For 20 years, Vladimir Putin has refused to say the name of his arch-enemy in Russian politics, the opposition leader Alexei Navalny. “That citizen”, “a certain person” – as Putin tends to get around the issue in press conferences – could only be empowered, or so the Kremlin seems to think, by mentioning him.

In fact, this he-who-must-not-be-named tactic blatantly backfires, by conferring on Navalny a feared, Lord Voldemort status: there are few other names Putin contorts himself so superstitiously to keep out of his mouth.

Blending biography, activism and a particularly gripping procedural element, the documentary Navalny homes in on the most notorious episode in these ongoing hostilities – the assassination attempt in August 2020, when Navalny became, in Putin parlance, “this patient in the Berlin clinic”, airlifted there after a near-fatal poisoning with the nerve agent Novichok. 

Although Putin literally laughed off the incident, accusing him of being a patsy for American intelligence, Navalny was fighting for his life at that very moment, having collapsed on a flight between Tomsk and Moscow. It’s now known that a hit squad of FSB operatives had succeeded in planting Novichok in his underwear before he boarded, in what would have been a lethal dose, had an emergency landing in Omsk not intervened.

Before getting to grips with these events, Navalny briskly sets up the reasons why this man has come to be regarded as an enemy of the state. He became internationally known when he was barred from Putin’s Presidential election campaign in 2018, having organised anti-corruption rallies and amassed YouTube subscribers in their millions.