What Navalny Represented
With his death, the curtain continues to close on the idea that a better Russia is around the corner.
There’s the narrative of how Russia is supposed to be saved. And then there’s what actually happens in Russia.
In the narrative of how Russia is supposed to be saved, there are a few grand gestures:
President Boris Yeltsin standing on the tank in opposition to the Communist coup of 1991.
Journalist Anna Politkovskaya relentlessly exposing corruption in the post-Cold War era.
Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov linking arms with opposition leaders, and, with the simple words, “Let’s go,” marching towards the Central Election Commission and facing expected arrest.
Opposition leader Alexei Navalny, unbowed by a poisoning attempt, having just released a triumphant documentary in which he catches his own would-be assassins, flying back to Russia to show Putin how unafraid he is.
The video Navalny released from the plane can stand in for two decades’ worth of reformist aspirations in Russia. In a line taken from Brother 2—the action movie that captured the mood of Russia in the 1990s—Navalny and his wife Yulia rip off their Covid masks when asked if they would like water. “Bring us vodka,” says Yulia. “We’re going home.”
Within hours, the optimism, the puckishness, of that video would play very differently. Navalny, on his arrival in Sheremetyevo Airport, was met by police and carried off to prison. After three years in captivity, much of it in solitary confinement, he died on Friday.
And, with that, Navalny joins the long litany of Russia-as-it-actually-is. Yeltsin collapsing into alcoholism and cronyism in his stint as Russia’s first democratic president—eventually giving way to Putin. Politkovskaya gunned down in the elevator of her apartment building—an assassination widely seen as a birthday present for Putin. Kasparov beaten with a chessboard after entering politics and eventually driven out of Russia; his fellow opposition leader Boris Nemtsov assassinated within sight of the Kremlin. And now Navalny, never cowed, dying at the age of 47 in an Arctic prison.
Navalny was a direct link to Russia’s moment of liberal optimism in the ‘90s. With his death, that thread really is cut: Putin’s work is complete. Russia has returned to being exactly the autocracy it was before the Soviet Union fell.
What Navalny represented was the idea that Putin’s stranglehold on civil society wasn’t some historical inevitability—that it was an aberration. His documentary films, which sometimes had upwards of 100 million views on YouTube, seemed always to radiate a healthy common sense. Their message was that Putin isn’t really some neo-Stalinist mastermind of terror. He is, at heart, just a grifter: The kleptocratic tendencies of the ‘90s had been consolidated in a top-down enrichment scheme, with everybody in power robbing Russia blind but without being particularly talented at it.
Navalny’s exposés delighted in uncovering, for instance, just how long Putin had spent renovating his palace in the Krasnodar region; just how lacking in taste Putin and his various oligarchs really are; just how much each of them is in thrall to their mistresses, to their entourages. “More money is constantly needed. Buy this yacht, buy this apartment. The pipe is burst, it needs to be redone. And the contractor asks for more. And the children are growing up. And everyone needs their own house. And everyone has colossal appetites. It really is endless,” Navalny said in one of his videos.
The apotheosis of Navalny’s sensibility came when he unmasked his own would-be assassins on camera. In a smirking press conference, Putin implied that the Russian security services were fully capable of offing anyone they wanted to—but that wasn’t the impression given by the befuddled FSB chemist Konstantin Kudryavtsev who answered the phone early one morning and, convinced by Navalny’s playacting, gave him a comprehensive account of the botched assassination attempt. This was the point Navalny wanted to make: that these “special agents,” government assassins, were really just small, harried men who would snap to for anyone with an official tone in their voice.
Navalny believed that the spell could be broken, that the Russian people could stop seeing the Putin regime as their leaders or even, in some sense, as their oppressors—that they could just view them as parasites and, in some healthy revolution of good sense, could restore the “real Russia,” the Russia that for a moment in the early ‘90s seemed so close at hand.
But it didn’t happen—at least not in Navalny’s lifetime. The issue is that the Russian people simply didn’t buy what Navalny was saying. Putin represented stability and strength after the chaotic ‘90s, and no inconvenient exposé could dent that. Polls—considered more meaningful than election results—consistently show Putin with around 80% popularity. As Lev Gudkov, Russia’s foremost independent pollster, puts it, “Russian society is amoral.” In a word, the liberalism of the ‘90s lost completely.
The puckish sensibility defined much of Navalny’s career and public persona: the prank he used with the FSB chemist; the spoof of Brother 2; the tireless good humor with which he prodded and goaded Putin, even long after his imprisonment. When the director of the documentary Navalny pressed him for a statement to be released in the event of his death, he responded: “Please let there be another movie, movie number two … and in the event I am killed, let’s make a boring movie of memory.”
But Navalny always knew that “movie number two” was unlikely to be made, and that the familiar Russian script would instead play itself out: the policemen waiting for him the moment he landed; his emaciated face in the last images released of him; his mother begging the prison authorities to release his body. The real point of Navalny is that he didn’t let any of that faze him.
In Brother 2, the hero, a philosophically-minded hitman, meditates on the nature of power: “Tell me: What is power? Is it money? I think that power is in truth. Whoever has truth on their side is stronger.”
The hitman doesn’t know the answer himself—he’s just testing out hypotheses. When it comes to an act of courage, you never really know if it will lead to anything. Maybe there will be some shining democratic movement in Russia; maybe it will just forever be policemen waiting at passport control.
As far as Navalny was concerned, that wasn’t his problem. What mattered was truth and right, and the truth alone gives you strength. It might make no practical difference, it might come nowhere close to saving Russia, but it is well worth the sacrifice of one’s life.
Sam Kahn is an associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia, where a version of this piece was originally published.
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Admit it. The same people that rant about Putin and what happened to Navalny support the exact same things being done by the American Democrat political establishment against Donald Trump.
Sure, but shame on you for taking "opinion polls" in Russia at face value. The pollsters do what they can, but even before the war started, they were getting 90+ percent refusal rates; supposedly much higher now. And there are good reasons not to regard the 3 or 5% who do respond as either representative or truthful. Go see what e.g. the Russian sociologist Yekaterina Schulman says about this (now in exile in Berlin).