Alexei Navalny — Perspectives

“Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Henry II *

Alexei Navalny died a year ago today in a Russian prison in the village of Kharp in western Siberia. He was 47. It’s hard to believe it was only a year ago, so quickly has he been forgotten. But oblivion is what Vladimir Putin wanted when he sent Navalny to Polar Wolf, a “regime colony” north of the Arctic Circle – as oblivion is what all autocrats want when for all dissidents.

Polar Wolf is a bleak place, especially in winter. “It hasn’t gotten colder than −32°C [−25.6°F],” Navalny wrote in his diary. “Even at that temperature you can walk for more than half an hour, but only if you are sure you can grow a new nose, ears, and fingers.” He was only allowed to walk in his solitary exercise yard – which was 11 steps by 3 steps – at 6:30 a.m., long before the sun came up.

Polar Wolf was the last leg of a three-and-a-half-year journey that had begun in August 2020, when Navalny was medically evacuated to a German hospital after having been poisoned with the nerve agent, Novichok. He blamed Putin. The following January he returned to Russia, where, even before he had taken a single step on his country’s soil, he was arrested and imprisoned. He was subsequently condemned to an escalating series of prison terms. “The number of years does not matter,” he wrote. “ I understand perfectly well that, like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence. Where ‘life’ is defined by either the length of my life or the length of the life of this regime.” The regime outlived him.

In another time, Nalvany would be considered a hero, a martyr even, for his relentless and principled resistance to Vladimir Putin’s Russian state. But in this age, when “those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them,'" Alexei Navalny is just another loser. The values he displayed – courage, steadfastness, integrity – were once considered part of the rite of passage to adulthood. Now they are scorned.

Nalvany was not perfect. Early in his career he aligned himself with the far-right “Great Russia” nationalist movement, which was stridently and ethnically nationalist, but he later retracted those views. In 2020 he spoke in support of Black Lives Matter. Alexei Nalvany was human. “The ghastliest days in prison are the birthdays of close family, especially children,” he wrote. . . .“But it is on my children’s birthdays that I am particularly aware of why I’m in jail. We need to build the Beautiful Russia of the Future for them to live in. Zakhar, happy birthday! I really miss you and love you very much!”

The opposite of a brave man or a brave woman is not a coward. At some point, we are all afraid. No, the opposite of a brave person is a bully. The brave person confronts injustice. The bully assaults the vulnerable. The brave person stands up to the powerful. The bully picks on the powerless. The brave person is willing to stand alone. The bully piles on.

The murder of Alexei Navalny, which had begun three-and-a-half years earlier with an attempted poisoning, ended on February 16, 2024, in the hospital at Polar Wolf, where he was taken for malnourishment and other ailments he attributed to his mistreatment.

“I’m an optimist,” he wrote from prison, “and I look on the bright side of my dark existence. I have as much fun as I can.”

* After Henry, the King of England and ruler of most of France, allegedly uttered these words, four knights set off from Normandy for Canterbury, where they murdered the archbishop, Thomas Becket, at the altar of his cathedral. The year was 1170.

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