The Navalny I knew was naive about Putin’s Russia, but he gave us hope. We are his hope now
The candle that cast at least a little light in Vladimir Putin’s darkness has been snuffed out. The official report claims Alexei Navalny “died”. Between “he died” and “he has been murdered”, there is a difference the size of Russia. My country no longer exists.
A Russia that so casually destroys its finest is not a country you can live in. In a land you can live in there is no space for this kind of criminal regime. The state that goes under the name of the Russian Federation, which visits death and malignancy on those who live in it and on the world at large, simply should not exist.
It had to murder Navalny. Dictatorship calls for a sullen population and nationwide jubilation at the least word from its leader. The regime recognised the threat this man posed. It tried to silence him by sentencing him to more than 20 years in jail. It tried to poison him, but failed. So now it has finished the job.
Officially, there is no death penalty in Russia … only, there is. Here is the proof, and this is only the beginning. The criminal regime cares not a fig who it murders – Ukrainians, the young people mobilised for its “meat-grinder assaults”, its political prisoners. The Red Wheel Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about is again on the move.
Today, after two years of slaughter in Ukraine and with the opposition in Russia totally routed, it seems scarcely credible that only a few years back Navalny could participate in the race for the presidency and be heard at election rallies throughout the land. What kind of president would he have been? I have no idea. He might have been brilliant, he might have been hopeless. The only way to find out would have been for him to win a free election, but for that you need free citizens. Fundamental to democracy are voters conscious of their duty as citizens. Democracy is founded on human self-respect. How much of that will we find among the majority of the Russian population?
I well remember how, after an election rally in a provincial Russian city at which Navalny spoke, someone came up to him and said: “Alexei, I like the way you speak and what you say. I like you as a person, but first become president. Then I will vote for you.”
Everyone speculates as to why he went back to Russia, when he must surely have known he would be thrown into prison. And, of course, he was; but he was a fighter, a soldier, and knew this had to be seen through to the end. He was no self-sacrificial lamb going to the slaughter – Navalny intended to win. He believed he would, and converted people near and far to that belief.
In Russia, those who have overthrown the regime have invariably previously been its prisoners. That was true of the revolution of 1917. It was true also of the end of the Soviet regime, which seemed so unassailable, but which collapsed to the accompaniment of the books of ex-convict Solzhenitsyn. To have experienced prison is always an advantage for a Russian politician: someone familiar with imprisonment identifies better with the “voting masses” whose life is permeated by prison “culture”.
Navalny misread the political situation. No Russia exists of which he could have become president. He did not truly know the land to which he devoted his life. He grew up and became a politician after the collapse of the USSR, during a brief period when freedom came to Russia, a period that saw social and political life emerging, and political parties and a free press appear. For him, that was his country, a place where anything was possible. His style was that of a western politician who believes you have to fight for votes, to be in the public eye, to be transparent, and take responsibility for what you say.
That is simply not the way in Russian politics, where you fight for power not in elections, which, after all, can be manipulated. Power has to be sought where real power lies. It has long and rightly been said that in Russia, the political contest is a fight between bulldogs under a carpet. Navalny could not and would not be one of those bulldogs. He believed that people in Russia would follow him, which was very naive.
He judged people by the standards he set for himself. He supposed that if, for him, what mattered most in life was the rights and freedom and dignity of the individual, then that must be what mattered most to others, too. He believed people could be persuaded, inspired and led – and indeed his followers, mainly young, wonderful men and women, numbered in the tens of thousands. But Russia was moving in the opposite direction.
The regime’s great aspiration is to resuscitate the USSR. Russia is ruled by people who made their careers and lived their lives within the Soviet KGB. Their dream of restoring the country of their youth is being realised before our eyes. It is a land where the population obediently lays its head on the executioner’s block, sighing that, of course, the tsar knows best. It is a land where there is no place for a Navalny, or for young people who want to live their lives not in the gulag, but in freedom.
If Alexei had known what was to come after his arrest, that the opposition would lose hands down, that the regime would instigate a shameful war against Ukraine – with a majority of the population supporting that ignominy – would he have taken the same decision, returned to Russia to be imprisoned and allowed himself to be murdered? I do not know the answer, but I think he would. There have always been, are now and ever will be, people who hold some things dearer than life itself.
He has given support to all of us. By existing, by refusing to give in, by making that supreme sacrifice, he has given us all hope. We are now his hope.
Mikhail Shishkin is a Russian novelist and winner of the Russian Booker, Russian National Bestseller and Big Book prizes. Translation by Arch Tait
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