Navalny – rolling a die with two faces

A brief commentary on the sad demise of Putin’s gadfly.

There was only going to one out of two outcomes for Alexei Navalny when he stepped off his plane in Moscow back in 2021. One was that he would be neglected to death, yelling and kicking on the way down. The other was the Cry Freedom scenario, in which he was finally released – a mythical figure of Mandela-like authority.

Putin clearly chose the former outcome. He almost certainly wouldn’t have lived long enough to see the latter come to pass.

I suppose Alexei’s death does illustrate the difference between Putin’s methods of dealing with his opponents and those of his hero, Josef Stalin. You wouldn’t expect Uncle Joe’s hitmen to botch the killing of the likes of Alexei. So why did Putin’s team screw up? Was it a deliberate under-dose designed to put the wind up Navalny and his supporters, or was it just a cock-up? In any case, Stalin dealt with serious rivals by show trails followed by a bullet in the neck in the Lubyanka. Not so easy for Putin, since he’s under greater international scrutiny than Uncle Joe ever was.

In any event, I have a feeling that Alexei knew that his fate was sealed once he was taken off to his first penal colony. The only thing that might have saved him was some form of coup that got rid of Putin. But even if that happened there would have been absolutely no guarantee that the coup plotters would have welcomed Alexei back in Moscow. Would Prigozhin have been pleased to see him? Highly unlikely.

It only remains for those of us who are interested in the future of Russia and its relations with the rest of the world to mourn the death of a brave man, to hope that his passing brings closer a time when Russia will be able to deal with its competitors with less of a snarl and a sneer. For that to happen there will be a need for more Russians with Navalny’s courage and principles to show a different way from the oppression and paranoia that prevails today.

Needless to say there will also need to be some deft diplomacy on the part of Russia’s rivals to help ensure that whatever leadership succeeds Putin is encouraged to enter into stable and constructive relationships with those rivals, as once appeared possible after the fall of the Soviet Union.