Actual Navalny. Life after death

Navalny's murder a year ago in a remote Arctic prison came as a shock to much of Russian society. The politician's funeral in Moscow turned into a spontaneous, days-long demonstration – for days people kept coming to his grave in a cemetery on the outskirts of Moscow. ​​Despite the wartime repressive climate and a ban on public gatherings, the Russian authorities did little to prevent this demonstration of mourning, although they surrounded the event with heavy police presence. They saw it as the last one: after all, the man who could mobilise tens and hundreds of thousands of people out onto the street could no longer call them to action.

Navalny's political programme was built on the intersection of two themes – corruption and fair elections. In societies with a brief and contradictory experience of electoral democracy, the value of elections is not obvious to the general public. This allows autocrats to gradually distort electoral procedures, reducing them to mere imitations. Meanwhile, corruption is a far more visible and direct injustice, one that people experience daily and that sparks outrage even among those uninterested in party politics.

Beginning with corruption exposés, Navalny realised that these revelations were ignored by the authorities unless they were backed by the threat of collective action. He began organising anti-corruption rallies, demanding answers to his investigations. At the same time, in every election, he exposed and urged people to document fraud, explaining that electoral manipulation and corruption were two sides of the same coin. This combination of the two issues – corruption and fair elections – gave Navalny a much stronger and broader political voice than any other democratic politician in Russia. In 2020, despite a massive state-run disinformation and propaganda campaign against him, 20% of Russians still told pollsters they supported his activities.

But that was not all. Navalny’s political doctrine, linking corruption and elections, was reinforced by an unprecedented display of personal courage. In the face of rising dictatorship, he preached the slogan ‘don’t be afraid’, knowing that its effectiveness depended entirely on personal example. Corruption, electoral fraud and fear – these are the three main tools of any dictatorship, Navalny argued, always interspersing this message with humour and self-irony.

When, after the first attempt on his life, Putin allowed a plane chartered by Boris Zimin to take off and fly the comatose Navalny to Germany, he was sure that Navalny would either not wake up or would be too weakened to inspire people again with his nearly irresistible mix of humor and fearlessness. However, when German doctors quite literally brought Navalny back to life, a critical dilemma confronted him: the slogan ‘don't be afraid’ would not work while Navalny was safe in Germany.

What happened after that seems to me like a story of almost biblical proportions. A new tale of David and Goliath, albeit with a much more dramatic turn of events. Navalny understood perfectly well that what awaited him in Russia was not just prison but another attempt on his life, with far fewer chances of survival (or, to be more precise, almost none at all). Putin understood this just as well, as did everyone else. Everyone knew that the rational choice for Navalny was not to return. But that would have proven that the slogan 'don't be afraid' did not work, that it was a naive fiction that Putin had clearly debunked. It would have demonstrated that fearing Putin was the reasonable thing to do. Navalny refused to recognise his own slogan as meaningless. He believed it would devalue years of resistance and be a betrayal of those he had inspired with his own conviction in its importance. 

Navalny did not allow Putin to revel in the triumph of the fear he instills in people and with which he rules. He left Putin himself with a choice: to kill him, thereby proving that Putin had failed to intimidate him, or to accept that fear is not all-powerful. Over the past year, Russian investigative journalists have gathered enough evidence to show that the entire official version of Navalny's death and the events preceding it has been completely falsified. Today, there is no other version of the events in the Arctic colony other than that of a deliberate and brutal murder. 

And yet, fearlessness was not defeated. That is what strikes us most in Navalny’s story. And that is what we must, above all, never forget.

There is still an ongoing debate within the opposition community about whether Navalny did the right thing by returning to Russia, or if it would have been wiser to lead the resistance from abroad. But there is a deeper truth. The history of humanity – and humanity itself – would be different if not for such examples of courage and unwavering conviction. Navalny now belongs to that pantheon of freedom fighters whose memory the world rightfully preserves.

Much can be said about Navalny’s political legacy. But there is one core idea that inevitably emerges at the heart of these discussions. Navalny’s greatest legacy is political optimism. Not the light-hearted optimism popularised by the meme about a ‘beautiful Russia of the future’, nor the forced optimism that borders on propaganda, the kind that reassures people, and oneself, that the tyrant’s days are numbered, but a high-calibre optimism. This optimism is rooted in the deep conviction that one’s political ideals are so significant, and one’s belief in them so strong, that neither can be shaken by the uncertainty of when they will come to fruition. And because of that, there is simply no option but to keep fighting.

And as long as this highest form of optimism lives among us, Navalny lives among us too. The actual Navalny.