On Friday — unless it had already happened the day before — dissident politician Alexei Navalny was killed in a jail for high-risk prisoners in Russia’s far north. The true causes of his death continue to be hidden, and it is not even known where his body is, though his parents and wife are unsuccessfully trying to get it back from authorities. Navalny may have died from a blow, from poison, or from the systematic torture to which he was subjected throughout three years in prison. We haven’t been told.

Many, including myself, still find it difficult to come to terms with the thought of Navalny’s death. Yet it must be admitted that this has been the expected outcome since he returned to Russia in January 2021. Back then, after miraculously surviving an attempted poisoning by Russian special services — an event that saw him hospitalized in Berlin — he flew back from the German capital to Moscow, where he was immediately arrested upon arrival. The legal grounds for his imprisonment were senseless: first he was sentenced to three years in prison, but then authorities added on a nine-year sentence for another case, and then a third for a further nineteen years. Navalny understood perfectly well that on Russian territory, his life depended only on the will of one man. In this sense, he became like any other Russian.

Navalny spent more than 250 days, with short breaks, in the so-called punishment cell — a kind of prison within a prison, detaining him in extremely difficult conditions, including a complete ban on any contact with the outside world. Yet, until his last days, he took every opportunity to read and write. As we know from history, for many political prisoners, the jail cell becomes a place of deep — often, unfortunately, final — reflections on the reasons for the defeat of the movements to which they belonged, the lessons that can be learned, and the challenges for the future.