On January 17, 2021, when Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny boarded a plane to Moscow from Berlin - where he had been treated after he was poisoned in Russia with the nerve agent Novichock - he said he was happy to return home; But he knew the risks involved: a long prison sentence, torture... and even death.
Navalny, who died on February 16 in a penal colony in the Arctic, faced the dilemma that all political dissidents must contend with: live in exile until fading into obscurity, or face an oppressive regime and risk becoming a martyrs In both cases, the probability of overthrowing the governments they oppose is practically zero.
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 welcomed, or stay in their countries and live under the corrupting influence of a dictatorship. Regimes that magnanimously reward those who conform and crush the few who refuse to conform often make corruption more attractive.
This is an especially 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 may decide to stay, but the mere fact of doing so exposes them to the exiles quickly condemning their attitude and considering them an immoral puppet of the dictatorship. Those who leave, meanwhile, are accused of betraying their country in exchange for the luxury of living abroad.
This happened in Nazi Germany during the 1930s: Thomas Mann, who was 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 stained by it that they lost all value. Some of these writers - who also opposed the Nazi regime - reproached him for choosing to live comfortably in California instead of witnessing what was happening in his country.
A similar dynamic was maintained in modern China: those who oppose the communist dictatorship from that country disdain 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 bravery - who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for defending intellectual freedom - has been criticized by some Russian exiles for staying in the country, despite even though he courageously opposed the war in Ukraine.
The dilemma lacks a correct answer: there are equally good reasons for staying and leaving, which often depend on each person's personal situation. Why then did Navalny make the decision to risk his life for a cause that he could never achieve, at least in the short term? Neither his probable 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 dictatorships' façade of total control. Dictatorships cannot depend only on military power or 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. That's why Soviet dissidents were often incarcerated in psychiatric facilities rather than prisons.
Navalny's return to Russia, regardless of how futile it may have seemed, showed that defending freedom of thought and expression is a rational response to tyranny. His defiance sent a signal to others, who felt the same but lacked his extraordinary courage, 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 especially Russian, German or Chinese about this; 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 that political martyrs leave us is fundamental: societies perverted by dictatorships must find a moral basis to build something better; and the people accustomed to servility and persecution must recover their morals. The fact that there have been brave people who defended freedom even when it seemed useless helps this process, because it offers a model.
Jean Moulin, a public official who led the French resistance and was tortured by the Gestapo in 1943, never saw 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 managed to dismantle his one-party regime. country. Navalny had no chance of overthrowing Putin's neo-Tsarist government... but the only hope of building societies capable of protecting freedoms and making people show their best lies in the examples of what they did.
Translation into Spanish by Ant-Translation. Copyright: Project Syndicate,
