No one can deny Navalny’s personal bravery. However, there were things that even he did not dare do. With most of his exposés in the area of corruption, he left the most terrifying aspect untouched: a violent, colonial and totalitarian past. In an essay first published by Liberties Journal, Russian writer Sergei Lebedev faces these underlying issues that stood in the way of Navalny's 'beautiful Russia of the future'. Because what future does a country have, whose 'civic memory seems to have had its long-term function disabled'?
Alexei Navalny. Photo: Evgeny Feldman / THIS IS NAVALNY PROJECT / ANP / AFP
Alexei Navalny was killed in the far north above the Arctic Circle, in the small town of Kharp, where the Ural Mountains are intersected by a railroad leading to the city of Labytnangi on the Ob River. This place of death, this scene of the crime, is not random. It puts a period to the argument with fate that Alexei Navalny led as a man and politician — even, one could say, to his argument with Russia and its history. The man who came up with The Beautiful Russia of the Future as image and slogan died in the horrible Russia of the past.
Approximately fifty kilometers southeast of Kharp, beyond the Ob, is the city of Salekhard. The sadly famous Road 501, the Dead Road, leads east from there. It is one of the last projects born of Stalin’s megalomania, a railroad branch to the Enisei River that would traverse uninhabited places unsuitable for construction across the permafrost and the swamps of western Siberia. All that remains of that pharaonic project are a few hundred kilometers of embankments, dilapidated camp barracks, and steam engines rusting in the tundra.
And corpses. Corpses in nameless ravines and pits, without a cross or a marker, unknown, buried without funerals, the dead whose killers and torturers remain unpunished.
This is the region of the Gulag, the wasteland of the murdered and the murderers. In these places, geography helps the work of the jailers, and the climate serves as a means of torture. Here, in this ideal geographic nothingness, a space beyond history, beyond evidence, the Soviet state cast out people doomed to annihilation. This is the place where Russia’s historical sin is preserved in material, sometimes even imperishable, form — permafrost, after all. Here lie Russia’s guilt and responsibility.
Alexei Navalny’s political credo, which changed over the years and is not easily summarized, did have one constant premise, one characteristic feature. He denied — or rather refused to consider — the power of the totalitarian past. He would not recognize the genealogy and the continuity of state violence, and most importantly, its long-term social consequences.
Navalny would not recognize the genealogy and the continuity of state violence, and most importantly, its long-term social consequences
Yes, he would come to the Solovetsky Stone — a monument to the victims of communist crimes in Lubyanka Square in Moscow, consisting of a large boulder brought a great distance from the very first Soviet penal camp — every year on October 30, the day commemorating the victims of political oppression, and lay a bouquet at the monument: the proper gesture. But his image of the 'real' Russia was always that of a tabula rasa, an ideal community over which the past had no power — the strange notion of a society that experiences the oppression of an authoritarian regime but somehow automatically aspires to democracy and is in a certain sense innocent, historically undetermined, without, so to speak, a medical record.
His 'beautiful Russia of the future' was already here, it already existed in the present, in his own generation, it only needed to be unblocked, unveiled, unpacked, affirmed in reality.
Yet it is unlikely that he could explain how it came to be, how it was born. He announced it with the disproportionate confidence of a fakir with a grateful audience that also wished to believe that you can turn over a new leaf without acknowledging historical guilt or admitting historical responsibility, without recognizing the stubborn presence of the past, without punishing the criminals and thereby severing the umbilical cord of violence.
Navalny told a fairy tale about a miracle. In classical myth, crimes and sins give birth to monsters, chthonic creatures, the embodiment of fate. He offered a postmodern reverse myth, the story that monsters are capable — simply by the force of history’s progressive course, or because you want to believe it — of giving birth to beautiful, ideal children. In other words, this was a rather spectacular case of a denial of trauma. It was premised on a population without memory and without unhealed scars. But history cannot be fooled. Monsters, if not completely killed, give birth only to monsters.
Prison guards walk inside the prison colony in the town of Kharp. Photo: human rights ombudsman of the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous district
Uncritical heroization
I may seem cold and too critical. After all, the earth is still fresh on the grave and the period of mourning is not yet over. But already I see the stirrings of an uncritical heroization and canonization that will confer upon Navalny’s views, and his temperament, a sacred status, and this, I believe, will inevitably lead to a repetition of his mistakes. His mistakes were fatal — not only to his person but to the trajectory of Russia’s opposition movement. He personified some of the most profound errors that a dissident leader can make: he was a moral leader whose moral authority was in fact based on a kind of amorality, a catastrophic substitution of hierarchies of values and an extremely optimistic populism.
Amorality? Isn`t that too harsh? For many people in Russia and abroad, after all, Alexei Navalny was the very symbol of moral behavior. He did not betray himself; he did not break in prison or under torture; he died for what he believed to be a just cause. An extraordinary man.
No one can deny Navalny’s personal bravery. His courage and the habits of a free man distinguished him and attracted others to him.
There were things that even Navalny did not dare do
But there were things that even he did not dare do. He did not dare do them, I believe, for a simple reason: he was a born politician. He had a better feel than most for the mood of the liberal youth. He loudly and cleverly criticized the Putin regime and fought against it — but where was his criticism directed? For a very long time Navalny’s target was corruption. His greatest exposés were in that area. He addressed himself to the material concerns of citizens whose money and votes had been stolen. He played on legal outrage, and on common sense.
The problem is that, from the very beginning, corruption was not the most terrifying aspect of the Putin regime. Vladimir Putin came to power as a war president. The second Chechen war raised and solidified his ratings, turning him into a national leader. That base and ruthless war turned the Russian Army into a punitive tool, because it not only fought with Chechen troops but it also 'pacified' the population. It was a war with tens of thousands of victims; a criminal war from start to finish. It certainly was a crime that on the scales of justice – and in common sense – significantly outweighed any number of stolen billions and any amount of cheating at the polls. It is strange to judge a murderer for the theft of office supplies, or to accuse a serial killer of forging lottery tickets. The right to life is the highest value. Vladimir Putin – like Boris Yeltsin before him – took away that right from tens of thousands of Chechens.
Before 2014, before the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine, this was Putin’s greatest crime. Without acknowledging the guilt and punishing the perpetrators in the two wars against Chechnya, which set Russia back on its old imperial and colonial path, and unleashed the spiral of state violence, and turned Chechnya into a 'black hole', a zone of lawlessness from where the lawless practices spread throughout Russia — without confronting all this, no bright and real 'Russia of the future' would be possible. Without an answer to the cardinal question of the right to secede, without a recognition of the centuries of repressive policies toward ethnic minorities, the Russia of the future will always be the Russia of the past.
Navalny was silent about the main crimes of the Putin regime and of Vladimir Putin personally
Alexei Navalny was silent about the main crimes of the Putin regime and of Vladimir Putin personally. If you think about it, it seems inexplicable. Or, perhaps, explicable but not justifiable — but the explanation destroys the very concept of the beautiful Russia of the future that needs only to be released from Putin’s regime to emerge. Navalny was silent either because he did not consider the Chechen war significant or because he understood all too well that even the liberal part of Russian society did not care about dead Chechens, about crimes far away in the Caucasus committed in the name of Russia. The discouraging truth is that Russian society had grown accustomed to war, it no longer reacted to pricks of conscience, and it became alert only when it came to matters of personal interest — for example, the reforms of social benefits, or the crushing of hopes connected to the allegedly more liberal rule of Dmitri Medvedev (during whose administration Russia attacked Georgia in 2008), or the news that Putin would go for a third term.
Then came 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops. The number of military and civilian dead was in the thousands, but Russia’s main opposition figure stubbornly continued to expose the economic crimes of Putin and his henchmen. As if no blood had been shed and international law was not being cynically and odiously violated. Whereas it could be said, in explanation of Navalny’s earlier behavior, that Russia’s war against Chechnya took place before he became a famous opposition politician, no such extenuation can be made of his diffidence toward the war against Ukraine, which occurred when he was already the informal leader of the opposition and a brand name.
That extraordinary status, one would have thought, demanded only one strategy: to speak out against the war clearly and consistently, and to create a broad antiwar coalition. As we know, Navalny cannot be accused of cowardice. It was not fear of repression by the government that kept him from taking this path. But I am certain that in this regard he felt fear — a fear of a different kind, the fear of every populist politician. He was afraid of losing support.
He sensed that a radical antiwar position would not increase the number of his supporters but would in fact decrease it
Again, this is just my supposition, but I think Navalny sensed that a radical antiwar position would not increase the number of his supporters but would in fact decrease it. In 2014-2022, almost all of Russia accepted Putin’s formula of pretend war, a limited conflict in which Russia was not even involved. Of course, everyone understood that Russia was deeply involved; I doubt that anyone was fooled by the clumsy camouflage, all those 'volunteers' and 'national republics'. The pro-war radicals demanded that the cards be shown without shame and organized in support of war. What did the antiwar people do? It would require a work of literature, a novel in the spirit of Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, to capture their delinquency — the mix of semi-apathy, semi-activity, intentions without intentions and protest without protest, that the liberal part of society used to delineate its Fronde, refusing to confront the issue for an either-or answer, continuing to cooperate with state institutions, seeking positive aspects in the capital’s urbanistic changes — in other words, to live an ordinary life.
Navalny, wittingly or not, played into the hands of that mass pretending to be a mobilized protest by lowering the drama and the ethical intensity of the situation, with his dominating anti-corruption agenda.
Trolling the executioners
Protest rally against Lukashenko, 13 September 2020. Minsk, Belarus. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
In August 2020, after an obvious falsification of the results of the presidential election, the people of Belarus went out onto the streets. It was truly a mass protest, not like the Russian ones. For a few days it seemed that the situation was balancing on a hair: President Lukashenko could flee to Moscow like President Yanukovich did in the Ukrainian revolution in 2014, to add to Moscow’s collection of retired dictators — or Putin could invoke the status of Belarus as a Union state and dispatch the troops to complete the annexation of Belarus.
It was during those days that Alexei Navalny was poisoned by Novichok, the poison of choice of the Russian security agencies, which has been used in several attacks. There is much speculation on whether the intention was to kill him. My own view is that the more important fact is that Novichok was used, because it is the calling card of Russian state violence. It was a clear signal to all Russian oppositionists, and the poisoned Navalny transmitted the signal.
It is very possible that Navalny had no intention of following the radical example of the Belarussians. But from the point of view of the Kremlin, he was the only person capable of stirring up a serious wave of protest in Russia, and that was why he was left in a coma, so that any Russian echo of the Belarussian turbulence would die before it was born. But it left something like a legend of the peaceful protest that almost won — as opposed to the brutally violent repression of the Ukrainian protest, with the burning tires of Maidan.
When he recovered and was literally back from the other world like a mystical hero, Navalny could and should have presented Putin with the bill
Nothing contributed to the demobilization of the pro-democratic community in Russia more than the temporary loss of its leader and the persistence of the narrative, presented as perfectly obvious, of peace, as if the liberal opposition had only to wait for the right moment (which would definitely come) for everyone to go out onto the streets. Then came the brilliant investigation by Bellingcat, which proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Russian special services had attempted to assassinate Navalny, and Navalny’s extraordinary phone call to one of his unsuccessful killers, when Navalny, playing a state official, literally forced him to confess.
Navalny with his family after awaking from his coma. Photo: Instagram @Navalny
So the proof of the regime’s culpability was there. But again Navalny preferred bravado, laughter, the merry mocking of the stupidity of the agents. This, instead of a serious conversation about the system, about the institution of political murder that had reappeared under Yeltsin, about the dozens of people who were poisoned, shot, beaten to death: Politkovskaya, Shchikochikhin, Yushenkov, Starovoitova, Kholodov, Litvinenko, the Skripals, Nemtsov, Estemirova, and many, many others (Vladimir Kara-Murza, for example, survived two poisonings and is now in a Russian prison).
He did not want to be a harsh and bitter prophet
When he recovered and was literally back from the other world like a mystical hero, Navalny could and should have presented Putin with the bill: to speak out about first principles and on the behalf of everyone whose life Putin had taken. But Navalny did not submit the bill in full. Even though he had had one foot in the grave, he preferred to play (it was not an act, it was his nature) the apostle of the beautiful Russia of the future that does not demand unsettling revelations about the past.
Some might say that this insouciance was the highest level of heroism, the highest bravery — literally to be resurrected and behave as if death had no business in your body and to troll the hapless executioners. I agree that there is courage there, and nerve. But sometimes it is more useful to be scared, to comprehend and proclaim the historical continuity of murders and murderers, to speak in the name of all who had been killed secretly, who were led in the 1930s to execution pits by the same Cheka agents with the same headquarters on Lubyanka. But that was not for him — too old-fashioned, perhaps. I can’t find a better word.
It would have put him among the ranks of denouncers and prophets such as Valeria Novodvorskaya, whom the liberal public liked to put down with the humiliating tag demschizo—democratic schizophrenics who were rabidly against the regime. Navalny did not want to be a demschizo. He did not want to be a harsh and bitter prophet. He wanted to be the less distressing harbinger of hope.
Cohabitation with evil
In the declassified archive of the Lithuanian KGB, I have seen documents concerning an attempted political assassination. In 1980, local officers wrote a letter to Moscow, to General Filipp Bobkov, head of the infamous Fifth (ideological) Directorate. It was about 'special measures' that were planned for a Catholic priest. Of course the letter did not contain the word 'assassination.' The Lithuanian KGB asked Moscow to approve the mission and to send two 'technical specialists'. Later these 'specialists', disguised as traffic police officers, stopped the priest's car on a night road under the pretext of checking documents.
The priest was not surprised. He was used to highway patrols stopping him more frequently and combing through his papers. It was more of the usual harassment. But this time, while one Moscow visitor opened the hood and checked the engine number with the priest, another sprayed some kind of substance on the driver's seat. A few hours later, the priest was brought to the hospital with a diagnosis of 'radiation burns'. He survived. But a few years later he died in a very strange road accident.
Nothing was said about it in his operational development file. And General Filipp Bobkov, who should have been in prison, after 1991 became a member of media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky's Mediamost Group, which owned, among other things, the independent television channel NTV. Bobkov was head of security. Amazingly, the many decent people, the bold journalists who worked for Gusinsky, never asked any questions. How could their security be guaranteed by a monster? But Bobkov could scare off the pettier monsters who multiplied in the freewheeling early 1990s.
Our civic memory seems to have had its long-term function disabled
The KGB’s murderous reputation and its connection to the political liquidations in the Soviet era were well known, even if not always proven. But no one quit, or even complained. Everyone chose the required cohabitation with evil. As did the citizens who later accepted the generals who fought against Chechnya as politicians and governors, such as Andrei Lugovoi, the assassin of Alexander Litvinenko, a member of parliament. It was a kind of covert social agreement that even the democratic community accepted: not forgetting the past completely, but also not exaggerating, not going to extremes, not shouting 'killer' at killers. Or not shouting it loudly.
This house of cards fell apart halfway on February 24, 2022, when the Russian army openly invaded Ukraine. Hundreds, even thousands, of smartphone cameras filmed how the Russians fought and showed it to the world in its full barbarity. Russians are often rebuked for protesting too weakly against the invasion. They defend themselves by pointing to the number of anti-war protestors who were arrested. I admit that I can understand people who would not risk protesting against the regime with the radical methods of Maidan. Not everyone can be a hero. The problem, rather, is that we did not notice, we were not aware of, how we ended up at that point of impotence.
Those who remembered the actions of Russian troops in Chechnya were not surprised at all by the atrocities of Russian troops in the early months of the invasion
In truth, we got there in part because of all the lulling speeches about how Russia was actually different, how we were an undeniable force, how there were so many of us — all the naive speeches that we are the power here and Putin fears us. One of the most frequent reactions of liberal Russians to the atrocities of Russian troops in the early weeks and months of the invasion was shock. Could Russian soldiers really behave this way? Some tried to shift the blame to the units from the Russian Federation’s national republics: it was the fault of those savages. But those who remembered the actions of Russian troops in Chechnya were not surprised at all. It was the familiar pattern of violence: mass reprisals against civilians, the wanton destruction of civil infrastructure, executions on the spot.
Our civic memory seems to have had its long-term function disabled. Every political generation now starts from scratch, zeroing out the account of responsibility and denying (or being utterly shocked by) the continuity of violence in both the state and the society.
Alexei Navalny was a brilliant tactician, but when it came to larger questions of morality and strategy he was a perfect avatar of this terrible tendency.
Hostages of the same imperial paradigm
Russia’s open war against Ukraine revealed yet another fatal flaw in the Russian opposition: a systemic inability for decolonializing thinking, an unwillingness to admit that Russia itself consists of subjugated and partially 'digested' nations that have undergone, in the words of the Ukrainian dissident Ivan Dzyuba, a process of forced denationalization. Without the voices of these nations, without their equal representation in the opposition, no conversation about the future of Russia has the right to take place, or will lead to a just result.
Navalnyism always bypassed or ignored the issue of national rights. When Navalny, who began his political career among Russian nationalists and made chauvinistic comments in the early period of his activism, emerged as a recognized leader, he turned out to be a kind of supra-national democrat. He did not divide his supporters by nationality, or recognize their specific national demands; instead he addressed them as conventional people of goodwill who are conscious (or modern) enough to also rise above national feelings and unite for the sake of the beautiful Russia of the future.
This point of view is dominant in the bearers of Great Russian Culture. It is a mixture of a sense of superiority, neglect, chauvinism, colonial-educational fervor — and a subconscious fear of finding out one day that these Others do not really want to be part of Russia at all.
Navalnyism always bypassed or ignored the issue of national rights
And here the approach of the irreconcilable opponents, Putin and Navalny, surprisingly converged. In Putin’s case, this perspective is clear. But it is sad to admit that his most talented and certainly his most relentless opponent turned out to be a hostage of the same imperial paradigm. Navalny had a chance to change history — but for this he had to first accept it himself, to hear voices in other languages presenting a historical account. And Navalny was too Russian for that.
It is noteworthy that there is something here that Navalny had in common with Soviet Russian dissidents of the past. They (there were some exceptions who proved the rule) often treated with a cold lack of understanding the ideas and the agendas of dissidents of the national republics who spoke about the colonial role of Russia, about language rights, about the right to self-determination. To Russian dissidents, it probably all seemed too archaic, a dead-end; and without noticing it they regarded these aspirations for emancipation through the optics of high Russian culture, into which are embedded a hierarchy of cultures and the idea of the national as backward and obsolete. The texts of the dissidents of the republics of the USSR contain bitter philippics addressed to conditional 'Muscovites' who talk about human rights, but the 'human' in their human rights does not seem to have a nationality.
Soviet Russian dissidents, whose personal qualities were certainly extraordinary, failed to become a tangible and independent political force. Navalny, by contrast, became such a force. But the dissident project contained at least half of the needed reckoning with the past: the memory of the victims of Soviet terror. Navalny’s project, directed into the future, did not offer even that half. Therein lay his power: people wanted to forget, to seal a compact of silence, as in Spain. And therein lay his weakness: because it was in that field of silence, in that agreement to forget about spilled blood, that Vladimir Putin’s multiple tyrannical ambitions flourished and eventually destroyed Alexei Navalny himself.
Excursion into the dictator’s head
Rationally speaking, Vladimir Putin had no need to fear Alexei Navalny. Navalny would not have been serious competition for Putin even in honest elections. He would have gotten a maximum of ten to fifteen percent of the votes of the liberal electorate — a lot, to be sure, but not enough even for a second round. Stories that Navalny would have beaten Putin are the electoral fantasies of his supporters, a fairy tale with a happy ending, with no convincing sociological or political basis.
So Putin’s worries about Navalny, his fears of Navalny, were completely irrational. To understand them we need to take an excursion into the dictator’s head — a voyage that a writer, rather than a scholar, is perhaps best qualified to take.
The Stasi identity card of Vladimir Putin, who served in Dresden from 1985 to 1990. Photo: bstu.de
Putin was and is an officer of the secret police, counterintelligence, a trained paranoid whose picture of the world is irreversibly deformed by ideological indoctrination and professional 'education'. I have read enough internal KGB documents to say this confidently.
The key word, the key concept, of this worldview is 'object.' The idea is to depersonalize people, to cleanse them of subjectivity, of selfhood. Object of surveillance. Object of influence. Object of operative interest. Object of development. Yours or someone else’s. In the world of objects, no one acts on his own. There are always hidden reasons, there are always puppet masters. But Navalny’s personality, his charisma, his preternaturally unflappable spirit, was a challenging anomaly for Putin, who was certain that all people were objects; and this exception to the rule, this man who somehow could not be made into an object, created an almost superstitious feeling in him. It is known that Putin never called Navalny by his name until after he died in the camps.
Navalny could somehow not be made into an 'object'
To better understand the genesis of Putin’s attitude toward Navalny, we must go back to Dresden in late 1989, where Putin was serving at the time. The local Stasi office and its corresponding KGB office were on the outskirts of the city, in an idyllic area of two-story villas, near the Elbe. Right there, about two hundred meters away, stood a typical urban five-story building, which housed families of Soviet officers. A walk along those streets today reveals that it is all one tidy whole, a cozy corner where apartment and work are close together. The neighborhood is so sentimental, so gemutlich, so safe.
But in late 1989 the coziness ended suddenly, when demonstrators surrounded the Stasizentrale building and blocked the KGB officers inside their neighbouring villa. Descriptions of those turbulent days share an important feature: the protestors acted wisely and in an organized way, while both the Stasi and the KGB were in disarray. And biographies (and hagiographies) of Putin mention the moment when he allegedly came to the gates and calmed down the crowd that was ready to storm the KGB villa, behaving like the tamer of wild elements, a man with a cool head. Journalists recorded the event: Moscow was silent, Moscow gave no orders, and Putin acted independently, at his own peril.
Putin felt a deep-rooted fear of people who turned in a flash into subjects of their own fate and history
That was the moment, I think, of his deepest and most destructive fear. Those East Germans, the obedient sheep, the objects that he and those like him were used to bossing around — they rose up, they acted with a firm and free collective will, they invaded a space that he was used to considering private and inviolable. Besides the threat to him and his family, he must have felt a deep-rooted fear, which is always absolute in a state security officer, of people who turned in a flash into subjects of their own fate and history. It was no accident that on his first visit to Germany as president, just a bit more than a decade after the event, he travelled to Dresden. They had thrown him out of there, but he came back — and as master of the situation. Putin would carry that fear — call it the Dresden fear — throughout his life: the fear of 'color revolutions', of Ukrainian Maidans, of any street protests where he can imagine the sudden doubling of a crowd’s energy and the invented foreign power behind it, the eternal conspiracy of Western influence.
There is another event in Putin’s life that is important in this context. In 1996, he was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, a man little known at the federal level and unknown to the general public. Yet only three years later, in 1999, he was prime minister and Yeltsin’s heir. That promotion cannot be described in terms of a consecutive career. There were no such careers. It is Fata Morgana, a postmodern composition in which one of many (and a career counterintelligence agent to boot) accustomed to conspiracy and to manipulations behind the scenes is suddenly elevated and made heir to the throne.
He would spend the rest of his life arguing that it was not an accidental choice, that he in fact was a leader, a historical figure, a messiah; part of the historical pattern, not just Yeltsin’s whim. Hence his obsession with history, his search for the ideological genealogy of his power.
He is like a commoner determined to create an aristocratic background for himself. Trained to be no one, anonymous, a gray man in a gray coat, he is possessed by a megalomania stemming from a deep fear of imposture. His perception is schizophrenically distorted: he is simultaneously sure of his right to rule the kingdom and waiting in dread to be finally exposed, in the fatal end of the play in which he was once assigned a role.
In contrast to Putin, Navalny created himself
The two fears converged in the figure of Alexei Navalny. In contrast to Putin, Navalny created himself. In contrast to Putin, Navalny was a genius of the masses, a born leader of the protest minority. Putin’s passion for history is profoundly pathological because it is only in the external world, the world of acts of power, acts of aggression, that he can confirm over and over that he really is the ruler. Taught to rule people through fear and submission, knowing neither love nor trust nor solidarity, he is prey to fears. Navalny terrified him.
A symbol of life
As declassified KGB archives in Ukraine and Lithuania show, the work of the secret police did not end when a target was arrested and sentenced, or when a political prisoner was sent to the camps. His file was sent with him, so that they could continue their persecution there.
They could try to compromise him, to ruin his reputation in the eyes of his comrades. To force him to change his views. To incline him to self-denial, to compel his repentance, his denunciation of his previous activity. A combination of carrot and stick. Play, tempt, press, force.
Judging from reports by Navalny’s lawyers and comrades, they did not play with him. They simply tried to destroy him. To kill him a second time. But Navalny had a lot of life in him.
Actually, he, with his body, his character, and his strength, symbolized life. Life against death. His mistakes, misunderstandings, and failures were the qualities of a living person. And so he spoke out — albeit belatedly — about the criminality of the war against Ukraine. He spoke from solitary confinement.
You can live and act freely in Russia, you can live without feeling doomed, without a bent spine
His surname came from the verb navalivatsya, to pile on, and it was the surname of a fighter. I do not feel it is necessary to discuss why he returned to Russia. He made his choice. The Christian connotations ascribed with almost religious fervor to that return, so as to make of him a redemptive sacrificial victim, are outrageously inaccurate. What he certainly never intended to be was a sacrificial victim. Not in a psychological, or legal, or sacral sense.
Basically, this is the main lesson of his life, his main gift, his main legacy: you can live and act freely in Russia, you can live without feeling doomed, without acknowledging the right of the regime to punish or pardon, without a bent spine. That is how we will remember him: the harbinger of an unfulfilled hope.
Alexei Navalny during a court hearing in Moscow on February 2, 2021. Photo: Handout / Moscow City Court press service / ANP / AFP
The last empire
Real politics in Russia will emerge only when the subject of liberal-democratic thought becomes the question of what to do with the so-called Federation, in which the 'subjects' of this Federation have no political subjectivity. What to do with a country that is a conglomeration of forcibly annexed nations, whose national identity has been and is being erased, whose culture is being Russified? What to do with the last empire, afflicted with residual imperial megalomania, and with a nuclear arsenal?
Everything else is not politics, but a way of avoiding this urgent and extremely painful question. For this reason, the distance between Vladimir Putin's United Russia and Alexei Navalny's 'Beautiful Russia of the Future' is not as great as it may seem. Both of these supposedly visionary concepts are just screens, a way to hide the real poverty of the political toolkit.
Alexei Navalny's utopia was futuristic, modernist, it functioned like a time machine, which is to say, he imagined that the future could simply be summoned rather than earned. The future drew its magic power from time as such: one day the future would come, and the future would put everything in its place, canceling the past. It is necessary only to live, to wait, as one waits for the change of seasons. Vladimir Putin's utopia, by contrast, is retrospective: what makes us strong is our connection to the past, to the figures of our archaic ancestors, the victors in World War II. The West, which rushed into the future, is afflicted with moral corrosion, while we are becoming morally stronger because our future is the past.
Real democracy in the Russian Federation will always (potentially) raise the question of political architecture, subjectivity and, in the end, independence
In relation to the real, historically conditioned Russian Federation, which began to unravel back in the 1990s, a process that was reversed by the ostentatious massacre of Chechnya and the establishment of an authoritarian regime, both political projects described above are mirages. Real democracy in the Russian Federation, which would give representation and political power to national minorities, will always (potentially) raise the question of political architecture, subjectivity and, in the end, independence.
Vladimir Putin, the self-appointed tsar, will never understand or recognize this. Alexei Navalny could probably have understood. He could have learned, which is a capacity only of the living. He had come a long way, from flirting politically with street nationalism to fighting against tyranny. In a bitter irony, flowers for him in the days of his death were left at monuments to the victims of Soviet repression, an unwitting recognition of the continuity of Russian violence, which he tried to deny with his life.
Translated from Russian by Antonina W. Bouis.
This article was first published by Liberties Journal.