--- title: The Story Behind TIME's Alexei Navalny Cover description: Navalny’s last letter arrived in mid-­January, and its tone was a lot darker than the other letters had been canonical: https://time.com/6140394/story-behind-time-alexei-navalny-cover/ author: Edward Felsenthal article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-01-19T23:30:25.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:51:46.203Z article:section: Ideas og:title: The Story Behind TIME's Alexei Navalny Cover og:description: Navalny’s last letter arrived in mid-­January, and its tone was a lot darker than the other letters had been og:url: https://time.com/6140394/story-behind-time-alexei-navalny-cover/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc6c69ed6672ac7d0/698a219809208f1749418c41/INT-TIM220131_Final.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2250 og:image:height: 1266 og:image:alt: INT-TIM220131_Final og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Story Behind TIME's Alexei Navalny Cover twitter:description: Navalny’s last letter arrived in mid-­January, and its tone was a lot darker than the other letters had been twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc6c69ed6672ac7d0/698a219809208f1749418c41/INT-TIM220131_Final.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Story Behind TIME's Interview with Alexei Navalny > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=edbff6c6-1b61-4116-82fe-4a1177e0202f&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: The Imprisoned Leader of the Russian Opposition [Watch (HLS stream): The Imprisoned Leader of the Russian Opposition](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/fZzhIDyb.m3u8) (6:42)  _Published 2022-01-19. A year has passed since Alexei Navalny, the leader of the Russian opposition movement, returned to Moscow, having recovered from a nearly fatal attempt to poison him. He was arrested upon his return and sent to prison._  by [Edward Felsenthal](https://time.com/author/edward-felsenthal/)  ## Edward Felsenthal Felsenthal is the Executive Chairman and former Editor in Chief of TIME. Jan 19, 2022 11:30 PM UTC  Photo Illustration by Neil Jamieson for TIME  by [Edward Felsenthal](https://time.com/author/edward-felsenthal/)  ## Edward Felsenthal Felsenthal is the Executive Chairman and former Editor in Chief of TIME. Jan 19, 2022 11:30 PM UTC Last October, TIME’s Simon Shuster reached out to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny with an interview request. It had been 10 months since Navalny’s voluntary [return to Russia](https://time.com/5930595/alexei-navalny-return-russia-why/) and imprisonment, and more than a year since he had been nearly killed by a chemical weapon. Simon has interviewed Navalny a half dozen times since he first emerged as a political force a decade ago, and the response suggested Putin’s public enemy No. 1 was happy to hear from him. In the town of Pokrov, where Navalny’s prison is located, “there is probably just one subscriber to TIME magazine,” he [wrote back to Simon](https://time.com/6140114/alexei-navalny-interview/). “And that’s me.” His lawyers had just brought him a recent issue that morning, which included [an article Simon wrote about a Holocaust memorial in Ukraine](https://time.com/6102593/ukraine-holocaust-memorial-kremlin-propaganda/). “I read it and thought: let’s do the interview,” Navalny said, drawing a little smiley face. **Read the cover story here:** [_The Man Putin Fears_](https://time.com/6140102/alexei-navalny-russia-profile/) With that, the two started a [correspondence](https://time.com/6140132/%D1%8D%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BB%D1%8E%D0%B7%D0%B8%D0%B2-%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B2%D1%8C%D1%8E-%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B5%D1%8F-%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BD%D0%BE/) that lasted well into January. The result is the powerful and moving profile of Navalny in this issue, a portrait of his life and of the political organization he continues to operate, improbably, from his barrack. Navalny’s last letter arrived in mid-­January, and its tone was a lot darker than the other letters had been. Navalny had been watching the U.S. negotiate with Russia about NATO and Ukraine, and it pained him to see the Americans get played, he said, “just like a frightened schoolboy who’s been bullied by an upperclassman.” --- ### More from TIME --- No journalist knows this terrain better than Simon, whose family immigrated to the U.S. from Russia in 1989 and who has covered the region insightfully and courageously for us for over a decade. In exile, Navalny “would be just another gadfly, too easy for Putin to ignore,” Simon writes. “In prison he is a reminder of what Russia has become, and a symbol of the freedoms that it lost.” ## Transcript [00:02] Alexei was quite a famous blogger back in the [00:06] day. He had a big page in LiveJournal. This is something like [00:11] MySpace but it was huge in Russia. He was writing about [00:14] corruption a lot. And he was writing about corporate crimes [00:18] about state owned companies abusing the powers that they [00:24] have. And stealing essentially from the state. He was writing [00:29] about boring stuff but in a very fun way. It was very, it was [00:33] very cool to read him, he was very noticeable. [00:56] The Anti-Corruption Foundation is an NGO that was established [00:59] about 10 years ago by Alexei Navalny. A group of people, [01:05] lawyers, investigators and managers got together to make [01:11] investigations fun again. And we did stories like they do in [01:17] magazines and newspapers, something about Russian [01:20] officials stealing money in different ways. And there are [01:23] plenty of ways and buying themselves; cars, yachts, houses [01:27] private jets. We would wrap those stories nicely, make either an entertaining [01:33] text out of it. Later, we started to produce [01:36] videos and then we would also sue. [01:53] We were in Tomsk. Well, Alexi left. In fact, my colleagues they [01:56] traveled to Moscow earlier than everybody else because Alexei [01:59] has this TV—YouTube show. An online YouTube show, every [02:03] Thursday that starts now at 8, he needs to be in Moscow. [02:06] So he flew back. And we stayed to wrap things up, prepare the new [02:09] investigation because it was meant to be cycle of regional [02:13] investigations and I came down for breakfast at around 9:39 [02:18] Two of my colleagues were already downstairs having [02:21] breakfast and one of them, Georgy Alburov was monitoring [02:25] Alexei's flight on flight radar. [02:28] Alexei Navalny became desperately ill aboard a flight [02:31] forced to make an emergency landing, groaning can be heard in [02:34] this unconfirmed cell phone video. [02:36] And he saw that the plane made an emergency [02:38] landing in Omsk. Couple of minutes later, we got a text [02:41] from Kira saying that Alexei is unconscious and that they are on [02:45] the way to the hospital. We knew straightaway that this is [02:48] poisoning. We went upstairs we asked administrators of the hotel to [02:52] let us in the room where Alexei just checked out from because [02:56] later we found out that Alexei was indeed poisoned in this room [03:01] because they have found—the German labs found traces of novichok [03:05] on one of the bottles. So actually two of the bottles. That's [03:09] Alexei left behind in the hotel, which kind of is a very good [03:12] timestamp of when the poisoning happened. So he was poisoned [03:16] before he left to the airport. Together with Bellingcat with [03:20] Christo Grozev from Bellingcat. We investigated the poisoning [03:23] and arrived at a group of people who we consider were part of [03:28] this specific operation where some of them were generals, high [03:31] level, some of them were medical people with medical backgrounds, [03:35] some of them worked in chemical labs and had this sort of [03:40] background. And just before the publication, just before the date [03:45] on 14th of December. We were meant to be live at the same [03:48] time with CNN. [04:02] We decided to make calls just to, we had all of [04:06] their numbers because we located them through their numbers. We [04:09] called 10 people at least. It was pretty fruitless. To be [04:14] honest, we had absolutely no hope to come on. They are secret [04:17] service agents like they should be resistant to pranks. And I [04:22] think they were most of them. And they even started—look like [04:25] as we were calling, going down our phone book. It looked like [04:29] they are less and less willing to talk and they wouldn't buy [04:32] into the legends that Alexei used that he's an aide to Patrushev [04:36] or something like that. And but I think they forgot about one [04:40] game to this chemist called Kudryavtsev. As the conversation was [04:45] enrolling, and as he was given details that thing up that [04:49] they applied poison to the underwear, a specific area of [04:53] underwear. And how he is upset that the operation to kill Navalny [04:59] failed. And that next time things will be better. [05:03] And that the failure only happened because the airplane was [05:06] landed too quickly and he wasn't in the air for a long enough [05:10] time. I just remember sitting there and being just called [05:16] completely and ultimately shocked. [05:19] This is the first time the direct question has been put [05:22] to President Putin. Did you order Alexei Navalny's [05:25] assassination? [05:28] Of course not. We don't have this kind of habit of [05:32] assassinating anybody. [05:34] To Russia now, tonight Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been [05:38] detained after flying back to Moscow, five months after the [05:42] nerve agent attack that nearly killed him. [05:46] There was absolutely no decision making [05:48] process in Alexei's decision of going back but from the day zero, [05:53] from the date he opened his eyes, he was completely and utterly [05:56] sure that he will go back to Russia. He announced it in his [06:00] first video, in his first interview, and the first [06:02] Instagram post, I think. That wasn't a tough decision to make. [06:08] It is unthinkable for him to continue to voluntarily take a [06:14] decision to withdraw from Russian politics so much and [06:20] like live abroad and lose touch with it. That's what makes him a [06:23] great politician. He—that's such a big part of his life, such a [06:28] big part of his personality that he would rather be in prison in [06:33] Russia than free elsewhere. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6140394/story-behind-time-alexei-navalny-cover/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6140394/story-behind-time-alexei-navalny-cover/"},"headline":"The Story Behind TIME's Interview with Alexei Navalny","datePublished":"2022-01-19T23:30:25.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:51:46.203Z","description":"Navalny’s last letter arrived in mid-­January, and its tone was a lot darker than the other letters had been","url":"https://time.com/6140394/story-behind-time-alexei-navalny-cover/","keywords":["protests"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc6c69ed6672ac7d0/698a219809208f1749418c41/INT-TIM220131_Final.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Edward Felsenthal","jobTitle":"Felsenthal is the Executive Chairman and former Editor in Chief of TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/edward-felsenthal/"}],"articleSection":"Ideas","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc6c69ed6672ac7d0/698a219809208f1749418c41/INT-TIM220131_Final.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"INT-TIM220131_Final","caption":"","creditText":"Photo Illustration by Neil Jamieson for TIME","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/section/ideas/","name":"Ideas"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/tag/protests/","name":"protests"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/6140394/story-behind-time-alexei-navalny-cover/","name":"The Story Behind TIME's Interview with Alexei Navalny"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"The Imprisoned Leader of the Russian Opposition","description":"A year has passed since Alexei Navalny, the leader of the Russian opposition movement, returned to Moscow, having recovered from a nearly fatal attempt to poison him. 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