He’d Already Shared a Final Message

Alexei Navalny is dead at the age of 47, following three years of incarceration in Russia. He was the most prominent opposition leader to stand against Vladimir Putin during his 24-year dictatorship.

Navalny was also a documentary filmmaker, directing and producing videos on behalf of the organization he founded in 2011, the Anti-Corruption Foundation. His last work before being imprisoned, and arguably his magnum opus, is “Putin’s Palace,” a 112-minute takedown of the leader’s corruption, written, narrated, and directed (though uncredited) by Navalny, which has received over 129 million views on his YouTube channel.

The opposition leader was also the subject of the Oscar-winning CNN Films documentary, “Navalny,” directed by Daniel Roher. It’s a clip from that film that’s gone viral in the hours after the Russian prison where he was being held announced Navalny’s death. (Russian officials attributed his death to a blood clot.) The prison is a hard labor camp 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Siberia.

In the “Navalny” clip, it was January 2021 and Navalny planned on returning to Russia to continue his activism against Putin in person after spending some time living in exile in Germany. In November 2020, he had been poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent and hospitalized for a month in Berlin. An investigation showed that Russia’s Federal Security Service was likely behind the assassination attempt.

Speaking directly to the…