“I’m not afraid and these 15 days convinced me there is nothing to fear. Let them be afraid instead.” — Alexie Navalny.
When I heard the news that Alexie Navalny died on Friday, March 16, in the Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence, my first reaction was of great sadness. I thought why would the good die young? Navalny represented the strongest and fiercest opposing voice against Putin. Now that voice is silenced forever. The hope is gone for a better alternative to Putin just in case he dies or loses power. There is no more formidable threat for him to staying in power for the rest of his life. Only history will account for his evil regime. But will history be kind to Navalny?
The initial announcement of Navalny’s death was a mere 28 seconds in Russia’s TV. Few days later, other media outlets picked up the story but with minimal coverage as well. Then when some Russians laid roses and carnations and lighted candles in the “Wall of Grief” — a memorial to the victims of political repression — the police removed them immediately and pushed the people out of the vicinity. The same thing happened in other parts of the country. There were also reports of hundred arrests of people attending vigils and rallies for Navalny. Authorities wanted to minimize the impact of Navalny’s death and the increased outpouring of love and grief. They could be over-reacting because it was reported that in “Patriki”, the centre of Moscow nightlife, it was all laughter and fun among the young revellers. There was no sign of sadness. Reuters quoted Olga Kazakova saying, “You in the West paint him as someone he was not. The West is not our friend – you are fighting against us in Ukraine.”
Putin is hugely popular in Russia. He has effectively cracked down his enemies and critics to oblivion, thereby reassuring his rule unopposed for 24 years now. It is expected Putin will win another six-year term in the coming March election. Navalny was a small thorn of dissent that the West relied on to keep Putin off-balanced. When informed about Navalny’s death, Putin, who was in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk, smiled and started making jokes with the factory workers. It reaffirmed his point that courage was useless, but I think his easy dismissal was just to mask his cowardice and fear of Navalny’s popularity. In fact, Putin was so scared of Navalny that he made a lot of trumped-up charges to ensure Navalny was out of the picture in influencing the Russian people. Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University and the author of the book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, said: “Autocrats are fragile and insecure creatures who are always looking over their shoulder to see who is after them. To build themselves up and deter others from challenging their power, they take others down in public, letting them know exactly where they stand and how much they scorn them.”
Alexie Navalny was born on June 4, 1976 to a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother and grew up in Obninsk, about 100 kilometers southwest of Moscow, but spent his childhood summers in his grandmother’s village in Ukraine. He was proficient in speaking both the Russian and Ukrainian languages. In 1998, he graduated with a law degree from the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia. He began his political activity in 2000 by joining the Russian United Democratic Party Yabloko. His first taste of jail happened on December 5, 2011 when he was arrested for protesting the result of a parliamentary election and sentenced a maximum 15 days “for defying a government official.” As soon as he was released from prison on December 20, 2011, Navalny called on all Russians to unite against Putin who would claim victory in the presidential election of March 4, 2012. He would be arrested and jailed again.
On December 13, 2016, Navalny put his name as a candidate in the coming 2018 presidential election. He was now representing himself as a viable option to Putin. But his campaign was derailed and blocked with legal issues and prison time. In December 2017, the Russia’s Central Electoral Commission disallowed Navalny’s candidacy, citing his corruption conviction. Navalny led several protests to boycott the 2018 presidential election but earned him more jail time instead.
By now Navalny had become an anti-corruption activist. On January 19, 2021, Navalny and his team released their investigation of Putin’s massive estate in the town of Gelendzhik in Krasnodar Krai. A video entitled “Putin’s Palace” showed an aerial footage of the luxurious estate that cost over 100 billion rubles ($1.35 billion) to construct and was situated in a 70 square kilometers of land. The video on YouTube got over 20 million views in less than a day, and over 92 million after a week. It was reported that the video had resurfaced once again following Navalny’s death and to date was seen more than 129 million times on YouTube.
As his modus operandi in dealing with his enemies and critics, Putin’s minions tried to kill Navalny with a poison during a flight from Tomsk to Moscow on August 20, 2020. Navalny was evacuated to Germany and recovered after weeks of being in a coma. Then he decided to return to Russia and took a flight with his wife on January 17, 2021. He was immediately arrested and imprisoned. He was not expecting that there would be another attempt in his life since he believed that his would-be assassins were capable of embarrassment after failing to kill him. He thought wrong and died at a very young age of 47, survived by his wife, daughter and son.
Odessa Rae, who produced the Oscar-winning documentary Navalny, said: “We always knew it was a threat – but for this to actually happen, right now, is very unexpected. A lot of people ask why Alexie felt he had to go back to Russia, because they don’t understand his circumstances and the times. For him, to sit in Germany would have been death itself, because every Russian opposition leader, like Khodorkovsky, who tried to operate outside Russia, became irrelevant in Russia. Russians would say: ‘How dare you speak to us from there? Why should we listen to you sitting comfortably in Germany?’ Alexie’s life purpose was to change that country.”
Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s wife, was attending the Munich Security Conference when she was informed about her husband’s death. Speaking tearfully and solemnly to the attendees and reporters, she said: “I want Putin, and everyone around him, his friends and his government, to know that they will be held responsible for what they have done to our country, to my family, and to my husband. The day of reckoning will come very soon.”
We can always be hopeful that Putin’s day is numbered. We can be wishful that the Russians will come to realize the total evilness and immense corruption of the Putin regime and rise up to overthrow it. Or we can just turn for comfort to Navalny’s words about what his death would mean when he said: “If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. So don’t do nothing.”
But it seems that evil always triumphs. Authoritarians and dictators have the leverage of power to kill their own people and be immune to prosecution. Look at Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ferdinand Marcos, and Rodrigo Duterte, to name a few. It now seems more likely that Putin won’t be held accountable for his crimes and to survive with impunity. Seldom do protest movements cause regime change. The 1986 People Power Revolution in the Philippines and the 2010 Arab Spring in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain were historical aberrations. Otherwise, protesters all over the world are either killed, imprisoned, harassed, tortured, or exiled. Courage is hard to sustain; fear always leads to indifference and inaction.
Dark days lie ahead for the opposition movement in Russia. Losing a charismatic leader as Navalny is a great blow. Even with Navalny’s final message of “to be scared of nothing,” it will not inspire or move his supporters to overcome their fear of death or prison. Navalny’s death just proves what a heavy price one has to pay in fighting against pure evil.
Vera Krichevskaya, the co-founder and ex-editor-in-chief of Russia’s last independent TV news station, Dozhd, or TV Raid, said: “I’m speechless. Speechless. It’s so painful. I’m a mess. I’m sitting here with two letters that Alexie sent me last year from prison. I’m re-reading them now and both were such a source of energy, source of hope, of optimism. They were full of jokes. It’s impossible to believe. It was his spirit that Putin had to kill, it was his biggest threat. It’s what Navalny had and what he distributes to others. What I’ve been thinking for the last couple of months, that Putin is breaking the spirit of Ukrainians, with help from American congressmen. That’s not about his position on the battlefields, that’s about breaking the spirit of the people. He’s saying that evil will win. For me and many of my friends, we were sure he would survive. It was our unconditional belief. He was so strong. We thought he would survive no matter what. We had no plan B.”
22 February 2024