NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly speaks to Luke Harding, the author of A Very Expensive Poison, about the death of the Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny.
CAMILA DOMONOSKE, HOST:
We begin tonight’s program with a closer look at the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. He died Friday in a remote Russian penal colony. There’s still a lot we don’t know about the circumstances of his death, but many people, including President Biden, suspect Russian President Vladimir Putin is responsible.
Putin is infamous for crushing dissent. Journalist Luke Harding knows this well. He’s a correspondent for The Guardian who’s covered Russia for years and says that Navalny was unique among Russian dissidents.
LUKE HARDING: He was actually a kind of Western-style guy who understood technology. He understood how to tweet. And he made extraordinary kind of videos exposing corruption at the top of the Kremlin, clicked by millions of people. He could connect with people in a way that no other modern Russian politician could.
DOMONOSKE: So what might Navalny’s death tell us about Russian politics? Luke Harding spoke with co-host Mary Louise Kelly, and they began by talking about the significance of Navalny’s death.
HARDING: I mean, I think the big picture is that these methods, KGB methods, communist methods of assassination and silencing critics, enemies of Kremlin power have come back big time. An awful lot of Vladimir Putin’s critics have died, both inside Russia and abroad. I wrote a book called “A Very Expensive Poison” about Alexander Litvinenko, who was an officer in the FSB, the spy agency that Putin used to run before he became prime minister and president. And yeah, he was killed with radioactive tea. There was another case…
MARY LOUISE KELLY, BYLINE: Just to pause because people may not remember the full details, that was back in 2006, in London. And yes, he…
HARDING: Yeah. And then more recently, we’ve seen Sergei…
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