Navalny Lives On
Navalny Lives On
Putin may seem to be at the peak of his powers. But his victory over his dead opponents may turn out to be pyrrhic.
“I’M NOT SURE WHETHER THIS IS THE START of a new era, or the old one turning even darker and bleaker,” journalist Yulia Latynina, a prominent voice in Russian independent media in exile, remarked a few days after the death of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny. There is a widespread sense among Russian dissidents that Navalny’s death in an Arctic Circle penal colony called “Polar Wolf” is a turning point. Its timing is rich with symbolism: Vladimir Putin prepares to be crowned for a new presidential term in a faux election next month, even as his reign approaches its twenty-five-year mark (in December) and as his war in Ukraine reaches the two-year mark this week. Where Russia goes from here, and how the West will respond, is a more urgent question than ever.
In retrospect, it seems obvious that Navalny’s arrest in January 2021, after his return to Russia from Germany following an assassination attempt—and his subsequent incarceration on a bogus fraud conviction in which he had originally received a suspended sentence—was part of the buildup to the war in Ukraine and to Russia’s concurrent plunge into nearly full totalitarianism. Russian troops began to mass near the Ukrainian border in early March 2021. In April, prosecutors moved to outlaw Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, which had a large network of offices across Russia, and designate it as an “extremist” group; in June, the foundation was ordered to cease operations.
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Navalny was on trial on new trumped-up charges of fraud and contempt of court; he used his court appearance to condemn the invasion. In March 2022, he was found guilty and given a nine-year sentence in a “strict-regime” (maximum security) penal colony; in August 2023, another bogus 19-year sentence for “extremism” was added on top of it. It was obvious that Putin wanted Navalny to die in prison. But no one expected it to happen so soon.
While Navalny, 47 at the time of his death, had a complicated political history that included flirtations with Russian nationalism and xenophobic agitation against migrants from Central Asia, it is indisputable that in the 2010s, he emerged as a key figure in the resistance to Putin’s authoritarian rule. It started with the protests that rocked Russia in late 2011 and early 2012, in response to blatant fraud in the 2011 Duma elections to hand a victory to Putin’s United Russia party and to the announcement that Putin was planning to retake the presidency after the Dmitry Medvedev interlude.1 Young, energetic, charismatic, with a “regular guy” vibe and a rare ability to connect to ordinary people, Navalny could galvanize crowds and bring tens of thousands into the streets—which was one reason the Putin regime feared him. His exposés of corrupt government officials and propagandists who loudly professed their Russian patriotism and denounced Western decadence but owned yachts in Miami and villas in Italy resonated even with many Russians for whom freedom, democracy, and human rights were distant abstractions; when he coined the phrase “the party of crooks and thieves” as a moniker for the ruling United Russia party, it caught on so readily that in two years, a majority of Russians agreed with the label. (Another Navalny-coined label that stuck was “bunker grandpa” as a nickname for Putin.)
The politically motivated fraud charges brought against Navalny in 2013 and 2014 were clearly intended to muzzle him but didn’t succeed. In September 2013, he managed to have a strong showing—officially 27 percent of the vote, although according to some calculations the real figure was at least 35 percent—in a Moscow mayoral race against Putin-loyalist incumbent Sergei Sobyanin despite a conviction for embezzlement and Sobyanin’s vastly superior resources. Disqualified from the 2018 presidential race, Navalny continued to be in a thorn in Putin’s side. In 2019, about a dozen Navalny allies were blocked from Moscow City Council elections, reportedly after internal polling showed they were likely to win; Navalny then encouraged his supporters to use a strategy of voting against any candidates linked to United Russia, including camouflaged “independents,” and almost certainly managed to do some damage to the ruling party.
Despite the politically motivated convictions, the regime was surprisingly lenient with Navalny for a while. He got off with relatively brief detentions, suspended sentences and sometimes house arrest, prompting speculation that he had protectors inside the Kremlin or that he might be useful to the regime in some way. Even when he was arrested after returning to Moscow from Berlin in the wake of an attempt to poison him (and after his own exposé, in cooperation with the Bellingcat investigative group, of the Russian security services’ role in that attempt), there was speculation about whether he would be jailed for a short time or was in for the long haul.
Navalny’s imprisonment coincided with the larger lockdown that came down on Russian society, and what remained of its post-Soviet freedoms, in the spring of 2022. Since then, the repressions have only gotten more draconian (and often utterly absurd: the recent ban on the “LGBT movement” as an “extremist organization” recently led to a young woman being jailed for five days for wearing rainbow-colored earrings, classified as an extremist symbol). Things one may cite as evidence that modern-day Russia still has more freedom than there was in the Soviet Union can often vanish overnight. A year ago, you could say that at least books by dissident émigré authors could still be openly bought and sold. Then, in December a major Russian book publisher and distributor, AST Books, announced that it was indefinitely suspending the printing and sale of books by two such authors, Dmitry Bykov (accused of participating in the work of an “undesirable” organization) and Boris Akunin, accused of “justification of terrorism” and “spreading false information about the Russian army.” The step was taken in response to a “request” from the authorities; titles by Bykov and Akunin have already disappeared from websites, and physical copies of their books are being removed from bookstores nationwide.
IN RECENT MONTHS, THE KREMLIN HAS BEEN sending unmistakable signals that its flirting with liberalism is over. The frenzied “cancellation” of musicians and actors who attended an “almost naked party” at a private Moscow nightclub just before Christmas was a message to the elites that they could no longer do whatever they pleased as long as they simply ignored the war and refrained from overt dissent. (The event was gleefully denounced by the propaganda machine as a vile, and probably gay, display of hedonism that insulted the Russian soldiers suffering and dying in the trenches of Ukraine, and guests were dropped from concerts and cut from already filmed movies and TV specials despite abject contrition; one attendee, a rap singer, served 25 days in jail on a charge of disorderly conduct and was handed a draft notice despite having a medical exemption.) Regime critics who have fled abroad have also been targeted, with moves to confiscate their property in Russia. In one case last month, Russian authorities made an aggressive effort to get expat singers from the antiwar rock band Bi-2—several of them Israeli passport holders—extradited to Russia after they were detained on a tour in Thailand for working without a permit. (This effort failed, thankfully.)
Official reactions to the public mourning for Navalny also show the regime’s draconian slide. Hundreds have been detained or roughed up by the police, or both, simply for coming out to pay tribute to the dead opposition leader by laying flowers—usually at the site of memorials to victims of political repressions—or by carrying his photo. In St. Petersburg, a priest was arrested after announcing his intention to serve a funeral mass for Navalny by the Solovetsky Stone, a 2002 memorial to victims of Soviet terror; he suffered a stroke while in custody. And all copies of the latest issue of one of Russia’s few surviving independent publications, the weekly magazine Sobesednik (“Interlocutor”), which put Navalny on its cover, have been confiscated. Ironically, the Navalny quote on the cover was, “But there is still hope.”
In a video clip that has gone viral since his death, Navalny is asked by filmmakers working a documentary about him what message he would have for his countrymen in the case of his untimely death. In reply, the dissident not only urges his followers not to give up but essentially says that his murder should be seen as a sign of the regime’s weakness: “If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong.”
Many of Navalny’s devastated supporters, such as former TV writer and satirist Viktor Shenderovich, doubted the optimistic message and suggested that, on the contrary, Navalny’s murder was a sign of Putin reveling in his power and impunity—perhaps thanks in part to recent Russian military successes in Ukraine and to Western disarray. Killing Navalny, Shenderovich said, was Putin’s way of exuberantly demonstrating that he could crush his biggest enemy and get away with it, as well as an unmistakable message to any dissidents who might still get ideas about sticking their necks out (by, for example, trying to nominate an antiwar and anti-Putin candidate for the presidency).
And yet Shenderovich and others have also suggested that Navalny’s murder might backfire. Just as the Russian victory at Avdiivka has been pyrrhic—the conquest of a devastated ghost town which has cost the Russian military unprecedentedly heavy losses in both lives and equipment, and which is likely to galvanize Western support for Ukraine, especially deliveries of the ammunition that could have prevented the city’s fall—Putin’s final “victory” over his nemesis may turn out to do him more harm than good. Even émigré former TV journalist Alexander Nevzorov, who flaunts his pessimistic and cynical view of Russia as a sick and servile country, has said that, much to the Kremlin’s bafflement, “Navalny’s death did not work the way it was supposed to: the population was not struck by mortal terror en masse.” Instead, the simple act of laying flowers to honor a dead man has become a form of resistance.
Now the Kremlin is facing the unpleasant choice of either continuing to withhold Navalny’s body from his grieving mother—a problematic move in a country where the sanctification of motherhood has always remained strong and is encouraged by the regime as part of its push for “traditional values”—or allowing his funeral to become a much larger focal point for protest and resistance. And the emergence of the widowed Yulia Navalnaya as a charismatic and eloquent figure in her own right, speaking of her grief and rage and promising to take her husband’s place as a resistance leader, is a wild card that could yet upend Russian politics. One obvious parallel is Corazon Aquino, the first female president of the Philippines whose challenge to dictator of Ferdinand Marcos led to his ouster in 1986, three years after her husband, opposition leader Benigno Aquino, was assassinated. But many Russian commentators remembered an example closer to home if far more distant in time: Princess Olga, the tenth-century ruler of Kievan Rus’, who became regent for her minor son after her husband, Prince Igor, was ambushed and killed by a prince from a neighboring tribe, the Drevlians. Olga’s famously bloody quest for vengeance is not particularly suited to a movement for liberal values (it included burning the Drevlians’ main city to the ground and enslaving the survivors), but it does set a memorable example of female ferocity.
IN THE EARLY DAYS OF RUSSIA’S WAR IN UKRAINE, I wrote about a remarkably relevant 1944 play by the Russian writer Evgeny Schwartz, The Dragon, a parable of autocracy and terror that Schwartz ostensibly wrote as an anti-Nazi allegory but that also transparently alluded to Stalinism (causing it to be banned by censors) and had a great resonance in later years as a more general commentary on Soviet tyranny. This brilliant work seems even more relevant now. The play’s hero, a wandering knight named Lancelot in a vaguely medieval setting, issues a seemingly hopeless challenge to a dragon who rules a town full of obedient people trained to see the three-headed beast as a paternalistic protector, despite an annual sacrifice of a maiden. With help from a group of resisters who supply him with miracle weapons, Lancelot manages to slay the dragon; but when he appears on the town square after the battle next to the dragon’s dead heads, he is in bad shape and believes he is fatally wounded. His monologue at the end of the scene is positively uncanny in the wake of Navalny’s death:
Come on, death, wait a little. You know me. I’ve looked you in the eye many times and I’ve never tried to hide. I’m not going to escape. I hear you. But let me think just another minute. They’re all hiding, yes. But right now at home, they are slowly, very slowly recovering. Their souls are righting themselves. Why, they whisper, why did we feed and pamper this monster? It’s because of us that out there in the square right now, a man is dying completely alone. Well, from now we will definitely be smarter! Look what a battle played out in the sky because of us. Look how it hurts poor Lancelot to breathe. No, no, that’s enough, we’ve had it! Because of our weakness, the best people died: the strongest, the kindest, the most impatient. Even rocks would get smarter. And we’re human after all. That’s what they’re whispering right now in every house, in every little room. . . . Yes, yes, that’s it. That means I’m not dying in vain.*2
It’s hard to know whether fellow political prisoner Vladimir Kara-Murza was consciously or unconsciously referencing that monologue when he wrote, in a Telegram post on Navalny’s death, “It is the best who perish: the bravest, the most sincere, the ones who care the most.” But the parallels are unavoidable.
In The Dragon, Lancelot’s hopes that his expected death will inspire the people he has liberated turn out to be vain; they easily allow themselves to be subjugated by only slightly less odious new masters. The happy ending is provided by Lancelot himself, who, it turns out, has recovered from his wounds and returns to punish the evildoers and free the city (and save his beloved, Elsa) a second time.
Unlike Schwartz’s Lancelot, Navalny, a real-life hero, is not coming back. But perhaps, in this version of the story, it’s Elsa who picks up the fallen hero’s weapons and beats the bad guys.
Medvedev was Putin’s handpicked placeholder president from 2008 to 2012 to get around the constitutional prohibition on more than two four-year presidential terms; Putin was prime minister during Medvedev’s term, but remained the real locus of power. It’s hard to believe, but in those days Medvedev was considered a liberal and Putin still felt the need to observe constitutional niceties.
My translation.