The voice of the opposition that endures in Russia has not been completely extinguished with the strange death of the dissident Alexei Navalny.
The Civic Initiative party failed to get its candidate, Boris Nadezhdin, permission to compete with Vladimir Putin in the March elections, but it managed to attract the attention of hundreds of thousands of Russians and is now another headache for the Kremlin within its own system.
“The death of Alexei Navalny is a political assassination regardless of the specific reasons for his death.
His imprisonment for political reasons and the numerous harassment bordering on torture to which he was subjected in the penal colonies led to his tragic end," the group denounced in a harsh statement in which, in compliance with Russian laws, it repeats the obligatory mention that the dissident was “declared an extremist and terrorist by the Ministry of Justice.”
The causes of Navalni's death have not been clarified.
The newspaper
Nóvaya Gazeta Europa
, declared an “undesirable organization” by the Kremlin, has revealed some unverified details about what happened on the day of his death.
According to a doctor from the ambulance service of the hospital where the dissident's mortal remains were taken, there were several bruises on his body.
“I have a lot of experience and, from how they described them to me, they were caused by seizures,” he said.
Likewise, a prisoner at the IK-3 prison in Jarp, where the dissident was held when he died, told the same media that all the prisoners were forced to lock themselves in their cells the night before the event and “there was a lot of commotion” in the prison. .
According to his version, they learned of Navalni's death "around ten in the morning", a couple of hours before the official version.
“We demand the immediate release of political prisoners and a radical reform of Russia's judicial and penitentiary systems,” Civic Initiative claimed in its message.
The party, with liberal tendencies and founded by the first Minister of Economy that post-Soviet Russia had, Andrei Nechayev, maintained “political differences” with Navalny, although the two movements agreed that Russian citizens should vote for another alternative candidate to Putin in the presidential elections from the 15th to the 17th and not boycott them.
“I have no words, I just cry,” the Civic Initiative candidate said this weekend upon learning of Navalni's death.
“It's a shock.
It is awful.
My deepest condolences to Yulia – the dissident's wife – and the children,” added Nadezhdin, whose surprise nomination as an independent candidate mobilized Russians fed up with the Kremlin.
The politician obtained more than 200,000 signatures to run in the elections, but the central electoral commission rejected his application on the grounds that thousands of them allegedly presented irregularities.
The opposition, however, believes that it was a direct veto from the Kremlin, in particular from one of Putin's closest presidential advisors, statesman Sergei Kiriyenko.
“Many signatures were rejected due to discrepancies between the signatory's passport data and the certificate from the Ministry of the Interior.
We contacted all the people to clarify the data and defend their signatures.
“I do not agree with the electoral commission's refusal to register, and that is why I will challenge the decision before the Supreme Court,” Nadezhdin announced this Saturday on his candidacy website.
Nadezhdin finds himself in a difficult situation.
Any kind of protest, no matter how small, is swept away by the police, and most politicians who have disagreed with the Kremlin over the invasion of Ukraine have been thrown in jail.
After Navalny's death, which many Russians consider a murder, all attention is on him, including Putin's.
“I have a plan B and a plan C,” the opponent told the independent newspaper Nastoyaschee Vremia
a week ago .
Definitely, on my part there will be no unauthorized demonstrations, m
aidans
[in reference to the Kiev protests of 2014 that ended with the flight of President Viktor Yanukovych].”
Neither Putin nor the Communist Party, the second largest party in the State Duma, have yet commented on Navalny's death.
Yes, the presidential candidate of the populist Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia, Leonid Slutski, did so, accusing the West of using the death of the dissident against the Kremlin;
and the New People candidate, Vladislav Davankov.
This last political party, founded in 2021 and which Putin has allowed to run in the elections, has shown some moderation by negotiating some type of collaboration with Nadezhdin and lamenting the death of Navalny.
The harshness of the statement in which the Civic Initiative denounces the “political murder” of the opponent is striking.
The Kremlin has tried to extinguish any symbol of protest these days.
At least 366 people have been arrested in 39 cities in the country, according to the organization OVD-Info, when they were placing flowers at monuments to the victims of political repression.
“I don't understand, it's not even a demonstration, everyone comes here and is quiet.
"Why are they detaining people?" lamented a 28-year-old girl next to the Wall of Pain -
Stena skorbi
, in Russian - a monument inaugurated by Putin in 2017 in which an infinite number of faceless human figures seem to march to Hades. after having been victims of Stalin.
Hours later, late at night, several officials collected all the flowers and threw them in the trash under an intense snowfall and the resigned gaze of the police in charge of guarding the place.
Nadezhdin's great challenge
“The statement has been a very bold step.
Nadezhdin is inside the country and it is very risky behavior,” renowned Russian political scientist Ekaterina Shulman tells EL PAÍS.
“Before collecting his signatures, he was on the political scene for almost 30 years, but he was not a figure that was in the foreground.
Now he is and his statements draw attention, he enjoys high visibility and potential influence,” she adds in a telephone conversation in which she warns that the risks of the opponent, as long as he remains within the country, " they are very big ".
Shulman points out that the Kremlin took note of the huge queues of citizens who supported Nadezhdin with their signatures and wanted to avoid taking risks with Navalny alive before the March elections.
“He thought that the president's team would draw conclusions after the elections about what happened to Nadezhdin, thinking that he was harmless and in the end he received a wave of popular support, but it is obvious that it has happened before.”
“Decision-making has completely passed into the hands of people who only think in terms of force and have two recipes to solve any problem: open a criminal case or murder,” warns Shulman.
“The authorities follow the principle
no person, no problem,
and thought they could not afford to take any risks before the elections because the public mood is volatile,” he adds, although he warns that social unrest can catch on from anywhere: “Dissatisfied people rush to look for any alternative, they take advantage of any opportunity to express in some way their disagreement with what is happening.”
“Under these conditions, having a person who can, even behind bars, call on the population to behave in a certain way during elections is too dangerous.
It is better to terrify them all so that they are paralyzed with fear.
Then, the elections will be held calmly.
“This is the Kremlin's logic,” he points out.
The political scientist insists on not making comparisons between Putin and Stalin.
“[The USSR] was a totalitarian regime that was building a kind of new future, but it didn't fit into that future and destroyed it.
This is a kind of social engineering.
“In Russia we face an authoritarian regime that aims to retain power and therefore acts through selective intimidation,” Shulman asserts.
“The repression has not stopped, it has intensified, after two years of war, but the persecution of the opposition for their political activity affects hundreds of people a year.
For a large country, this is selective repression.
This does not make them better, but modern autocracies have neither the need nor the necessary resources to launch massive repressions,” he points out before pointing out the difference “with the USSR, Cambodia or Nazi Germany.”
“There were certain social categories that had to be completely exterminated,” says the political scientist, who emphasizes that “this was a certain stage of history that is not repeated.”
“Putin only seeks to stick to his goals.
Therefore, the one who poses a threat is eliminated.
That's all.
He does not need to transform society into something else,” Shulman concludes.
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