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The writer is senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, Berlin and visiting fellow at the European University Institute, Florence
Responding to the news that her husband and Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny has died in a maximum-security prison, Yulia Navalnaya said on Friday: “I want Putin and all of his entourage, Putin’s friends and his government, to know they will be held accountable for what they have done to our country, to my family and to my husband . . . This regime and Vladimir Putin must be held personally responsible for all the terrible things they have been doing . . . to our country Russia in recent years.”
Western leaders followed Navalnaya in suggesting that the Russian government was responsible for her husband’s death.
After the murder in Moscow in 2015 of another opposition figure, Boris Nemtsov, some asked if Russia had changed from the kind of dictatorship in which opponents of the government are cheated in elections to one in which they are killed. We now appear to have a definitive answer to that question.
In the years since Nemtsov was murdered, Russia has transformed — to use the language of political science — from a dictatorship of deception to a dictatorship of fear and then, after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, into an outright dictatorship of terror, akin to the one that exerted an iron grip on the Soviet Union for much of the 20th century.
In August last year the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was killed in a mysterious plane crash after daring to march his troops on Moscow two months earlier. Putin showed no mercy to his former henchman. We should not have expected him to show it towards an old and reviled political enemy.
Navalny’s death, which comes nearly two years to the day after Russia invaded Ukraine and ahead of sham elections in March, is a reminder that Putin’s regime is waging a war on two fronts — externally against Ukrainian citizens and internally against its own.
The war has changed Russia beyond recognition. And the treatment of Navalny over a decade or so shows just how vicious the regime has become. In 2013, after a regional court sentenced Navalny to five years in prison on charges of embezzlement, people took to the streets of Moscow in protest. The sentence was subsequently reduced to a suspended term. After that, Navalny was even allowed to participate in the Moscow mayoral elections.
Today, however, neither such demonstrations nor such judicial moves, not to mention the participation of a notable opposition figure in a local election, are remotely conceivable.
Opposition figures used to be convicted on trumped-up economic charges. When Navalny himself returned to Russia in January 2021 after recovering from poisoning, he was arrested at the airport in Moscow, accused of violating the terms of his probation for embezzlement. But in August last year, he was sentenced to a further 19 years in prison on purely political charges, including creating an “extremist community”. This, and sentences handed out to other opponents of the regime, are reminiscent of Stalin’s time.
Navalny’s death is a profound watershed for modern Russia. Compare Russia today with the cruel and cynical regime in Belarus, where the main opposition figures, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and Maria Kolesnikova, are alive, although the former is in exile and the latter in prison.
History teaches us that the death of an opposition leader can sometimes lead to a wave of protests that ultimately results in the collapse of a brutal regime. For instance, the cold-blooded murder of Benigno Aquino in 1983 became the catalyst for the eventual fall of the Marcos regime in the Philippines. But it did not happen immediately. Justice frequently takes even more time to arrive.
For many, Navalny embodied a more hopeful future for Russia — because of his remarkable ability to cope in the most difficult conditions, his sense of humour and confidence in himself and the country, which he did not lose even in prison. It was there that he became recognised around the world as a leader of the Russian opposition, a Russian Mandela ready to lead the country after the end of the current regime. And this, of course, greatly irritated the Kremlin. But that very irritation is itself a sign that Putin is not as confident either in himself or the future as he wishes to appear.
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