Back in 2013, when the fabricated criminal case against Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was launched, I remembered how my great-grandfather, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, compared Russia to a bowl full of dough. "You put your hand in it, you push it all the way to the bottom and when you take it out, there's a little indentation." But then, "before your eyes", the dough returns to its original state - a "spongy, thick mass". Navalny's death in a remote Arctic penal colony ten years later proves that little has changed.
The prison where Navalny died was one of the most cruel. Dubbed "The Polar Wolf," it's an icy gulag for violent criminals. But Navalny, a lawyer and anti-corruption blogger, was not convicted of violence. In 2013, he fought bogus embezzlement charges and was sent to "Polar Wolf" in 2021 for parole violations, fraud and contempt of court. During his time in prison, he racked up even more convictions on bogus charges, including supporting extremism.
Of course, Navalny's real crime was challenging President Vladimir Putin. From leading protests against rigged parliamentary elections in 2011, to investigating corruption among the Russian elite and trying to topple Putin (in a presidential election from which the authorities excluded him), he has been relentless in his nearly two-decade-long campaign against Putin and his entourage. Many of the trials resembled Stalinist ones, and were designed to create the illusion of a constitutional state and to keep prominent critics off the ballots and television screens. But while the death penalty and the gulag were widely used in Stalin's era, no case against Navalny, no matter how inflated, could justify such a sentence - at least not officially.
The Russian prison service claims that Navalny lost consciousness after the walk and that resuscitation failed despite all the efforts of emergency medical services. But Navalny did not seem "sick" neither the day before, when he testified via video link at the trial, nor the day before, when his lawyer visited him. I don't mean to say that Navalny's death was undoubtedly an assassination attempt ordered by Putin himself; life in the "Polar Wolf" prison would destroy the health of any human being. However, it was Putin who directly or indirectly killed Navalny.
And this wasn't even the first attempt. In the summer of 2020, Navalny was poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent, a Soviet invention, and was flown to Berlin for treatment. He knew that his return to Russia would mean more politically motivated prosecutions, as in the case of former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and punk-rock agitator Pussy Riot. He even knew that he could be killed, like Boris Nemtsov, Anna Politkovska and many others. But he decided to return to Russia to continue his opposition to Putin.
Navalny was arrested immediately after landing in Moscow. The protests that followed, during which tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets to demand Navlny's release, only reinforced the Kremlin's view of him as a threat that must be neutralized. During the rigged trials that followed, no government authority dared even use his name, they called him the "German patient". It was like living in the Harry Potter universe, where the fearsome Lord Voldemort is "he who must not be named."
When I wrote about the sham trials against Navalny in 2013, I suggested that Russia might be developing, albeit slowly. I did not know that this period would later be remembered as the "vegetarian times", during which independent media were stifled but not banned, public protests were punished but not with long prison sentences, and prominent opponents of the Kremlin, such as Navalny, could lead funds for fighting corruption and speaking out against injustice. However, after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin became a carnivore.
Since the beginning of the invasion, almost 300 cases have been opened for "discrediting the Russian armed forces" alone. Today in Russia it is enough to read an anti-war poem to be judged. The tragedy of the despot is that the struggle never ends. The more mock trials the regime organizes, the more it has to produce in order to keep citizens under control. The more repression people endure, the more pressure is needed to avoid a reaction. The more blood is shed, the more blood must flow.
For an authoritarian like Putin, there is no end point - no finish line. He must hold on to power today and do it again tomorrow. So it's reasonable to assume that, ahead of Russia's upcoming sham presidential election next month, Putin's tolerance for opponents will be at an all-time low.
Yes, the elections are expected to go smoothly, and Navalny's death may have attracted more attention than his statements from prison; the possibility remains that the killing was indirect. But the same logic would apply to the poisoning of Russian-British double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, two weeks before the 2018 presidential election. Neither victim posed an immediate threat to Putin, and their deaths generated a great deal of negative international attention. But Putin had to send a signal: enemies, beware.
And again the bowl is full of dough.
The author is a professor of international affairs at the New School of New York University
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024. (translation: NR)
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