First death anniversary

Navalny: A Year Later

Corruption, Falsification, and Fear

Alexei Navalny's murder a year ago in an Arctic prison came as a shock to a large part of Russian society. YouTube traffic of independent Russian media in exile surged by more than one and a half times. The politician's funeral in Moscow turned into a spontaneous multi-day demonstration – people marched to his grave in a cemetery on the outskirts of Moscow for several days.

Despite the repressive wartime atmosphere and the ban on any mass gatherings, the Russian authorities did little to prevent this demonstration of mourning, although they surrounded it with tight police cordons. They considered it to be the last one: after all, the man who had mobilised tens and hundreds of thousands of people to take to the street could no longer call on them to act.

Navalny's political platform was built on the intersection of two issues – corruption and fair elections. In societies that have had only a brief and controversial experience of electoral democracy, the value of elections is not an obvious thing to the general public. This allows autocrats to distort the electoral procedures gradually, reducing them to mere imitation. At the same time, corruption is a much more tangible and obvious manifestation of injustice that people encounter on a daily basis. Even those uninterested in party politics can relate to the outrage it provokes.

Beginning with corruption investigations, Navalny quickly realised that these revelations were ignored by the authorities unless they were backed by the threat of collective action. He began to bring people out to anti-corruption rallies, demanding answers to his findings. At the same time, at every election, he exposed and encouraged people to document irregularities and fraud, explaining that electoral rigging and corruption are two sides of the same coin. This combination of the two issues – corruption and fair elections – gave Navalny a much stronger and broader support than any other democratic politician in Russia. In 2020, despite the vast information and propaganda war waged against him, 20% of Russians still told pollsters that they supported Navalny's activities.

But that was not all. The political doctrine, linking corruption and elections, was reinforced by Navalny's unprecedented personal courage. In the face of an increasingly oppressive dictatorship, he preached the slogan 'don't be afraid,' realising that its effectiveness could only be ensured by personal example.

Corruption, election fraud, and fear, he argued, were the three main tools of any dictatorship. He delivered this message with a mix of humour and self-irony.

When, after the first attempt on his life, Putin allowed a plane chartered by Russian businessman Boris Zimin to take off and transport the comatose Navalny to Germany, he was certain that Navalny would either never wake up or would not be able to recover and inspire people with his near-irresistible combination of humour and fearlessness. However, when German doctors quite literally brought Navalny back to life, a critical dilemma confronted him: the slogan 'don't be afraid' did not work while Navalny was safe in Germany.

What followed seems to me like a story of almost biblical proportions. A modern retelling of David and Goliath, albeit with an even more dramatic turn. Navalny understood perfectly well that what he was facing in Russia was not prison, but a new assassination attempt, and there would be much less chance of survival, or rather almost none at all. Putin and everyone else knew this perfectly well. Everyone understood that, for Navalny, staying away was the rational choice. But that would have proven that the slogan 'don't be afraid' did not work, that it was a naive fiction that Putin had clearly debunked. It would have demonstrated that fearing Putin was the reasonable thing to do. Navalny refused to recognise his own slogan as meaningless. He believed it would devalue years of resistance and be a betrayal of those he had inspired with his own conviction in its importance.

Navalny did not allow Putin to revel in the triumph of the fear he instils in people and with which he rules. He left Putin himself with a choice: to kill him, thereby proving that he had failed to intimidate him, or to accept that fear is not all-powerful. Over the past year, Russian investigative journalists have gathered enough evidence to show that the entire official version of Navalny's death and the events preceding it has been completely falsified. Today, there is no other version of the events in the Arctic colony other than that of a deliberate and brutal murder. And yet, fearlessness was not defeated.

Within Russian opposition circles, the debate still rages on whether Navalny did the right thing by returning to Russia, or whether it would have been more sensible to lead the Russian opposition to the regime from abroad. However, there is a truth of a different magnitude: the history of humanity, and humanity itself, would be very different if there were no cases like this.

Is There Life After Death? The Russian Opposition After the War and Navalny's Murder

The organisational structures of the Russian opposition inside the country have been largely dismantled. The Russian opposition activists, politicians, human rights defenders and journalists who have left the country have not yet managed to establish any political structures that represent the Russian opposition and enjoy relatively broad support even among the Russian diaspora.

This is not a coincidence, but a systemic phenomenon. Coalition building has always been an extremely weak point in Russian political culture, including among the 'democrats'. This, in turn, may be explained by the weak traditions of party politics. In the 1990s – the most democratic era in Russian history to date – political parties were created, as a rule, as short-term electoral projects and rarely survived beyond two election cycles, unless they had a strong 'personalist' foundation (Zhirinovsky's populist LDPR party or Yavlinsky's democratic Yabloko party). But these kinds of structures are also resistant to coalition-building, which dilutes the leader's individual authority. Even the structures created by Navalny partially adhered to this paradigm, resembling more of a project office or an order, bound together by the figure of its unconditional leader.

At the same time, the Russian democratic opposition as a whole demonstrates a high level of resilience. It more closely resembles a kind of rhizome (to borrow from poststructuralist terminology), consisting of numerous activist and human rights initiatives and structures, public speakers, experts, and, of course, a well-organised and professional media infrastructure. Upon relocating beyond Russia's borders — beyond the reach of Russian law enforcement agencies — this network quickly launched a large-scale operational framework for its activities.

Thanks to the new era of digital communications and the fact that the Russian authorities have thus far failed to effectively isolate the Russian segment of the Internet, we seem to be dealing with a new phenomenon in political history — the existence of an independent Russian public sphere outside of Russia, while conditions of dictatorship prevail inside the country. This goes beyond dozens of media projects spanning various formats and orientations. The independent Russian-speaking public sphere also includes relocated human rights and activist organisations, experts, and even entire expert centres, politicians, public speakers, monitoring projects that track the situation within Russia across various fields (science, education, ecology). All of this together generates the content and forms the agendas that the independent media that have moved abroad broadcast in their publications.
It is difficult to estimate the Russian audience of this alternative public sphere. Recent studies (in particular, a report by the JX Fund) vividly illustrate the ongoing struggle that the Russian authorities are waging to suppress its reach within Russia, while the independent media and bloggers themselves are working continuously to develop new ways of delivering content and circumventing censorship. The experts of the above-mentioned report estimate that the Russian audience of this segment is between 6-9% of the Russian adult population.

Our own expert assessments indicate that this audience has a heterogeneous and more complex structure. It consists of a core group, i.e. those who consume independent media content on a regular basis, and a peripheral audience, i.e. those who access it sporadically and fragmentarily, learn about it second-hand, etc. As previously mentioned, during periods of information shocks (such as Navalny's murder and his funeral, the terrorist attack in Crocus City Hall, the Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk region) traffic to Russian independent YouTube projects grew by 1.8-2 times.

Additionally, a recent Levada Centre survey found that about 30% of respondents in Russia were aware of the Russian opposition rally in Berlin. This unexpectedly high figure testifies to the high permeability of signals emanating from the Russian independent public sphere abroad, which are reaching even those who may not follow its activities on a regular basis.

A different question is: what are the political consequences of this informational influence? The fact that many people in Russia wake up in the morning to find news from the Riga-based Meduza or watch Dozhd TV channel broadcasting from Amsterdam, just like their compatriots in Europe who have fled the threat of repression, does not mean that the former will take to the streets to overthrow Putin's regime in the afternoon.

His stability and overall political balance depend on a broader set of macro factors – the economic situation, the foreign policy context, and the loyalty of the security agencies and key economic elites to the regime.

The political significance of the independent Russian public sphere abroad and its influence on the domestic Russian audience is most likely determined by two key factors. First, it prevents the informational isolation of Russians inside Russia. If certain events detrimental for the regime occur, the lack of isolation of the domestic Russian audience will amplify their impact on social sentiment. Second, should the regime be weakened — due to changes in the economic or international situation — those who are loyal to the regime today will begin looking for alternatives. And, among those alternatives will not only be a return to the once discarded project of a democratic and pro-European Russia, but also the project of the further radicalisation of the regime through consistent nationalism and even greater right-wing fundamentalism. At this point, the validity, and sophistication of alternative political visions, their visibility, and influence will be important in determining the direction of change.

Of course, politicians are more interested in short-term effectiveness — and discussions about the balance of power in some indefinite future is frustrating and tiresome. However, when that future arrives, missed opportunities from the past will be felt as an unfortunate and possibly tragic mistake. Undoubtedly, the impact of an independent Russian public sphere on Russia's future would be more significant if the Russian diaspora managed to establish formal political institutions. This would be significant both from the point of view of coalition-building skills and also helping to brand a democratic and pro-European project for Russia’s future. However, the shrinking and marginalisation of the Russian independent public sphere abroad will only hinder such developments.

Kirill Rogovis is the Founder and Director of Re:Russia.