fearless use of the internet as a platform to reveal the Kremlin’s corruption earned him the moniker “Russia’s Julian Assange” from The New Yorker.
Navalny applied to the Yale World Fellows program in 2009, backed by recommendations from prominent Russian dissenters. He realized that to effectively target Russian oligarchs funneling state funds abroad, he needed to understand U.S. and U.K. money laundering laws. He also hoped to study American party politics, checks and balances, and the mechanics of successful elections—insights he aimed to apply back home in Russia.
Leslie Powell, a former Yale World Fellows admissions officer, remembers Navalny “stumbling” through the admissions interview, emailing afterward to apologize for his English. “But even then it was clear he was onto something big,” Powell said.
The Yale World Fellows program has supported four hundred fellows across ninety-six countries in its global leadership programming, boasting a more competitive entry rate than Yale College. Political dissidents stood out in a program that typically prioritized government leaders, entrepreneurs, journalists, artists, scientists, and humanitarians—or “people who are moving the needle in some way via different pathways,” as current program director Emma Sky said. Only three fellows—Navalny, Turkish intellectual Hakan Altinay, and Nicaraguan activist Félix Maradiaga—have faced political exile or imprisonment.
In August 2010, 34-year-old Alexei Navalny settled into a condo on New Haven’s Prospect Street with his wife, Yulia, and their young children, Dasha and Zakhar. Navalny immediately found a primary school for six-year-old Dasha, enrolled his family in the Yale healthcare system, and rented a car so the Navalnys could get around the city from their lodging up the hill.
He lent his car to his neighbors, other World Fellows with whom he shared drinks, recipes, and gatherings with his family—Nicaraguan fellow Ricardo Terán, South Sudanese fellow Lumumba Di-Aping, and United Kingdom fellow Marvin Rees.
A lanky figure with piercing blue eyes, Navalny carried himself with a measured intensity that drew attention without demanding it. He approached the experience with the mindset of someone intent on absorbing as much as possible. “I firmly believe that all the best things on Earth have been created by brave nerds,” he would later say.
Navalny’s four months at Yale, in the fall of that year, marked his first extended stay outside of Russia. Even before arriving at the program, Navalny had cast a wide net, determined to leverage his experiences at Yale to create change back home. According to former World Fellow admissions officer Valerie Belanger’s email records, he made a list of experts at Yale Law School he wished to consult on U.S. and UK anti-corruption measures. Once arriving at Yale, he finally reached them—legal and political corruption scholars like Susan Rose Ackerman and Bruce Ackerman, Cold War historians like John Gaddis, and political economists like Aleh Tsyvinsky.
In class, Navalny voiced his convictions with brevity. Before he finished his sentence, peers like Ted Wittenstein and Marvin Rees could comfortably bet the phrase “corrupt Russian government” would leave his mouth.
For all his clarity of purpose, Navalny’s political past was not without controversy.
Navalny’s neighbors remember debating his annual participation in the “Russian March,” a rally that brought together Russian ultranationalist groups, like neo-Nazis. YouTube videos from 2007 show him likening Moscow migrants to tooth cavities, an issue that he proposed could be “carefully but decisively removed through deportation.”
Navalny confronted this criticism in his posthumous memoir, Patriot, stating, “I decided that if I, with my democratic values, supported the right of free assembly, I needed to be consistent and support other people’s right to do the same.”
“Look, he’s a product of Russia and Russian politics,” Rees said. “Even though he shared the stage with people we would find problematic, when I got to Yale, I didn’t find a guy who was acting towards me or any of the other fellows with any sort of individual hostility. I didn’t hear tunes of global white supremacy. I met a man who had a north star of corruption in his country, but also someone who was not fixed in his worldview.”
His peers remembered him as disciplined. He jogged each morning. He set off to read, a lot: political strategy, Protestant theology, and The Hunger Games. He admired The Wire television series, and would later model its grassroots organizing in his Moscow mayoral campaigns, insisting his team watch and take notes of the street gatherings in TV Baltimore.
“You know that tacky thing of going somewhere new, being a student, and wanting to be a better version of yourself?” Biryukova asked. “Well, in his case, it actually worked.”
Belanger, the former admissions officer, remembers Navalny confiding in her that he was inspired by how many Yale students believed they would be world leaders. “Just to be around that level of confidence and belief in that kind of power of an individual to affect change…It’s really influencing me,” Belanger recounts Navalany saying.
At Yale, Navalny kept his anti-corruption blog—Navalny.ru—alive while also expanding his efforts through RosPil, a crowdsourced project aimed at exposing fraudulent state contracts. In November 2010, he released a 300-page dossier exposing alleged massive corruption in the construction of Transneft’s East Siberia–Pacific Ocean pipeline. “But before you start reading, look in your wallet,” he wrote in one post that first revealed his findings.“You may not have noticed, but about 1,100 rubles [approx 37 dollars] have disappeared from it. Not much for each of us, but this amount was stolen from every adult resident of Russia. In total, at least $4 billion were stolen in the course of this story.”
Within six months, the site received one million visits monthly. Navalny encouraged visitors to anonymously share information about dubious government agreements and discuss the allegations online. Meanwhile, the Kremlin sought to discredit him, placing Navalny under investigation by the Russian Minister of the Interior.
Near the end of the program, the fifteen fellows of the Class of 2010 traveled to Washington, D.C., for the program’s annual visit to the State Department. There, Harold Koh, a Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, who was serving as Legal Adviser to the State Department, made a point of pulling aside former program director Michael Cappello and Navalny. Cappello remembers Koh saying, “Secretary [Hillary] Clinton knows Alexei’s name.” People at the highest levels of U.S. foreign policy were aware of Navalny’s work and his ties to the University. Cappello pointed out that Secretary Clinton is a graduate of Yale Law herself, and “that that connection with this Russian dissident mattered.” It was clear that some of Yale’s most powerful levers were being engaged on his behalf.
III.
Less than a year after the program ended, Navalny seized international attention by leading mass protests against suspected fraud in the December 2011 parliamentary elections. Expanding his investigations, he branded the ruling United Russia party as the “Party of Crooks and Thieves,” a label that stuck and contributed to its declining vote share. The fallout sparked Russia’s largest anti-Kremlin protests since Putin took power, with nearly 60,000 demonstrators nationwide.
His online campaign urging Russians to vote against United Russia had helped push the party’s official support below 50 percent, but Putin’s party still claimed victory. Opposition figures and outside observers, including the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, called the results a sham, citing widespread fraud and “serious indications of ballot box stuffing.”
Navalny was arrested the night of the protest and sentenced to fifteen days in jail for defying a government official—the first of more than ten arrests over the next decade during which he spent hundreds of days in custody.
Upon word of Navalny’s arrest, the Class of 2010 World Fellows’ Whatsapp group quickly mobilized, as fellows coordinated efforts to support his release. Filipino World Fellow of the Class of 2005, Vicente Santiago Pérez, suggested each fellow hand-deliver a letter to the Russian embassy in their country demanding Navalny’s release. Nearly 150 fellows followed suit. To avoid fueling accusations of Western imperialist interference, they appealed directly to their own governments, leveraging the World Fellows’ global network rather than invoking the Yale University name. Three weeks later, Navalny was released, further solidifying his status as the face of the opposition.
Navalny’s political influence grew when he campaigned for the position of Moscow mayor in 2013. His grassroots approach garnered 27 percent of the vote, an unprecedented feat for an opposition candidate during Putin’s tenure.
Russian state media frequently highlighted his Yale education, labeling him “the Yale World Fellow” and “Yale Mayor” during his mayoral campaign. Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Russian Communist Party, demanded Navalny’s imprisonment due to his ties to the “Imperial West” and labeled him as a “direct offspring of their union.” Kremlin-aligned critics went as far as accusing him of being a Central Intelligence Agency operative, reflecting the broader distrust towards intellectuals who engage with global networks.
During Navalny’s mayoral campaign, Cappello, despite helping advocate for Navalny’s release within the World Fellows network after his 2011 arrests, refuted claims that Yale had bolstered Navalny’s political ambitions. Cappello told the German newspaper Deutsche Welle, “Our intention is not to support transitions of government.”
Navalny was eager to dispel accusations that he was a tool of foreign interests, whether that of Yale or the United States government. Belanger remembers him pleading she close his and his wife’s Bank of America accounts during his run for Moscow mayor in 2013. A foreign bank account would do him no good in securing national trust in Russian elections, he realized.
In his email to Belanger, he went on to cite his growing criminal accolades, courtesy of the Kremlin. “I guess I can be named as the most criminal Yale World Fellow ever. I’ll be extremely grateful if you can help me,” he wrote in 2013.
He’d lose his mayoral election, but go on to draw up support for a Yalie on another ballot three years later. Rees, now-Mayor of Bristol, England, commented on Navalny’s support during his 2016 mayoral election as another gesture of his former neighbor’s generosity.
“I’m still not allowed to leave Russia, but when I can, I’m gonna visit Bristol like a boss with a mayor friend of mine,” he emailed Rees.
IV.
Upon his return to Russia, Navalny established the FBK. Relying on small donations from thousands of ordinary citizens rather than a few large donors, Navalny built a movement resilient to state interference.
“The most important thing we do is, then, to spread the story so millions hear about it,” he wrote in Patriot, about the strategy behind FBK’s early media campaign. Investigative documentaries turned opaque graft into compelling narratives that resonated with ordinary Russians. Notable examples include Putin’s Palace: History of the World’s Largest Bribe (2021), which exposed a $1.4 billion palace allegedly built for Putin and amassed over one hundred million views. Another FBK documentary detailed then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s network of bribes, sparking nationwide protests.
From prison, Navalny reflected, “The year 2012 set a pattern in my life, an endless vicious circle for many years to come: protest rally, arrest, protest rally, arrest. It was unpleasant, of course, but that was not going to stop me.” Even with his candidacy banned, Navalny ran again for mayor of Moscow in 2016 and for president under Russia of the Future Party in 2018. He expanded the FBK to include offices in over eighty Russian cities. His ambition was clear: to create a “permanent working structure” for the opposition that could bring people to the streets, participate in elections, and—eventually—win them.
In August 2020, Russian operatives poisoned Navalny with the nerve agent Novichok. The assassination attempt, which is widely believed to be ordered by Putin, left the then 44-year-old hospitalized in Germany for over two weeks while he remained in a coma. Just five months later, he decided to return to Russia. He refused to ask his countrymen to risk their lives to take down the Putin regime while he mused on political theory from abroad.
Upon his return, he was immediately arrested on faulty extremism charges upon landing, sparking nationwide protests in his support.
Cappello reflected that those close to the leader saw that, “the fundamental problem in protecting Alexei, was Alexei.” They could not imagine a scenario in which he would have been comfortable not returning to Russia.
“I remember thinking, would I be more likely to attend his inauguration, or his funeral?” Capello said. “Turns out, I’d go to neither.”
With Navalny’ death came the collapse of a fragile hope. An alternative Russian history of liberatory democracy, a near end to the Putin years that seemed far-fetched but not impossible, for the moment, was gone.
Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnaya says, when the Putin era ends, which she sees as inevitable, she will run as an opposition candidate. Until Putin leaves power, she cannot return to Russia, as she was charged in absentia to two months in prison for participation in an extremist organization: the FBK.
V.
Navalny’s passing hasn’t stopped the opposition. Biryokova likens the FBK’s work in exile to running with weights tied to your legs, growing heavier with every step. “Right now, in Russia, you have to run and run. And it gets worse, and worse. You can’t just go to the streets. You can’t just protest Putin.”
She recalls how Navalny’s unflinching belief in the promise of a democratic future for Russia kept the team going, even under immense pressure. “After speaking with him in his office, you’d walk away with three new projects to take on,” Biryokova said. “He’d convince you to keep pushing, that the movement needed you, that you must serve like he was.”
Now, in the absence of that guiding force, the task ahead feels even more pressing. “We don’t have a silver bullet that will end it tomorrow,” Volkov, former Chairman of the FBK and director of political operations for the Russia of the Future party, says. The opposition’s focus, he explains, is to force Putin to expose the contradictions and inefficiencies of the political system. “We don’t know when it will collapse, how it will collapse, or how much time it will take, but shedding light on its flaws makes it more likely to collapse sooner.”
Since Navalny’s death, the danger has only escalated. As of February 2025, Volkov faces eleven politically motivated criminal cases initiated by Putin’s regime. Biryukova was forced to flee Russia in 2019 due to mounting threats from the government.
“What bothers me deeply is that Alexei always talked about the beautiful future he envisioned, but he never got to see it,” Biryukova says. But, as she reflected, they could only expose the Kremlin’s lies if they kept telling the truth. “Give me a little time. And then I go to work,” Biryukova posted in her tribute to her boss and friend, on February 17, 2024, the day after his passing.
For the FBK — and the future of the Russian opposition — there is no alternative.
Volkov says the opposition is prepared to run campaigns and win elections. They’ve done it before—cutting United Russia’s hold on the Moscow city parliament in 2019—and they’ll do it again.
“The only predictable thing about how change happens in Russia,” Volkov reflected before a screening of Navalny (2022) last November in Yale’s Luce Hall, “is that it always happens unpredictably.”
This unpredictability shaped Navalny’s approach to leadership, including his preparations for the possibility of his own death.
“After his poisoning attempt, journalists kept asking, ‘What would your team do if you were killed?’” Biryukova recounted.
Navalny’s answer—steady, pragmatic: “They would just work. They know how.”
Anna Biryukova remembers the day she gave birth to her second child while Alexei Navalny was in prison, just one month after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “It was an overwhelming day, as I was dealing with the birth of our child while Alexei’s future remained uncertain,” she recalls. Despite the chaos, Navalny sent a note through his lawyer and addressed Biryukova by one of many endearing nicknames he was known to coin for his team (Biryukova, for her part, always called him Alexei.). “Annette, I congratulate you,” he wrote. “You can have many days like those in court, waiting for another sentence, but giving birth is something unique, and this is what makes today important.” Even from behind bars, Navalny’s message was clear—life, new life, and specifically the new Russian generation, was something worth celebrating.
-Paola Santos is a senior in Davenport College and former Executive Editor of The New Journal.