Two years without Navalny
The details that have emerged from the analysis carried out by laboratories in five countries on the poison that led to his death in the Kharp labour camp in February 2024 highlight the void left by the man who embodied popular and youth dissent against Putin for a decade. A charismatic and contradictory personality who had brought many different sources of inspiration to everyday life in Russia.
On 16 February 2024, Aleksey Navalny died in the Kharp labour camp in the far north of Russia, after a walk in the winter cold, and – as laboratories in five different countries have confirmed – due to poisoning caused by the serum of an equatorial frog, prepared especially for him, since he had managed to survive the Novichok preferred by the Russian services, which had been administered to him four years earlier.
After miraculously coming back to life thanks to treatment in a German hospital, Aleksey decided to return to Russia, certain that he would die for proclaiming his faith in freedom and mutual love, which he had discovered by reading the Gospel and many other books on spirituality and the philosophy of hope.
He was 48 years old at the time of his death, and for over a decade Navalny had represented popular and youth dissent against Vladimir Putin's dictatorship, who was so afraid of him that he sought out the ultimate poison in the swamps of South America.
He had appeared publicly at the end of November 2011, a week before the State Duma elections, organising mass protests on Bolotnaya Square in front of the Kremlin together with a million people.
His movement denounced the corruption of the powerful and the “party of thieves and swindlers”, similar to other populist groups and parties that had sprung up in various countries in Europe and around the world coinciding with the decline of the “globalist” phase of extreme capitalism.
His charismatic and contradictory personality brought many different sources of inspiration to everyday life in Russia. He was capable of criticising himself and changing his mind on many issues, without closing himself off in ideologies and the artifices of “values”, whether traditional or innovative.
He had an irresistible sense of humour, which made him likeable and friendly even to the prison guards who poisoned him, and dispelled the cloud of resentment and contempt for life that has dominated Russia since the rise to power of the grim “wizard of the Kremlin”. Vladimir Putin, the heir to the Soviet KGB committed to destroying the world order in order to prevent other peoples from enjoying life.
Navalny also represented the genuine sense of Russia's religious rebirth after seventy years of atheism, without allowing himself to be confined by the canons of the Orthodox Church subservient to the regime, but living the experience of searching for the meaning of things and sharing these feelings with those around him and anyone who really wanted to discover “the happiness of the present and the future”, as he defined Russia's destiny.
He himself recalled that “as children, we used to beat each other up when the streets were full of gopniki”, muscle bound hooligans, of which Putin was a typical representative, but “only those from the upper classes managed to beat me up”.
He loved hunting, but he was a “theoretical hunter” who had only killed one black grouse and one woodcock in his entire life, and his favourite pastime was “sedentary hunting”, spending hours next to the hay waiting for a pheasant to fly by.
Bloodthirsty hunting, on the other hand, “has become the main characteristic of power in Russia”, as he recalled in interviews with Esquire magazine, the first to publish his face on its cover.
He also criticised the regime within his family, and his daughter Daria constantly shouted at school that “Putin is a scoundrel”, prompting protests from his wife Julia, who explained to the child that “your father is not Robin Hood”.
Aleksey married Julia in 2000, the year Putin became president, and described their relationship by telling her that ‘I can't lie on the sofa with snacks if you are not there watching me’. To understand American politics, he watched episodes of The Simpsons on television with Daria and his other son, Zakhar.
Despite being a popular hero of the fight against corruption, Navalny claimed to be ‘a man like any other, I have bribed traffic police a hundred thousand times to avoid fines’, the main rule of the highway code in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.
Except that at a certain point he realised that ‘you shouldn't keep paying, but you should try to break fewer rules’. He therefore stated that ‘two fundamental conditions are necessary for the fight against corruption: political competition and freedom of expression’, which had been abolished in Russia, and he tried until the very end to encourage the choice of political alternatives with ‘smart voting’, voting for various parties even if they did not allow him to create his own, so as not to vote for Putin's United Russia.
When Navalny began to gather crowds, he himself observed that ‘today Russia is richer and freer than it has ever been in its history, and the enormous amount of money circulating in the country gives us the opportunity to make great changes to live better and better, but it seems that no one wants to use it for this purpose.’
In fact, ‘the state in our country has turned into a mafia, in the Italian sense of the word, where everyone is dependent on each other... the difference is that in Moscow there is no place where everyone can gather.’
For this reason, he believed that a revolution was inevitable, but ‘change does not come about through artificially organised actions, it is unpredictable episodes involving ordinary people that stir the entire population.’ Change can only happen when people are dissatisfied, and ‘today in Russia there are many discontented people’.
He said he would forgive Putin ‘if he became the Russian Lee Kuan Yew’, the dictator of Singapore who ‘ drove out all the criminals with his totalitarian policy’, but Putin is not even capable of ‘becoming the Russian Lukashenko’.
He wanted to know ‘how sincerely Putin believes in everything he says and imposes, how much he believes that his system can last indefinitely’, a question that is more relevant than ever after four years of war in Ukraine, with an increasingly shaky economic system caused by what he called ‘corrupt patriots’.
If he were given a minute on Channel One television, 'I don't think I could communicate the truth to the people, I do not possess this metaphysical gift of speech, but at least I would try to explain what the biggest lie is‘, namely the fact that although Russia is the main exporter of oil, ’all the money is stolen by the people around Putin", naming them by their first and last names.
He would invite everyone to take an active stance in politics and not just “make charitable donations to help children in need; let's try to help everyone, not just little Anja”.
Navalny recalled the Soviet dissidents, ‘brave and daring men’, in particular Anatoly Marchenko, who died in a labour camp at the age of 49 in 1986, just as would happen to him almost forty years later, described as ‘a titan of the spirit’.
He, on the other hand, described himself as “a poor man from Marino”, the Moscow neighbourhood where he lived and where he is now buried, “someone who likes to walk around in a coat and trainers”.
Ideologically, he stated that “I am a Kantian, even if it sounds a bit pathetic, but I can't think of anything better: act in such a way that the best you can do can become a rule for everyone's behaviour”. He tried to retreat and rest from the many tensions by going to isolated places, but “after a couple of days I start to miss other people”. .
Navalny was baptised and considered himself a true Orthodox Christian, but ‘I am a typical Soviet Orthodox Christian, I cross myself in front of the church, but I don't go inside’. He claimed to have begun to understand religion after reading the novel Moskva-Petuški, Venedikt Erofeev's post-modernist work from the 1970s about a journey from the capital to the utopian destination of the province, and ‘I discovered that every two sentences in the book there was a biblical quotation’.
So faith is acquired ‘not so much by participating in Orthodox rituals, and if you know nothing about Christian tradition, you will not be able to understand anything about the culture,’ inviting people to read more and cultivate ‘the search for truth, beauty and goodness.’ Even with regard to Islam, he stated that ‘when you see carpets stretched out to the horizon near a mosque, it does not mean that men are religious, it is just a way of coming together and feeling like one we’.
He claimed to ‘love junk food, from McDonald's or Rostic's, even though I try not to put on weight’ and to remember very well ‘my first shawarma, it was huge, it was prepared for me by the Lebanese students at the University for the Friendship of Peoples where I studied, and I ate it so many times that all of you together couldn't manage it’.
Legend had it that he was very good at making apple pie, but ‘I only made it once, I'm not usually interested in eating what I cook’. We have lost a friend, a real man, with whom we would like to go and eat a sandwich and talk about the future of Russia and the whole world.
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