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There was one question that Russians repeatedly asked the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, who died in a remote Arctic penal colony on Friday, and he confessed that he found it a little annoying.<\/p>\n
Why, after surviving a fatal poisoning attempt widely blamed on the Kremlin, had he returned to Russia from his extended convalescence abroad to face certain imprisonment and possible death? Even his prison guards, turning off their recording devices, asked him why he had come back, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want to give up either my country or my beliefs,\u201d Mr. Navalny wrote in a Jan. 17 Facebook post<\/a> to mark the third anniversary of his return and arrest<\/a> in 2021. \u201cI cannot betray either the first or the second. If your beliefs are worth something, you must be willing to stand up for them. And if necessary, make some sacrifices.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That was the direct answer, but for many Russians, both those who knew him and those who did not, the issue was more complex. Some of them considered it almost a classical Greek tragedy: The hero, knowing that he is doomed, returns home anyway because, well, if he didn\u2019t, he would not be the hero.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Navalny\u2019s motto was that there was no reason to fear the authoritarian government of President Vladimir V. Putin. He wanted to put that into practice, Russian commentators said, and as an activist who thrived on agitation, he feared sinking into irrelevancy in exile. The decision won him new respect and followers as he continued to lambast the Kremlin from his prison cell, but it also cost him his life.<\/p>\n \u201cNavalny was about action,\u201d said Abbas Gallyamov, a former Kremlin speechwriter who sometimes had differences with Mr. Navalny over that job. \u201cFor him politics was action, not just democracy and theory like it is for many in the Russian opposition. They are quite content to sit abroad, speaking and speaking and speaking without doing anything with their hands. For him that was unbearable.\u201d<\/p>\n The return marked both his unbridled emotional attachment to the cause and his deep sincerity, Mr. Gallyamov added.<\/p>\n Still, it prompted extensive bafflement and curiosity, not least because he had a wife and two adolescent children who stayed in exile.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cMany have written throughout these three years: \u2018Why did he come back, what kind of idiocy, what kind of senseless self-sacrifice?\u2019\u201d Andrey Loshak, a Russian journalist, wrote in a tribute<\/a> published by Meduza, an independent news agency. \u201cFor those who knew him, it was natural: You see him in life and understand that a person cannot do otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Loshak said that after Mr. Navalny\u2019s return, he had posted the opposition leader\u2019s picture with just one word for the caption: \u201cHero.\u201d Before, he had considered that kind of self-sacrifice as the stuff of movies. \u201cHe was a beacon in this darkness \u2014 here he sits somewhere in these terrible punishment cells and laughs at them,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt shows that this is possible.\u201d<\/p>\n Some people were wary of Mr. Navalny. He began his political career in the nationalist camp and made some offensive comments about immigrants. Later, he characterized it as a temporary step needed to start building the opposition from someplace, because the nationalists were the only group then willing to take to the streets.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n