Opinion | How Alexei Navalny got trapped by Russian history

Approximately 30 miles southeast of Kharp, across the Ob, is the city of Salekhard. The sadly famous Road 501, the Dead Road, leads east from there. It is one of the last projects born of Joseph Stalin’s megalomania, a railroad branch to the Yenisei River that would traverse uninhabited places unsuitable for construction across the permafrost and the swamps of central Siberia. All that remains of that Pharaonic project are a few hundred miles of embankments, dilapidated camp barracks and steam engines rusting in the tundra.

And corpses. Corpses in nameless ravines and pits, without a cross or a marker, unknown, buried without funerals, the dead whose killers and torturers remain unpunished.

This is the region of the Gulag, the wasteland of the murdered and the murderers. In these places, geography assists the work of the jailers, and the climate serves as a means of torture. Here, in this ideal geographic nothingness, a space beyond history, beyond evidence, the Soviet state cast out people doomed to annihilation. This is the place where Russia’s historical sin is preserved in material, sometimes even imperishable, form — permafrost, after all. Here lie Russia’s guilt and responsibility.

Alexei Navalny’s political credo, which changed over the years and is not easily summarized, did have one constant premise, one characteristic feature. He denied — or rather refused to consider — the power of the totalitarian past. He would not recognize the genealogy and continuity of state violence, and most important, its long-term social consequences.

His image of the “real” Russia was always that of a tabula rasa, an ideal community over which the past had no power — the strange notion of a society that experiences the oppression of an authoritarian regime but somehow automatically aspires to democracy and is in a certain sense innocent, historically undetermined, without, so to speak, a medical record.

His “beautiful Russia of the future” was already here; it already existed in the present, in his own generation. It needed only to be unblocked, unveiled, unpacked, affirmed in reality.

Yet it is unlikely that he could explain how it came to be, how it was born. He wished to believe that you can turn over a new leaf without acknowledging historical guilt or admitting historical responsibility, without recognizing the stubborn presence of the past, without punishing the criminals and thereby severing the umbilical cord of violence.

This may seem cold and too critical. After all, the earth is still fresh on the grave, and the period of mourning is not yet over. But already I see the stirrings of an uncritical heroization and canonization that will confer upon Navalny’s views and temperament, a sacred status, and this, I believe, will inevitably lead to a repetition of his mistakes. His mistakes were fatal — not only to his person but also to the trajectory of Russia’s opposition movement. He personified some of the most profound errors that a dissident leader can make: He was a moral leader whose moral authority was in fact based on a kind of amorality, a catastrophic substitution of hierarchies of values and an extremely optimistic populism.

Amorality? Isn’t that too harsh? For many people in Russia and abroad, after all, Alexei Navalny was the very symbol of moral behavior. He did not betray himself; he did not break in prison or under torture; he died for what he believed to be a just cause. An extraordinary man.

No one can deny Navalny’s personal bravery. His courage and his refusal to abandon the habits of a free man.

But there were things that even he did not dare do. He did not dare do them, I believe, for a simple reason: He was a born politician. He had a better feel than most for the mood of the liberal youth. He loudly and cleverly criticized the Putin regime and fought against it — but where was his criticism directed? For a very long time, Navalny’s target was corruption. He addressed himself to the material concerns of citizens whose money and votes had been stolen. He played on legal outrage and common sense.

The problem is that, from the very beginning, corruption was not the most terrifying aspect of the Putin regime. Vladimir Putin came to power as a war president. The second Chechen war raised and solidified his ratings, turning him into a national leader. Before 2014, before the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine, Chechnya was Putin’s greatest crime. Without acknowledging the guilt and punishing the perpetrators in the two wars against Chechnya, which set Russia back on its old imperial and colonial path, unleashed the spiral of state violence and turned Chechnya into a zone of lawlessness from which lawless practices spread throughout Russia — without confronting all this, no bright and real “Russia of the future” would be possible. Without an answer to the cardinal question of the right to secede, without a recognition of the centuries of repressive policies toward ethnic minorities, the Russia of the future will always be the Russia of the past.

Alexei Navalny was silent about the main crimes of the Putin regime and of Putin personally. If you think about it, it seems inexplicable. Or, perhaps, explicable but not justifiable — but the explanation destroys the very concept of the “Russia of the future” that needs only to be released from Putin’s regime to emerge. Navalny was silent either because he did not consider the Chechen war significant or because he understood all too well that even the liberal part of Russian society did not care about dead Chechens, about crimes far away in the Caucasus committed in the name of Russia. The discouraging truth is that Russian society had grown accustomed to war. It no longer reacted to pricks of conscience, and it became alert only in reaction to matters of personal interest — for example, the reform of social benefits, or the crushing of hopes connected to the allegedly more liberal rule of Dmitry Medvedev (during whose administration Russia attacked Georgia in 2008), or the news that Putin would run for a third term.

Then came 2014 and the initial invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops. The number of military and civilian dead climbed into the thousands, but Russia’s main opposition figure stubbornly continued to focus on exposing the economic crimes of Putin and his henchmen. As if no blood had been shed and international law were not being cynically and odiously violated. Whereas it could be said, in explanation of Navalny’s earlier behavior, that Russia’s war against Chechnya took place before he became a famous opposition politician, no such extenuation can be made of his diffidence toward the war against Ukraine, which occurred when he was already the informal leader of the opposition and a brand name.

That extraordinary status, one would have thought, demanded only one strategy: to speak out against the war clearly and consistently, and to create a broad antiwar coalition. As we know, Navalny cannot be accused of cowardice. It was not fear of repression by the government that kept him from taking this path. It was a fear of losing support. Again, this is just my supposition, but I think Navalny sensed that a radical antiwar position would not increase the number of his supporters but would in fact decrease it.

From 2014 to 2022, almost all of Russia accepted Putin’s formula of pretend war, a limited conflict in which Russia was not even involved. Of course, everyone understood that Russia was deeply involved. The pro-war radicals demanded that the cards be shown without shame and organized in support of war. What did the antiwar people do? They responded with a mix of semi-apathy and semi-activity, intentions without intentions and protest without protest, refusing to confront the issue for an either-or answer, continuing to cooperate with state institutions, seeking positive aspects in the capital’s urbanistic changes — by living an ordinary life.

And Navalny, wittingly or not, played into the hands of that mass pretending to be a mobilized protest by lowering the drama and the ethical intensity of the situation, with his dominating anti-corruption agenda. The proof of the regime’s culpability for its crimes (also for attempting to assassinate him) was always there, but Navalny preferred bravado, laughter, the merry mocking of the stupidity of the agents. This, instead of a serious conversation about the system, about the institution of political murder that had reappeared under Boris Yeltsin, about the dozens of prominent people who were poisoned, shot, beaten to death: Anna Politkovskaya, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Sergei Yushenkov, Galina Starovoitova, Dmitry Kholodov, Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei and Yulia Skripal, Boris Nemtsov, Natalia Estemirova and many, many others. (Vladimir Kara-Murza, for example, survived two poisonings and is now in a Russian prison.)

Navalny certainly had courage, and nerve. But sometimes it is more useful to be scared, to comprehend and proclaim the historical continuity of murders and murderers, to speak in the name of all who had been killed secretly, who were led in the 1930s to execution pits by the same Cheka agents with the same headquarters on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. But that was not for him — too old-fashioned, perhaps. I can’t find a better word. He did not want to be a harsh and bitter prophet. He wanted to be the less distressing harbinger of hope.

Russia’s open war against Ukraine revealed yet another fatal flaw in the Russian opposition: a systemic incapacity for decolonializing thinking, an unwillingness to admit that Russia itself consists of subjugated and partially “digested” nations that have undergone, in the words of the Ukrainian dissident Ivan Dziuba, a process of forced denationalization. Without the voices of these nations, without their equal representation in the opposition, no serious conversation about the future of Russia can take place or lead to a just result.

Navalnyism always bypassed or ignored the issue of national rights. When Navalny, who began his political career among Russian nationalists and made chauvinistic comments in the early period of his activism, emerged as a recognized leader, he turned out to be a kind of supranational democrat. He did not divide his supporters by nationality or recognize their specific national demands; instead, he addressed them as conventional people of goodwill who are conscious (or modern) enough to rise above national feelings and unite for the sake of the “beautiful Russia of the future.” It is sad to admit that Putin’s most talented and most relentless opponent turned out to be a hostage, like him, of the imperial paradigm. Navalny had a chance to change history — but for this he had to first accept it himself, to hear voices in other languages presenting a historical account. And he was too Russian for that.

His surname came from the verb navalivatsya, to pile on, and it was the surname of a fighter. Basically, this is his life’s main legacy: You can live and act freely in Russia, and you can live without feeling doomed, without acknowledging the right of the regime to punish or pardon, without a bent spine. That is how we will remember Navalny, as the harbinger of an unfulfilled hope. In a bitter irony, flowers were left for him in the days after his death at monuments to the victims of Soviet repression, an unwitting recognition of the continuity of Russian violence, which he tried to deny with his life.