I don’t subscribe to not speaking ill of the dead, but death does provide an opportunity to rethink some things about people. Sometimes, bad opinions are not caused by what somebody has done, but by an apprehension of what they might do in the future. For aspiring politicians like Navalny, the issue is what they might do given power, and knowing his Russian nationalism and all its attendant bigotry, it’s true that, as president, he probably would have been just a somewhat different flavor of imperialist than his predecessors, not a liberal democrat. But that is no longer even a theoretical possibility.
What Navalny did do was lead the closest thing to a political opposition and a free media that Russia has seen in over a decade. His campaigning in various elections and exposés of corruption certainly stirred up a lot of political consciousness among Russians. In contrast, I think that the more explicitly nationalistic and racist commentary he did back when he was less prominent was largely preaching to the choir - I doubt many people became more racist because of his rants (casual racism towards the ethnicities of former and present imperial subjects is, unfortunately, very much the norm in Russia).
I think that with Navalny also dies the hope of political change in Russia by democratic means. The current regime will carry on until, sooner or later, it will collapse violently.
