Alexei Navalny RIP

Commentator

There’s the narrative of how Russia is supposed to be saved. And then there’s what actually happens in Russia. 

In the narrative of how Russia is supposed to be saved, there are a few grand gestures: 

-There’s Yeltsin on the tank talking down the Communist coup.

-There’s Anna Politkovskaya relentlessly exposing corruption. 

-There’s Garry Kasparov linking arms with opposition leaders, and, with the simple words, “Let’s go,” marching towards the Central Election Commission and facing near-certain arrest. 

-There’s Alexei Navalny, unbowed by a poisoning attempt, having just released a triumphant documentary in which he catches his own would-be assassins, flying back to Russia entirely to show Putin how unafraid he is.

The video Navalny releases from the plane can stand in for two-decades’ worth of reformist aspirations in Russia. In a line from Brat 2 — the action series that captured the mood of Russia in the ‘90s — Navalny and his wife Yulia rip off their Covid masks when asked if they would like water. “Bring us vodka,” says Yulia. “We’re going home.” 

Within hours, the optimism, the puckishness, of that video, would play very differently. Navalny, on his arrival in Sheremetyevo Airport, was met by police and carried off to prison. After three years in captivity, much of it in solitary confinement, he died on Friday. 

And, with that, Navalny joins the long litany of Russia-as-it-is. Yeltsin collapsing into alcoholism and cronyism in his stint as Russia’s first democratic president — eventually giving way to Putin. Politkovskaya gunned down in the elevator of her apartment building — with the assassination widely seen as a birthday present for Putin. Kasparov beaten with a chessboard after entering politics and eventually driven out of Russia; his fellow opposition leader Boris Nemtsov assassinated within sight of the Kremlin. And Navalny, never cowed, dying at age 47 in an Arctic prison. 

“Everybody else gave up but for some reason he just didn’t,” I remember being told about Navalny. He represented the direct link to Russia’s moment of liberal optimism in the 1990s. With his death, that thread really is cut: Putin’s work is complete. Russia has returned to being exactly the autocracy it was before the Soviet Union fell. 

I think it’s in danger of being completely forgotten — just how optimistic that spirit of the ‘90s really was. There was the explosion of energy that went into the end of the Soviet Union. A movie like Sergei Solovyov’s Assa conveys it perfectly: the closing scene with Victor Tsoi singing his heart out to ‘Changes’ — “Our hearts are calling for changes / Our eyes are calling for changes” — and then the camera spinning out to a vast crowd shining their candles and cigarette lighters. There was a freedom in art — the way, as Emmanuel Carrère describes it, “Russians were seized by a reading frenzy….They read as if possessed by what they’d struggled so hard to get their hands on.” By the time I became aware of it in the 2010s, there was a theater scene that was freer and wilder — and more passionately followed — than anything that existed anywhere in the West. 

That spirit always had a tragic aspect to it. Tsoi wouldn’t even make it to the end of the Soviet Union — he died in a car crash in 1990 at age 28. The cultural paradise that seemed to be promised in the early ‘90s disappeared in economic collapse and gangsters’ shootouts. With Putin’s ascension to the presidency in 2000, the screws slowly, inexorably tightened on the civil sphere. All artists and free thinkers in Russia have either had to leave or make their compromises with the regime. 

What Navalny represented was the idea that Putin’s stranglehold on civil society wasn’t some historical inevitability — that it was an aberration. His documentary films — which sometimes had upwards of 100 million views on YouTube — seemed always to radiate a healthy common sense. Putin wasn’t really some neo-Stalinist mastermind of terror. He was, at heart, just a grifter: the kleptocratic tendencies of the ‘90s had been consolidated in a top-down enrichment scheme, with everybody in power robbing Russia blind but without being particularly talented at it. Navalny’s exposés delighted in uncovering, for instance, just how long Putin had spent renovating his palace in Krasnodar; just how lacking in taste Putin and his various oligarchs really were; how much each of them were in thrall to their mistresses, to their entourages. “More money is constantly needed. Buy this yacht, buy this apartment. The pipe was burst, it needs to be redone. And the contractor asks for more. And the children are growing up. And everyone needs their own house. And everyone has colossal appetites. It really is endless,” Navalny said in one of his videos.

His premise was that the spell could be broken, that the Russian people could stop seeing the Putin regime as their leaders or even, in some sense, as their oppressors — that they could just view them as parasites and, in some healthy revolution of good sense, could restore the ‘real Russia,’ the Russia that for a moment in the early ’90s seemed so close at hand. 

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But it didn’t happen — at least not in Navalny’s lifetime. The issue is that the Russian people, by all possible accounts, simply didn’t buy what Navalny was saying. Putin represented stability and strength after the chaotic ‘90s. Polls — considered more meaningful than election results — consistently showed Putin with around 80% popularity. As Lev Gudkov, Russia’s foremost independent pollster, put it, “Russian society is amoral.” In a word, the liberalism of the 1990s lost completely. 

The puckish sensibility defined much of Navalny’s career and public persona — the “prank way” by which he got one of his assassins to reveal the entirety of the hit to Navalny himself; the cartoon that he and Yulia watched on their return to Russia; the spoof of Brat 2; the tireless good humor with which he tweaked and goaded Putin, even long after his imprisonment. “Please let this be another movie, movie number two, and in the case I would be killed let’s make a boring movie of memory,” he said when the director of the documentary Navalny pressed him for a statement to be released in the event of his death.

But Navalny did always know that “movie number two” was unlikely to be made and that the familiar Russian script would play itself out: the policemen waiting for him the moment he landed; his emaciated face in the last images released of him; his mother begging the prison authorities to release his body. The real point of Navalny is that he didn’t let any of that faze him.

In Brat 2 — the film that was on the Navalnys’ mind on their return to Russia — the hero, a philosophically-minded hitman, meditates on the nature of power: “Tell me: what is power? Is it money? I think that power is in truth. Whoever has truth on their side is stronger.”

The hero of Brat 2 doesn’t know himself — he’s just testing out hypotheses. With an act of courage, you never really know if it will lead to anything — maybe there will be some shining democratic movement in Russia; maybe it will just forever be policemen waiting at passport control. As far as Navalny was concerned, that wasn’t his problem. What mattered was truth and right, and the truth alone gave you strength. It might make no practical difference, it might come nowhere close to saving Russia, but it was well worth the sacrifice of one’s life.