On January 17, 2021, when the leader of the Russian opposition Aleksei Navalny boarded a plane to Moscow from Berlin - where he had been treated after he was poisoned in Russia with the nerve agent novichok - he claimed to be glad to go home; but he knew the risks involved: a long prison sentence, torture... and even death.
Navalny, who died last February 16 in a penal colony in the Arctic, faced the dilemma with which all political dissidents must struggle: live in exile until they fade into obscurity, or face to an oppressive regime and risk becoming martyrs. In both cases, the probability of overthrowing the governments they oppose is practically nil.
Even those who do not actively challenge oppressive regimes - and especially those who have the means to flee - face a similar dilemma: rebuild their lives abroad, where they may not be well received, or stay in the their countries and live under the corrupting influence of a dictatorship. Often regimes that magnanimously reward those who conform and crush the few who refuse to conform make corruption more attractive.
This is a particularly bitter dilemma, because it creates a rift between those opponents who stay and those who leave... a rift that benefits oppressive regimes. There are many reasons why someone might decide to stay, but the simple fact of doing so exposes him to the exiles quickly condemning his attitude and considering him an immoral puppet of the dictatorship. Those who leave, meanwhile, are accused of betraying the country in exchange for the luxury of living abroad.
This happened in Nazi Germany during the 1930s: Thomas Mann, famous enough to maintain his influence even from exile, denounced German writers who remained in the Third Reich. His works, he later declared, were so tarnished by this that they lost all value. Some of those writers - who were also opposed to the Nazi regime - reproached him for choosing to live comfortably in California instead of witnessing what was happening in his country.
In modern China, a similar dynamic was maintained: those who oppose the communist dictatorship from that country despise the dissidents who emigrated, because they consider them disconnected from reality and irrelevant. This is also evident today in Russia, for example, Dmitry Muratov, a journalist of immense courage - who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for defending intellectual freedom - has been criticized by some Russian exiles for staying - se in the country, despite the fact that he courageously opposed the war in Ukraine.
The dilemma lacks a correct answer: there are equally good reasons to stay and to leave, which often depend on each person's personal situation. Why then did Navalni make the decision to risk his life for a cause that he could never achieve, at least in the short term? Neither his likely assassination nor the alternative of staying in Western Europe would have put an end to the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But it made sense: Explicit defiance damages the facade of total control of dictatorships. Dictatorships cannot rely only on military power or the fear of the secret police, people must be convinced that submitting to the tyrant is normal, and resisting is abnormal and even a kind of madness. This is why Soviet dissidents used to be incarcerated in psychiatric facilities instead of prisons.
Navalny's return to Russia, no matter how futile it may have seemed, showed that defending freedom of thought and expression is a rational response to tyranny. His defiance sent others, who felt the same way but lacked his extraordinary courage, a signal that they were not alone.
And there is another issue: when they reward conformists, make people repeat lies and propaganda, and force friends and relatives to betray each other, dictatorships bring out the worst in people; they create a culture of fear, mistrust and betrayal. There is nothing particularly Russian, German or Chinese about it; many nations, at different times, have been perverted by oppressive governments, but it is not necessarily something that lasts forever. Regimes are defeated and tyrants die.
It is then that the example left to us by the political martyrs is fundamental: societies perverted by dictatorships must find a moral basis to build something better; and peoples accustomed to servility and persecution must recover their morals. That there have been brave men who stood up for freedom even when it seemed futile helps this process, because it provides a model.
Jean Moulin, a public servant who led the French resistance and was tortured by the Gestapo in 1943, never got to see the end of the Nazi occupation he fought against. The Nazis executed Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer in April 1945, three weeks before Adolf Hitler committed suicide. Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo - who returned to his country during the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989 - spent the rest of his life in and out of prison, and died in custody in 2017 without having achieved dismantle the one-party regime in his country. Navalny had no chance of overthrowing Putin's neo-tsarist government...but the only hope of building societies capable of protecting freedoms and getting people to show their best lies in the examples of what they did.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024.
