Rebecca Solnit posted on Facebook -
Carole Cadwalladr's assessment/elegy of both Navalny and the country he was trying to save from Putinism, which is like Stalinism without the ideological cloak:
It will be days if not weeks and months before we know some version of the truth of what happened in a grim Siberian jail to Alexei Navalny, the greatest leader Russia never had.
But, it’s the timing that sent a chill down many people’s spines. Because this wasn’t any old Friday in February. It was the first day of the Munich Security Conference, a key global summit attended by world leaders and the Nato secretary general. And top of the agenda this year is the threat to Nato itself.
A threat that just ramped up another notch. “I think Putin is showing he has total impunity. That’s his message,” says Vera Krichevskaya, the co-founder and ex-editor-in-chief of Russia’s last independent TV news station, Dozhd, or TV Rain. She is crying when I call. “I’m speechless. Speechless. It’s so painful. I’m a mess.
“I’m sitting here with two letters that Alexei sent me last year from prison,” says Krichevskaya. “I’m re-reading them now and both were such a source of energy, source of hope, of optimism. They were full of jokes. It’s impossible to believe.”
There was no one else like . But his reported death and the west’s utter weakness in the face of Russia’s aggression and the ticking of the timebomb to Nato’s future that a second Trump term represents is the ever-present chill that underlies this year’s discussions at the Munich conference.
Was the timing a coincidence? Or that among the delegates was Yulia, Alexei Navalny’s wife? Hours after the news of her husband’s reported death broke, she showed the courage that Navalny had modelled to the Russian people for the past decade and a half, standing on the stage and saying that she’d asked herself: “Should I stand here before you or should I go back to my children? And then I thought: what would Alexei have done in my place? And I’m sure that he would have been here, standing on this stage.”
He would have. Navalny’s courage was never in doubt. Though the excitement and energy of the protests that erupted across Russia in response to his decision to fly back to Moscow, knowing he faced imprisonment after the failed assassination attempt on his life, now belongs to a different era.
It was an era that began in thebrief period from 2008-2012 when Putin surrendered the presidency, and both the TV station Krichevskaya co-founded and Navalny emerged, sharing that spirit of optimism. It’s that optimism, she says, that is Putin’s deadliest enemy.
“It was his spirit that Putin had to kill, it was his biggest threat. It’s what Navalny had and what he distributes to others. What I’ve been thinking for the last couple of months, that Putin is breaking the spirit of Ukrainians, with help from American congressmen. That’s not about his position on the battlefields, that’s about breaking the spirit of the people. He’s saying that evil will win.
“For me and many of my friends, we were sure he would survive. It was our unconditional belief. He was so strong. We thought he would survive no matter what. We had no plan B.”
Dozhd’s current editor-in-chief, Tikhon Dzyadko, has just come off air when I talk to him on Friday night. Forced into exile after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it now broadcasts from the Netherlands. “People are broken,” he says. “We were ringing people to get them on air and we received a lot of refusals. People just don’t know what to say. They are speechless. It’s such a terrible thing. The same reaction from our viewers. They are absolutely broken, absolutely lost.”
For Dzyadko and many Russians, a clip from the documentary Navalny, a winner at last year’s Oscars, is where they’ve turned for comfort: to the words, spoken by Navalny, of what his death would mean. “If they decide to kill me,” he says, “it means that we are incredibly strong. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good people to do nothing. So don’t do nothing.”
As the second anniversary of the invasion approaches, Russians find most aspects of their lives reshaped at an unprecedented pace by their president.
Children read freshly printed history books that defend Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and they learn how to handle military drones. War veterans, often former convicts from the notorious paramilitary Wagner group, visit schools to preach “patriotic values”.
Theatres and museums, once at the centre of a bubbling independent cultural scene, have seen their critical shows curtailed, with artists and directors jailed or in exile. Some museums now put on exhibitions featuring the personal belongings of Ukrainian soldiers killed on the battlefield.
Under the guidance of a militaristic orthodox church, the Kremlin has virtually outlawed being gay, sentencing its citizens for wearing frog-shaped earrings displaying an image of a rainbow or posting pictures of the LGBTQ+ flag.
In one of the most visible demonstrations of Russia’s embrace of conservative values, authorities in December cracked down on a raunchy celebrity-studded party in Moscow, signalling the shrinking of political freedoms even for the well-connected. One of Russia’s most most prominent pop singers, Philipp Kirkorov, has since embarked on a tearful apology tour, performing for soldiers in occupied Ukraine.
Observers say that state pressure has created an atmosphere of fear and denunciation – with neighbours, friends and even family members reporting on each other, often anonymously – reminiscent of the darkest repressions under Joseph Stalin.
One recent poll showed that up to 30% of Russians were scared to voice their opinions about the war, even to friends and family.
“We have seen a clear nationalistic and patriotic consolidation around the war,” said Denis Volkov of the independent polling agency Levada Centre, pointing to surveys that show consistently high levels of support for the invasion among Russians.
www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/18/alexei-navalny-didnt-just-show-enormous-courage-and-express-irrepressible-hope-he-embodied-themFrom the Anti-corruption Foundation website.
Yulia Navalnaya's appeal to the EU Foreign Affairs Council
acf.international/news/obrashenie-yulii-navalnojShort Michael McFaul piece in the Washington Post.
"Former ambassador Michael McFaul's: Vladimir Putin killed my friend Alexei Navalny this week. There will be a time and place to discuss the politics and how the free world should respond. For now, I want to share a few memories.
The Alexei Navalny I knew was super smart. For me, the sign of a true intellectual is the courage to change your mind. We disagreed about some things he had said in the past, particularly about the Caucasus and Crimea. He listened, and it felt to me he was rethinking some of his earlier statements. But he also pushed back, challenging my commitment to “neoliberalism” in the 1990s. Russia would be better off, he argued, had the West supported social democratic ideas back then. He was right. I changed my mind, too. That’s called learning. He was exceptional at that."
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