Because of this, Navalny died while in the hands of the state. The famous dissident disappeared into a mysterious Arctic prison, suffered ill health for months and died on Friday, according to Russian authorities. Putin's wife was accused of murder. President Biden said that what happened to Navalny is evidence of Putin's “brutality.”
Navalny's death was both shocking and unsurprising. He joins a long and tragic history of Kremlin opponents swallowed up in labor camps, but his message was so powerful and his skills as a messenger so unrivaled that it was easy to imagine that he could share in Mandela's story of ultimate liberation and political victory. It was not to be.
Over the weekend, mourners searched for the meaning of his loss. “Navalny dreamed of a free Russia,” Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “Barbaric dictators like Putin can kill men, but they cannot kill ideas.”
“Even behind bars, Navalny posed a real threat to Putin, because he was living proof that courage is possible, that truth exists, and that Russia can become a different kind of country,” Anne Appelbaum wrote in The Atlantic.
There is no doubt that Russia is currently Putin's country. Entering the third year of his all-out war in Ukraine, the Russian president has withstood international sanctions, geopolitical isolation from the West, and outright rebellion by prominent mercenaries. His edifice of power remains intact, while those who threaten him face harsher consequences than they did at an earlier stage of his rule.
“It is tempting to see Navalny’s apparent killing, as some American analysts have done, as a sign of weakness on Putin’s part,” Masha Gessen wrote in The New Yorker. “But a dictator's ability to annihilate what he fears is a measure of his grip on power, as is his ability to choose the right time to strike. Putin appears to be feeling optimistic about his future.
In fact, Putin is preparing to secure a new presidential term in the farce of the elections that will be held next month, where any real competitor will be excluded. Dissent is subjugated, suppressed and dispersed. Fewer Russians are willing to risk taking to the streets than in previous years. Putin also has reason to smile as he watches politics in the West, with Republican lawmakers in the United States blocking new American funding for Ukraine and far-right parties sympathetic to him on the rise across Europe.
“Putin is still alone now,” Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based senior research fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centers, told my colleagues. “He is Solus Rex, the Sole King. No one can stop him from triumphing.”
Analysts saw a link between Navalny's death and 2015 assassination Prominent Putin critic Boris Nemtsov, Who was shot dead while walking on a bridge in Moscow. It appears that Nemtsov's killing highlighted the shift in the nature of Putin's rule. The tyrant in the Kremlin can no longer satisfy himself with rigged elections and a judiciary that operates according to his whims. Nemtsov was a highly respected advocate of reform and an opponent of Russia's seizure of Crimea the previous year, as well as its launch of a pro-Russian insurgency in southeastern Ukraine.
“In the years since Nemtsov’s murder, Russia has transformed — to use 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, similar to the dictatorship of terror.” To those that imposed an iron grip on the Soviet Union throughout most of the twentieth century.
Public grief for Navalny is in itself a risky business. At least 366 people They were detained in 36 cities across Russia as a show of sympathy, my colleagues reported on Sunday, citing a monitoring group. Near the bridge where Nemtsov was killed, which has become a kind of unofficial memorial, pro-regime guards tore up flowers and candles left at the vigil by Navalny's supporters.
“People are so constantly afraid that they lose their wits,” a 24-year-old mourner in Moscow, who identified herself as Yulia, told my colleague Francesca Epel. “This is a dictatorship where you cannot express yourself.”
It is difficult to imagine anyone mobilizing the massive rallies that Navalny himself organized in previous years. “Street protests can only succeed if millions turn out,” Gennady Gudkov, a senior Russian opposition politician who now lives in exile in Paris, told my colleagues. “But because people are not organized and do not have any resources, newspapers, political leaders, parties or unions, there is nothing.”
This situation was intentional as a result of Putin's relentless tightening of his grip. “In a way, Navalny’s death represents the culmination of years of efforts by the Russian state to eliminate all sources of opposition,” Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan wrote in Foreign Affairs. “For more than two decades, Putin has made political assassination a core part of the Kremlin’s toolkit.”
Navalny still leaves an indelible mark. Millions of Russians turn to his allies in exile to obtain accurate news and information about their country. Social media – a field in which Navalny was a pioneer and king – is full of forums and discussions on issues silenced by the state. “So far, the forces unleashed by Navalny are unlikely to disappear,” Soldatov and Borogan concluded.
