Olga Mikhailova spent 16 years defending Alexey Navalny in court. Now her most famous client is dead, and she’s in exile.
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.
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.
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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.
“Alexey, who wanted everything to be fair, demanded an apology from the Kirov prosecutor for the illegal initiation of a criminal case, after which [Investigative Committee Chief Alexander] Bastrykin chewed out the entire Kirov leadership in a meeting and demanded that everything be reopened,” the lawyer recalled. “After that, I handled every criminal case involving Alexey.”
Indeed, the Kirovles case was just the beginning of Navalny’s troubles with the Russian justice system. But even then, Mikhailova understood that her client wouldn’t be silenced:
“I remember when they opened the Kirovles case for the second time and I went to appeal it, the prosecutor immediately told me: ‘Tell your client that if he shuts up, the criminal case will be dropped and everyone will forget everything right away.’ It was clear that Alexey couldn’t keep quiet. He called [Russian officials] ‘crooks and thieves’ and corrupt, so they filed cases against him on economic charges, trying to show that he was the corrupt one.”
‘We were very afraid for him’
The Kremlin’s campaign against Navalny seemed to culminate in August 2020, when FSB agents poisoned him with a chemical nerve agent. By this point, he had become Russia’s most prominent opposition leader — and the attempt on his life brought Navalny international fame. He was taken to Berlin for treatment and was still recovering at the Charité hospital when he called Mikhailova to tell her that he planned to return to Russia.
“Someone was holding the phone up for him because he was unable to at the time,” the lawyer recalled. “Navalny told me, ‘I’m going back, think about when it would be best for me to do this.’” Mikhailova told him “never,” but Navalny wouldn’t change his mind:
“In December 2020, he said that he was definitely going back; this was his final decision and he didn’t want to hear anything more on the subject. In the end, I was only able to keep him in Berlin until January 2021, and then they just sent me Moscow–Berlin–Moscow tickets and that was it.”
On the plane from Berlin to Moscow, Mikhailova told Navalny that the Russian authorities were going to “throw him in prison for ten years.” Grinning, he replied that in that case, she’d be the one defending him in court.
As predicted, Navalny was jailed immediately upon arrival in Russia. And once they had him behind bars, the authorities continued to bring new criminal charges, piling additional years on his prison term. At the time of his death, Navalny was serving a 19-year sentence in a notorious maximum-security prison above the Arctic Circle.
“We were very afraid for him,” Mikhailova said. But even she didn’t realize the full extent of the damage the Russian prison system was doing to Navalny’s health:
“When he was arrested after returning from Berlin, we tried to visit him every day. This was very important because we were afraid he might be poisoned again. In the penal colonies he was starved, prevented from sleeping, and thrown in a punishment cell. He had changed a lot physically in [those] three years, but I didn’t fully understand how much.”
During her visits with Navalny, Mikhailova often spoke to her client through plastic windows that were badly scratched and patched with opaque film. “Hearing or seeing anything was quite challenging,” she explained.
“I could only see him face-to-face during court hearings, and when this happened for the first time in the summer [of 2023] I was horrified. He was very skinny and gray, and standing next to him was this rosy-cheeked prison official. I said, ‘What have you done to him?! Why does he look like that?!’ And the prison official replied: ‘He looks great, it’s just the glare from the gray wall.’”
‘That kind of person’
In the months leading up to Navalny’s death, the Russian authorities started going after his lawyers. Defense attorneys Vadim Kobzev, Alexey Liptser, and Igor Sergunin were jailed pending trial on extremism charges in October 2023.
At the time, Mikhailova was vacationing in Jordan with her daughter. They decided not to return to Russia in light of the arrests. Then, on February 15 — the day before the prison authorities announced Navalny’s death — a Moscow court issued arrest warrants for Mikhailova and Alexander Fedulov, another lawyer for Navalny. The Russian authorities also added Mikhailova’s name to an international wanted list.
According to Mikhailova, the judge based the arrest order on a wiretap of a conversation she had with Navalny when she visited him in prison on April 11, 2023. “He said to me: ‘Listen, I’m afraid to seem paranoid, but it seems I’m being poisoned here,’” the lawyer told Meduza. “And this wiretap [was used as] evidence that I, Olga Mikhailova, am a member of an ‘extremist group.’”
The way Mikhailova sees it, the persecution of Navalny’s lawyers marked a turning point for attorneys working in Russia:
“We were faced with a completely new reality; no one thought that lawyers needed help, too. My colleagues are in custody for [allegedly] participating in their client’s ‘extremist group’ and everyone who defends the opponents of the current government [now] risks this fate. In other words, we’re seeing a persistent trend: Lawyers are [also] being accused of crimes they did not commit.”
Mikhailova also pointed out the grim irony that Russian attorneys jailed just for doing their jobs need defense lawyers themselves. This realization has since led her to take on a coordinator role at Rule of Law Empowerment, a newly established organization that will offer assistance to “[lawyers] working in Russia and those who were forced to leave [the country].”
Mikhailova is still living in exile herself. Like so many others, she watched Navalny’s funeral on YouTube via a live stream broadcast by his Anti-Corruption Foundation. “Never in my life did I think I would watch such a thing,” she said. “But when you can’t go and say your goodbyes, you sit and watch the broadcast.”
Although she argued with Navalny over his decision to return to Russia, Mikhailova says she now understands that he was simply “that kind of person.” “If he had been ordinary, he wouldn’t have returned,” she explained. “And he wouldn’t have endured the last three years steadfastly, with a smile, offering encouragement to us all.”
Interview by Svetlana Reiter
Adapted for Meduza in English by Eilish Hart