Law, Power, and Justice

SUNDAY 18 FEBRUARY 2024

ARTICLE NOTES:

Weekend Article: The Death of Alexander Navalny

In 2021 Alexander Navalny was imprisoned when he returned to Russia after being poisoned and almost killed by the Russian government,.  He is now dead at the age of 47.  “The forces that Navalny has unleashed are unlikely to go away.” (Foreign Affairs 2/17/24)

Even though Navalny’s death was not unexpected, it left even his close friends and colleagues in a state of shock. 

They commented in interviews that Navalny just seemed larger than life (and I suppose larger than death).  Friends said that Navalny did not seem like a real person.  Navalny and his friends thought he would survive Putin and become president of Russia someday.  They were waiting for planning for that day.  And, every time Navalny escaped a murderous Kremlin attempt the belief in his invincibility grew even stronger.

One commentator said that when Navalny returned to Russia in 1921 after almost dying from the novochok poisoning, some people portrayed him as having risen from the dead.  This  reflects the mythical status Navalny had..  So, when friends and colleagues were asked if the death was a surprise, they said yes. This was the case even though Navalny himself has talked about what his followers should do after his death: Not give up.

         Some questioned why Putin would chose to murder Navalny now, confined as he was to an already murderous prison regime beyond the Arctic Circle.  But silencing Navalny once and for all made “perfect sense.”  Navalny was “a master of social media.”  In 2020, he even managed to get a confession out of his own “would-be government assassins.”  Even more dangerous was “Navalny’s extraordinary boundary-defying popularity.”  Uniquely in Russian history, his following went beyond the urban elites.  Navalny was appealing even to young Russians who many thought were too young to even have a sense of what democracy might mean for their lives.  In a Russian society that was “confused, depressed, and constantly besieged by an ever more repressive regime” Navalny was a “unifying figure.”

For traditional Russian liberal politicians the rural/urban divide was insurmountable.  Only in the urban areas were there people receptive to their arguments.  In the hinterlands, people didn’t seem to understand the democracy thing.  But, when Navalny explained it, they seemed to rally to the ideas.

Navalny produced a documentary in 2017 (“Don’t Call Him Dimon”) in which he exposed the corruption of the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, close friend of Putin’s.  This video helped Navalny organize protests in 100 cities and towns across Russia.  This “allowed him to destroy the Kremlin’s conceits that he was just another lonely liberal in an ivory tower in Moscow, dreaming of implausible reforms.”

Putin lost a narrative he had used successfully for years.  Putin had talked about the people in the rural areas, people he thought didn’t understand or lean towards “Western Freedoms” as the “real Russians.”  It was assumed that “for these ordinary Russians, liberalism meant anarchy, and for this reason, it was too early to give them Western-style rights.”

So Putin implemented what he called “managed democracy” which meant the appearance of democracy (like elections) and a strongman at the top.

But, Navalny had a lawyers “knack for unearthing precise, prosecutorial evidence with innate gifts as a communicator and a keen sense of the issues ordinary Russians cared about most…”  When, for example, in 2015 Russia annexed Crimea.  There was a Kremlin consensus that Putin’s propaganda had succeeded with Rusia’s youth.  The reasoning was that they had never experienced the talk about democracy and were too young to remember the democratic reforms of the 1990s.  After years of indoctrination and top-down rule, the young and the people in the hinterlands were content to leave politics to the professionals.

Navalny’s organization, FBK, Anti-Corruption Foundation, exploded that myth.  Crowds of teenagers joined Navalyn’s protests.  For the first time there was a national opposition party.

Then, Navalny repeatedly found technological ways around the Kremlin’s attempts to silence him.  Even when he was in prison, he managed to get messages out and even videos.  The day before he was murdered he was videotaped smiling and joking with authorities, essentially making fun of them.  Ridicule is powerful.

The murdering of Navalny was “a dark new step in Putin’s ruthless pursuit of power.”   But, it wasn’t as if murder was something new.  “For more than two decades, Putin…made political assassination an essential part of the Kremlin’s toolkit.”  It has been used against “troublemakers such as the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the whistleblower Alexander Litvinenko.”  It has been used against “political opponents Boris Nemtsov  Vladimir Kara-Murza, poisoned twice and now in prison.”

Source: Soldatov, Andrei and Irina Borogan (2/16/24) Putin Cannot Silence the Opposition Leader’s Movement