Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was not always well-regarded in Central Asia, because of his history of ill-judged remarks about people from the region. His death has nevertheless been greeted there with shock and dismay, if also much indifference.

The news of his death on February 16 at the IK-3 prison colony in Kharp, a settlement in the far north of Siberia, dominated the headlines of many privately run outlets.

State media, however, mostly avoided the topic. An exception was Kyrgyzstan’s Kabar news agency, which reproduced a dry bulletin from Russia’s state-run TASS news agency.

A tweet by Eldiyar Arykbayev, a journalist from Kyrgyzstan with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, echoed the sentiments of many who saw a comrade-in-arms in an activist who made his strongest impact when documenting graft and greed among Russia’s elite.

“It always seemed to me that Navalny would come out of this fight as a winner. And most importantly, that he would be alive,” Arykbayev wrote. “He may no longer be alive, but he will still be victorious.”

Mourners in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s business capital, a city to which thousands of Russians have decamped to avoid being called up for military duty, left flowers at the gates of the Russian consulate. The same scene played out at the Russian Embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. A photo posted on Telegram showed how somebody had placed a single red rose at the base of a monument to victims of political repression in Pavlodar, a city in northern Kazakhstan.

Aruzhan Uvaliyeva, an advertising agency worker in Almaty, said she saw Navalny as an avatar for a future that could have been.

“Navalny fought for justice. He is the only one who could resist [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” Uvaliyeva told Eurasianet. “If Navalny had come to power in Russia, a lot would have changed for the better. People would live more freely, and not in fear, as they do now.”

Yuliy Yusupov, an economist in Uzbekistan, offered a more bitter and caustic assessment.

“The war in Ukraine has played a big role. It was a distraction. And the Nazi regime had nothing left to lose,” he wrote on his Telegram, alluding to the Russian government. “Against the background of half a million killed in this war, a dead Navalny is almost invisible. What is one more murder or one less…”

The intensity of the public conversation around Navalny has differed across the region. In the very relative openness of Kazakhstan, those with views shared them online. In the suffocated environment of Tajikistan, the idea of showing sympathy to anti-system figure appears to have discouraged similar conversations.

Opinions on the activist are also invariably strongly correlated with exposure to Russian state media. Where Kremlin talking points get more of an airing, views are accordingly conditioned.

Navalny’s standing in Central Asia was complicated by other factors. Remarks he made to journalists in the past betrayed a readiness to dabble in xenophobic rhetoric. That point was made to Global Voices by Sergei Abashin, a professor at the European University at Saint Petersburg, in a 2021 interview.

“Ten years ago, Navalny took part in the annual ‘Russian Marches’ that were openly xenophobic,” Abashin said. “During the Moscow mayoral elections of 2013, one of Navalny’s main talking points in his public appearances was the topic of migration, something he proposed to fight, using in his rhetoric a flurry of xenophobic attacks against people from Central Asia and the Caucasus, accusing them of being criminals, posing a terrorist threat and being alien to Russian culture.”

One episode that caused much upset in Uzbekistan occurred in 2017, when Navalny said dismissively of Uzbeks that it was unlikely that many of them had heard of the famous Russian poet Alexander Pushkin.

In a later interview, from 2020, following his recovery from a poisoning carried out by Russian state agents, he apologized for those remarks, admitting that he had spoken out of turn.

“Uzbekistan is a huge country, there are 10 of millions of people, and there are many people there who know who Pushkin is. Some people might not know him, but then there are some people in Russia who don’t know [Pushkin] either,” he said.

If some in Central Asia identified with Navalny and his plight, it may be because there is no shortage of people there too that have been imprisoned on political grounds.

Rita Karasartova, an activist in Kyrgyzstan now under house arrest pending the outcome of a much-criticized criminal case against her and dozens of other activists on charges of plotting to seize power, was laconic in her reaction to the death.

“They killed him,” she wrote on Facebook above a photo of Navalny.

Opposition figures and activists in Central Asia are vividly aware of the dangers implicit in ending up behind bars in their countries.

In 2020, an ethnic Uzbek human rights activist, Azimjan Askarov, died in a prison in Kyrgyzstan at the age of 69. Askarov had suffered from poor health for much of his 10 years in confinement. A lawyer who visited him in prison only a few days before his death, said his client had lost his appetite, that his skin “looked yellowish in color.” The authorities brushed off those reports.

The poet Aron Atabek was Kazakhstan’s longest-serving political prisoner when he was released from prison in October 2021. Toward the end of his 15-year stretch, for a crime he always insisted he had not committed, he was ravaged by bouts of COVID and pneumonia. Weakened to near-death by his time in prison, he would go on to live for less than two months in freedom.

Stories of deaths in prison in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are legion. In Turkmenistan, many are convicted and never heard from again, leaving their loved ones to wonder.

Vlada Yermolcheva, an activist in Almaty, was among those who brought flowers to the Russian consulate. In a filmed message, she voiced her grief over Navalny’s death and expressed the hope his passing would send a message to Kazakhstan’s government.

“We don’t want to see the same thing in Kazakhstan. We want all political prisoners to be freed. That is our main demand: freedom to all political prisoners,” she said.