Even behind bars, the dissident leader was a threat to the corrupt Russian dictator.

Anne Applebaum

Feb 16, 2014

Alexei Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021. Right before he boarded the plane, he posted a film titled “Putin’s Palace: The Story of the World’s Largest Bribe” on YouTube. The video, nearly two hours long, was an extraordinary feat of investigative reporting. Using secret plans, drone footage, 3-D visualizations, and the testimony of construction workers, Navalny’s video told the story of a hideous $1.3 billion Black Sea villa containing every luxury that a dictator could imagine: a hookah bar, a hockey rink, a helipad, a vineyard, an oyster farm, a church. The video also described the eye-watering costs and the financial trickery that had gone into the construction of the palace on behalf of its true owner, Vladimir Putin.

But the power of the film was not just in the pictures, or even in the descriptions of money spent. 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 other 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.

And Russians listened. A poll conducted in Russia a month after the video appeared revealed that one in four Russians had seen it. Another 40 percent had heard about it. It’s safe to guess that in the three years that have elapsed since then, those numbers have risen. To date, that video has been viewed 129 million times.

That Putin still feared Navalny was clear in December, when the regime moved him to a distant arctic prison to stop him from communicating with his friends and his family. He had been in touch with many people; I have seen some of his prison messages, sent secretly via lawyers, policemen, and guards, just as Gulag prisoners once sent messages in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The enormous contrast between Navalny’s civic courage and the corruption of Putin’s regime will remain. Putin is fighting a bloody, lawless, unnecessary war, in which hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians have been killed or wounded, for no reason other than to serve his own egotistical vision. He is running a cowardly, micromanaged reelection campaign, one in which all real opponents are eliminated and the only candidate who gets airtime is himself. Instead of facing real questions or challenges, he meets tame propagandists such as Tucker Carlson, to whom he offers nothing more than lengthy, circular, and completely false versions of history.

Even behind bars Navalny was a real threat to Putin, because he was living proof that courage is possible, that truth exists, that Russia could be a different kind of country. For a dictator who survives thanks to lies and violence, that kind of challenge was intolerable. Now Putin will be forced to fight against Navalny’s memory, and that is a battle he will never win.

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Navalny.

It took longer than expected, but Putin finally succeeded in ending Alexei Navalny’s life by having his people abuse him until his once strong body gave up.

In contrast his mind never surrendered; indeed, his courage was incredible. After being poisoned by ‘persons unknown’ he was taken to a German hospital where he made an incredible recovery and then to everyone’s surprise returned to Russia in the clear knowledge that he would be arrested, convicted and quite possible killed.

There was an incredible calmness about him as he exposed the Russian legal system’s hypocricy and passively resisted it while at the same time he accepted his fate. It was as though he considered himself to be already dead. With no escape from the tyrant that ruled his country he used his return to provide the Russian people with something they truly loved, – a martyr. For that is what Alexei Navalny is, a martyr, an icon, an idea, a focal point of resistance and if there is one thing can Putin cannot kill, it is a martyr.

Navalny highlighted the corruption that is Putin’s Russia, the dregs of the Soviet Union regurgitated by a man some have appropriately nicknamed ‘Putrid’.

Navalny’s death was deliberate and planned with the intention that any fault could be plausibly deniable. It was (in any western sense of the word) murder.

His name and his ghost, will haunt Vladimir Putin for the rest of his life. There will be no escape, not in his palace, and not in his sleep. The stuff perhaps, of Faustian nightmares, the devil will eventually claim his own.

All Russians are not Putin. All Russians are not Lenin, Stalin or Beria. A lot of Russians are Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn and of course Navalny!

Rest in Peace Алекс.

Who Dares Shares
Robin Horsfall

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