As fate would have it, the day I heard the sad but unsurprising news about Alexei Navalny’s murder death in an Arctic gulag prison, I was reading the riveting account of modern-day Russia by journalist Elena Kostyuchenko.
Her book, I Love Russia: Reporting from A Lost Country, is a must-read for anyone wanting to know what life is like in an autocratic nation run by one of the most despicable men on Earth, the corrupt despot Vladimir Putin, apparently a mentor for former President Donald Trump as well as his favorite hand puppet, Tucker Carlson.
Carlson’s recent softball interview with Putin further enshrined the fired FOX News host as an enemy of democratic ideals.
He also placed his foot firmly in his mouth when he said, regarding not challenging Putin on increased repression in Russia, “I have spent my life talking to people who run countries, in various countries, and have concluded the following: That every leader kills people, including my leader. Every leader kills people, some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people, sorry….”
Navalny’s assassination death was announced four days later.
Repressive Turn
Don’t let the title of Kostyuchenko’s book fool you. It is an ironic statement, but probably also true. The former reporter for the now-shuttered newspaper Novaya Gazeta is a native Russian who loves her country but is also critical of the Stalin-like repressive turn her nation has taken under Putin and his cronies.
Too many of her colleagues at the newspaper have been murdered for their fearless reporting, including famed journalist Anna Politkovskaya, gunned down in the elevator of her apartment building, the price apparently for speaking truth to power in Russia.
In her book, Kostyuchenko reports from Russia’s cruel and poorly-run mental hospitals and from the country’s environmental disasters, where whistleblowers are cowed into silence and health concerns are covered up by Putin’s puppets.
And, like Navalny himself, Kostyuchenko was also a victim of poisoning, frequent staple in Putin’s arsenal of vengeance that he deploys anywhere in the world without consequences because, as Carlson said, “Leadership requires killing people.”
Lies and Cover-Ups
Life in Russia is dismal under Putin. State-controlled media fills citizens with lies and cover-ups. Protesters of Putin’s unjust war are beaten and jailed, including the mothers of the more than 120,000 Russian soldiers killed and the 180,000 wounded. (Ukraine estimates 70,000 of its soldiers have been killed and as many as 120,000 wounded.)
In the case of Novaya Gazette, Putin shut the newspaper down in 2022, calling it “undesirable.” Its crime? Too much honest reportage in the wake of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine the same year. The publication has resurfaced as Novaya Gazeta Europe and now publishes from Riga, Latvia. On its website is the following mission statement: “Censorship may have decimated independent journalism in Russia, but it won’t stop us reporting freely about the country and the war in Ukraine.”
Recent headlines: Scorched earth: Photos from Avdiivka, the ruined Ukrainian city now under Russia’s control; A mysterious commotion: A fellow inmate recounts events in the IK-3 penal colony on the eve of Alexey Navalny’s death; and At least 157 people detained in 25 cities as Russians mourn the loss of Alexey Navalny.
That number keeps growing. Since Navalny’s homicide passing at the Polar Wolf IK-3 penal colony, some 400 Russians have been arrested for holding peaceful protests around the country. Will they get a fair trial? Doubtful. Will they be found guilty? No doubt.
Our Fight
As Kostyuchenko writes in I Love Russia, “In 2021, Russian courts oversaw the trials of 783,000 people. Of these, exactly 2,190 were found innocent… The probability of someone charged with a crime being exonerated was 0.28 percent.”
As I write this, Navalny’s body has not been released to his widow Yulia Navalnaya. The reason seems obvious. His corpse would reveal the cause of his very unnatural death. Navalnaya believes her husband was killed with the nerve agent Novichok and the Kremlin is holding his body until the poison dissipates. Novichok was employed against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in England in 2018. They survived.
Putin will be “elected” next month for a fifth term. With Navalny and others out of the way, the “election” is just another orchestrated Russian Potemkin farce that fools no one.
The death of Navalny will ignite a thousand Navalnys because all autocrats eventually meet their end because the power of ideas cannot be crushed with force. The walls of oppression are porous. Because of the courage of journalists like Elena Kostyuchenko and the doggedness of news organizations like Novaya Gazeta Europe, Putin’s day will also come sooner rather than later.
As Yulia Navalnaya said in her recent video message to the world: “I will continue Alexei Navalny’s work … I want to live in a free Russia, I want to build a free Russia. I call on you to stand with me. To share not only grief and endless pain … I ask you to share with me the rage. The fury, anger, hatred for those who dare to kill our future.”
All of us around the world share that rage. Navalny’s fight is our fight, and it is not yet finished.