Without Navalny, Russia’s opposition is tearing itself apart

Since the death of Alexei Navalny in an Arctic penal colony in February, Russia’s opposition movement has found itself in disarray. Instead of Navalny’s death uniting those exiled Kremlin critics campaigning for a democratic future for Russia, the past eight months have seen the opposition movement fracture into bickering factions, unable to collaborate on anything much at all. Now, that fighting has broken out into the open – and risks putting the cause of a future democratic Russia in jeopardy.

Last week, Latvia’s anti-corruption bureau announced they had begun an investigation into allegations made by Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) that Latvian law enforcement officers had had a hand in organising a physical attack on one of his allies earlier this year. Navalny’s former chief of staff Leonid Volkov was attacked with a hammer and tear gas outside his home in Vilnius, Lithuania in March, leaving him bleeding and bruised with a broken arm.

At the time, it was widely assumed that the attack on Volkov was a Kremlin hit-job: it took place approximately a month after Navalny himself died in highly suspicious circumstances.