Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent voice for freedom, is dead at 47 — murdered outright or worn down by the police state that relentlessly arrested him, jailed him, poisoned him, tormented him and finally sent him to the brutal Arctic prison camp where he mysteriously died Feb. 16.
“Sudden Death Syndrome,” the prison authorities called it, while refusing to allow Navalny’s grieving mother to see his body. At this writing, nearly a week later, his family still doesn’t know where his remains are.
His killers are waiting for the poison they used to leave his body, charges his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, who has taken up leadership of the struggling Russian freedom movement.
Perhaps. Or maybe it’s just another expression of contempt and cruelty toward anyone who resists them.
Despair or hope
With Navalny’s death, many Russian activists have lost all hope for change. Worn down by President-turned-dictator Vladimir Putin’s ever-increasing repression, they’ve either been jailed, driven into exile or harassed and intimidated into silence. Hope died with Navalny, some say.
“This is exactly what Putin wants from his subjects: surrender.”
This is exactly what Putin wants from his subjects: surrender. Submission to the vast web of lies, corruption and violence that enable him and his cronies to maintain power.
And it is exactly what Navalny, the cheerful freedom fighter, would never, ever permit — in himself or others. Listen to his own words, when he was asked in the Oscar-winning documentary Navalny (streaming now on Max) what people should do if he were killed upon his planned return to Russia in 2021:
My message (if) I am killed is very simple: Not give up. … You’re not allowed to give up. If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong. We need to utilize this power, to not give up, to remember we are a huge power that is being oppressed by these bad dudes. We don’t realize how strong we actually are. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. So don’t be inactive.
He grinned sheepishly before he said these words, then looked intently into the camera for a moment after finishing — as if he were ready to jump through it and grab us by the shoulders if we dared to waver. Then he laughed.
These words, and the way he delivered them, personified Navalny: Hope, determination, optimism, courage, anger, humor and charm, with a generous helping of media savvy.
Freedom fighter for a media age
Navalny — young, confident, ready with a joke — was a freedom fighter for the social media age. He battled Putin’s flat-eyed lies with scores of slick, funny online videos skewering the state’s staggering corruption from an average Russian’s perspective.
“Hi, I’m Alexei,” was his standard opening, before he launched into the latest outrage committed by the criminals in power.
“Dictators fear mockery almost as much as they fear armed resistance.”
He brilliantly used such media, along with street politics (before his rallies were banned), to build a national protest movement that threatened the gangster state with ridicule. Dictators fear mockery almost as much as they fear armed resistance.
Navalny’s most famous production — besides contacting (on camera) the assassins who nearly killed him with poison in 2020 — was Putin’s Palace: The Story of the World’s Largest Bribe. Posted on YouTube in January 2021, just as he willingly returned to Russia to face arrest and imprisonment, the nearly two-hour video exposed Putin’s secret Black Sea villa. The $1.3 billion monstrosity, built at Russian taxpayers’ expense, includes a hockey rink, a helipad, a hookah bar, a vineyard and an oyster farm.
“The power of the film was not just in the pictures, or even in the description of the money spent,” writes Russia expert Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic. “The power was in the style, the humor, and the Hollywood-level professionalism of the film, much of which was imparted by Navalny himself. This was his extraordinary gift: He could take the dry facts of kleptocracy — the numbers and statistics that usually bog down even the best financial journalists — and make them entertaining.
“On-screen, he was just an ordinary Russian, sometimes shocked by the scale of the graft, sometimes mocking the bad taste. He seemed real to ordinary Russians, and he told stories that had relevance to their lives. You have bad roads and poor health care, he told Russians, because they have hockey rinks and hookah bars.”
One in four Russians had seen Putin’s Palace within a month of its release. To date it has been viewed 129 million times, Applebaum reports.
Humor, ridicule and anger
Humor and ridicule punctured Putin’s flimsy facade, but a darker undercurrent also flowed through Navalny’s defiant speeches and online posts: anger.
It went back to his early days as a Moscow real estate lawyer and financial blogger, when he began to discover the true magnitude of Putin’s and his fellow oligarchs’ thievery. They had robbed common Russians of their money and their chance at post-Soviet freedom — all because of their greed for wealth and power.
“I can’t stop myself from fiercely, wildly hating those who sold, pissed away and squandered the historic chance that our country had in the early ‘90s” after the Soviet Union fell, Navalny said in an interview.
Unlike the Bolsheviks and the Soviet communists, “contemporary Russia doesn’t have ideology, doesn’t have any idea to sell,” observes Navalny’s longtime friend, journalist/activist Yevgenia Albats, in an interview with Politico. “They can sell corruption, they can export corruption, but that’s it.”
Navalny’s fury also fell upon those who “look the other way” — servile judges, state functionaries, common Russians who refuse out of fear or passivity to stand up to Putinism.
“You have one, God-given life, and this is what you choose to spend it on?”
“You have one, God-given life, and this is what you choose to spend it on?” he asked the judge and court officers who sentenced him last summer to an additional 19 years in prison on trumped-up charges.
During his sentencing in another trial a decade ago, Navany declared to his accusers: “On one side of (the battlefield) are the crooks who have seized power in our country, and on the other are people who want to change this. We are fighting over the people who look the other way, the people who shrug their shoulders, the people who are in a situation where all they have to do is not do something cowardly, who do it anyway.”
Such is the “banality of evil,” as political philosopher Hannah Arendt famously observed when writing about the vast number of ordinary Germans who enabled the Nazis to carry out the Holocaust. Or the multitude of Russians who helped run the Soviet-era Gulag prison camps, where millions suffered and died. Or the willing minions required to operate any police state.
Live not by lies
Navalny declined to participate in the banality, the lying and being lied to.
“I am standing here and am prepared to stand here as many times as I have to to prove to all of you that I don’t want to tolerate these lies,” he told a sentencing court in 2014. “I refuse. Do you understand that everything we are being told is a lie?”
Vladimir Putin
In this courageous declaration he echoed the late, great Russian writer and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who nearly died in Stalin’s Gulag before helping bring down the Soviet empire with his powerful books. “Live not by lies,” Solzhenitsyn often said. Do not participate in the lie. If enough people join you, the lie will be exposed for what it is.
So Navalny returned to Russia after his near-miraculous recovery from the 2020 poisoning. He knew he would be arrested — and likely imprisoned until Putin’s fall or death. He didn’t want to leave his beloved wife and children again (you can watch the poignant days they spent embracing, laughing, teasing each other and planning for the future during his recovery in Germany, as captured in the Navalny documentary).
Among the scores of books he voraciously devoured during his final imprisonment, Navlany re-read Solzhenitsyn’s classic novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, about a typical zek (inmate) trying to survive a single day of his long sentence in the freezing Gulag. That was true horror, Navalny wrote to a friend, worse than what he was temporarily experiencing — which included some 300 days in solitary confinement.
Toward the end, when they took him to the “Polar Wolf” camp north of the Arctic Circle, he shivered in a cold, damp cell. But he kept writing letters to friends and eagerly awaiting their replies, kept asking questions, kept arguing and debating with his correspondents, kept preparing for leadership once he was released through the study of political biographies.
Hunger and thirst
His tormentors made sure he was constantly hungry, he wrote. They brought him the meals he had ordered but dumped them out in his sight, leaving him with stale bread and three hot cups of water a day — one for morning coffee, one for packaged soup and one for the evening. They put mentally ill inmates in his cell, hoping to provoke him to violence.
He never was allowed to see his wife after May 2022.
In his closing statement during his 2021 trial, Navalny surprised many by declaring his faith.
“The fact is that I am now a Christian.”
“The fact is that I am now a Christian, which usually sets me up as an example of constant ridicule in the Anti-Corruption Foundation (the nonprofit he founded), because most of our people are atheists, and I was once quite a militant atheist myself,” he said.
“But now I am a believer, and that helps me a lot in my activities, because everything becomes much easier. … There are fewer dilemmas in my life, because there is a book in which it is more or less clearly written what action to take in every situation. It’s not always easy to follow this book, of course, but I’m actually trying.”
He went on to quote Jesus’ words in this book: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.”
Navalny hungered for truth, to be sure, and he thirsted for freedom — whether spiritual or political.
Now he’s gone. But we’re still here, and we face a cascade of lies and threats to freedom throughout the supposedly free world — fueled by the likes of Putin and his friends in the West. You know who they are. If we submit to the lies while we still have the freedom to resist them, Navalny will rightly condemn us from the grave.
Watch Navalny in his memory. Look into his clear eyes. Listen to his words — the hopeful ones and the angry ones. And act.
Remember what he said: You are not allowed to give up.
Erich Bridges, a Baptist journalist for more than 40 years, has covered international stories and trends in many countries. He lives in Richmond, Va.
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