In a 2022 CNN Films documentary, Alexei Navalny delivered a message to the Russian people. If he was killed, he said: “You can’t give up.” The task that Navalny set himself, of opposing and exposing the evils of Putin’s regime, is now left to Russia’s disparate, disunited and partially dismantled opposition, with a new figurehead: the widow by Navalny, Yulia.

On Monday, just three days after her husband’s death, Yulia Navalnaya once again assumed herself as a political force, promising to resume her husband’s work. “I have no right to surrender,” she said in an eight-minute video posted on her late husband’s social media. “I ask you to share my anger with me.”

This is the first time Navalnaya has done so. She has always been by her husband’s side, in campaigns, protests and arrests, but until now she has never tried to attract the spotlight to herself, a point she emphasized at the beginning of her recording. “I shouldn’t be in this place, I shouldn’t have recorded this video.”

And yet, behind the scenes, it proved to be an effective operator. After her husband’s poisoning in 2020, it was Navalnaya who took the first available flight to the Siberian city of Tomsk, where the plane had landed, and wrote a direct appeal to President Putin to allow her evacuation to Germany. Even after that, her determination to support him remained unshakable. Less than two months later, she told Russian journalist and YouTube star Yuri Dud: “I absolutely support what Alexei does. I’m being completely honest. And giving up halfway is not good.”

There are those who argue that, if Navalnaya wants to ensure that her husband’s movement does not fade away, this is her moment. The weight of public emotion over her husband’s death and the international spotlight are significant tailwinds, argues Boris Bondarev, a former Russian diplomat who resigned in 2022 in protest against the invasion of Ukraine.

Her decision to address world leaders at the Munich Security Conference just hours after Russian prison services first reported her husband’s death, and after meeting with European foreign ministers in Brussels, puts her in a “powerful position”, Bondarev stressed to CNN.

And yet, if Navalnaya wants to do more than just continue the work of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, if the goal is to create a functional opposition within Russia, he could need a different approach than her husband. The big test will be whether she can become a unifying force for those who oppose Putin.

“If it offers broad participation of all opposition forces on an equal basis, then the situation will change,” says Bondarev. If he doesn’t do so, he believes that “people will eventually wake up and see that nothing changes”.

Navalny, despite being the most popular opposition figure in Russia and the best known outside the country, never managed to unite the different anti-Putin forces. He was a long-time member of the liberal opposition Yaboko party in the early 2000s, before being expelled in 2007 for “nationalist activities”. “Our views have diverged for a long time”, considered the party’s founder, Grigory Yavlinsky, in a statement published after Navalny’s death. “We discussed and criticized each other.” That division boiled over again in 2021, ahead of parliamentary elections, after Yavlinsky harshly criticized Navalny’s vote-getting campaign.

The other challenge is that, even though Navalnaya may prove to be a unifying figure, there are now fewer opposition forces to unify. Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ilya Yashin, a close ally of Navalny and a rising star in opposition circles, and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian-British citizen leader and opposition politician, they were sentenced to long prison terms. Former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and chess champion Garry Kasparov have long been exiled. Russia’s central election commission has just banned the only remaining anti-war candidate, Boris Nadezhdin, from running in the upcoming March presidential elections.

And yet, for those who remain, Navalny’s death has created some impetus to keep trying. The man who launched Nadezhdin, the leader of the Civic Initiative party, Andrey Nechaev, former Economy Minister in the 1990s, denies that there is no functional opposition. “I consider myself a figure of the constructive opposition,” said Nechaev in an interview with CNN from Moscow. Nechaev is working on several avenues to keep the movement alive.

Several court cases are underway to appeal the decision to prevent Nadezhdin from running in the presidential elections, and Nechaev intends to present candidates for the local elections, having just sent a request to the Moscow authorities to hold a rally to mark the ninth anniversary of Boris Nemtsov’s death, in memory of him and Navalny. “Of course, it is very likely that the mayor’s office will refuse”, he says, but “drop by drop we are sharpening the stone”.

It is also possible to detect traces of unity. “Our reaction to his murder must be to join forces, continue their work together and ensure that the hope of a democratic Russia does not die with him,” Khodorkovsky published in X. On Saturday, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielus Landsbergis published a photograph of himself with Khodorkovsky, Kasparov and another exiled former Russian opposition politician, Dmitry Gudkov. “We share the deep concern that Putin is now being allowed to act with complete impunity,” he wrote. And there is evidence, from the lines of Russians that formed outside Nadezhdin’s campaign headquarters, to the steady stream of people leaving flowers in Navalny’s memory, that some Russians yearn for an alternative.

And yet, in a country where the media is almost entirely controlled by the State and dissent is systematically stifled, others warn that there is nowhere near a critical mass . “We should not overestimate the spread of opposition ideas, opposition moods in Russian society,” says Bondarev. “Many people… who don’t like the situation, who see that it is deteriorating, still cannot establish a logical connection between the situation and the worsening of the situation. situation and policies of President Putin. Because, for them, Putin has always been there.”

By CNN, Analysis by Clare Sebastian