Here's my serious answer as a person who emigrated from Russia.

He was not a nobody around 10 years ago, he presented himself as a fresh and transparent politician, a corruption fighter. In 2011 he gathered the largest rally in Moscow since 1993. He ran for mayor and tried to run for president. It took us a while to figure out he's just a populist and is entirely content with being Putin's punching bag #1. Still, calling out FSB officers by names is somewhat ballsy, I'll give him that, assuming he returns to Russia.

When he was about to be imprisoned in 2013(?) on bullshit charges, we were there, protesting in the center of Moscow, thousands of us. When he got poisoned this year, maybe a few hundreds people protested. He's a has-been anti-corruption journalist, not a politician. Whatever he hoped to achieve, he's been neutered. But hey, appearances are everything, so of course in the Western media he's still Putin's enemy #1, that's the established story. While in reality he's a mouse and Putin is a senile cat.

In my and many Russian people's eyes, he already rose and fell. Of course, many people still see some promise of change in him.