Life After Death

Russia's Elections, the Legacy of Alexei Navalny, and Rebooting TL;DRussia

Alexei Navalny’s casket departs the Quench My Sorrows Church in the Marino neighborhood of Moscow | © Meduza 2024

A note to readers

Sorry, friends.

This newsletter has been AWOL for a while, due to a combination of writing deadlines and other obligations, all of which seemed to pile up in the latter quarter of last year and continued through the first quarter of this one. It might be hubris to think that anyone noticed my absence, but if you did, I apologize—and I’m grateful for your patience.

Looking ahead, I’m going to play around with the format a little bit. Instead of lengthy weekly reports, I’ll aim to deliver a reasonably comprehensive roundup of key developments and readings every second week, augmented by topical columns as events occur and thoughts arise. I’d also like to experiment with an interactive element, but that will likely come a little bit later in the year. As always, the newsletter will remain free.

Why Navalny Died

The decisive vote in this weekend’s Russian presidential elections was cast on 16 February.

I do not know how Alexei Navalny died that day. Indeed, we may never have a satisfactory answer to that question. But I think I have an idea why he died.

I’ll be honest: I’m not sure I buy the theory that Navalny’s murder had anything to do with the purportedly pending exchange for the Russian assassin Vadim Krasikov, held in Germany. I’m not even particularly certain that anyone in the Kremlin intended for Navalny to die the day he did. Indeed, some of the people in charge of delivering Putin’s victory this weekend seem to have felt that Navalny’s death made their life harder. Nonetheless, I am certain that the Kremlin intended for him to die in prison, and if that happened to occur just a month before the elections, so be it.

To an outside observer, it’s hard to fathom why Navalny—already set to spend more time in prison than Vladimir Putin could ever spend in office—might be enough of a threat to the Kremlin to warrant murder. The important thing to remember, though, is that we’re not the ones who have to fathom that threat: Putin is. If I make a prediction about Russian politics and am wrong, I look silly. If Putin makes a prediction about Russian politics and is wrong, the consequences are considerably more dire. For that reason alone, authoritarian leaders tend to over-respond to potential threats, as, indeed, Putin has done since the advent of the anti-corruption and pro-democracy movement that Navalny led.

That said, however, I don’t think an autocratic instinct for risk aversion is the whole story, or even most of it. In fact, I don’t think Navalny died because Putin was afraid of him. I think Navalny died because he wasn’t afraid of Putin.

If that sounds a little less than nuanced—which I readily admit it might—please allow me to explain.

The Kremlin worked hard to ensure that these elections—which would, should he serve to the end of his next six-year term, extend his rule longer than Stalin’s—were devoid of any vision for Russia’s future. Instead, to paraphrase Andrei Kolesnikov, what Putin offers is an everlasting present, into which past and future dissolve without a trace, and in which nothing can be imagined to be different than it is today. Putin’s own election campaign offered no discernible platform for change or progress, and neither did those of his three Kremlin-approved opponents.

These elections were designed in large measure to cement Russia’s futurelessness. Authoritarian leaders hold elections for a whole host of reasons, including as a means of simulating democratic legitimacy for domestic and foreign audiences, coordinating and corralling elites, and gathering useful feedback about public opinion. I suppose those reasons are still valid in Russia today, but they all ring hollow. The ballot is no longer an opportunity for Russians to choose Putin: it’s a demonstration that Russians have no other choice than Putin.

Reducing elections to a ritual, however, does not mean that they are senseless. Like any other ritual—attending a religious service, or a sporting match, for example—these elections are designed to create a sense of extraordinary togetherness. For those who lean towards true belief, the ritual is meant to demonstrate how widely their faith is shared. For those more prone to doubt, the ritual takes on more sinister overtones. A lack of faith in a community of true believers, after all, isn’t just a difference of opinion: it’s heresy.

Navalny, for all his human faults and all the divisions he evoked, gave succor to Russia’s political heretics. He refused to allow fear—the knowledge that he was facing imprisonment and likely death—to cow him into silence or exile. For Putin, then, Navalny was dangerous not because he could have won an election or led a revolution. Rather, Navalny died for the reason that dogmatists have murdered heretics for millennia: his example threatened one day to provoke a crisis of faith.

The opposition, of course, has countered with rituals of its own, and rightly so. Navalny’s funeral, and the laying of flowers on his grave and at other memorials around the country by 25,000 or more supporters, is nothing if not a moment of extraordinary togetherness. So, too, is the “Noon against Putin” tactic, in which opposition supporters were encouraged to turn out en masse at their polling stations at noon on 17 March. Both have the effect of allowing anti-Putin and anti-war Russians to see that there are more of them than they might have believed, and thus allowing for their own faith and fervor to grow. Individual acts of resistance—setting ballot boxes alight, or dousing them in ink—serve to puncture the fear. (The use of fire only adds to the religious overtones, I suppose.) Whether these images will serve to galvanize the opposition into further action, or to drive home its isolation and marginalization, I do not know. We can be certain, however, that the authorities will mobilize the state’s coercive apparatus, come what may.

There was, of course, never any danger of these elections being competitive. The Kremlin controls too much of the process, from the nomination of candidates to the conduct of the campaign and the counting of the votes. The vote cast when Navalny died, however, goes well beyond that. By killing Navalny, Putin ensured that, from here on out, Russian politics will only ever be about him. The question put to Russian citizens will no longer be whether he or someone else is better placed to run the country. For as long as Putin lives, like Stalin before him, the only question put to Russian citizens is how long they will be content to let Putin rule.

What I’m Reading

Even a bullet-pointed list of the reading list I’ve accumulated since the last time I wrote this newsletter would be miles long, and, of course, much of it will have found its way to you in any case. Nonetheless, here is a small handful of things that caught my attention, and that might be worth a bit of yours:

• Back in January, as the Russian military was in the midst of its successful push towards Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine, iStories published an investigation by Irina Dolinina and Rina Nikolaeva on the “Svatovo meatgrinder”, laying bare the colossal cost Russia’s war is imposing on the men who are fighting it.

• On a related note, also in January, Verstka published an investigation by Darya Kucherenko on corruption in the military, about both the supply of and demand for ways to make this war more survivable for soldiers and officers, if not more winnable for Russia.

• Shortly after Navalny’s funeral, the independent Russian sociologists Elena Koneva and Alexander Chilingarian published a research note on who was coming out to honor his memory and the impact his death was—or was not—having on public opinion. In a nutshell: propaganda works, but not for everyone, and not always. For a more intimate take on the same story, see Meduza’s vox pop among attendees at Navalny’s funeral.

• Last week, Meduza published a lengthy investigation by Lilia Yapparova on the lengths Russia’s government is going to in its effort to brainwash the children it has stolen from Ukraine, and to prevent them from becoming a political problem.

• Just a few days ago, the Russian liberal economist Alexander Auzan published an interesting essay in the Russian edition of Forbes, whose argument—not buried too deeply between the lines—is essentially that the Russian state, having increasingly taken control of the economy, does not have the wherewithal to make it grow.

• In a bit of shameless self-promotion, I published this piece in The National Interest two days after Navalny’s death, suggesting five policy responses Washington and other Western capitals ought to take. I’m sorry to say that, a month later, no one seems to be listening. Not surprised, of course, but sorry.