Ten days ago, upon news that Alexei Navalny had died of “natural causes” in an Arctic prison, I texted my family thread to discuss. We didn’t really go too deep, and maybe we didn’t have to, because a short line from my mother summed it all up pretty well: “It’s all back to the bad old times".
Coming from a family of Soviet Jewish immigrants, the fact that I initially hesitated to write something about the death of Russia’s most popular opposition leader, let alone include a vaguely negative quote commenting on its implications, similarly may tell you all you need to know about our psyche. I mean, I wasn’t even born in Russia. We’ve resided in America—land of the free press, where nothing bad ever, ever, ever happens to you for voicing your opinion online—since the USSR’s fall in 1989. But oh well, I figured. My Substack doesn’t have a particularly large following. It’s meant as a place for me to explore raw thoughts on culture, identity, and going from here to there. So let’s get into it.
What are the bad old times? I’ll never really know, because I wasn’t there. What I can say is that if Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago prompted my parents to comment that things had become worse than when they left, the level of crackdown on any dissent of Putin’s regime today might be reminiscent of another few decades earlier: the end of the Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin era.
Maybe not all the way, to be fair, given Stalin’s brutal methods. Mass resettling and deportation and killing was a hallmark of his regime from the ‘30s until his death in 1953—Poles, Finns, Koreans, Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, Muslims, Greeks, Jews—it seems that very few ethnic groups were left alone. Had he lived a little longer, it’s even possible that rumors of a mass pogrom against Jews would have become reality, further altering the course of my family’s trajectory just a decade or so after Hitler had his way with it. I recently read Paul Goldberg’s The Yid, which draws upon this dark potential plot to tell the (fictional) story about a few of its soon-to-be-victims that conspire to murder Stalin before he can murder them. There’s plenty of humor in it, but the reality of the country and period it operates in was decidedly unfunny. Unless you were in the right circle, day-to-day life more or less sucked. If you drifted far enough outside that circle, your life blurred into the same miserable day in prison or exile, or you didn’t have a life at all. Today, we seem to be have gotten all the way past rough day-to-day and well into lots of prison or exile for dissenters. I wonder how long that chapter lasts?
This is disturbing to think about, but more generally sad and weird is the relationship I thought I had to Russia while growing up. Genuinely, I used to feel that being Russian was a huge part of my identity, and perhaps in a way that’s true, but it would be more precise to say that being from a family of Jews that lived in the Soviet Union is a huge part of my identity. The Russia that my parents and grandparents grew up in was borderline inhospitable to them, much as Putin’s Russia currently is to homosexuals, foreign journalists, anyone who so much as makes a peep about Ukraine, and yes, any political figure who dares to challenge the status quo.
It’s a fair question to ask why Navalny came back to Russia in 2021 after recovering in Germany from a near-fatal poisoning widely attributed to the Kremlin. And on some level the answer makes sense: he knew that standing up for his beliefs and exerting his influence couldn’t happen fully in exile. He knew that it required sacrifice, and it all ended with the ultimate one. Death from natural causes. Which, sure, natural causes after three years in prison, roughly 300 days of solitary confinement, and transportation to a facility inside the arctic circle. Putin may not have pulled the trigger himself, but his standoff with Navalny ended pretty much as it was always destined to. Make no mistake about who’s responsible for his death.
But now that it’s over, what’s next? In the immediate term, at least Navalny’s mother can bury his body. After that, though? Who knows. If you’re Putin, this was a pretty good time for Navalny to go away. There’s another sham election next month that will surely be framed as an affirmation of Putin’s policies, including of course the continued war on Ukraine. Much of the world’s attention is still on Israel’s war in Gaza. A rematch of the 2020 US election is about to kick off in earnest. Sadly, this death may not function as the galvanizing force it could be. I say sad because even if Navalny had his faults, the man showed a real potential to stop and even reverse Russia’s backward slide. Because as long as Russia keeps moving in that direction, the world gets more chaotic.
Because the frustration and hopelessness that can come from these moments just breeds more of the same, and that is good for only one person.
So Navalny is actually a next generation to Putin as he was in mid forty’s and it is really up to that generation or even next one born after 1989 to possibly change Russia for the better . In my opinion , while Putin and his generation are at the top unlikely anything will change for the better , hopefully not to the worse ..