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A handwritten note lies at a makeshift vigil outside the Russian Embassy in honor of Russian lawyer, activist and opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who recently died in the remote Arctic penal colony where he was imprisoned.
© Edna Leshowitz/IMAGO
With Navalny's death, the opposition in Russia is headless - and Putin is a lonely ruler.
But for him the Kremlin critic remains dangerous.
Moscow – There is a heartbreaking hope among Alexei Navalny's friends and admirers: that his legacy will live on.
Navalny, 47, was Russia's Nelson Mandela, an inspiring champion of freedom and reform who in 2021 chose state imprisonment in Russia over a life of exile.
The charismatic and tireless Navalny had examined President Vladimir Putin's kleptocratic regime, ridiculed its corrupt and incompetent apparatchiks and, with the help of a network of independent activists and journalists, conveyed to countless Russians a vision of a bourgeois future that went beyond the authoritarian demagogue whose Reign will probably extend into a fourth decade.
His popularity reached far beyond the liberal-minded elites in cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Navalny's death: Putin's actions were anything but surprising
For this reason, Navalny died in the hands of the state.
The celebrated dissident, who was housed in an obscure prison in the Arctic Circle, suffered from poor health for months and died last Friday, Russian authorities said.
His wife Yulia accused Putin of murder.
President Biden said what happened to Navalny was evidence of “Putin’s brutality.”
Conversely, the Kremlin blames the West.
Navalny's death was both shocking and unsurprising.
He joins a long, tragic story of Kremlin opponents being swallowed up by the Gulag, but his message was so strong and his skills as an ambassador so unparalleled that it was easy to imagine him recalling Mandela's story of eventual liberation and could participate in political victory.
But that wasn't the case.
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Protest in Russia: Navalny's idea lives beyond his death
Over the weekend, mourners searched for meaning in his loss.
“Navalny dreamed of a free Russia,” wrote Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, in an op-ed in the
Washington Post
.
“Barbaric dictators like Putin can kill people, but they cannot kill ideas.”
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“Even behind bars, Navalny was a real threat to Putin because he was living proof that courage is possible, that there is truth, that Russia could be a different kind of country,” wrote Anne Applebaum of
The Atlantic
.
Putin weakened after Navalny's death?
Analysts see the opposite
At the moment, Russia is undeniably Putin's country.
The Russian president is now in the third year of his war in Ukraine and has withstood international sanctions, geopolitical isolation from the West and a brazen rebellion by a prominent mercenary.
The edifice of his power remains intact, while those who threaten it face even harsher consequences than in an earlier phase of his rule.
“It is tempting to see Navalny’s apparent assassination, as some American analysts have done, as a sign of Putin’s weakness,” Masha Gessen wrote in the
New Yorker
magazine .
“But a dictator's ability to destroy what he fears is a measure of his position of power, as is his ability to choose the moment to strike.
Putin appears to be optimistic about his own future.”
Indeed, Putin will win a new presidential mandate next month in an electoral farce in which every serious challenger has been disqualified.
The opposition is intimidated, suppressed and scattered;
fewer Russians than in previous years are willing to take to the streets.
Putin also has reason to smile at politics in the West, as Republican lawmakers in the United States block new U.S. funding for Ukraine and sympathetic far-right parties gain traction across Europe.
“Putin is left alone now,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based senior research fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
“He is solus rex, the lonely king.
No one can stop him from triumphing.”
First Nemtsov, then Navalny: mourning the Kremlin critics is becoming a tightrope walk in Russia
Analysts saw a connection between Navalny's death and the 2015 assassination of leading Putin critic Boris Nemtsov, who was shot while walking across a bridge in Moscow.
Nemtsov's assassination seemed to signal a change in the nature of Putin's rule;
The despot in the Kremlin could no longer be satisfied with rigged elections and a judiciary that worked according to his whims.
Nemtsov was a respected supporter of reform and an opponent of Russia's capture of Crimea the year before and the start of a pro-Russian uprising in southeastern Ukraine.
“In the years since Nemtsov's assassination, Russia has moved - to put it in the language of political science - from a dictatorship of deception to a dictatorship of fear and then, after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, to an outright dictatorship of terror developed, similar to the one that ruled the Soviet Union with an iron hand for much of the 20th century,” wrote Alexander Baunow in the
Financial Times
.
Public mourning for Navalny is itself a risky act. At least 366 people have been arrested in 36 cities across Russia for expressing their sympathy.
On the bridge where Nemtsov was murdered and which has become a kind of unofficial memorial, vigilantes loyal to the regime tore up flowers and candles that had been placed by Navalny's supporters.
“People are just constantly afraid,” a 24-year-old mourner in Moscow who identified herself as Julia told the
Washington Post
.
“This is a dictatorship where you can’t express yourself.”
Murder is part of Putin's toolbox
It is hard to imagine anyone being able to mobilize the mass rallies that Navalny himself organized in earlier years.
“Street protests can only work if millions of people take to the streets,” said Gennady Gudkov, a leading Russian opposition politician now living in exile in Paris.
“But because people are not organized and have no resources, no newspapers, no political leaders, no parties or unions, there is nothing.”
This situation is intentional; it is the result of Putin's relentless tightening of his fist.
“In some ways, Navalny’s death marks the culmination of years of efforts by the Russian state to eliminate all sources of opposition,” Andrei Soldierov and Irina Borogan wrote in
Foreign Affairs
.
“For more than two decades, Putin has made political assassination an essential part of the Kremlin’s toolbox.”
And yet Navalny has left an indelible impression.
Millions of Russians turn to his allies in exile for news and accurate information about their country.
On social media - an area in which Navalny was both a pioneer and a king - there is a wealth of forums and discussions on topics otherwise hushed up by the state.
“Even now,” Soldierov and Borogan conclude, “the forces that Navalny unleashed are unlikely to disappear.”
To the author
Ishaan Tharoor
is a foreign policy columnist at The Washington Post, where he writes the Today's WorldView newsletter and column.
In 2021, he was awarded the Arthur Ross Media Award in Commentary by the American Academy of Diplomacy.
Previously, he was a senior editor and correspondent at Time Magazine, first in Hong Kong and later in New York.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on February 19, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.