Gwynne Dyer
Vladimir Putin’s regime had been assassinating Chechen warlords, defectors from the Russian intelligence services and sundry wayward oligarchs for years, but its first political murder was the hit on high-profile journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was gunned down in her Moscow apartment in 2006.
Then in 2014 opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was killed as he crossed the bridge from Red Square to the south bank. Four bullets in Nemtsov’s back and all the security cameras in the area turned off “for maintenance”: it was a clear message to all protesters.
Which brings us to the latest death, that of Alexei Navalny on Friday. Putin’s henchmen had already tried to kill Navalny in 2020, breaking into his hotel room and smearing his underwear with the nerve agent novichok while he was on a speaking tour in Siberia. He nearly died on the plane back to Moscow, but the pilot made an emergency landing and he survived.
He was evacuated to Germany and made at least a partial recovery, but as de facto leader of the democratic opposition in Russia he felt obliged to go back. It was a mistake, although a very brave one. As soon as he got off the plane in Moscow in 2021 he was arrested, and the regime set about dismantling the modest political network he had managed to create. His colleagues and helpers either got out of the country in time or went to jail.
Navalny himself disappeared into the gulag, surfacing in various prisons from time to time, while the state conducted a series of sham trials that yielded ever longer prison sentences. By the time he died they were up to 19 years, but that was irrelevant. As he said himself, he would be in jail until he died or the regime ended.
Well, it was the former, and there is no reason to doubt that he was killed on Putin’s orders. Nothing as important as that happens in Russia without Putin’s say-so.
The Russian internet is already filling with speculation about why Putin killed him now, when he was already neutralised. Navalny posed no serious threat to the Russian strongman any more (if he ever did), and one would have thought that Putin didn’t need any more negative publicity. But that ignores the role of Putin’s injured vanity.
Strongmen hate to be mocked, and Navalny’s specialty was slick, sarcastic videos portraying the Great Leader and his cronies as massively corrupt and incompetent.
Putin was so obsessed with Navalny that he could never bring himself to mention the man’s name in public, but he was no longer a threat. The repression in Russia in the past few years has been so harsh that almost everybody is keeping their heads down now. The revolution has been postponed indefinitely, and Navalny died in vain.
This begs Lenin’s famous question: “If not now, when? If not us, who?”, but nobody wants to answer it right now. There’s a war on: most people close ranks, and those who know better keep their mouths shut.
This doesn’t mean that Putin will be in power forever, or that Russia can never be a modern democratic society. Of course it can. It might have made it the first time, in the 1990s, if Boris Yeltsin had not been a venal drunk and the United States had not ensured his “re-election” to the presidency in 1996.
There will be another chance for Russia sooner or later, and another after that if they mess it up again. And one day there will be statues of Alexei Navalny in Moscow.
■ Gwynne Dyer’s latest book is The Shortest History of War.