Olga Mikhailova began defending Alexey Navalny in the early 2000s. She was his lawyer in the Kirovles and Yves Rocher cases, and when he was on trial for founding an “extremist” group. After he was convicted and sentenced to 19 years behind bars, it was Mikhailova who visited Navalny in prison. Then, in October 2023, the Russian authorities decided to cut off Navalny’s last links to the outside world and launched a trumped-up criminal case against five of his current and former lawyers. Mikhailova, who was vacationing abroad at the time, suddenly found herself unable to go home. Six months later, Russian prison authorities announced that Navalny was dead. In an interview with Meduza special correspondent Svetlana Reiter, Olga Mikhailova reflects on the life and death of her most famous client and what the persecution of Navalny’s lawyers means for their colleagues working in Russia today.
Navalny suspected that he might be slowly 'poisoned' in prison, as revealed by his lawyer Olga Mikhailova
Mikhailova stated that she was arrested in absentia precisely because of a wiretapped conversation with Navalny in the colony, during which the politician expressed his… pic.twitter.com/6r4oRhuUO5
— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) March 9, 2024
When Olga Mikhailova heard that Alexey Navalny had died in prison, she thought to herself, This can’t be true. “We always feared that he might be poisoned, but the thought that they wouldn’t kill him so openly prevailed, because this would attract the world’s attention. But this didn’t stop them,” she said in an interview with Meduza.
Mikhailova had been Navalny’s lawyer for 16 years. She first defended him in court in 2007, after he was arrested for firing a traumatic pistol during a brawl that broke out after a political debate at Moscow’s Gogol club. “At the time, many people told me: ‘Don’t represent him, he’s kind of weird,’” Mikhailova recalled. “He wasn’t very famous, it was just the beginning of his political and creative journey.”
Undeterred, Mikhailova took the case and “everything turned out fine” — the authorities dropped the charges against Navalny (and returned his non-lethal handgun). Meanwhile, the aspiring politician had made a positive impression on his defense attorney. “He was a young man and quite ambitious. It seemed to me that he wanted to change everything for the better and tried to do so as best he could,” she said.
A few years passed before Mikhailova got another phone call from Navalny. This time, investigators had opened a criminal case against him on charges of embezzlement from the state-owned timber company Kirovles. Mikhailova managed to get the case dropped due to a lack of evidence in 2011, but the victory was short-lived.
Sources
Russia: Olga Mikhailova spent 16 years defending Navalny. Now he is dead and she is in exile
