After Putin murders Navalny

Nobody should be surprised that Alexey Navalny, erstwhile leader of the anti-Putin opposition in Russia, died in prison on 16 February, long before his 20-year sentence was up. The Federal Penitentiary Service published a report (a mere two minutes after his official time of death) stating that he had “felt unwell after a walk and almost immediately lost consciousness”, and did not respond to attempts to revive him.

Navalny had been in prison since January 2021 on charges of "extremism", a feeble attempt to justify his immediate arrest upon arriving back in the country after a failed assassination attempt by the FSB, Russia's Federal Security Service and heir of the Stalinist KGB. In December 2023, he was transferred to Penal Colony 3, in the Arctic Circle.

Russian prison is a horrifically brutal institution at the best of times. Prisoners arrested on spurious grounds with little recourse to justice die in captivity on a regular basis. Even then, Navalny’s sentence was harsher than most. OVD-Info report https://en.ovdinfo.org/navalny-murdered that of his 32 months in prison, he spent 290 days in "SHIZO" – a particularly harsh form of solitary confinement. He was denied food, lost a lot of weight and for weeks at a time was denied access to meetings with his lawyer or family.

The first arrest of a protestor after Navalny’s death took just a couple of hours – a woman carrying a placard in Murmansk was arrested early on the afternoon of the 16th. The Russian state prosecution service has pre-emptively warned citizens against taking part in unsanctioned protests. Demonstrations have been called in cities around the world, and statements of support for Navalny and anger at Putin have been coming in a steady stream since the announcement was made.

Outrage and upset at the cruelty of the Russian state and the death of yet another Russian oppositionist is entirely justified. Navalny’s predecessor, Boris Nemtsov, was shot on a bridge in Moscow in 2015. This death is the latest in a long line of Putin’s opponents to have met similar fates; constant and bloody setbacks to any organised movement against the Russian leader are forming a depressing cycle.

Anger should not prevent us from keeping a clear head: as Solidarity has said consistently, despite his evident charisma, Navalny’s politics were concerning. He had a streak of racist nationalism that he explicitly refused to renounce, and no plan for addressing the roots of Russian oligarchy and mass inequality beyond rallying people against "corruption".That is a famously slippery term in post-Soviet Eastern European politics. Once upon a time, Alexander Lukashenka was elected as the "anti-corruption" candidate in Belarus.

In protests against Navalny’s arrest, and the anti-war movement that Navalny spurred on from the courtroom, the thousands who participated were a bigger and more politically diverse force than Navalny’s own politics. As we reported https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2021-02-02/russias-left-navalny-protests-are-not-about-navalny at the time, many who participated in those protests did not see Navalny as central to them, and were fighting instead for a positive vision of a freer Russia, a Russia that did not invade its neighbours, and did not imprison its political opposition. This movement can, and should, live on after Navalny. §