Daniel Roher and Julia Ioffe remember the Navalnys

The Naked Pravda

It’s been seven weeks since a local branch of Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service published a brief news post about the death of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. “He went for a walk, felt sick, collapsed unconscious, and couldn’t be resuscitated.” Russian officials would later insist that Navalny died of natural causes — his mother was told that he succumbed to “sudden death syndrome.” In mid-March, while celebrating his claim on a fifth presidential term, Vladimir Putin finally uttered Navalny’s name in public but only to dance on his grave, claiming that he was ready to trade him off to the West, provided he never came back. “But unfortunately, what happened happened. What can you do? That’s life,” said Putin.

This week, The Naked Pravda looks back at Navalny’s career in politics and ahead to the political future of his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, by speaking to two of the people most responsible for educating the English-speaking world about his work: filmmaker Daniel Roher, whose documentary on Navalny won an Oscar last year, and journalist Julia Ioffe, who was one of the first Western reporters to write about Navalny and who’s tracked him and his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, in numerous articles for more a decade, profiling them in stories for The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Ioffe is also the author of the forthcoming book “Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy,” now available for preorder.

Timestamps for this episode:

• (1:55) How Daniel Roher started filming Team Navalny
• (10:15) Roher’s goals when making the “Navalny” documentary
• (11:51) Choosing a literary trope for the Navalny story
• (15:02) Did anyone try to talk Navalny out of returning to Moscow?
• (19:39) Filming Navalny’s nationalism
• (22:37) Rethinking the film after Navalny’s death
• (24:21) Julia Ioffe remembers meeting Alexey Navalny for the first time
• (29:47) Ioffe reviews Navalny’s views on nationalism and Ukraine
• (36:15) Looking ahead to Yulia Navalnaya and back at past revolutionary women

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