Michael: What’s the dumbest thing an assassin can do? Kevin: Oh boy. I feel like this is a long list. Forgetting the bullets? Leaving a business card? Michael: How about confessing to the man he just tried to kill? Kevin: Come on. That’s not real. Michael: It is. That’s not the plot of a bad spy movie; it’s the true story of how Vladimir Putin’s biggest rival exposed the entire operation to poison him. It’s absolutely wild. Kevin: No way, that can't be real. That sounds like something out of a Jason Bourne movie, but even the writers would cut that for being too unbelievable. Michael: It's one of the most incredible stories in the book we're diving into today: Navalny: Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future? by Jan Matti Dollbaum, Morvan Lallouet, and Ben Noble. Kevin: Three authors? That's unusual. Michael: Right? And they're all Western academics specializing in Russian politics. So they bring this really sharp, analytical eye to a figure who is often painted in very simple, black-and-white terms. They're trying to understand the man behind the myth, the mechanics of his movement, and the system he's fighting against. Kevin: I can see how that would be useful. It’s a story that feels like it needs a scalpel, not just a broad brush. So where does this insane phone call fit in? Michael: It’s the climax of this absolutely terrifying chapter in his life, which really sets the stage for everything. It begins in August 2020. Navalny is on a flight from Tomsk, in Siberia, back to Moscow.

Kevin: And he was in Siberia for what? Campaigning? Michael: Exactly. He was there supporting local opposition candidates and, of course, filming another one of his famous anti-corruption investigations. He has a cup of tea at the airport cafe, gets on the plane, and not long after takeoff, he becomes violently ill. He’s screaming in agony. The flight has to make an emergency landing in the city of Omsk. Kevin: Wow. So the people on the plane knew something was terribly wrong. Michael: Oh, completely. His press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, was with him and immediately suspected poisoning. They get him to a hospital in Omsk, but the situation gets bizarre. The hospital is suddenly swarming with police and men in suits. The doctors are cagey, claiming it's a "metabolic disorder," refusing to let his family or his personal doctor see him. Kevin: That sounds incredibly suspicious. They’re clearly trying to control the narrative from the very first minute. Michael: Precisely. His wife, Yulia, flies in and demands he be released so he can be treated in Germany. After a tense standoff, they finally relent. He's flown to Berlin, still in a coma. And the German doctors confirm it. He was poisoned with Novichok. Kevin: Hold on, Novichok? Isn't that the same military-grade nerve agent used in the Skripal poisoning in the UK? That's basically a state signature. Michael: It's the Kremlin's calling card. There is no other way to get it. This elevates the attack from a criminal act to an act of state-sponsored terror. But this is where the story gets even crazier. While Navalny is recovering, the investigative journalism outlet Bellingcat, working with Navalny’s team, uses phone records and travel data to identify the entire FSB hit squad that had been tailing him for years. Kevin: They just figured it out from open-source data? That’s amazing. Michael: It's a masterclass in digital sleuthing. They have names, photos, everything. So Navalny decides to take it a step further. He gets a secure phone line, spoofs the caller ID to make it look like it's coming from a senior FSB official, and he just... starts calling the agents on the list. Kevin: You have got to be kidding me. What was he thinking? What are the odds that would work? Michael: Most of them hang up or deny everything. But then he gets a man named Konstantin Kudryavtsev on the line. Navalny pretends to be an aide to a top security council official, saying he’s writing a report on what went wrong with the operation. And Kudryavtsev, this chemical weapons expert from the FSB, just… talks. Kevin: He falls for it? Michael: Hook, line, and sinker. For 49 minutes. Navalny asks him why the mission failed, and Kudryavtsev explains the whole thing. He says the dose was right, but the pilot’s quick emergency landing and the paramedics injecting him with atropine immediately saved his life. And then Navalny asks the million-dollar question: where was the poison applied? Kevin: I’m almost afraid to hear the answer. Michael: Michael: The book quotes the transcript directly. Kudryavtsev says, "'The underpants… the inner side… where the groin is'—that’s where the Novichok was placed." They put it on the inseam of his underwear, hoping it would be absorbed through his skin. Kevin: That is one of the most chilling and bizarre things I have ever heard. He got a confession from his own would-be assassin. After all that, after surviving a state-sponsored assassination attempt, why on earth would he go back to Russia? He had to know he'd be arrested the second he landed. Michael: Everyone asked him that. A journalist on the plane back to Moscow asked, "Aren't you afraid?" And Navalny's view, which he stated over and over, was that his fight was in Russia, with the Russian people. He said, "'This is my home.'" To stay abroad would be to admit defeat. His return was his ultimate act of defiance. And you're right, he was arrested at passport control before he even officially entered the country. Kevin: It’s like he was walking willingly into the lion's den, but he believed the lion was more afraid of him than he was of it. Michael: That’s a perfect way to put it. And that courage, that willingness to confront the system head-on, wasn't new. He'd been building the tools to do it for over a decade. The poisoning made him a global martyr, but he was already Putin's biggest domestic problem because of how he weaponized the internet.

Kevin: Right, because he wasn't just a politician in the traditional sense. He started as a blogger, didn't he? Michael: He did. The book traces this fascinating evolution. He started in the 2000s as a minority shareholder activist. He’d buy small stakes in giant state-run oil companies like Surgutneftegaz and Rosneft. Kevin: Why would he do that? Michael: Because as a shareholder, he had the legal right to demand financial documents and attend shareholder meetings. He’d fly to these remote Siberian towns, stand up in a room full of stone-faced executives, and ask incredibly uncomfortable questions about their opaque ownership structures and where the money was going. Then he’d blog about it. He was using the system's own rules against itself to expose its hypocrisy. Kevin: That's clever. He was like a corporate governance troll, but for a good cause. Michael: Exactly. But he realized that was small-scale. The real power was in reaching the masses. So he founded the Anti-Corruption Foundation, the FBK. And this is where he really becomes an innovator. The book describes how the FBK professionalized anti-corruption work. They weren't just activists; they were a full-blown media production house. Kevin: And this is where the famous YouTube videos come in. Michael: This is the main event. His masterpiece was the 2021 investigation, "Putin's Palace." It was released right after he was arrested upon his return. It’s a two-hour documentary, complete with stunning drone footage and 3D architectural renderings, exposing a secret, billion-dollar palace on the Black Sea coast allegedly built for Vladimir Putin. Kevin: I remember seeing clips of that. The scale of it was just mind-boggling. Michael: It was beyond belief. We're talking about a property 39 times the size of Monaco. It had its own underground ice hockey rink, a private theater, an arboretum, multiple helipads, and a secret tunnel down to the beach. Navalny’s narration is just dripping with sarcasm and outrage. He calls it, "'This is not a country house, not a dacha, not a residence—this is a whole city, or, rather, a kingdom.'" Kevin: Okay, but a hundred million views on YouTube is one thing. Does it actually matter? Does it lead to real-world action, or is it just a form of entertainment for people who already hate the government? Michael: That's the critical question, and the book gives a clear answer: it mattered. The video was viewed by over 25% of the adult population in Russia. And it directly led to the largest coordinated protests Russia had seen in years, spanning over 100 cities. It made the abstract concept of "corruption" visceral and personal. People could see the stolen money in the form of golden toilet brushes and an "aqua-disco." Kevin: The golden toilet brushes! I remember that becoming a protest symbol. But the book says something fascinating here—that corruption can actually stabilize Putin's rule, not just undermine it. How does that work? Michael: This is such a crucial, counter-intuitive point. The authors explain that the system is built on what they call "managed corruption." Putin allows the elites—the oligarchs, the security officials—to enrich themselves. That's the carrot; it ensures their loyalty. But because their wealth is illicit, the state can use the threat of corruption charges to crush anyone who steps out of line. That's the stick. So corruption is both the glue that holds the system together and the weapon the Kremlin uses to maintain control. Kevin: Wow. So Navalny isn't just attacking their wealth; he's attacking the very operating system of Putin's power structure. Michael: Precisely. He’s trying to break the code. And when you do that, the system has to fight back with everything it has. Kevin: So on one hand, Navalny is exposing this massive corruption, and on the other, the system is using that very corruption to stay in power. It feels like an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. How did the Kremlin fight back against these viral videos and protests?

Michael: The Kremlin's response has been an escalating game of cat and mouse. The book argues that for a long time, their strategy was simply to ignore him. Putin famously refuses to say Navalny’s name in public, referring to him as "that blogger" or "the Berlin patient." The idea was to deny him legitimacy. Kevin: To make him seem insignificant. But after the poisoning and the palace video, that strategy was no longer viable. Michael: Not at all. The protests showed he was a real threat. So the Kremlin shifted gears from ignoring him to actively dismantling his entire infrastructure. Their most powerful tool has been lawfare—using the legal system as a weapon. They passed and expanded a series of laws on "foreign agents" and "extremist organizations." Kevin: I've heard about the 'foreign agent' label. What does that actually mean in practice? Michael: It's a brand, a stigma. Any organization or individual who receives any amount of foreign funding—no matter how small—and engages in vaguely defined "political activity" can be labeled a foreign agent. It’s a term loaded with Soviet-era connotations of being a spy or a traitor. It buries organizations in paperwork and scares away supporters. In 2021, they used this logic to declare Navalny's FBK an "extremist organization," putting it in the same category as ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Kevin: That's insane. So being an anti-corruption activist is now legally equivalent to being a terrorist? Michael: In the eyes of the Russian state, yes. It effectively criminalized his entire movement overnight. Anyone working for him, donating to him, or even sharing his materials could face years in prison. It was a decapitation strike against the opposition. Kevin: But Navalny's team was still trying to fight back from the outside, right? With things like 'Smart Voting'? Michael: Yes, and this was another stroke of tactical genius. Navalny knew the opposition was too fractured to win head-on. So he created 'Smart Voting.' The idea was simple: in any given election, his team would analyze the candidates and identify the one person—regardless of their party—who had the best chance of defeating the candidate from Putin's party, United Russia. Kevin: So 'Smart Voting' is basically just telling people, 'hold your nose and vote for whoever isn't Putin's guy'? Even if it's, say, a Communist? Michael: Exactly. It's purely pragmatic. It's designed to consolidate the protest vote and break United Russia's monopoly on power. And it worked surprisingly well in some local elections, causing some major upsets. The Kremlin, of course, went into overdrive trying to block it, shutting down the website and pressuring Apple and Google to remove the app from their stores. Kevin: It really is a high-stakes chess match. But it's not just digital, is it? The book talks about the human cost, the crackdown on actual protesters. It sounds like the Kremlin just decided to stop playing games and bring out the hammer. Michael: That's the final piece of the puzzle. The book details the case of Ildar Dadin, an activist who was the first person jailed under a new law that criminalized repeated participation in unsanctioned protests. The state's response to the pro-Navalny rallies in 2021 was brutal. Over 11,000 people were detained. The message was clear: the era of even limited, managed protest is over. We will now meet any dissent with overwhelming force.

Kevin: So when you put it all together—the poisoning, the viral investigations, the legal crackdown—it paints a picture of a man who single-handedly forced an entire authoritarian regime to change its tactics. Michael: That's the core insight of the book. Navalny's true impact wasn't just in exposing a palace here or an official there. It was in forcing the Kremlin to show its true, repressive face to the world and, more importantly, to its own people. He held up a mirror to the system, and the system couldn't stand what it saw, so it decided to shatter the mirror. Kevin: He made the implicit threat of the state explicit. He called their bluff, and they responded by showing they weren't bluffing. Michael: Exactly. He revealed the brittle, fearful nature of modern authoritarianism. It's a regime that has to poison its critics' underwear because it's so terrified of a YouTube video. It has to jail thousands of peaceful protesters because it can't tolerate even the slightest challenge to its power. Kevin: So, the book's title is a question: 'Russia's Future?'. After all this, what's the answer? Is he the future, or a tragic figure from a future that will never happen? Michael: The authors are academics, so they don't give a simple answer. They leave it open. Navalny is in a penal colony, his health is precarious, and his organization is in ruins. By any conventional measure, he has lost. But the book suggests his legacy might not be about winning elections. It might be about the thousands of activists he inspired across the country, the generation of young Russians he taught to question authority and demand accountability. Kevin: So the future isn't him, but the people he awakened. Michael: Perhaps. And he himself offered a vision for that future. In his final court statement, he wasn't just defiant; he was hopeful. He talked about creating a "wonderful Russia of the future." And he ended with this incredible line, which I think is the perfect place to leave it. He said: "'Russia must not only be free, it must be happy, too. Russia will be happy.'" Kevin: Wow. Even from a courtroom cage, he’s still articulating a vision. That’s powerful. Michael: It is. It’s a testament to the idea that you can imprison a person, but you can't imprison an idea. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.