Alexei Navalny Was Murdered For Telling the Truth
By: David Xiong
On March 21, 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin swept yet again another “democratic” Russian election. He broke records by capturing 87.3% of the vote with a whopping 77.4%. His opponents? They got a 3-4% share of the vote. The election was most certainly anything but “democratic.” Putin borrowed Soviet antics previously used in show elections with his own spin: mobilization of the public sector and state corporate employees, a phony opposition, and prefixed vote totals. With this meticulously controlled system, one would think that Putin easily controls Russian politics. In reality, though, this rigged election follows broader patterns of Putin showing an increased insecurity over his grip on power amid the Russia-Ukraine war and internal instability.
This past February, Putin likely was responsible for killing his top political opponent Alexei Navalny, who had exposed the Putin administration’s corruption and condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At the time of his death, Navalny was incarcerated on charges of vandalism and extremism, at Russia’s notorious IK3-penal colony north of the Arctic Circle. The authorities’ response to Navalny’s death seemed unfortunately similar to past deaths of other opposition figures. Usually, official reports on cases like Navalny’s would say he fell out a window. Or maybe a plane crashed, as was the case with Wagner group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, who attempted a coup against Putin. This time, however, Russian officials were more creative with their narrative. Somehow, on April 16, Navalny “felt unwell after a walk, almost immediately losing consciousness.” These Russian officials allegedly claim that they made all possible attempts for resuscitation. However, does this explanation seem plausible when, according to the independent Latvian-based newspaper Novaya Gazeta, a commotion erupted in the prison with the guards the night before, and an ambulance only arrived several hours after his death? Make no mistake, this death was another Kremlin-orchestrated show of Putin’s ego.
Putin, though, will do anything to make the Russian public believe in official narratives of Navalny’s death. He distorts reality to satisfy his own delusional self, intentionally misleading the public through his various schemes, denying basic rights to human dignity. Putin organized a massive police force to immediately arrest anyone who dared to defy his administration’s orders against attending Navalny’s funeral. He compelled churches and funeral sites to deliberately refuse services to Navalny’s family. Putin’s double denial of dignity and truth shows his true character as a leader: cowardice.
When considering that Navalny has done the bulk of work in unraveling Putin’s lies, Putin’s fear of Navalny is unsurprising. After a stint in law, Navalny’s career as a politician began in 2008. That year, he alleged corruption in the state-run oil and gas firms Rosneft and Gazprom. Navalny continued his work in investigating suspicious Russian government finances through his social media outlets and the anti-corruption platform RosPil, which gained the following of many young Russians. Navalny’s exposure to the dark elements behind Russia’s government woke up many Russians to the harsh reality they were facing. Gone was the image of the young, promising official who Boris Yeltsin appointed as a charismatic president of Russia so many years ago. In those moments, people knew that Putin was a power-hungry dictator surrounded by his business cronies who too were desperate to be close to the source of power at the Kremlin.
However, Navalny’s true crime was translating discontent over the “lies” of the government into tangible political opposition. Even in a climate that allowed for very little political opposition, Navalny found ways to maneuver within the system to project his voice. After the Russian courts ironically hit Navalny with their own corruption charges against him, his work did not stop. Navalny popularized the famous “Smart Voting” system. Under this method, he would encourage people to vote for opposition against Putin’s preferred candidates–even if the opposition was often deemed phony. By selecting anyone but Putin’s hand-picked favorites, he reasoned, Russia could build change from the ground up, step by step, and gradually shift back towards the democratic nation that he dreamed of. Indeed, the strategy turned out to be quite successful–at least at making change at a local level, mainly because Putin tended not to pay as much attention to these elections and wanted some opposition to create the facade of a legitimate, democratic system.
Putin likely killed Navalny because he feared Navalny and his growing organizational power. The Russian dictator has realized that Navalny is not naive enough to be a mouthpiece for Russia–even under duress. Putin now believes that the harm of the public attention around his targeting of Navalny far outweighs any minimal benefit obtained by holding Navalny hostage. Even when Putin sucked the life out of Navalny with Arctic-like weather conditions at the penal colony, Navalny could not stop his sassy humor, as he poked fun at Russian officials. “It has not been colder than -32°C yet… Nothing quite invigorates you like a walk in Yamal at 6:30 in the morning,” Navalny remarked earlier this year, commenting on the mandatory morning walks in the penal colony as a subtle, pointed criticism of Russia’s prison conditions. And closer to his tragic death, Navalny irked a Russian judge through playful and disdainful behavior regarding Russian officials’ charges against him.
Indeed, one cannot look at the case of Navalny’s death in isolation. Navalny’s death parallels a larger pattern of Putin’s fears of opposition. Putin has killed off anyone in his way, whether it is his barbaric actions against Ukraine simply because it asserted its right to its sovereignty, his suppression of public opinion with his “elections,” or the detainment of independent journalists like Evan Gershkovich. But let us not make the grave mistake of forgetting Putin’s cruelty from the past, today, and tomorrow. Let us hear the silent cries from Navalny’s posthumous memoir and his wife, Yulia Nalvalnya. After Navalny’s death, his wife proclaimed that she will not give up fighting for justice, freedom, and democracy and carry on her husband’s legacy. “I will continue Alexei Navalny’s work … I want to live in a free Russia, I want to build a free Russia,” Navalny remarked.
And remember: if we forget his atrocities, we as society will have let Putin succeed in his quest to assert his ego and conquer the world.
