When criticism of the Kremlin led Alexei Navalny to face false criminal charges in 2013, I remembered the time my great-grandfather, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, compared Russia to a tub full of dough. “You put your hand in it, all the way in,” and “when you take it out at first there is a small gap”; but then, “before your eyes,” the dough returns to its original state, a “spongy, puffy dough.” More than a decade later, Navalny's death in a remote penal colony in the Arctic highlights how little the situation has changed.
The prison in which Navalny died is particularly brutal. Called Polar Wolf, it is a cold gulag for violent criminals. However, Navalny (a lawyer and blogger dedicated to fighting corruption) was not known for being violent. In 2013, he was defending himself against false accusations of embezzlement; In 2021, the convictions that served to send him to Lobo Polar were for violation of probation, fraud and contempt of court. During his time in prison, he racked up new sentences based on trumped-up charges, including supporting extremism.
Navalny's real crime was, of course, defying President Vladimir Putin. Through various initiatives, from leading protests against the rigged parliamentary elections of 2011 to investigations into the corruption of Russian elites and the attempt to unseat Putin (in a presidential election from which the authorities excluded him), he carried out a relentless campaign of almost two decades against Putin and his circle. The numerous judicial trials were farces in the style of the trials organized by Stalin; processes aimed at offering a semblance of justice while keeping a high-profile critic away from the ballot box and television screens. Now, while the trials of Stalin's time made liberal use of the death penalty (and also of the gulags), no accusation against Navalny (no matter how invented) justified that punishment; at least, not officially.
Russian prison service staff say Navalny lost consciousness after taking a walk and could not be revived, despite the efforts of emergency medical staff. However, Navalny did not seem “unwell” the day before, when he participated in an online judicial procedure, nor the day before, when his lawyer visited him. That does not mean that Navalny's death was a coup directly ordered by Putin himself; Life in Lobo Polar can destroy anyone's health. However, directly or indirectly, it was Putin who killed Navalny.
And that wasn't even the first attempt. In the summer of 2020, Navalny was poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent (a Soviet creation), although he was flown to Berlin, where they managed to save him. He knew that returning to Russia would mean new politically motivated prosecutions, such as those suffered by former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the agitators of the punk-rock group Pussy Riot. He even knew that he could end up murdered, like Boris Nemtsov, Anna Politkovskaya and many others. Despite this, he chose to return to Russia and continue confronting Vladimir Putin.
He was arrested as soon as he landed in Moscow. The ensuing protests, in which tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets to demand his release, only reinforced the Kremlin's view that he was a threat that needed to be neutralized. In the rigged trials that followed, no government authority dared even use his name and referred to him as the “German patient.” It was like living in the Harry Potter universe, where the feared Lord Voldemort is called “He Who Must Not Be Named.”
When I wrote about Navalny's judicial farces in 2013, I noted that Russia had perhaps evolved, however slowly. Little did he know that this period would later be remembered as the “vegetarian era,” when independent media was repressed but not banned, public protests were punished but not with long prison sentences, and a high-profile enemy of the Kremlin how Navalni could continue directing an anti-corruption foundation and denouncing injustice. However, since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin has turned carnivorous.
Since the invasion, almost 300 cases have been filed for “discrediting the Russian armed forces.” Nowadays, it is enough to recite a pacifist poem to get a rigged trial in Russia. The tragedy of the despot is that the fight never ends. The more mock trials a regime holds, the more it must hold to keep the population under control. The more repression people endure, the more repression is necessary to avoid a violent reaction. The more blood that is spilled, the more blood that has to be spilled.
There is no end point – no finish line – for an authoritarian figure like Putin. He must hold on to power today and he must do so again tomorrow. It is therefore reasonable to assume that on the eve of Russia's mock presidential election scheduled for next month, Putin's tolerance for dissent is at an all-time low.
Yes, the elections are expected to go smoothly, and Navalny's death has undoubtedly attracted more attention than his statements from prison; it remains possible that the murder was indirect. However, the same logic would apply in the case of the poisoning of Russian-British double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia two weeks before the 2018 presidential elections. None of the victims posed an imminent threat to Putin, and the Actions against them sparked much negative international attention. The fact is that Putin needed to send a message: “Enemies, be careful.”
And the dough once again occupies the entire tub.
