Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone with On the Media's midweek podcast.

Speaker 2: Russia's jailed opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, has died in prison according to the prison officials there in Russia.

Speaker 3: The outspoken Putin critic had been serving a 19-year sentence for extremism and fraud charges widely considered to be politically motivated.

Speaker 4: Make no mistake, Putin is responsible for Navalny death.

Brooke Gladstone: Navalny had been living behind bars since shortly after landing in Moscow in January of 2021. He was returning home following months of recovery in Germany after he fell violently sick on a flight between Siberia and Moscow.

Speaker 5: Mr. Navalny is in a coma after a suspected poisoning. He was flown to Germany after initially being treated at a Siberian hospital. His supporters and his wife say he was intentionally poisoned.

Speaker 6: Alexei Navalny survived, thin and gaunt in a German hospital bed.

Brooke Gladstone: In the months following Navalny's poisoning, Christo Grozev, former lead Russia investigator at Bellingcat, was stuck in Vienna with filmmaker Daniel Roher. The two had just been booted from Ukraine where they had been trying to film an investigation. Now Grozev had lots of time on his hands and a laptop and a fresh stack of data from the Russian black market. Naturally--

Daniel Roher: Christo walked into a meeting we were having one day and said very quietly as if he was divulging a state secret that he thinks he has a lead in who tried to poison Navalny.

Brooke Gladstone: Daniel Roher directed the documentary, Navalny, which portrays the story of the close collaboration between Navalny, his team, and Grozev in the hunt for the dissident's would-be killers. Last year I spoke to Roher and Grozev about the making of the documentary, which won the Oscar for best documentary feature. This is so the Christo that I learned about during our first interview some months back. He'll follow up on leads on his own with his own money, on his own time. Tell me how you started sniffing this out.

Christo Grozev: I decided to take this approach, which was, let's look for a bottleneck in the Russian system of state assassinations, somebody that they have to go through. Who would that be in every assassination? Because we had previous data from previous overseas attempts to poison people.

Brooke Gladstone: That's the sort of assassination, you mean?

Christo Grozev: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: A poisoning not an Anna Politkovskaya type assassination?

Christo Grozev: No, no. Poisoning is something that Putin loves, because we knew at some point that Navalny had been poisoned with Novichok.

Brooke Gladstone: Novichok is?

Christo Grozev: Is a nerve agent.

Brooke Gladstone: This is his preferred method in previous investigations, the Russian double agent, what would you call Skripal?

Christo Grozev: Sergei Skripal.

Brooke Gladstone: Right.

Christo Grozev: He was a double spy because he worked for Russia's military intelligence but he was working also for the Brits.

Brooke Gladstone: Skripal went to London to live.

Christo Grozev: Correct.

Brooke Gladstone: And was pursued as you determined by Russian thugs that used Putin's favorite poison to do him in.

Christo Grozev: That is true.

Brooke Gladstone: And others.

Christo Grozev: That became an interesting data point for us, because we knew the scientists who had manufactured and given the Novichok nerve agent to those thugs who went to the UK. When we were looking at the Navalny poisoning, we thought, "Well, they must have used the same scientists. They can't have hundreds of scientists who do this. This has to be kept top secret. These people have to take the risk to manufacture this toxin." I started looking at the phone records of these scientists, and we bought them on the Russian markets where you can buy absolutely any kind of data.

We started looking at whether these scientists did something strange in their communication around the days in which Navalny was poisoned. Lo and behold, we did find something strange. They were talking to this cluster of secret service officers from the FSB, from Russia's domestic service, in the 10 days before the poisoning, and then at the night of his poisoning, there was a peak of communication.

Brooke Gladstone: Is that when you went to Daniel?

Christo Grozev: That is exactly when I went to Daniel. Because only a couple of days later, we found the second smoking gun, which was that these FSB thugs that had communicated with the scientists had actually traveled for four years, always in the vicinity where Navalny was going. Then we knew that we have the proof.

Brooke Gladstone: Huh.

Daniel Roher: I said to Christo, "Who's making that movie?" He says, "I don't know. Should I ask him?"

Brooke Gladstone: Ask Navalny?

Daniel Roher: As we say in the film, Christo just sent him a direct message on Twitter.

Brooke Gladstone: He DMed him.

Daniel Roher: He slid into the DMs of the leader-

Brooke Gladstone: It's so prosaic.

Daniel Roher: -of the Russian opposition. That's right.

Brooke Gladstone: I know that your DMs were met, Christo, with something less than enthusiasm by Navalny's people.

Christo Grozev: Well, Navalny himself was enthusiastic. We understand in the background that his advisors, and especially Maria, who we've grown to love, but at the time she was very, very hard to work with.

Brooke Gladstone: Maria?

Christo Grozev: Pevchikh. Yes. She had been advising Navalny that, "Well, you have to be careful. Who knows? Maybe Christo works for the CA. Maybe he works for MI6. We don't want to be involved with spies." Anyway, it worked out. I had the call. At the end of that call, I said, "Hey, can I bring a couple of guys and this young director? We want to make a film while we are doing this investigation together."

Daniel Roher: My focus in that first meeting was to present Navalny and his team with a very low-risk, high reward proposition. That was the following. "This investigation is unfolding in real time. You will never have another chance to capture it, to document it. Let's just start shooting. We don't have to sign any paperwork, we don't have to make a deal. Let's just start shooting. If you like the work we do, then we'll continue working together. If you don't, you can take the footage and we'll walk away and you can do whatever you want with it." For them it was like, "Okay, you're right. Let's start shooting." We did the next day.

Brooke Gladstone: One very successful conceit of the film is this moment out of time that he has periodically in the bar with you on the other side of the camera, and him staring directly into it. It's got incredible intimacy. At the same time, it's like he's outside his own life for a moment.

Daniel Roher: We shot that interview three days preceding his eventual return to Moscow. It had this sense of, "All right, what do you have to get off your chest because you're not going to be able to speak to the world again for a long while?" We shot probably 15 hours of interview over three days. I had no idea in that moment how this interview would be weaved into the film. I had an instinct that it wouldn't even make it into the movie. I thought that this film wanted to be a propulsive, in the room, vérité, political thriller. It's only when we started editing the film that months elapsed from the last time I had seen Navalny, six or seven months since the world had seen him or heard from him, that I understood the historic value of this interview. This is the guy's last appearance. I was the last person he spoke to.

Brooke Gladstone: I think you made the right decision. I understand you're not wanting to mess with the forward motion of the film, but the stakes get higher the closer we feel to the protagonist. It's a nature of drama and you really did that. You also played with time in a lot of ways. You flash back to the Navalny before the poisoning, this young, promising, charismatic lawyer with his flamboyant social media presence and huge following on YouTube and TikTok and had a knack for riling up the crowds against Putin.

Alexei Navalny: If I want to fight Putin, if I want to be a leader of a country, I have to do something practical about it. Well, I have to organize people. [Russian language]

Brooke Gladstone: Navalny knew he was becoming notable in the eyes of the Kremlin as he was banned from newspapers and rallies and and so forth. Yet with all that, Navalny seemed to become more confident that he wouldn't be targeted?

Daniel Roher: He thought that his profile and his fame and his notoriety would protect him in a way.

Alexei Navalny: I was totally sure that my life became safer and safer because I am a famous guy and it'll be problematic for them just to kill me.

Christo Grozev: Boy, were you wrong?

Alexei Navalny: Yes. I was very wrong.

Brooke Gladstone: Then the Kremlin struck, he was poisoned on a flight between Tomsk and Siberia and Moscow, and was saved only by an emergency landing. The documentary shows harrowing footage of his wife, Yulia, arriving at a crappy apartment building where Navalny was sent.

Speaker 10: [Russian language]

Brooke Gladstone: Filled with agents and police rather than doctors.

[Russian language]

Brooke Gladstone: Eventually a charity German flight sent Navalny to Vienna where he steadily got better. Christo, you went knee deep in investigation into the poisoning, and you convinced Navalny that you would be able to identify the men.

Christo Grozev: They provided the data of how Navalny had traveled to what locations. I matched it to the known travel data of the poisoners and spies. We saw this pattern, essentially a group of six to eight FSB poisoners had been tailing him for more than four years to a total of 66 different towns and cities during his presidential campaign and later after that during his anti-corruption work. It was interesting because he brought his wife, Yulia, when I was presenting this and he said, "Look at these guys that Christo has found. Haven't you seen this guy?" "Yes, I think this was the guy in Kaliningrad where we were just two weeks before the poisoning," and so on and so forth.

Brooke Gladstone: Wow. Then there's the jaw-dropping moment in the film where Navalny essentially prank calls the would-be murderers and the chemists involved in formulating the Novichok.

Alexei Navalny: [Russian language]

Speaker 11: [Russian language]

Alexei Navalny: [Russian language]

Speaker 11: [Russian language]

Christo Grozev: Yes. It was early in the morning when we did the sequence of calls, Alexei Navalny calling his would-be killers and asking them one by one, "Why did you try to kill me? What have I done to you?" That was a sarcastic plot that he had. It was boring, everybody was hanging up. Then at one point, he decided to change gear and to prank one of them and he turned to me and said, "Who do you think will be the dumbest of these people that I can prank?" He was pointing to this suspect chart on the wall and I said, "I don't know about dumbness, but somebody who may not be trained in avoiding such pranks, maybe one of the scientists. This one looks both dumb and a scientist, so why don't you call him?" That was Kudryavtsev. He called him and it worked.

Brooke Gladstone: Ah, Navalny poses as an aide to a former FSB chief and he talks about having received the number of the chemist from the head of the FSB's special technology center and then he gets all urgent. "How did the mission go awry?" He asks Konstantin. He asks exactly how the poisoning was carried out and that's when the infamous blue underwear comes into the conversation. We get to see your jaws eventually dropping on the table. Not the least, Navalny's aide Maria's jaw hitting the table. You guys, it's just electric. How did that feel?

Christo Grozev: Ten minutes into the call, we started getting new names and new circumstances beyond what we had discovered ourselves and then I knew, okay, this is for real. This guy is actually spilling the beans. Then over the next 50 minutes, because the call is nearly 50 minutes, it's not just the 8 minutes you see in the film. It was a gamut of emotions that went through the surprise, then went through the feeling that we actually may have just caused the demise and the death of this spy because he's going to be punished. He can't be allowed to go unpunished. Then one of the feelings that both I and Maria shared that we experienced towards the end of the call was a feeling of doom that we piqued in our journalistic career because we'll never get to see anything like this again.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] What was the view behind the camera?

Daniel Roher: I don't speak a word of Russian. Very first thing to know, but when we were shooting that scene, I had very little expectations that anything meaningful would happen. We were up at 5:00 in the morning. We were shooting for probably an hour and a half before he got Kudryavtsev on the phone and I was nearly falling asleep behind my camera. That's when I saw one of the conversations was progressing longer than the other phone calls had and then I saw Maria's jaw unhinge and hit the floor. This is a woman whose emotional range towards me up until this point had been mildly annoyed to very annoyed. So to see her experiencing this shock and I could just see she was floored and I just kept rolling. I knew exactly what was happening and I knew that it was just stunning and revelatory and the most extraordinary thing I would ever film.

Brooke Gladstone: The other challenge was how to portray Navalny, not just as a political hero, but as a human being with flaws. I was waiting for that. I knew about his background and his associations with the far right and some anti-Semites. I was waiting for that moment of pushback and you provided it when you questioned him about marching with Nazis earlier in his career.

Daniel Roher: Because a lot of politicians will be uncomfortable with even associating or being in the same photograph with one of these guys. Are you comfortable with that?

Alexei Navalny: I'm okay with that and I consider it's my political superpower. I can talk to everyone. Anyway, they are citizens of Russian Federation and if I want to fight Putin, if I want to be a leader of a country, I cannot just ignore the huge part of it. There are a lot of people who call themselves a nationalist.

Daniel Roher: Essentially, what he's saying is that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. His singular focus is unseating this regime, relegating Vladimir Putin to the dustbins of history, and installing a democratic tradition in Russia.

Christo Grozev: I've historically challenged Navalny over his foreplay with the extreme right. He says, "I did it because I thought at that point in time, this is the best for Russian democracy. You have to understand we are now fighting against a single-party system, and when we get rid of it, we will then have a meaningful discussion on the subject, on the content of the platforms of different parties. Then is the right time and the right place to challenge these Nazis or these extreme rights on their platforms, but it's not now. We first need to get rid of the one-party system.

Brooke Gladstone: Challenges that I could imagine with portraying Navalny is, for one thing, as you've observed, he's a master politician. He's unbelievably charismatic. He's so pretty. He really understands social media, but I think the thing that struck me the most, he has a certain messianic quality, a sense of destiny. I think that's why he went back to Russia after having nearly been killed. Did you get a sense of the messianic, either of you, from him, a sense of destiny that might not go well, but that would live forever, that kind of thing?

Christo Grozev: Let me start. I did. It's clear. It has to be put in the context of the messianic proclivity of the Russian soul. A lot of my friends who are journalists in Russia, they have that messianic quality to themselves. They're doing a job that essentially puts their lives, their families' lives at risk at any given moment. I spoke with him and I spoke with his family at length about this plan to go back to Russia. I alerted them, I thought for the first time, to the risks of them going back, and they all said, "We are aware of the risks. We know that Alexei will be jailed, and not for a week, not for a month, but for years." I said, "And you're fine with this?" The answer was yes, because that's the only way for him to earn the trust of the Russian people for a time when he can actually go and run for president again. It is messianic, no question about it, but I think societies are changed by a minority of the people that have messianic tendencies.

Daniel Roher: What I often think about is whether or not Navalny would have been so keen to go back so quickly had this war in Ukraine already been launched. He went back about a year before the war started.

Brooke Gladstone: His family was Ukrainian. They had to decamp from where he grew up after Chernobyl.

Daniel Roher: That's right. Of course, now he is the single loudest anti-war advocate in Russia, which is why he is in a little solitary confinement cell, removed from the general prison population in what amounts to torturous conditions. He has no regard for his own longevity. His only, it seems, mission and ambition is to end this war and to get rid of this regime. He continues to embody those virtues, even as the regime is ratcheting up their torture towards him, which includes weaponizing other prisoners as biological weapons, sending in men with tuberculosis and fever and COVID to try and get him sick. Then when he gets sick, they treat him with prison doctors and he's not informed of what his treatment is and he doesn't know what they're injecting him with. In the last, I think, two and a half weeks, he's lost about 15 pounds and it's quite clear that the regime is trying to murder him in slow motion.

Brooke Gladstone: It's interesting that he's still able to communicate with the world, that the Russians are letting him continue to communicate with the world. It seems like the Russians are doing the maximum to look bad. We get to watch him die, even as he exhorts us. What is the calculation, do you think?

Christo Grozev: Navalny is very good at playing the foibles, the weaknesses of Putin. He knows that Putin wants to indict him for more and more crimes, imaginary crimes. He does that. Each new indictment, and we've seen four since he was incarcerated. Now, the latest one is he's accused of running an extremist organization from inside jail, the extremist organization being the Anti-Corruption Fund that has been banned by Russia, but each of these new indictments brings the constitutional requirement for Alexei to meet with his lawyers. Each new meeting with the lawyers brings him the opportunity to send a message in the form of a handwritten note that is posted on Instagram and Twitter. It becomes a vicious circle because each new message brings a new indictment and it brings back the lawyers. That's how he's playing the system.

Brooke Gladstone: We got the news in December, Christo, you are the first foreign national to be placed on Putin's most-wanted list. You are Bulgarian. You have been in Vienna, not a very safe place to be. England isn't such a safe place to be. Where are you going to go?

Christo Grozev: Fortunately, I have the excuse of needing to stay in the United States for a while because we're waiting for the Oscars. I'm taking that opportunity to also teach a little bit here, investigative journalism. You're right, I'm on the wanted list. Furthermore, I know that I'm on the kill list in addition to the wanted list, and therefore I'll have to reconsider where my family lives, where I live. I can't claim that I'm as messianic as a Russian, but I still see that this is also a recognition of the effect of our investigations. I see the positive side of that too.

Brooke Gladstone: Have you done any of your own research to look into your own case?

Christo Grozev: That is literally what I'm working on at the moment. Looking for my would-be killers. It's one of the most surreal experiences to do that. It's almost like a doctor trying to cure themselves.

Brooke Gladstone: Wow. How do you begin? They haven't left a trail like they did for Navalny years in advance.

Christo Grozev: I'm looking for people. I shouldn't be telling you because they will know what I'm doing. Let's talk about it after I catch them.

Brooke Gladstone: Oh, boy. Christo Grozev, lead Russian investigator at Bellingcat, features in the film Navalny directed by Daniel Roher. Thank you both very much.

Daniel Roher: Thank you for having us.

Christo Grozev: Thank you for having us.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Thanks for listening to the Midweek podcast. Check out the big show on Friday where I talk to Cord Jefferson about American Fiction, an Oscar-nominated feature film, which is fabulous.

[music]

[00:22:30] [END OF AUDIO]

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.