Is it true that Alexei Navalny’s grandfather collaborated with the Germans during the war?

In February 2021, information appeared on the Russian-language Internet that the grandfather of politician Alexei Navalny was a policeman during the Great Patriotic War. We checked whether there is evidence to support these claims.

This is the first time such an accusation has been made. appeared February 6, 2021 on the Instagram account russia_.power. The author of the publication claims that the politician’s grandfather Ivan Tarasovich Navalny “was in the service of those who occupied the territory of Ukraine, worked for the Nazis,” and “the veil of secrecy was lifted” thanks to “military archive workers” who showed the house book of the Navalny family. Four days later, on the Voice of the Fatherland YouTube channel, associated with the National Liberation Movement, appeared a video that retells the content of an Instagram post. Apparently, the publications were prompted by the recent trial of Navalny, whom found guilty for slandering veteran Ignat Artemenko.

A post in which Alexei Navalny’s grandfather is accused of collaborating with the Germans during the war appeared on the russia_.power Instagram account. This profile was created at the end of August 2020; Since then, the author has made more than 1,500 publications, that is, on average he posted eight to nine photographs daily. Most of the photographs are accompanied by captions in support of the authorities and very radical comments regarding the protests, Ukraine, Europe and the West in general. At the time of writing, just over 600 people have subscribed to the account, and the profile description consists of a link to the website of the All-Russian Popular Front.

The publication itself consists of three photographs. The first two are an image of the family of Ivan Tarasovich Navalny and a fragment of this photograph, which shows only the politician’s grandfather. Apparently, the family portrait is genuine - back in 2013 it was published Ukrainian portal Vesti.ua. The third image in the post is a very blurry photograph of some Soviet-era document. Judging by the author’s statement, this is the house book, presented by employees of an unnamed military archive.

It turned out that this paper had nothing to do with wartime, and it was shown not by an employee of the military archive, but by the secretary of the village council. On February 4, 2021, the BBC Ukrainian Service released plot about the village of Novoye Zalesye located near Kyiv, where the father of the Russian politician was born. Journalists went to the Kyiv region to learn more about the “historical homeland” of the oppositionist. Now the village council of Novy Zalesye is headed by his distant relative Pavel Navalny. It was he who sent BBC reporters to his assistant Irina Voloshina, who showed the entries about Navalny’s grandfather in the house book of 1956. This document says that Navalny lived with his wife and three children in his own house built in 1939 with a barn and a vegetable garden. The family also owned a cow and piglets. The house book says nothing about cooperation with the German invaders. Thus, the publication on Instagram is not based on an exclusive from the “military archive”, but on a distortion of the reporting of Ukrainian journalists.

The BBC report was also used by the authors of the Voice of the Fatherland channel in their video. At the same time, instead of the original soundtrack in Ukrainian, in several fragments they superimposed a Russian one. The statements contained in the latter are strikingly different from Voloshina’s comments and the contents of the house book itself, but they almost completely coincide with the caption to the original Instagram post. By the way, on February 12, a fragment of this video with edited sound published and in the russia_.power account.

An Instagram user who told his followers about Navalny’s grandfather, who was allegedly a police officer, did not stop there on February 22 published new post. It consisted of several photographs of rather poor quality: the cover of a certain criminal case, the cover of an obviously different criminal case allegedly opened against Ivan Tarasovich Navalny, and a screenshot of a certain website that talks about the amnesty of Soviet citizens who collaborated with the occupiers during the war, adopted in 1955. Where the blogger got these documents from and why he did not present them to his subscribers immediately is unknown. We were unable to find a criminal case against Navalny’s grandfather in open sources, but even if the cover presented is genuine, it is unlikely to serve as evidence of Ivan Navalny’s collaboration. This cover indicates that the politician’s grandfather is accused under Art. 80 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR, in which described punishment not for collaboration or war crimes, but for concealing foreign currency earnings and other tax violations.

In some publications, telling about the statement being verified, another argument is given: there is no information that Navalny received orders or medals for participating in battles. On the “Feat of the People” portal, which contains information about all known cases of awarding, there is really nothing about Ivan Tarasovich Navalny not reported. However, it is quite difficult to consider this as evidence that the politician’s grandfather was a “policeman,” because many participants in the war, for one reason or another, returned from the front without awards. On the same website “Feat of the People” we could not find any mention, for example, of the fathers of Boris Yeltsin, Viktor Chernomyrdin, Nursultan Nazarbayev and Leonid Kravchuk. We also failed to find confirmation on the websites of military archives in Russia and Ukraine that Alexei Navalny’s grandfather collaborated with the German military. Thus, at the moment there is no reliable evidence that the accusation voiced by the Instagram user has any basis. Instead, it is based on speculation and manipulation of facts from the BBC story.

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. https://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/features-russian-55922932
2. https://zona.media/online/2021/02/05/navalny-1281
3. https://vesti.ua/strana/21302-ukrainskie-rodstvenniki-navalnogo-rasskazali-o-ego-mestnyh-kornja