A year ago today, the Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny perished in the remote Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence. The authorities initially attributed his passing to “sudden death syndrome” – Russian dissidents having long proven worryingly susceptible to unexpected incidents of sudden death — while leaked documents revealed symptoms consistent with poisoning. His widow Yulia Navalnaya accused Vladimir Putin of ordering the use of Novichok.

Navalny had earlier reassured supporters that his killing would mean “that we are unusually strong at this moment”. The reality was somewhat different, his untimely end not a reflection of Putin’s weakness but of his strength. There had been whispers that Putin might spare Navalny’s life, nervous of the potential backlash from martyring a man whose arrest had drawn tens of thousands onto the streets. Coming as Navalnaya attended the Munich Security Conference and on the eve of an election victory that fixed Putin’s presidential mandate until 2030, this execution was not the desperate act of a cornered, skittish man but instead a leader flexing his authority, removing Navalny at the time that suited him best.

The dissident’s death was timed to demonstrate the fate of all challengers to Putin’s authority, to prove that in Russia only one man is untouchable. The size of the protests accompanying Navalny’s arrest were not replicated in the repressive wartime atmosphere of his passing. The tributes were quickly cleared away, as they will be today. How many flowers will be laid next year?

Unsurprisingly, Navalny’s death has been followed by a crackdown on his remaining associates. Last month, three of his lawyers were hit with jail sentences for participating in an “extremist organisation” after relaying his messages from prison. Rights group OVD-Info said it was intended to outlaw the defence of political prisoners, while Navalny’s top advocate, Olga Mikhailova, described it as a return to the era of Stalin’s purges, the last time lawyers were condemned with their clients.

Navalnaya has herself tried to fill the gap left by her husband, taking over the management of his Anti-Corruption Foundation and vowing to run for president of Russia after Putin vacates the post. For now, hers is a comfortable existence of declining relevance, trapped in a private prison of bodyguards and exile. It is a succession of meetings with Western politicians who nod sympathetically to demands that the screw be tightened on Putin’s cronies before doing precisely nothing.

As Navalny’s widow, Yulia is his natural successor. Yet her public image is that of a mother and grieving wife in a militarised nation that has not had a female leader since Catherine the Great. She rivals her late husband for courage and defiance, but perhaps not for the charisma and verve that fuelled his popularity. Along with the life he might have led were he still around, she has inherited some of the difficulties inherent to it. In the current wartime situation, a Russian oppositionist faces a tricky balancing act — how to maintain the support of Kyiv’s anti-Putin Western allies without alienating those Russian citizens who are indifferent or enthusiastic regarding Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

Navalnaya has been targeted by Ukrainian anti-war protestors following her comments in October that Kyiv’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region “has two sides” and her ambiguity on the supply of weaponry to Ukraine. Realistically, she has no choice but to hold this position: any support for the guns that take Russian lives would be gleefully seized upon by the Kremlin as evidence that she is no patriot and unfit to lead a people whose deaths she has championed.

She has stated that she and Ukraine have “one enemy”, claiming it is “Putin’s war” alone. Meanwhile, her late spouse attributed the invasion solely to “Putin’s desire to hold on to power” and alleged — perhaps questionably — that most of his countrymen were against the war yet bound by their dictatorial system of government. Navalnaya has organised anti-war marches with fellow resistance figureheads Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, though the Russian opposition as a whole remains adrift in exile, so divided that a brutal attack on Navalny’s associate Leonid Volkov was, his team allege, ordered by fellow Kremlin critic Leonid Nevzlin.

Navalny once reflected on the importance of the individual in determining the course of history. “If it had not been for Gorbachev’s personality, that rickety building would still be standing and oppressing its residents,” he wrote of the USSR. It is no coincidence that Navalny spent his days musing on the role one leader can play in bringing down an authoritarian regime. We will now never know what more he could have done to build a Russia unblighted by the corruption, dictatorship and repression that plague her now. The Russians he should have been galvanising no longer speak a name they once chanted. As he warned his countrymen from hospital: “God knows how many more such lost and stolen years lie ahead.”

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Bethany Elliott is a writer specialising in Russia and Eastern Europe.

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