Navalny meets his fateful end

The death of Alexei Navalny is as predictable as it is deplorable. After all, any Russian who becomes a thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime ends up dead.

And Navalny was the thorniest of them all. Not least because of the way he lampooned Putin for living like a czar while pretending to be just a humble public servant.

Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most famous opposition leader, died on Friday after collapsing and losing consciousness at the penal colony north of the Arctic Circle where he was serving a long jail term, the Russian prison service said. Navalny, 47, rose to prominence more than a decade ago by lampooning President Vladimir Putin and the Russian elite whom he accused of vast corruption, avarice and opulence.

‘That’s the difference between me and you: you are afraid and I am not afraid,’ he said [in 2011]. I realize there is danger, but why should I be afraid?’

(Reuters, February 16, 2024)

Remarkably, the media are reporting this as shocking news. It’s anything but. I even predicted his grim fate in commentaries like “Germany Confirms What Everyone Knew: Putin Poisoned Navalny” on September 3, 2020, and “Navalny Withers as Putin Summits” on May 29, 2021.

Navalny now joins the heroes gallery of Russian martyrs. Moreover, his death underscores Putin’s longstanding practice of ruthlessly extinguishing dissent. This gallery includes luminaries such as:

• Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB spy who Putin stealthily poisoned in London in 2006;
• Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who Putin shamelessly killed in her apartment building in Moscow in 2006;
  
• Sergei Magnitsky, the jailed anti-corruption tax advisor who Putin killed in 2009 the way he killed Navalny today; and
  
• Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader who Putin brazenly murdered near the Kremlin in 2015; 

On the other hand, there was Yevgeny Prighozin, the mercenary leader Putin assassinated in spectacular fashion last year. That was Putin showing that he has no compunction about treating comrades who betray him just like dissidents who defy him. Not that anyone harbored any doubt.

Putin, the democratic autocrat

Putin has an ambivalent craving for Western respectability. And it’s laughable. Nothing betrays this quite like the way he orchestrates “democratic” elections. Former Cuban President Fidel Castro produced a similar farce for nearly 50 years. But Putin’s cynical charade would even make Castro laugh. 

Of course, the results of these elections are as fixed as a rigged carnival game. Even so, Putin jails or kills Russians like Navalny because he fears any presidential candidate with more charisma than a cabbage will force him to rig too many votes. 

A glaring example was last month’s disqualification of Boris Nadezhdin from Putin’s quadrennial farce. Nadezhdin, an anti-war crusader, poses a threat Putin can’t tolerate – drawing attention to Russia’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine. After all, Ukrainians are killing as many Russians in defense of their nation as the number of Ukrainians the Russians are killing in a vain attempt to recreate Soviet-style dominion.

Putin upholds his iron-fisted rule through the killing of dissidents and the stifling of dissent, supplemented by a diet of propaganda and election rigging. Yet, these actions unwittingly reveal him as the quintessential dictator –  weak, paranoid, and perpetually terrified of his own people, if not of his own shadow.

Putin wants to be like Kim and Xi

Putin intends to wield in Russia the kind of dystopian control Kim Jong-un wields in North Korea. This fact alone should cause any Westerner in their right mind to hold Putin in existential contempt. 

Yet he enjoys unsettling admiration among right-wingers in America. This smacks of the admiration America Firsters had for Adolf Hitler in the years before WWII.

Leading this Putin fanfare is none other than former President Donald Trump, the Pied Piper of autocratic adoration. Trump unabashedly counts Putin, along with fellow autocrats Kim and Xi, as his closest allies among world leaders.

This admiration is as misplaced as it is shortsighted, blatantly overlooking the suppression of basic freedoms necessary to maintain such a regime. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson threw this into embarrassing relief just last week. Reporting from Moscow, he regaled his social media followers with propaganda tales, extolling how much better life is in autocratic Russia than it is in democratic America. 

Western condemnation rings hollow

Biden is leading the chorus of condemnation from Western leaders. But his outcry reeks of hypocrisy and rings as hollow as a drum.

After all, this echoes the chorus of condemnation he led after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) ordered the assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. 

Biden vowed to make Saudi Arabia a pariah state. Yet, a humbled Biden was soon on a pilgrimage to kiss MbS’s ass for oil. 

Of course, Putin is notorious for killing dissidents and dissent with impunity. So you can bet he reassured his BFF MbS that self-righteous Westerners would get over themselves. 

No doubt that’s the kind of confident contempt Putin has for Biden’s condemnation today. Because he is banking on Western leaders playing out this predictable script of moral grandstanding followed by pragmatic backpedaling.

Navalny: the willful martyr

Navalny faced a stark choice: fight for his cause while living comfortably free in the West, or fight for his cause while dying miserably jailed in Russia. He made his choice. He was brave. He was not afraid. But now, he’s dead. 

Still, his name is now etched in the annals of those who dared to challenge tyranny. More than any other, his death is a bleak testament to the cost of defying autocrats, a sad reminder of the relentless brutality of authoritarian regimes. 

RIP, Alexei Navalny. In your fearless confrontation with an insecure tyrant, you’ve become an enduring symbol of resistance, a beacon for all who dream of freedom.