When in 2013 criticism of the Kremlin led Aleksei Navalny to face trumped-up criminal charges, I recalled the occasion when my great-grandfather, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, compared Russia to a tub full of batter. “You put your hand in it, all the way to the bottom”, and “when you take it out, at first there is a small gap”; but immediately, “before our eyes”, the mass returns to its original state, a “spongy and swollen mass”. More than a decade later, Navalni’s death in a remote penal colony in the Arctic shows that little has changed in the situation.
The prison where Navalny died is particularly brutal. Called the Polar Wolf, it is an icy gulag for violent criminals. However, Navalni (lawyer and anti-corruption blogger) was not known for being violent. In 2013 he defended himself against false accusations of embezzlement; in 2021, the convictions that sent him to the Polar Wolf Penitentiary were for probation violation, fraud and contempt of court. During his time in prison, he racked up more convictions on trumped-up charges, including supporting extremism.
Navalny’s real crime was, of course, defying President Vladimir Putin. Through various initiatives, from leading protests against rigged parliamentary elections in 2011 to investigations into Russian elite corruption and the attempt to unseat Putin (in a presidential election from which the authorities excluded him), he waged a relentless campaign of almost two decades against Putin and his circle. The numerous judicial processes were shams in the style of the trials organized by Stalin; processes aimed at offering a semblance of justice and, at the same time, keeping a high-profile critic away from the ballot boxes and television screens. Now, while Stalin-era trials made liberal use of the death penalty (and gulags too), no accusation against Navalny (no matter how fabricated) justified such punishment, at least not officially.
Russian prison service staff say Navalny lost consciousness after falling and could not be revived, despite the efforts of emergency medical personnel. However, Navalni did not appear to be “unwell” the day before, when he participated in an online court proceeding, nor the day before, when the lawyer visited him. This does not mean that Navalny’s death was a blow directly ordered by Putin himself; life in the Polar Wolf can end anyone’s health. However, directly or indirectly, it was Putin who killed Navalny.
And it wasn’t even the first attempt. In the summer of 2020, they poisoned Navalny with the nerve agent Novichok (a Soviet creation), although he was flown to Berlin, where they managed to save him. He knew that returning to Russia would mean more prosecutions for political reasons, such as those suffered by the former executive director of Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and the agitators of the punk-rock group Pussy Riot. He even knew that he could end up murdered, like Boris Nemtsov, Anna Politkóvskaia and many others. Despite this, he chose to return to Russia and continued to confront Vladimir Putin.
He was arrested when he landed in Moscow. The ensuing protests, in which tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets to demand his release, did nothing but reinforce the Kremlin’s view that he was a threat that needed to be neutralized. In the rigged trials that followed, no government authority dared even use his name and he was referred to as the “German patient”. It was like living in the Harry Potter universe, where the dreaded Lord Voldemort is called “He Who Must Not Be Named”.
When I wrote about Navalny’s judicial shenanigans in 2013, I pointed out that Russia may have evolved, however slowly. Little did I imagine that this period would later be remembered as the “vegetarian era”, when independent media were suppressed but not banned, public protests were punished but not with long prison terms and an enemy of high profile Kremlin like Navalny could continue to run an anti-corruption foundation and denounce injustice. However, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin has turned carnivorous.
Since the invasion, almost 300 cases have been initiated for “discrediting the Russian armed forces”. Nowadays, reciting a pacifist poem is enough for a person in Russia to have a rigged trial. The tragedy of the despot is that the struggle never ends. The more mock trials a regime holds, the more it will have to hold to keep the population under control. The more repression people endure, the more repression is needed to prevent a violent reaction. The more blood is shed, the more blood must be shed.
There is no end point – no finish line – for an authoritarian figure like Putin. He must hold on to power today and he will have to hold on to it again tomorrow. So it’s reasonable to assume that ahead of the Russian presidential mock election scheduled for March, Putin’s tolerance for dissent is at an all-time low.
Yes, the elections are expected to be held without problems, and Navalni’s death has undoubtedly attracted more attention than his statements from prison; it remains possible that the killing was indirect. However, this same logic would apply in the case of the poisoning of Russian-British double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia two weeks before the 2018 presidential election. None of the victims posed a threat imminent for Putin, and the actions against the victims drew a lot of negative international attention.
The fact is that Putin needed to send a message: “Enemies, be careful”.
And the dough takes up the whole tub again.
