Aleksei Navalny and the Politics of Courage

Featured

Mar 28

We in the United States in 2024 are in the midst of what political scientists and others call “polarization,” by which the poles of right and left grow stronger while the “center does not hold,” as the Irish poet once wrote. Despite the real problems and tensions that this polarization creates, U.S. citizens do not face the grim threats of arbitrary arrest for political dissent, followed by a brutal imprisonment, ending in a murder widely believed to be carried out with government approval. One who faced all those horrors with courage, grace and even humor was Alexsei Navalny. A longstanding critic of the Russian government led by Vladimir Putin, Navalny went into exile and while there, it is widely believed, to have been poisoned by agents of Putin, barely surviving the attack. He returned to Russia in January of 2021 knowing that he almost certainly faced arrest; indeed, he had barely gotten off the plane at the Moscow Airport when he was taken into custody, never again to live as a free man. In the middle of February of this year, it was announced by Russian officials that Navalny had died at a remote penal colony in the Arctic, in a Soviet era facility originally built to house political dissidents. Alexei Navalny was 47 years old. The cause of his death remains unclear, with Russian authorities maintaining it was due to natural causes; but many sympathetic to Navalny believe he was deliberately killed on the spot, or that the brutal conditions he faced in the Russian prison system contributed significantly to his passing.

Who then was Alexei Navalny, and why should his life and death matter to us? Born in 1976 to a Russian mother and Ukrainian father, he was only fifteen years old when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Raised near Moscow, he was recognized as a promising student, studied at university and earned a degree in law. After practicing law in post-Soviet Russia, he entered politics in the early years of the Putin era, joining Yabloko (Apple), a liberal party committed to democratic reform. As the Putin regime became more authoritarian, Navalny began to challenge it on a range of political and legal fronts, emphasizing repeatedly the corruption of Putin and his associates and the riches they gained at the expense of the people of the Russian Federation. Navalny, by the second decade of this century, had become the most prominent, charismatic, and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin. His activism drew the attention and the ire of Russian authorities, and Navalny soon faced a series of arrests and short jail sentences, usually for public protests without a legal permit, acts of defiance that often led civil rights activists in the United States in the 20th century to suffer similar punishments. Navalny thus joined a distinguished list of leading Russian and Soviet dissidents that includes Leo Tolstoy, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and Elena Bonner. During the peak of détente, President Gerald Ford declined an opportunity in 1975 to meet with Solzhenitsyn, an exiled Soviet dissident, drawing criticism, especially from within his own party. Ford no doubt respected Solzhenitsyn’s integrity and literary talents, but sought to maintain good relations with the Soviet government at that particular moment, as the Apollo-Soyuz joint U.S.-Soviet space mission hovered above the earth, took precedence.

The duel between Navalny and Putin, in which the Russian President has for now prevailed, raises questions about the nature of politics, ones that transcend time and place. Putin has the formidable administrative and military power of the Russian state behind him, and he knows how to use it to advance his interests. Navalny, who had been an outspoken critic of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 had, in the eyes of many around the world, captured the moral high ground in his struggle with Putin. The Russian President has snarled in public that dissidents such as Navalny are “scum,” especially with regards to the Ukraine war. In the face of this, Navalny’s grace under pressure reminds one of Ernest Hemingway’s definition of courage as grace under pressure. It is human to seek to avoid suffering, pain, and death itself; usually, one needs a commitment to a higher cause to overcome fear and stand in the gap. Alexei Navalny was sustained and emboldened by his vision of a more decent and democratic Russia; but in his final years, he also became a Christian, most likely drawn to the Christian notion of redemptive suffering.

Putin on occasion justified his making war on Ukraine as part of a global culture war with Russia drawing on its deep Christian roots to battle the forces of Western decadence that had allegedly taken root in Ukraine. With the literal blessing of the leading clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church, Putin’s military has conducted its war with little regard for the lives of Ukrainian civilians, actions well documented by observers as proof that his claim to being in effect a Christian leader are hollow. Meanwhile, thousands turned out in Moscow on a late winter’s day recently to pay their last respects to Alexei Navalny, whose funeral was at the Church of the Icon of Mother of God Soothe Our Sorrows, just outside of the Russian capital. Those who came to pay their respects and also to make a broader statement about Russia risked the possibility of arrest, detention, and imprisonment, but Navalny’s courage had become their own. Rare is the leader who can inspire in that fashion. His widow Yulia Navalny has promised to pick up her husband’s fallen standard and carry on his cause from exile in Europe, and called on Russians to vote against Putin in the presidential election that was held from March 15-17th.

Someday a leading biographer will chronicle Navalny’s life and find out things about him that we do not currently know, and undoubtedly not all the revelations will be favorable to his reputation. But we in the United States and West, along with those in Russia who look to him for continued inspiration, also have his example. Navalny demonstrated in bold and dramatic terms that character and courage are essential to genuine political leadership that is grounded in morality, principle, and character. His tragic fate also contains within it an important element of hope: that especially students and young people seeking role models and examples need not be discouraged permanently by the venality of dictators, no matter how powerful they might appear at any given moment. Alexei Navalny showed us anew the ancient truth that politics can be a noble and even sacred calling. Few if any of us - we hope - will be forced to confront what he did, and we are unlikely to be called upon to endure what he willingly suffered. But indifference to and complacency about politics is not what is needed now, in Russia or anywhere else. The United States itself has struggled in recent years with questions on the nature of democracy and how it is best implemented under the Constitution. We have the freedom to exercise our unalienable rights, and also the duty to do so. We have examples of moral leadership in our own past to be sure, and now another one from Russia, a land long associated in the American mind with tyranny.