My country and that of Alexei Navalny no longer exist.
A Russia that destroys her children in this way cannot be
a terre des hommes
, a land of men.
This State that calls itself the Russian Federation and brings death and calamity on the entire world and its own population should not exist directly.
In today's Russia, Alexei Navalny was inevitably going to lose his life.
A dictatorship means that the people remain silent and rejoice in the leader's word.
The regime saw a threat to itself in this man, whom it wanted to silence by imprisoning him for more than 20 years.
They tried to poison him, without success.
Now they have executed him.
In Russia there is no official death penalty.
But it does exist: here it is and this is just the beginning.
This criminal power does not care who kills;
to Ukrainians, to their young people mobilized for this deadly assault or to political prisoners.
The “red wheel” that Solzhenitsyn wrote about continues to roll.
Today, after the brutal carnage in Ukraine and the total destruction of the opposition in Russia, it is impossible to imagine what was a possibility just a few years ago: that Navalny could have participated in the electoral campaign and spoken at electoral events for the whole country.
What kind of president would he have been?
Don't know.
It could have been great, but it could also have been a flop.
There would have been only one way to prove it: a free election in which he would have won.
But free elections require free citizens.
Democracy begins with the dignity of the person.
How much human dignity do the majority of the Russian population feel inside?
I will never forget how after an electoral event in a provincial Russian city, a person approached Navalny after he had given his speech and said: “Alexei, I like what you say, I like you.
But first become my president and then I will vote for you.”
Everyone was wondering, and now they will do so with more reason, why Navalny returned to Russia, knowing that he would be arrested.
I say “knowingly” because yes, he knew.
He was a fighter.
He knew he had to go all the way.
But he didn't want to be a victim just for the sake of being one, he didn't want to go to the slaughterhouse, he wanted to win.
He believed that he would win and he infected everyone with this conviction, both those around him and the entire country and far beyond.
In Russia, those who overthrow the regime have always previously been prisoners.
This is what happened in the Revolution of 1917 and this is what happened with the end of Soviet power.
The Soviet regime, which seemed indestructible, collapsed under the books of Solzhenitsyn, a former recluse.
The experience in prison is always beneficial for a Russian politician: whoever was in prison is closer to that “mass of voters” whose entire life is permeated by the “prison culture.”
Navalny's political calculation turned out to be incorrect.
His sacrifice did not impress the majority of Russians who have remained loyal to Putin and done what the regime demanded of them.
I am sure he would have been a good president for the country.
But where could he find a Russia where he could become president?
Such a Russia does not exist today.
Alexei did not really know the country to which he gave his life.
He became a politician after the collapse of the USSR, in that brief historical period in which freedom came to Russia, public life and political life took off, and the free press emerged.
For him, this was his country;
a country where everything was possible.
Navalny corresponded to the typology of a Western politician, someone who knows that he has to fight for the voters' votes, that he has to be a public person and a transparent human being, responsible for his words and who must be held accountable.
But Russian politics doesn't work like that.
In Russia, power is not achieved in elections - these are manipulated anyway - but rather you must go where the real power is.
For some time now, there is a phrase that has become known internationally: the political struggle in Russia is a bulldog fight under the rug.
Navalny could not and did not want to be one of these bulldogs.
He believed that people would follow him in Russia.
This was an idealistic conviction, beautiful but also very naive for this country.
The free and active political life that Alexei devoted himself to in the 1990s was just a whisper on the surface of the Russian ocean, or the gigantic Russian swamp, depending on which metaphor suits you best.
He judged men according to his own parameters.
He assumed that, if for him the rights of the individual, his freedom and his dignity were the most important values in life, these were also the most relevant for others.
He believed he could convince, inspire and guide men towards the future.
And, in fact, tens of thousands of young people followed him.
But the country moved in the opposite direction.
Putin's dream is the rebirth of the USSR.
The country is governed by those who built their careers and lives in the Soviet KGB.
His dream—the revival of the country of his youth—is being carried out before our eyes.
In this country, the citizens obediently lay their heads on the scaffold and sigh: the tsar knows why we die now, and we must die.
In this country, there is no place for Navalny or for any young man who does not want to build his life in the gulag but in freedom.
If Alexei had known what would happen after his arrest;
If he had known that the opposition would lose completely, that the regime would start an abominable war against Ukraine and that the majority of the population would support this atrocity, would he have dared to take this step again?
Would he have returned to Russia to go to prison and allow himself to be murdered?
Don't know.
But I suspect he would have.
Well, there have always been, there are and there will be people who pursue a goal that matters more to them than their own lives.
Alexei Navalny helped all of us.
He gave us hope thanks to his existence, his willingness to not give up and endure until the end.
Now we are his hope.
Mijaíl Shishkin
is a Russian writer, winner of some of the most relevant awards in Russia, and also winners in Germany, France and Italy.
Since the nineties he has lived in Zurich.
He is considered a literary and dissident reference.
Translation by
Pablo Alejandro Arias
.
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