Alexi Navalny – Part 2

Man on a Mission

Comments on the death of Alexi Navalny urged more discussion of the man and his legacy. A previous article did not intend to qualify the accomplishments of the Russian dissident and the Russian president. The article intended to qualify what his death accomplished. Navalny was a man on a mission and death was a part of his mission, achieving martyrdom to gain recognition for his efforts.

No matter the judgments — scorn from those who praise the Russian system and praise from those who scorn it — Navalny exhibited dedication, energy, and courage of heroic conviction and warranted a long and sturdy life. His transgressions against the constrained system were not sufficiently severe to place him in a cell for a long term. Tracing the events from the time he returned from Berlin to Russian soil until the present indicates he was marked for his ultimate fate.

Challenging the Russian government showcased Navalny as one of many dissidents that the Russian system treats harshly. Exposing Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev to charges of massive corruption disclosed Navalny as a daring and suicidal-bent person. Putin could not allow a continuous discussion of the corruption charges and had to silence the voice that uttered them. Navalny’s detention, conviction of extremism, 19-year sentence, and transfer to an isolated Arctic prison, distant from his family and public were markers on the path to his destruction. Even if he was not physically killed, the killing of his spirit was underway, with physical collapse to follow. Proof of the reason for his demise is lacking. Speculation and thought fill the gap.

Alexi Navalny’s death on a day that was close to the day that Yulia Navalny was prepared to speak at the Munich Security Conference is no coincidence. Her presence at a conference that opposed Russia’s interests could not please Putin. Did he warn Mr. Navalny that if Ms. Navalny intended to speak at the conference there would be consequences? Some communication of the sort must have occurred. In his death, Navalny became a martyr and achieved the recognition his government attempted to deny him. Watch for streets named after Navalny, newborns named after him, and each anniversary of his death gathering remembrance.

Putin showed weakness. Responding brutally to Navalny’s charges indicates Putin sensed the dissident was a threat to his regime and the Russian president has no mechanisms but brutality to protect himself. Many articles I have written on Russia and its president (before originating the substack) supported Putin against unfair attacks. One article, Is the Russian government, under direction from President Putin, silencing critics? rigorously examined several unusual deaths of officials, dissidents, and journalists. This was Part II article of three articles, titled Russia Defrosted, Russia's role in the cruel world. Part I was Russia and the United States' Presidential Election and Part III was Is Russia a Threat to World Peace? Another set of articles is a subset of foreign policy articles and is available at: https://www.alternativeinsight.com/foreign_policy.html. The continuous rollout of anti-regime corpses and credible corruption revelations changed my mind about Putin’s behavior.

The unusual number of people who left their rooms from hotel balconies, coupled with Putin’s demeanor when faced with questions, convinced me that Putin may have been a leader trying to straighten out a crooked nation but became twisted in the process. The task required illegal compromises and Putin could not untangle himself, finally succumbing to sharing the largesse and protecting the syndicate. My shift happened after Russian agents allegedly tried to poison a former Russian spy in Salisbury, England, in 2018 with Novichok. Found unconscious on a bench, the former agent, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter survived. Their survival contradicts Putin's statement that “If Russians wanted to poison Navalny, they would have succeeded.”

Not being unique, I imagine my thoughts are repeated by many throughout the world. Putin faces a discontent that can only grow. The principal discontent is in himself, in realizing that his vision for making Russia great again has been sidetracked into Russia making him and his cohorts greater each day. He may have honestly tried to protect his people, now he must protect himself. 

A survey of Navalny’s life does not coincide with those who consider him an insignificant lightweight, an opportunist and charlatan who stung like a fly and fought like a dancer. He did have characteristics of an opportunist and charlatan, but he left his mark and aroused a public dampened by an authoritarian government. One argument against Navalny is his support for contentious issues identified with the right-wing — pro-gun rights, nationalism, and immigration restriction. This may be a reason not to ally with Navalny, it is an insufficient reason to reject him. People are not one-dimensional and have to be judged on their total composition and not on their baggage.

Revered President Roosevelt did not discourage support from Southern Dixiecrats and had, as a faithful friend, James F, Byrnes, who opposed the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education and favored Strom Thurmond's switch to the Republican Party. “Since the early 1850s, Lincoln had been advancing colonization as a remedy for the gradual emancipation of the nation’s enslaved. While he strongly opposed the institution of slavery, he didn’t believe in racial equality, or that people of different races could successfully integrate.” For Navalny and Russians, the right-wing issues have a different meaning than observed in Western nations.

Navalny leaned toward nationalism but not ultra-nationalism. He asserted that although he attended the Nationalist March, as a member of the Yablonko Party, he condemned "any ethnic or racial hatred and any xenophobia" and called on the police to oppose "any fascist, Nazi, or xenophobic manifestations." Russians and Navalny approach gun control and immigration restrictions from different conditions and perspectives than in Western nations. The words may be the same in both societies but the expressions are not. It doesn’t matter, except for effectively using immigration restrictions as an issue in the 2013 Moscow mayoral election, where Navalny came in second with 27% of the vote, these issues were never part of his character or his political voyage. In an article, The Evolution of Alexey Navalny’s Nationalism, by Masha Gessen, a close associate, explains Navalny’s complexity.    

In the absence of politics, in the absence of any public conversation, little remained to form political alliances around. Putin was trafficking in nostalgia for the Soviet empire. The only alternative seemed to be broadly ethno-nationalist ideas, which also addressed a sense of humiliation—and these were emerging both on what could be roughly described as the left and vaguely designated as the right.  

Navalny’s political views have developed in an unusually public way over the past decade. He has never apologized for his earliest xenophobic videos or his decision to attend the Russian March. At the same time, he has adopted increasingly left-leaning economic positions and has come out in support of the right to same-sex marriage. This strategy of adopting new positions—without ever explicitly denouncing old ones—is probably the reason the suspicion of ethno-nationalism continues to shadow Navalny.

Gessen’s report may be viewed as an apology for a friend. On the other hand, the friendship elevates Navalny; Gessen has gained strong credibility for her article in the New Yorker in which she compared Gaza to a Nazi-era ghetto.   

Another damning of Alexei Navalny arises from convictions on fraud charges. In one conviction, he and his brother were convicted of embezzling $540,000 from a Russian subsidiary of French cosmetics company Yves Rocher. Navalny was given a suspended sentence and his brother was sentenced to a prison term. The European Court on Human Rights (ECHR) heard his case and ruled “there has been a violation of the Convention or the Protocols thereto, and if the internal law of the High Contracting Party concerned allows only partial reparation to be made, the Court shall, if necessary, afford just satisfaction to the injured party.” Navalny received more than 200 thousand euros over five years, paid to him from the Russian federal budget.

In the other conviction, the Investigative Committee charged Navalny with embezzlement by “conspiring to steal $500,000 worth of lumber from Kirovles, a state-owned company while acting as an adviser to Kirov's governor.” Navalny was sentenced to five years. For an unknown reason, the sentence was declared invalid. In 2017, a district court of Kirov reawakened the conviction and changed it to a five-year suspended sentence.  

No doubt that Navalny enriched himself by dubious methods and an appraisal of his efforts should take that into account. The significance of transgressions by political figures is related to the subjective opinion of the figure; those who are against the person will vilify; those who support the person will conveniently forget. Look at Donald Trump and Joe Biden's dealings — guilty or innocent, relevant or irrelevant, serious or harmless — attention depends upon the angle of view.

Not clarified is why Navalny received suspended sentences and his brother was sent off to jail. Something amiss in the judicial system? The state of the judiciary in Russia, a report of the ICJ research mission on judicial reform to the Russian Federation, 24 June 2010 answers the question.

Lack of independence of judges and the interconnected problem of lack of confidence of the public in the judiciary were pointed out as the main problems in the Russian judicial system.

Legislators influence the judiciary in Russia. Did someone influence the judges to go light on Navalny? Notice that he had no jail time problems until becoming the zapper who documented alleged corruption by Medvedev and Putin. Soon he was reeling from a Novichik look-alike and barely survived. I assume Putin was glad to have him travel to Berlin, thinking he would remain in exile and no longer be a major problem for the Russian government. A defiant Navalny returned and an angry Russian president gave an order, well, not exactly an order. It goes like this.

Official #1: “This guy, Navalny is a pain.”
Official #2: “Yeah, someone should get rid of him.”
Official #1: “I understand what you mean.”

In his peripatetic voyage, Navalny gained sympathetic travelers and found a niche ─ investigative documentaries that exposed corruption. The argument that these sympathetic travelers were only 2-4 percent of the electorate is a plus for him. Libertarian candidate, Joe Jorgensen, received a little more than one percent of the vote in the United States 2020 presidential election. For a nation that does everything to restrict fundraising, access to media, demonstrations, and mass assemblies of incipient opponents, one man gaining a following of a few percent is a major achievement.

The documentaries, He Is Not Dimon to You, which accused Dmitry Medvedev, then prime minister and previous president, of accumulating more than $1 billion of assets including palaces, yachts, and a Tuscan vineyard, and, Putin's Palace, that cited Putin as being an invisible owner of a billion dollar elephantine mansion close to the Black Sea were tour de forces of muckraking journalism, shots that vibrated the Kremlin walls as strongly as Napoleon’s cannons. They may be disputed, some parts may be exaggerated, and some images may not match the commentary, but they effectively challenged the system, supposedly viewed more than 110 million times on YouTube.

Navalny found the pedestal he sought. He reached the peak of his endeavors and was shot down before his wit and talent could penetrate the Kremlin walls. Give him the credit due to him. Nobody has gotten closer to pressing Putin into quiet submission.