A commentary by a Policy contributing writer who was Canada’s ambassador to Russia, high commissioner to the U.K., and ambassador to the European Union. He lives in Victoria.
“Navalny n’est plus?”
In France, the newspaper headline over the report of a significant death is often, poignantly, that the defunct person “n’est plus.” He/she is “no more.”
Alexei Navalny’s death signals the opposite. This is his biggest news day ever.
He is not just in the news. He has become an enduring martyr to the grotesque regime that rules over Russians.
His murder by a state that feared him propels his name and example across Russia, if in silence for a fearfully suppressed people. Navalny’s bravery will rattle the collective conscience of Russians beyond the large — if intimidated and forcibly quiescent — mass of his supporters in Russia’s largest cities.
As we know from Dostoevsky, Russians are prone to torment from conscience, even or especially as they do awful things to each other.
Navalny returned from Berlin in 2021 to certain imprisonment to show Russians the power of resilience in resistance to the revived police state.
Putin’s harsh repression forces people into submission by intimidation and punishment, including for families, for any gesture of dissent from support for his war of aggression on Ukraine, or for revival of the democratic aspirations and an honest society that Putin has trampled on.
Navalny’s murder — because that is what it is — will make of his example a precious national legend of bravery. The open secret of the personalized autocracy’s venality has now become a public truth.
No one knows the true state of Russian public opinion. In a non-democracy, there is no reliable measure.
But Navalny was convinced of the bedrock strength of Russian character, brutalized and traumatized by a horrible century of violence.
Russians venerate the courage he has now immortalized. They shun cowardice, which increasingly, the cosseted tyrant in the Kremlin represents. The open secret of Vladimir Putin’s phoniness is now a public truth.
There was hope that one day Alexei Navalny would emerge from imprisonment, like Nelson Mandela, when the regime crumbled, to re-establish decency.
Russians will now confront the reality that he will not be present when Russia inevitably overthrows their criminal regime. Their sadness and bitterness are combustible.
Putin is very much weaker as of today.
