Now Putin has done it. He has finally murdered his main competitor. Last Friday, we received news of Navalny’s death. There is no doubt that Putin is responsible — he has done everything he can to set in motion a murderous machine, which finally achieved its result. Putin is and always has been a killer. He needs to be stopped, now more than ever.
But this is not about Putin, it is about Navalny and his movement — and people like him.
I grew up in Communist East Germany. I am rather familiar with the kind of system in place in Russia today. Organized fear, organized snitching, organized disinterest in actual politics, organized pseudo-support for a leadership disliked by all but the collaborators of the system. The difference is, today’s Russia has shed all pseudo-utopian socialist pretense and celebrates itself as a cold-blooded killer, invader, brutalizer and reactionary disturbance in Russia and the world, thinly masked by an allegedly traditionalist “Pax Russica” or “Русский мир” (Russkiy Mir — “mir” means both world and peace). All of that was true for the Soviet Union and its satellites, and also for Communist China and North Korea already, but at least you got to see pretty pictures of happy people working together internationally. For those who did not believe the quasi-religious façade, then and now, the Gulag or its equivalent would await them.
Navalny exposed the lies, exposed the corruption, exposed the fraud, showed that Putin’s interest only lies in the primitive amassing of ostentatious wealth. He is a thief, first and foremost; everything he does is done in the interest of his thievery. He is allegedly the richest person in the world. Those who have been closest to him have benefited financially — until they reneged on their support. Windows can be a dangerous thing. But this primitive thievery has also been true of the leadership of other dictatorships. Even in East Germany, the leadership had their own relatively luxurious resort town of Wandlitz north of Berlin. Greed rules the world, and if power is unchecked, it rules absolutely. Even the Holocaust, as exposed by Goldhagen in his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, had an underlying profit motive.
Alexei Navalny is the latest in a history of victims of Putin’s ambitions. Liberal politician Boris Nemtsov was shot right outside the Kremlin in 2015, and journalist Anna Politkovskaya in her apartment building in 2006. The list of assassinations of Putin’s critics is long.
Things look dark now. They always do at this stage, when a dying system is trying to somehow force itself to survive by cracking down on any resistance. Let us remind ourselves about the current circumstances. How is Russia doing?
- Russia failed to take Ukraine quickly. It failed to take Kiev, Kharkiv, Odessa, and lost Kherson. The only district it completely holds is Crimea. The other areas – Luhansk, Donets, Zaporizhia and Kherson, it only holds partially. Any territorial changes recently have been marginal. It took Russia 10 years to conquer Avdiivka, for instance.
- Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is hiding, suffering losses.
- Russia’s loss of manpower due to the war is staggering.
- Russia lost hundreds of thousands of people who fled the country.
- Russia is suffering from sanctions. It could be suffering even more, but the cost is still enormous. It can only hold out due to previously amassed reserves.
- Discontent is growing – proved by the Kremlin’s actions: banning two promising candidates for Presidency, and killing Navalny. A strong government does not feel the need to do this.
- Russian propaganda is furious. Again, a strong government does not feel the need to do this.
- The war appears to be at some sort of a stalemate, which is a misleading image. This is the result of a lack of support for Ukraine. As soon as that support resumes or re-targets, things will look different.
- Ukraine will not stop defending and counter-attacking. It is nobody’s vassal — it requires support, yes, but some of that was guaranteed by the Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine is not a beggar. It was assured support, and European countries know they’ll benefit from a strong Ukraine.
- Russia seems to be not as supported by China as was believed. China is itself weaker economically than most have thought, and its leadership knows that it needs trade with the West. Remember: Before the war, the size of the Russian economy — mostly based on resource extraction — equaled that of Italy. China needs the West, the West needs China. Nobody needs Russia, especially if it is misbehaving like that. Those who still cooperate with Russia do so at immensely skewed conditions that do not favor Russia.
- Iran is realizing that it has overplayed its hand. Israel is about to finish Hamas as much as possible, then the war in Gaza (which was started by Hamas’ genocidal actions!) will be over, and a major source of discontent will slowly again drift into the background. Nobody really cares about Palestine. Eventually, some sort of peace will be achieved and the world will go back watching television, if it hasn’t already. Apparently, Iran has been signaling its allies to tone it down. The West is stronger than its enemies have assumed, and it is just starting to rearm. Careful what you wish for. Eventually, Russia is standing on its own.
- NATO has expanded by two countries — Finland and Sweden. Swedish membership is only depending on some paperwork, basically. Turkey agreed, and Hungary will agree as well — especially as Orban has been weakened by a recent domestic scandal.
- Western leaders know that if Putin’s regime falls, the Russian grip on Georgia, Transnistria, Belarus and several African countries will loosen. That alone is motivation to continue helping Ukraine.
The world needs a peaceful, democratic, federal Russia as a partner – not the demons unleashed under Putin. Fighters for democracy like Alexander Navalny prove that decency still exists in Russia, and those putting flowers on memorials to murdered dissidents have demonstrated that Russian people may be beaten, they may be suppressed, they may be afraid — but more of them than typically presumed still know what is right and what is wrong.
The darkest days may still be coming. But Putin is only fighting the inevitable. Russians have a history of revolutionary desires. These desires may have to come from those closest to Putin. His policies have been endangering the elite of the country as well. The coup led by Yevgeny Prigozhin — who certainly was no dissident — showed how fragile Putin’s power could be. An even darker, more repressive, more violent path will not be profitable. Eventually, those who see Russia’s path as heading in the wrong direction, will find a window for Putin to change his mind, one way or the other.
History can be a guide here. Soviet power was supreme, but finite. The war against Afghanistan depleted its resources and power. The Soviets had to leave Afghanistan defeated in 1991, whereas the West just didn’t care anymore in 2021, shamefully. (I believe that Putin misread the Allied withdrawal as a sign of Western defeat, which encouraged him to attack Ukraine half a year later). The War had been weakening the Soviet Union’s grip on the periphery. Poland’s declaration of martial law from 1981-1983 did not stop the Solidarność (Solidarity) movement, and Lech Wałęsa successfully led his country to topple its communist dictatorship. In Hungary, foreign minister and later prime minister Gyula Horn opened the border to Austria to let fleeing East Germans go. Once the East German government failed to gain support by the Soviets to again repress its population, it gave up and opened the border to West Berlin on November 9th, 1989. In Romania, Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife met their end, after a brief trial, by firing squad on December 25, 1989.
Sic semper tyrannis.
Ceterum censeo Ucrainam esse defendam. Слава Україні!
Erratic Attempts 