Most of Russia’s opposition leaders are dead, in exile or in prison. What happens now?

A tribute to the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison colony, is left near the Russian Embassy in London. “This is a very difficult loss for the Russian opposition.” The biggest problem that has plagued the opposition, said University of North Carolina political science professor Graeme Robertson, author of a book about Putin and Russian politics, “is that it has been unable to break out from small liberal circles to attract support from the broader population.” Khodorkovsky, who lives in London, is one of several Russian opposition politicians trying to build a coalition with grassroots antiwar groups across the world and exiled Russian opposition figures. Squabbling among the opposition, “doesn’t help,” said Nigel Gould-Davies, a former British ambassador to Belarus and senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. But, even if the opposition were united, he questioned whether “given the instruments of coercion, repression and intimidation available to the Russian state, what difference, at least in the short term, would that make?” Three decades of Putin Putin is eyeing at least another six years in the Kremlin, which means he could effectively rule Russia for almost three decades. Although Navalny had his finger on the pulse, and his team succeeded in widely publicizing the investigation, the anticorruption message ultimately failed to produce political change inside Russia, Robertson said, because most Russians “know their country is badly governed and that their elite is corrupt, but they don’t see it being any other way.” In the three years since Navalny was jailed, Russian authorities have introduced more laws tightening freedom of speech and jailing critics, often ordinary people, sometimes for decades.