While we don’t know the details of the death of Alexei Navalny, 47, it is all too obvious Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin, had him tortured to death in a prison camp in the Arctic north.
Putin kills his enemies deliberately without haste.
This is an important political event.
Without exaggeration, one can say Russia has only two politicians, Putin and Navalny.
After Navalny’s death, Putin has no obvious competitor.
In August 2020, Putin had his secret police poison Navalny with the nerve agent Novichok in his underwear, but Navalny was saved after being rushed to a hospital.
He was allowed to go to Germany for treatment.
When he bravely returned to Russia, he was immediately imprisoned and sentenced to 19 years for purely political reasons.
Navalny was trained as a lawyer, and he was politically active in opposition to Putin since 2000, mainly as a liberal.
He broke through as a political leader in the December 2011 protests against the doctored parliamentary elections. Navalny stood out as young, charismatic and eloquent.
All along, he appealed to the youth and he paid attention to the whole country.
In 2013, Navalny succeeded in registering as a candidate in the Moscow mayoral election, impressively receiving 27% of the votes despite having no media access.
After Putin clamped down on the 2011-12 protest movement, Navalny used his legal training to focus on high-level corruption.
His anti-corruption foundation exposed one top-level official after another for unfathomable larceny. Navalny’s aides investigated all conceivable official documents and filmed Russian officials’ palaces with drones.
They presented the outrageous corruption in riveting films on YouTube.
Navalny’s group revealed how pervasive kleptocracy is in Russia’s ruling elite.
Navalny’s greatest success was a film about Putin’s billion-dollar palace he had built for himself on the Black Sea shore from funds embezzled from public procurement of medical equipment.
This film has been downloaded more than 120 million times.
Russia has blocked access to most social networks, but curiously not to YouTube — it is too popular with the Russian elite.
Russia has a long tradition of honoring political martyrs, going back to Ivan the Terrible and Peter I.
In December 1986, the prominent Soviet dissident Anatoly Marchenko died in his prison camp at the age of 48, which aroused a public outcry in those heady days of glasnost and perestroika.
Mikhail Gorbachev seized on the moment to end the exile of the top dissident Andrei Sakharov and later liberate all the many Soviet political prisoners.
Putin will naturally resist, but he will come under some pressure.
The last major funeral of a political martyr I can recall was that of the great liberal politician Boris Nemtsov, a friend and ally of Navalny (and a great friend of mine).
Nemtsov was executed Feb. 27, 2015, outside the Kremlin walls, undoubtedly at Putin’s request.
His funeral was held in accordance with Orthodox tradition three days later, and it was attended by thousands of people, including some of the top oligarchs.
Will Putin allow Navalny a public funeral?
I doubt it.
Russians are not afraid of going to funerals, and a Navalny funeral in Moscow would gather tens of thousands of people, posing a potential challenge to Putin’s power.
Tellingly, when the popular coup leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was buried last August, after Putin presumably had him killed, the whole cemetery was closed to the public.
On the other hand, if Putin does not allow a normal funeral for Navalny, he shows the public what a creep he is, which is not good for him just before the so-called presidential election March 15 to 17.
So far, no Navalny associate, not even his lawyer, has been permitted to see Navalny’s body.
Since labor camps tend to be closed to the outside world during weekends, his lawyer will probably not be allowed to see him until Monday, when a funeral should be held.
Russians have a strong sense of protocol, so these intricacies should not be underestimated.
Putin is surely happy to have had Russia’s opposition leader killed, but his new conundrum is that his enemy has become a martyr, and martyrs cannot be tortured to death.
Anders Åslund is the author of “Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
