Originally published 2021-01-25.
On Saturday 23 January 2021, people in more than a hundred Russian towns and cities went into the streets to demand the release of opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who had been arrested at a Moscow airport six days earlier. Police detained protesters in huge numbers: the independent monitoring group OVD-Info counted 4,002 detentions nationwide that day, more than 1,500 of them in Moscow. Navalny's wife, Yulia Navalnaya, was among those held.
The first reports, including ours, put the figure at around 3,000; the count kept rising as lawyers and monitors logged cases from across the country. It was the largest wave of anti-Kremlin protest in years, and the first of several weekends of demonstrations that winter.
Why Navalny's return set off the protests
In August 2020 Navalny collapsed on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk and he was later flown, in a coma, to the Charité hospital in Berlin. German government laboratories concluded that he had been poisoned with a nerve agent from the Novichok group, a finding later confirmed by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Navalny blamed the Russian state; the Kremlin denied any involvement.
After months of recovery in Germany he flew home on 17 January 2021. Officers detained him at passport control at Sheremetyevo airport, saying he had broken the conditions of an old suspended sentence while he was abroad receiving treatment. A hastily convened court ordered him held for 30 days.
Two days later his Anti-Corruption Foundation released a long video investigation accusing Vladimir Putin of benefiting from a lavish palace on the Black Sea coast. The Kremlin dismissed it, but it passed 60 million YouTube views before the first protest weekend and gave many people, especially younger Russians, a reason to come out.
The day of the protests
Rallies began in the Far East and moved west with the time zones, through Siberia and the Urals to St Petersburg and Moscow, often in bitter cold. In Moscow the crowd gathered around Pushkin Square and spread along the boulevards. Estimates of its size differed sharply: the authorities said about 4,000, other observers said 15,000 to 25,000, and Reuters estimated up to 40,000.
Video from the capital showed riot police in helmets wading into the crowd, grabbing individuals and marching them to waiting police buses. Many people reported that mobile internet and phone signal dropped in central Moscow and St Petersburg during the rallies.
Sergei Radchenko, a 53-year-old protester, told Reuters he had come out for his son as much as for himself. "I'm tired of being afraid," he said.
Yulia Navalnaya, Lyubov Sobol and the detentions
Yulia Navalnaya was detained as she left the Teatralnaya metro station in central Moscow and held for about three hours before being released. Navalny's close ally Lyubov Sobol, a lawyer with his Anti-Corruption Foundation, was seized by police moments after reaching Pushkin Square; a video of the moment was posted on her account, and she was later fined. Several members of Navalny's team had already been detained in the days before the rally.
Момент задержания Любови Соболь pic.twitter.com/8Qr0xjhoDG
— Соболь Любовь (@SobolLubov) January 23, 2021
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Detentions in Russia do not usually mean criminal charges. Most of the people held on 23 January were reportedly released within a day or two, many facing fines or short administrative jail terms for joining an unauthorised event. A smaller number were reported to face criminal cases, such as accusations of using force against police.
How Moscow and the EU responded
Russian officials treated the rallies as unauthorised gatherings, which under Russian law allowed police to detain participants and courts to fine or briefly jail them.
Abroad, criticism was swift. The European Union's foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said in a statement reported by the BBC: "I deplore widespread detentions, disproportionate use of force, cutting down internet and phone connections." He later visited Moscow in early February and pressed for Navalny's release, but EU ministers held back from new sanctions at that stage.
The less comfortable side of Navalny's record
Navalny was the most prominent opponent of Putin inside Russia, but his politics were not always the liberal kind that his Western supporters assumed. In the mid-2000s he was openly involved with Russian nationalists. In 2006 he applied to Moscow city hall to hold the annual Russian March, a gathering that drew far-right and neo-Nazi groups, and in December 2007 he was expelled from the liberal Yabloko party over his nationalist views and his participation in the march.
He also made statements against irregular immigration and, during the 2008 war with Georgia, which he supported, used a widely criticised slur about Georgians. He backed a campaign to stop federal subsidies to the North Caucasus, a mainly non-Russian region.
These positions resurfaced in 2021. In February, Amnesty International said it would no longer call him a prisoner of conscience because of past comments it considered advocacy of hatred. In May it reversed the decision and apologised, saying the change had been a mistake and that the Russian government had used it to further violate his rights. Some analysts argued that this nationalist past made Navalny harder for the Kremlin to dismiss as a puppet of the West.
What happened next
The protests continued. On 31 January OVD-Info counted 5,611 detentions. On 2 February a Moscow court converted Navalny's suspended sentence into real prison time of more than two and a half years, and 1,463 more people were detained that day, many outside the courthouse.
Navalny never walked free again. In March 2022 he received an extra nine years for embezzlement and contempt of court, and in August 2023 a further 19 years on extremism charges. He was moved to the IK-3 "Polar Wolf" penal colony at Kharp, above the Arctic Circle, where he died on 16 February 2024, aged 47. Russian authorities said the cause was a heart rhythm problem; his widow rejected that account.
In February 2026 the governments of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands said tests on samples from his body had confirmed the presence of epibatidine, a toxin found in poison dart frogs, and that he had been killed. Yulia Navalnaya has since continued his political work from outside Russia.
Sources: 2021 Russian protests (Wikipedia); Alexei Navalny (Wikipedia); Death and funeral of Alexei Navalny (Wikipedia); Al Jazeera: Amnesty re-designates Navalny as prisoner of conscience; BBC News (January 2021); Reuters (January 2021).
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