As of: March 10, 2024, 10:33 a.m
From: Foreign Policy
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After the death of Alexei Navalny, the West must avoid pinning its hopes on a single Russian dissident.
Because nationalism is deeply rooted.
With Navalny's death, the supposed last hope for a democratic Russia dies
For all of Alexei Navalny's courage, his Russian nationalist politics should not be overlooked
For years, Navalny refused to condemn Vladimir Putin's 2014 annexation of Crimea
Lessons for the West: History shows that you cannot put all your hope in one individual for Russia to become a democratic country
This article is available for the first time in German - it was first published by
Foreign Policy
magazine on March 1, 2024 .
Moscow – In recent weeks, the death of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny has led to a wave of mourning and appreciation.
And rightly so.
Navalny's death in a Siberian gulag has nipped in the bud what many saw as the clearest path to Russia's eventual democratization.
No one imagined that Navalny would somehow win Russia's upcoming elections, while President Vladimir Putin's re-election was all but certain.
But there were many, especially in the West, who saw in Navalny a figure comparable to Nelson Mandela, who would lead his country into a bright, democratic future after a long period of imprisonment.
Now this dream is over.
And a possible democratization of Russia seems to have become even more distant and unlikely.
After Navalny's death: clear lesson for the West
But as the remaining Russian opposition continues to search for new strategies to employ in the wake of Navalny's death, hopefully a clear lesson has emerged for those in the West.
It is too risky to pin all hopes of democratizing a country on one person.
Flowers in memory of the late Kremlin critic.
© IMAGO
It's not just about the fact that a single person can be killed, as in the case of Navalny.
It's also about the fact that despite all the courage that Navalny has shown, his policies also had clear errors and weaknesses.
Still, to be clear: Navalny has shown more courage than most people will ever know.
While Navalny proved to be Putin's most capable political opponent, he also displayed many of the same revanchist tendencies that drove Russia into Ukraine in the first place - a reality that far too many in the West choose to ignore or downplay.
Russian nationalism is deeply rooted: even Navalny must be viewed critically
But this reality can no longer be overlooked.
Because Russian nationalism brought the most destructive conflict in Europe since the Second World War.
And brought the world closer to a potential nuclear conflict than anything else in recent decades.
Anyone who shows these tendencies, as Navalny has for years, must consequently be treated with caution.
The clearest lesson from Russia's Ukraine war should be to listen much more to what Ukrainians say about Navalny and other leaders of Russia's anti-Putin opposition.
Western interlocutors generally need to listen more to warnings and analyzes from former Russian colonies.
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All of this points to a clear realization from the last few weeks: after Navalny's death, it is time for the West to abandon the idea that a Mandela-type figure will emerge in Russia.
Instead of pinning its hopes on a single future leader, the West should diversify.
The West would be far better served by confronting the threat of Russian irredentism and finally focusing on eliminating Russian nationalism as a political force once and for all.
Russia's history shows that individuals quickly succumb to imperialist tendencies
Ironically, the West's willingness to pin all its hopes on a single, conspicuous figure in Moscow - while simultaneously turning away when that figure's imperialist tendencies become apparent - hardly began with Navalny.
This phenomenon can be traced back to the late Soviet Union, when the administrations of both former presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. strongly supported Mikhail Gorbachev and his domestic policy reforms.
Of course, Gorbachev's policy portfolio, including achievements such as glasnost (or "openness," which referred to greater transparency and the relaxation of state censorship), was far better than that of his predecessors.
But as Gorbachev's forces slaughtered anti-regime protesters in countries like Kazakhstan, Georgia and Lithuania, the West barely batted an eyelid and embraced Gorbachev even tighter - blinding the West to the anti-colonial movements that were emerging across the Soviet Union.
These movements, which the United States actively sought to suppress, eventually brought down the Soviet empire entirely, catching Washington off guard and leaving Gorbachev a man without a country.
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Yeltsin establishes the super-presidential system: Putin sticks to it
Under the Clinton administration, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington pinned its hopes of democratizing Russia on Boris Yeltsin, the newly elected president.
Amid the Soviet ruins, Yeltsin was the clear leader of the emerging Russian Federation and a man who, at least rhetorically, hinted at democratic aspirations.
But then, in his first term, Yeltsin's authoritarian nationalism came to the fore.
Not only did he shut down parliament and introduce the super-presidential system that Putin later adopted, but he also refused to withdraw Russian troops from eastern Moldova.
He also oversaw armed intervention in North Georgia.
While at the same time he threatened to redraw Russia's borders with both Ukraine and Kazakhstan if the former colonies did not comply with Moscow's orders.
After Chechens voted for independence from Moscow, Yeltsin launched a devastating campaign to crush Chechen separatists in 1994 - an invasion that he and Putin would repeat late in the decade and that resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties.
Disturbing similarities between Navalny and his reformist predecessors
All the while, U.S. officials offered virtually no criticism of Yeltsin.
An academic analysis of the era states: "The Clinton administration saw no alternatives to Yeltsin and was prepared to support him in every way." Of course, there are gaping differences between Navalny and these predecessors, not least the fact that Navalny never came anywhere near power.
Yet there are troubling similarities between them, which the West continually downplays, but which are easy to see in both current and former Russian satellite states.
Navalny, for example, was a clear Russian nationalist.
In addition to supporting Moscow's invasion of Georgia in 2008 and calling Georgians "rodents," he also used other ethnic slurs to describe other people from the Caucasus.
Additionally, he described himself as someone who would remove “non-white immigrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus through ruthless deportation,” as journalist Terrell Jermaine Starr wrote in 2021.
Navalny would have retained control of Crimea as president
Most notorious is Navalny, who not only refused for years to condemn Moscow's initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, but also dodged questions about whether Russia should return the Ukrainian region of Crimea to Kiev.
Even if he had been elected president, he said in 2014, he would maintain Moscow's control over Crimea.
It was not until 2023, nearly a decade after the Kremlin first invaded Ukraine, that Navalny called for the restoration of Ukraine's circa 1991 borders.
This shift was of course welcome.
But the fact that it took a devastating war to do so - a war in which the Kremlin has shed more blood and treasure than in any other war in which Moscow has been involved in the last 80 years.
This serves as clear evidence of how deeply rooted such revanchist views still are, not only among Navalny but even among his supporters.
And the fact that so many in the West have willingly overlooked such backward-looking views hardly reflects the willingness of Western politicians to confront how deep Russian nationalism really runs.
One person cannot lead Moscow to democracy - not even Navalny
But that was back then.
Navalny's death has presented the West with an opportunity to finally abandon the idea that a single person could lead Russia to democracy.
Even in the midst of Russian opposition, Moscow's imperialist madness shimmers.
It is a tragedy that it took Navalny's death to open up this possibility - but it is an opportunity that the West cannot let slip away again.
Former world chess champion Gari Kasparov (l.) and Alexei Navalny protested side by side in Saint Petersburg in 2012 for fair elections.
© IMAGO / ITAR-TASS
In other words: There will be no Russian Mandela.
And if we continue to refuse to confront the problems of Russian nationalism head-on - even among those who oppose Putin - then we risk that a post-Putin Russia will also be put back on imperialist footing and that Europe will once again fall into catastrophe .
Post-Navalny world also means fighting Russian nationalism
That is why, in this post-Navalny world, the West must focus on eradicating Russian nationalism wherever it finds it.
This means that the insights and advice of former Soviet states, such as
B. those in Kiev, need to be even more appreciated;
after all, these former Soviet satellite states have proven to be more far-sighted about Russia than policymakers in Washington or Berlin ever were.
This means recognizing Russian irredentism as a phenomenon that extends far beyond Putin's base and that enjoys far more prestige in Russian politics than the West realizes.
As scholar Mark Galeotti recently noted in his podcast, even among segments of the population that oppose Russia's expanded invasion in 2022, "pretty much every single Russian, whether for or against Putin, believes that (Russia's original annexation Crimea in 2014) was fine.”
Navalny's legacy for the West: A reformer cannot dissuade Russia from nationalism
And that means we must finally abandon the idea that a single figure will win the Russians over to their cause and shake off the yoke and pull of Russian expansionism once and for all.
Not that the West shouldn't support the anti-Putin opposition;
As long as Putin remains in power, the war will continue, and it could get much worse.
But when Putin leaves office, the West cannot put all its money on a single reformer—especially if that means ignoring that reformer's nationalism and ignoring his past support for Putin's invasions.
It is a legacy that Navalny might well have been proud of.
And it is a legacy that will, perhaps for the first time, set Western politicians on the right path - and eventually bring us to the democratic Russia we all so long for.
To the author
Casey Michel
is director of the Human Rights Foundation's anti-kleptocracy program and author of American Kleptocracy: How the US Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History.
Twitter (X): @cjcmichel
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com” on March 1, 2024 - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.