Don’t give up

These days the news from Gaza regularly makes me cry, but other than that there aren’t many headlines that bring tears to my eyes. Friday was an exception. When I heard, fairly late in the day, about the death of Alexei Navalny tears did come unbidden. I immediately stopped what I was doing and switched on the television to watch the news.

I can’t remember if it was someone who knew Navalny being interviewed on Al Jazeera or the BBC or if it was later when something told me to watch the National on CBC, which included an interview with Daniel Roher, the Canadian who made Navalny, the 2022 documentary, but one of those people, when it was put to them that Navalny’s death in a Siberian prison should not come as a surprise, said that somehow it was a surprise. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Navalny was supposed be Russia’s next president, instead of which he was now Russia’s Martin Luther King. I started crying again.

This was Navalny the day before his death.

Joking with the judge at his latest court appearance, making court officials laugh. A bit gaunt, perhaps, but surely not a 47-year-old man who was suddenly going to drop dead for no reason the next day? Well, maybe yes, according to Christo Gorzev, the Bulgarian journalist who identified the members of the hit squad responsible for poisoning Navalny in 2020. Interviewed by CNN on Friday, Gorzev conceded it was possible the extraordinarily harsh conditions in which Navalny was imprisoned did eventually shut his body down. But, he said, it was far more likely that Navalny was murdered. 

I’ve had Navalny on my PVR for some time now. One of those things you’ll get around to watching some night. 

Last night I finally did sit down to watch it.

Much of the documentary centres on the time Navalny spent in Germany recovering from the attempt to kill him in 2020, working with Gorzev to piece together how it happened. In one remarkable scene Navalny himself calls members of the hit squad and manages to trick one of them into giving away all the details of the plot. (Poisoned underpants? You really could not make this shit up.)

And then there is Navalny’s return to Moscow with his wife Yulia. At Vnukovo airport, where his flight from Berlin was scheduled to land, so many supporters and journalists had gathered that the police could not arrest them all. The plane was ordered to divert to Sheremetyevo airport where Navalny was detained as soon as he reached passport control. The crime? He had breached his bail conditions by leaving the country. (To receive life-saving treatment in a German hospital after FSB agents had attempted to kill him – a trip out of the country sanctioned by Putin, who no doubt hoped Navalny would stay away. Like I said, you could not make this shit up.)

As Yulia Navalnaya left passport control without her husband and entered the arrivals terminal you can hear people calling her name: “Yulia! Yulia! Yulia!” I started crying again, not least because, watching this in the aftermath of her husband’s death, I couldn’t help wondering how much will now be expected of this woman, how big a target she has on her back?

Navalnaya was in Munich on Friday, attending the annual security conference, when her husband’s death was announced. At the time she spoke, there was still a remote possibility that the news was not true.

In an interview in Berlin, shortly before Navalny’s return to Moscow, Roher asked him if he had any message for the Russian people if he were to be killed. Navalny’s answer was used in news coverage everywhere on Friday.

Remember this?

Remember the optimism felt by the world when an attempted coup by Communist hardliners was thwarted in August 1991 and it seemed as if Russia’s fledgeling democracy was going to take root?

Remember the disappointment when it became clear that this hoped for democracy had turned into a kleptocracy? And when the biggest kleptocrat of them all, the evil little KGB agent from Leningrad, turned it into the autocracy it is now and has been for far too long?

One man, no matter how handsome and charismatic, was never going to overturn that. However, maybe, just maybe, that man’s death could be lighting the fuse that could lead to the second revolution Russia so desperately needs. One can but hope.