Alexei Navalny on the poisoning attempt: “It wasn’t pain — it was something worse.”

At six o’clock on Wednesday morning, Alexei Navalny arrives for an interview at Der Spiegel’s Berlin office. The office is just a few steps from the Charité hospital, where Navalny was treated for a month and hovered between life and death. Only last week was the Kremlin critic, poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok, discharged from the hospital. Four criminal police officers are providing security for his visit. Navalny, who for a time could not walk at all, came upstairs by the stairs rather than the elevator. Forty-four-year-old Alexei Navalny is Russia’s best-known opposition politician. But after the attempt on his life on August 20 in the Siberian city of Tomsk, he found himself at the center of world politics. Angela Merkel pushed for him to be allowed to leave for Germany. Since he was poisoned with a substance that could realistically have come only from Russian state laboratories, people around the world are asking about the personal responsibility of Russian President Vladimir Putin. This is not the first time someone has tried to kill a Russian opposition figure—but never before have the circumstances pointed so clearly to the Kremlin. It denies any involvement. The conversation with Der Spiegel is Navalny’s first interview since the attack. During the meeting he appears focused and remembers a great deal—and yet the effects of the poisoning are still visible. Scars on his neck show where he was connected to a ventilator. When he pours water from a bottle into a glass, it is clearly difficult for him; he has to use both hands. He refuses help. “My physiotherapist says I have to push myself and do everything on my own,” he says. Navalny seems more nervous than at previous meetings; his face is thinner, his body leaner and more sinewy. He has lost 12 kilograms. But his voice is the same, as are his humor and irony. Sitting beside him is Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s press secretary. On August 20, she was sitting next to him on the plane when the symptoms of poisoning began to appear. Before the conversation begins, Navalny wants to make a preliminary statement. “You don’t feel pain, but you know you are dying” Alexei Navalny on the poisoning attempt, Putin’s guilt, and the Germans. In Navalny’s hotel room in Tomsk, his team removes water bottles. One of them is found to contain traces of poison. Navalny: It is important to me that this interview appear in the German press. I have never had close ties to Germany. I don’t know anyone here. I didn’t know a single politician. And now it has turned out that—see, my voice is already trembling, I’ve become so sentimental—it was German politicians and Angela Merkel who took part in my fate and saved my life. The doctors at Charité saved my life a second time and, even more importantly, gave me back my identity. So first of all I want to say this: I feel enormous gratitude toward all Germans. I know it sounds a little pathetic, but Germany has become a special country for me. I had almost no connection to it at all; in fact, I came to Berlin for the first time only three years ago! And then—so much human compassion from so many people. SPIEGEL: Our readers will be pleased to hear that. How are you feeling today, Mr. Navalny? Navalny: Much better than I was three weeks ago, and I’m getting better every day. Not long ago I could climb only ten steps; now I can make it to the fifth floor. The most important thing for me is that my mental abilities have returned. Though perhaps in the course of this interview we may establish the opposite (laughs). SPIEGEL: You wrote on Instagram that you could no longer stand on one leg. Navalny: Now I can. My new assignment is to stand on one leg and stretch the other one forward; I practice that every day. These are basically the kinds of exercises some 90-year-old men do in the park. SPIEGEL: Are you sleeping well? Navalny: That’s my biggest problem. I used to laugh at people with sleep problems because I never had any myself. But then there was the coma, the anesthesia, withdrawal from pain medication, that long state between life and oblivion when I was neither asleep nor awake. Since then I haven’t been able to fall asleep without sleeping pills. SPIEGEL: When you lost consciousness, you were a Russian opposition politician. When you came out of the coma, you were already a figure in world politics. Chancellor Angela Merkel visited you at your hospital bed. What did you talk about? Navalny: That was last week. Completely unexpectedly: the door opened, my doctor came in—and Merkel. It was a private meeting, in a family setting; my wife Yulia and my son Zakhar were there. I can’t say anything about the details, but we did not discuss anything secret or sensational. The visit was a gesture. I was impressed by how well she knows Russia and my case. She knows some details better than I do. She really has a deep understanding of what is happening in Russia. And when you talk to her, you understand why she has led Germany for so long. I thanked her for her concern, and she said: “I only did what was my duty.” SPIEGEL: What does your everyday life look like after being discharged from the hospital? Where are you living? Navalny: I’m living in Berlin with my wife and son. My daughter has gone back to university at Stanford. We have rented apartments. My daily life is monotonous. I train every day and do nothing else. In the morning I walk in the park—that’s my assignment—then I do exercises with a doctor, and in the evening I walk again. During the day I try to work at the computer. The doctors say I may recover 90 percent, maybe even 100 percent, but no one knows for sure. Essentially, I’m something like a guinea pig—there aren’t many people who can be observed after surviving poisoning with a nerve agent. One day they will probably write about me in medical journals. And I’m happy to share my experience. Seriously: the Russian leadership has developed such a fondness for poisonings that they are unlikely to stop anytime soon. So my medical history may still prove instructive. SPIEGEL: Judging by your social media posts, you often got out of bed in the hospital. Navalny: The doctors and nurses at Charité are the most patient people in the world. I was a difficult patient. I got up at night in intensive care; once I pulled all the tubes out of my body, and blood was flowing. Later, when I was conscious again, recognizing the people around me and talking, I had hysterical episodes. I said I was healthy and wanted to go to a hotel. Only weeks later did I realize that this strange behavior was a consequence of the poisoning. SPIEGEL: Let’s reconstruct what happened to you. Let’s start with your last memory before you lost consciousness. August 20, eight in the morning. You are sitting on a plane from Tomsk to Moscow. You had spent several days in Siberia. What were you thinking about? Navalny: It was a wonderful day: I was going home, and a difficult but successful work trip was behind me. We were shooting films for the regional election campaign, and everything had gone well. I’m sitting comfortably in my seat and looking forward to a calm flight during which I can watch a series. At home in Moscow I want to record my weekly YouTube show and then spend the weekend with my family. I feel fine, just as I did at the airport. And then... It’s simply hard to describe because there’s nothing to compare it to. Organophosphates attack your nervous system the way a DDoS attack hits a computer—it’s an overload that destroys you. You can no longer concentrate. I feel that something is wrong; I break out in a cold sweat. I ask Kira, who is sitting next to me, to give me a napkin. Then I tell her: talk to me! I need to hear a voice; something strange is happening to me. She looks at me as if I’m crazy and starts talking. SPIEGEL: What happened next? Navalny: I don’t understand what is happening to me. The flight attendants are coming through with a cart—at first I want to ask them for water, and then I say: no, let me through, I’m going to the bathroom. I splash cold water on my face, sit down on the toilet and wait, then splash water on my face again. And then I think: if I don’t get out of here now, I never will. And the main sensation was this: you don’t feel pain, but you know you are dying. Right now. And yet nothing hurts. I come out of the bathroom, address a flight attendant—and instead of asking for help, to my own surprise I say: “I’ve been poisoned. I’m dying.” And then I lie down on the floor in front of him to die. He is the last thing I see: a face looking at me with mild surprise and a faint smile. He says, “Poisoned?” probably thinking I had been served bad chicken. And the last thing I hear, already lying on the floor, is: “Are you having heart problems?” But my heart doesn’t hurt. Nothing hurts at all; I just know I’m dying. Then I hear voices growing fainter and fainter, some woman shouting: “Just don’t lose consciousness!” And then that’s it. I know that I am dead. It just turned out later that I was mistaken. SPIEGEL: There is a video from one passenger in which your screams can be heard on the plane. It sounds terrible, almost like the cries of an animal. Navalny: I watched that video; online it is circulating under the title “Navalny screams in pain.” But it wasn’t pain. It was something else, something worse. Pain lets you feel that you are alive. Here you simply understand: this is the end. SPIEGEL: How long did all of this last? Navalny: From the moment I thought something strange was happening to the moment I lost consciousness, maybe 30 minutes passed. All of it happened after takeoff. SPIEGEL: You spent the night at the Xander Hotel in Tomsk, and presumably that is where you came into contact with the poison. Do you remember what you touched there? Navalny: Traces of poison were found on a water bottle. Apparently I touched a contaminated surface, then picked up the water bottle, drank some from it, put it back, and after that left the hotel room. So I assume the poison entered my body through the skin. In a hotel there are many things you touch before leaving—the shower, the toilet, a clothes hanger, a bag handle—you are bound to touch something. That is why it is so important to examine my clothes. The poison could have been applied to any item of personal clothing. SPIEGEL: Your clothes were taken when you were admitted to the hospital in Omsk and were never returned. Navalny: I have no doubt that my clothes have been boiling for a month in a huge vat of bleach! To destroy the traces (laughs). If not for this chain of lucky circumstances—the pilots made an emergency landing in Omsk, the ambulance was already at the airport, I was given atropine within an hour and a half—then I would have died. The plan was clever: I would take off, die during the flight, and end up in a morgue in Omsk or Moscow. And then nobody would find Novichok, because morgues don’t have mass spectrometers. Besides, they could have waited a little longer before doing any analysis. It would simply have been a suspicious death. SPIEGEL: You could have died in the hotel. Navalny: Some people assume the plan was for me to die in my sleep. But honestly, after going through this poisoning, I think: that would have woken me up. It would have been a funny image for the hotel surveillance cameras if I had crawled down the corridor in my underwear—with those symptoms I would definitely have crawled out with my last strength. Letting me die in the hotel would have been a risky plan. The staff might still have called an ambulance. SPIEGEL: How do you explain that no one but you was harmed by the poison? In Salisbury in Britain, where former agent Sergei Skripal was poisoned, things were different. Navalny: I think they learned lessons from the Skripal case, when 48 people were contaminated and an случайная woman died. So the poison was probably not applied to something like the sink or the shower, which I might not even have used. Or to my mobile phone, which I might have handed to Kira—and then instead of one suspicious death there would immediately have been two. As I said, I’m only speculating here. Clearly this was a more sophisticated method, and it was applied to an object that only I would touch. SPIEGEL: And the traces you yourself left on the water bottle? Navalny: They were harmless; it was a minimal amount of poison. Anyone could have touched it without harm. SPIEGEL: You have your staff to thank for the fact that the water bottle could be examined in Germany at all—they took it, along with other items, from the hotel room. Navalny: They were still sitting in the same hotel having breakfast when they got an SMS from Kira in Omsk saying that I had been poisoned. The scenario that I might be killed was, of course, always there, though more as a joke. But they immediately thought they needed to go into the room and secure the things there. More out of desperation than anything else—in the end, everyone thought I had been poisoned by tea at the airport. No one expected a nerve agent. I myself could hardly believe it. It’s like dropping an atomic bomb on one person. There are a million more effective methods. When my wife Yulia and our colleague Maria Pevchikh brought these items to Germany, it was not about evidence; it was simply about finding out what exactly I had been poisoned with. They handed the items over to doctors, not to some secret agents in dark glasses with earpieces. SPIEGEL: Apparently you were already being followed every step of the way in Tomsk—as Russian security officers leaked to a Moscow newspaper. Did you notice anything? Navalny: I have been under constant surveillance since 2012, often quite openly. When I travel to the regions, there is usually a whole horde there—the police anti-extremism center, the FSB’s domestic security services, and so on. But we noticed nothing out of the ordinary. I heard about that article. It seems to me that part of the security services responsible for the surveillance was publicly justifying itself—as if to say, we are not to blame for the poisoning! Surely there was no order for the entire FSB to kill Navalny. This was limited to the very highest level. And those responsible for the surveillance were themselves surprised by what happened. SPIEGEL: Have the German authorities told you more than they have told the public? Navalny: No. Everything I know, I learned from the German media. What we do know for sure is that I came into contact with the poison in the hotel. It was Novichok, more precisely a new version of it. This poison is available only to a very narrow circle of people. SPIEGEL: You have many enemies. Who is behind your poisoning? Navalny: I maintain that Putin is behind it, and I have no other version of what happened. I’m not saying this to flatter myself, but on the basis of the facts. The most important fact is Novichok. The order to use or produce it can come only from two people—the head of the FSB or the head of the SVR, the foreign intelligence service. SPIEGEL: What about the military intelligence service, the GRU, which has been linked to the attack on Sergei Skripal? Navalny: Probably the GRU too. If Putin claims that I produced Novichok myself and poisoned myself with it, that is impossible. We can assume that only three people can give the order to begin “active measures” and use Novichok. If you know Russian reality, you understand that FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov, SVR chief Sergei Naryshkin, and the head of the GRU cannot make such a decision without Putin’s instruction. They answer to him. SPIEGEL: If Putin is behind it, why did he let you leave the country? Navalny: I think they were firmly determined not to let me leave the country, and that is why they publicly said I was not transportable. They were waiting for me to die. But thanks to the support and efforts of my wife, all of this threatened to turn into a kind of reality show called: “Navalny dies in Omsk.” And a great many people, to whom I am extremely grateful, said: we do not want to watch such a show. For Putin’s people, it is important not to give an opponent the status of a victim, not to give him—alive or dead—political capital. If I had died in Omsk or suffered irreversible damage there, that would unequivocally have been their responsibility. Perhaps Novichok could not have been proven then—but the fact that I was not being allowed to leave the country would have been obviously their fault. Besides, they waited 48 hours, probably hoping that the poison could no longer be detected. SPIEGEL: Until now, Putin divided his opponents into two categories: enemies and traitors. Any means are permissible against traitors; former agent Skripal belonged to that category. You belong to the category of enemies. So why Novichok? Navalny: If someone had told me six weeks ago that I would be poisoned with Novichok, I would have laughed in their face. We know how Putin fights the opposition. We have 20 years of experience. You can be arrested, beaten, splashed with brilliant green antiseptic, or shot on a bridge, like Boris Nemtsov. But chemical weapons used to be the privilege of the security services. SPIEGEL: Did Putin move you from the category of enemies to the category of traitors? Or did we have a false understanding of Putin’s system? Navalny: I think the understanding was correct, but reality has changed. And something has changed in Putin’s head. Putin knows everything about me; I live under total surveillance. He knows that I am not an oligarch and not a secret agent, but a politician. But now there are also the protests in Belarus against Lukashenko, the protests in Khabarovsk Krai against the Kremlin party. And the fact that our “regional headquarters” still exist... SPIEGEL: ...the local offices of your organization, through which you effectively operate a nationwide party, even if officially it cannot exist. Navalny: For two years we have been under unprecedented pressure: several searches a week, confiscation of office equipment, frozen accounts, arrests, attempts to push people out of Russia. But our organization still exists; we have 40 regional headquarters. I am only speculating now. But perhaps they said to themselves: we tried the gentle way, but if these methods don’t work, then we need to resort to extreme measures. SPIEGEL: And what if it wasn’t Putin after all? Navalny: If it wasn’t him, then it is even worse. One glass of Novichok is enough to poison all the passengers at a large Berlin subway station. If access to this warfare agent is not limited to three people but to 30, then it is a global threat. That would be terrible. SPIEGEL: Is Putin really that interested in you? He is, after all, very busy with foreign-policy ambitions. Navalny: People often claim that he is now concerned only with geopolitics and indifferent to everything else. That is not true. He saw what happened in Khabarovsk. People there have been taking to the streets for more than 80 days, and the Kremlin still has no idea what to do with them. The Kremlin understands that it must resort to extreme measures to prevent a “Belarusian scenario.” The system is fighting for its survival, and we have just felt the consequences ourselves. SPIEGEL: You were poisoned during a trip to Siberia devoted to regional elections, more precisely to preparing your “Smart Voting” strategy. You want to drive the Kremlin party United Russia out of local parliaments across the country. Through an app, you help protest-minded voters find the most promising opposing candidate. The success was mixed. In Tomsk your “Smart Voting” worked well; in Novosibirsk, less so. Navalny: The elections showed how political reality has changed. Someone runs in a major Russian city as a “Navalny headquarters coordinator”—and gets 50 percent of the vote in his district against Tomsk’s leading oligarch. In Novosibirsk, the head of our headquarters got 45 percent in his district. Tomsk was a victory, Novosibirsk a success, even if our mandates were stolen. SPIEGEL: What are you going to do next? Navalny: The most important thing is preparation for the 2021 Duma elections. “Smart Voting” is not a simple strategy. It involves supporting unpleasant people too, for example Communists. For two years now, that has taken up most of my work: explaining to people why we support such people as well. In Moscow it worked well several years ago: we elected Communists, and now Putin’s mayor Sergei Sobyanin is afraid to appear in the city parliament. In Tomsk, United Russia lost its majority. SPIEGEL: That is a strategy “against” something. What is your own agenda? Navalny: Of course it is work against something: we have to destroy United Russia’s monopoly on power. We do this through the tactical organization of votes in a political environment that most often does not allow truly independent candidates at all. SPIEGEL: Is United Russia important? After all, the party is merely a wormlike appendage of Putin’s system. Navalny: There is a basic infrastructure through which Putin governs the country. It includes several key factors: once it was his personal popularity, then television propaganda, controlled courts—and precisely United Russia. It is important to target the party. Destroying its monopoly is the precondition for us to have any chance at all to formulate a positive agenda. What irritates the Kremlin is that we have found methods of struggle that work, even though we ourselves have been thrown out of the system. SPIEGEL: Where do you place yourself politically? On the right? On the left? Navalny: Russia has never developed as clear a political spectrum as the West. Right, left—this division doesn’t work for us. Are the Russian Communists a left-wing party? In reality they pursue a rather right-conservative course. Our leftists in Russia stand in church and cross themselves. The templates of German or American politics do not fit. SPIEGEL: So where do the political dividing lines in Russia run? Navalny: Part of society repeats Putin’s rhetoric that Russia must follow a special path. It is about establishing some kind of supreme rule, resembling a monarchy, supposedly based on certain spiritual values. Opposed to that are people like me, who consider this a lie and hypocrisy and are convinced that Russia can develop only along a European model. SPIEGEL: You have been in politics for two decades and have traveled a long road: for a time nationalist notes could be heard from you, then you shifted leftward. Navalny: Well hello there, I started out in the social-liberal party Yabloko! SPIEGEL: You were expelled from it, among other reasons because of your appearances at the nationalist “Russian March” in Moscow. Have your views changed? Navalny: I have the same views I had when I entered politics. I see no problem in cooperating with everyone who basically holds anti-authoritarian positions. That is why it does not bother me that in elections now we support Communists. I do not clutch my heart in shock just because one of the candidates we support wears a Lenin badge. You in Germany already have democracy. We first need to create a coalition of all forces that support alternation of power and independent courts. That is why for a time I tried to unite the liberal-nationalist camp of the opposition. That brought me a lot of angry comments, including from SPIEGEL. Now people say I shifted left only because I support the trade union movement. But for me it is only about Russia taking a European path of development. I see no contradiction in supporting trade unions while at the same time demanding a visa regime for migrants from Central Asia. SPIEGEL: You are one of the leading opposition politicians, you effectively founded one of the few functioning parties in the country—and with your anti-corruption investigations you partly substitute for investigative journalism in Russia. Isn’t that all too much? Navalny: It is a problem. Since 2011 I have been regarded as the main opposition figure, and I know that many people are tired of that. In a normal system I would run in elections, and if I won I would become the leader of the opposition or come to power. If I lost, someone else would do it. SPIEGEL: You want to return to Russia despite the attempt on your life. Why? Navalny: I was glad that not a single person around me even entertained the idea that I would not return. Not returning would mean that Putin had achieved his goal. And my task now is to remain the guy who is not afraid. And I am not afraid! If my hands are shaking, it is not from fear but from this filth. I will not give Putin such a gift—not returning to Russia. “Right now it sounds pathetic, but Germany has become a special country for me.” SPIEGEL: Aren’t you worried about your wife and two children? Navalny: That is a difficult question. They are not afraid. My wife fought with the doctors in Omsk and got me out of there. Of course I worry about my family and the people around me. Today I am here under protection, and the Berlin police told me: you were attacked with a dangerous substance, and we do not want anything similar to happen here or other people to be put at risk. Of course I constantly joke about this whole Novichok story and about the strange box in which I was brought to Germany. But in between, unpleasant thoughts arise: what if someone had placed poison in my Moscow apartment, where my wife and my two children live? SPIEGEL: Do you draw any conclusions from that? Navalny: I attract attacks, and that entails responsibility. On the other hand, it is clear: without this struggle, everything will get worse. They will kill far more people, they will imprison far more people. Already today in Russia, people are convicted practically every day for some social media post or other. Not resisting would, in the long run, expose everyone to even greater danger. That is the situation: we are fighting monstrous scoundrels who are ready for the worst crimes. SPIEGEL: Will you change your behavior now? Navalny: I will continue traveling to Russia’s regions, staying in hotels, and drinking the water left in the rooms. What else am I supposed to do? There is almost nothing one can set against Putin’s invisible killers anyway. Politically, little has changed: it remains a confrontation between those who stand for freedom and those who want to drive us back into the past, into a strange Orthodox copy of the Soviet Union decorated with capitalism and oligarchs. They will use more sophisticated methods against us, and we will try to survive. The use of Novichok inspires fear—and that is Putin’s strategy. Merkel and Macron tell him something about “red lines,” and he runs far beyond those lines and shouts: “You can’t even imagine what else I’m capable of.” “It wasn’t pain. It was something worse. You understand: this is your end.” SPIEGEL: Do you feel hatred toward the representatives of this system? Navalny: My emotional relationship to my work is very strong. I fight corruption. And although many criticize me for this, I consider it one of my strengths that I do it personally. We do not merely criticize the system; we document the crimes of specific people—from Putin down to provincial officials. Take the doctors in Omsk, who first told my wife to her face that of course I could be transported—and then suddenly declared that I was not transportable. In my view, the chief doctor of the Omsk hospital is worse than the security-service employees who kill people. For them, killing is at least their profession. But he knows everything and tells the world stories about metabolic disorders and claims that I drank too much moonshine. People who call themselves medical professionals and are prepared to wait until I die. Do I hate them? Probably. Do I want to take up a huge sword and cut off everyone’s heads? No. I am for the rule of law. These people should stand trial in a fair process. SPIEGEL: Your case has led to a crisis in German-Russian relations. Navalny: Germany and Russia have always had a special relationship. For a long time, it was therefore considered unthinkable that Putin would risk a conflict with Berlin. That is over—just as the time is over when it was impossible to imagine political murders in Russia. The unexpectedly harsh words from the German government are probably not so much about me personally. Rather, they reflect an awareness of the dangerous path Russia is taking. If the Kremlin liked operations of this kind, then why not eliminate a German politician too—someone, for example, who opposes Nord Stream 2? SPIEGEL: What is your advice to German policymakers? Navalny: My impression from talking to Angela Merkel is that she does not need my advice. But any strategy toward Russia must take into account the stage of madness Putin has reached. “The use of Novichok inspires fear—and that is Putin’s strategy.” SPIEGEL: Should Germany impose sanctions on Russia? Navalny: The best approach is to protect your own citizens and your own society from Russian criminal money. For Putin, this is about power and personal enrichment, and the two are inseparable. How many billions can he pass on to his daughters, to his friends? It would hurt them if Europe finally drew clear boundaries, confiscated their assets, and stopped letting them in. Despite all the sanctions imposed so far, these people still feel quite comfortable in the West. As long as the Russian elite can use European infrastructure, nothing will change. SPIEGEL: Should Germany stop Nord Stream 2? Navalny: That is Germany’s business. Decide for yourselves! Sanctions against Russia as a whole will achieve nothing. What is needed is punishment for specific criminals, and I can tell you this: 95 percent of Russian citizens would welcome that. Then the beneficiaries of the corrupt system would no longer be able to enjoy life in Berlin. SPIEGEL: There is one influential man who was clearly pleased by your condition and has long been waging a personal war against you: businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, who controls a mercenary group and is nicknamed “Putin’s chef.” What role do you think he plays? Navalny: We have clashed with quite a few people who have access to certain resources, for example a whole series of security-service generals. Can I imagine that Prigozhin has access to Novichok? A man who ordered the killing of three Russian journalists in Africa? No, because in that case he probably would already have poisoned half the world. “If my hands are shaking, it is not from fear but from this filth.” SPIEGEL: When do you want to return to Russia? Navalny: My task is to get back into shape as quickly as possible so that I can return. Since yesterday my physiotherapist has been training me to juggle, to improve coordination and to make my hands move in the same direction as my eyes. SPIEGEL: More than four million people subscribe to your YouTube channel. When will you go back on air? Navalny: I thought about that for quite a long time. If I broadcast from Berlin, it will look as if Alexei Navalny wants to talk about revolution while sitting abroad. I do not need all that émigré nonsense. I do not want to be an opposition leader in exile. I am a politician who calls for concrete action and shares all the risks himself. So I will return to my channel when I am back in Moscow. SPIEGEL: Has the Russian embassy contacted you? After all, you are a sick citizen abroad. Navalny: I only read their statements in the media. They demand medical tests, they demand blood samples, although there must still be plenty of my blood in Omsk. Of course they do not want to investigate the substance of the case. Their goal is to portray the German government in the darkest possible colors; next, I suppose, they will accuse Angela Merkel personally of poisoning me with Novichok. SPIEGEL: Has your view of the world changed? Navalny: There are many people in Russia who at some point become disillusioned and leave politics. But my faith in people has grown stronger. Of course, in this story we saw scoundrels and murderers, but there were also all those people who fought and brought me here. SPIEGEL: People often asked you: if things in Russia are really as bad as you say, why hasn’t Putin long since tried to eliminate you? Navalny: There ought to be at least some benefit in this story for me. At last that question will disappear. SPIEGEL: Mr. Navalny, thank you for this conversation.