Press Release

IMPRISONED RUSSIAN OPPOSITION LEADER, ALEXEI NAVALNY, WINS 2022 CIVIL COURAGE PRIZE

Mikhail Baryshnikov to keynote 10/24 symposium in his honor

New York, NY – Alexei Navalny, imprisoned Russian opposition leader, lawyer, and anti-corruption activist, will receive the annual Civil Courage Prize in absentia on Monday, October 24.  Navalny is the founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation and leader of the Russia of the Future Party.  He has been imprisoned on fabricated charges since January 2021 following his return to Russia from Germany, where he had been receiving emergency medical treatment after an assassination attempt through the military nerve-agent Novichok.

Mikhail Baryshnikov, co-founder of True Russia who defected from the Soviet Union in 1974, will offer keynote remarks at a symposium highlighting Navalny’s groundbreaking work for freedom and transparency in Russia.  Gillian Tett, Chair, Editorial Board and Editor-at-Large, US for the Financial Times, will lead a conversation about Navalny’s current condition following his transfer to the IK-6 prison, known for its widespread claims of torture and abuse.  She will also explore Navalny’s anti-corruption work with Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief-of-staff and political director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation and Maria Pevchikh, head of the Foundation’s investigative unit.  Ambassador Michael McFaul, former US Ambassador to Russia, will offer remarks from Stanford University.

Alexei Navalny has become known for his anti-corruption investigations against state corporations, oligarchs, and senior government officials—work he has been able to carry out from prison until recently when his attorney-client privileges have been increasingly denied. He is currently serving 9 years in a maximum-security prison. Navalny came in second in the Moscow mayor elections of 2013; he was not allowed to participate in the Russian presidential election of 2018. In August 2020 he was poisoned through the deadly Novichok by the orders of the Russian authorities. He spent a month in a coma.

In January 2021, after a period of rehabilitation in Germany, he returned to Russia, while the Anti-Corruption Foundation released an investigation about president Putin’s enormous luxury palace. This investigation, Putin’s Palace, has reached 125 million views on YouTube. The investigations of the Anti-Corruption Foundation have led to freezing of assets of Russian officials and oligarchs in excess of 1 billion Euros.

Upon his return to Russia, Alexei Navalny was arrested and imprisoned on the grounds of a fabricated criminal case, the verdict of which has already been dismissed by the European Court of Human Rights.

He is the subject of a new documentary Navalny produced by HBO Max and CNN Films which premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival.

The Train Foundation has awarded the Civil Courage Prize since 2000.  Recipients have played leading roles in resisting evil and injustice at great personal risk.  John Train, who passed away in August, drew inspiration for the founding of the prize from his association with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  As John Train explained, “Trying to think of a name for the virtue that Solzhenitsyn so splendidly exemplified, I realized there wasn't one in English, so I proposed ‘Civil Courage,’ as distinct from martial valor.”

The symposium is being co-hosted by the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and its director, Professor Joshua Tucker, in collaboration with the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.

To attend the Civil Courage Prize Symposium at New York University as a member of the media, please contact Barbara Becker at EqualshotNYC@gmail.com

For further information about the Civil Courage Prize please visit:  http://www.civilcourageprize.org. 

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