Translated material
Didn't die, but killed
We are sending you a “Signal”.
On February 16, Alexei Navalny died in the Polar Wolf colony. More precisely, he was killed. This is not a figure of speech by his comrades : regardless of what happened that day, the politician was deliberately kept in unbearable conditions (27 rooms in a punishment cell is torture).
Propagandists are confusedly trying out ways not to call a murder a murder: a detached blood clot, “sudden death syndrome,” a Western conspiracy (examples: one , two ).
On social networks, the phrase “not dead, but killed” became the main reaction of shocked people - feeling, as people should, different things. Some are devastated, some feel angry, some experience Navalny’s death as the loss of a loved one, some say they feel nothing - and in most cases this is a defensive reaction to acute grief.
People are trying to understand why this happened. Find the logic of what is happening and stick to it. Somehow I can get it into my head that Navalny is no more.
This letter is dedicated to an event that is still impossible to believe, and our emotions from it.
Why did this happen?
Rationalizing grief seems to help us get through it.
But Navalny’s murder is beyond rationality. And we are not talking about propagandists here who shout “this is not profitable for us” or even “it would be profitable and right for us to hide this.”
It just seems like it’s high time to stop applying human standards of rationality and expediency, or even benefit or disadvantage, to the actions of “collective Putin.”
Probably, Putin - collectively and individually - had some kind of motivation to imprison Navalny for 19 years and kill him in a colony. Like starting a war with Ukraine ten years ago and a full-scale invasion two years ago. It is simply pointless to delve into this motivation. There have been no questions for Putin and those who serve him for a long time; their logic is interesting, rather, for research purposes.
Another thing is to understand why the perpetrators, countless judicial officials, jailers, police officers, and other security officials obeyed this logic: they poisoned Navalny, imprisoned him, and tortured him. What is the reason for their collective behavior?
Most likely, it is explained not by the inherent evil of people, but by cowardice. Political scientist Tatyana Stanovaya writes that Putin’s attitude towards Navalny as a swindler and enemy “programmed the system for a merciless attitude.” The security forces—from prosecutors to jailers—were more afraid that they would be suspected of sympathizing with Navalny than that something would happen to Navalny.
This fear overpowered even the main fear of a bureaucrat (including a bureaucrat in uniform): “no matter what happens.” Not to mention all the other emotions. There was nothing personal, no living feeling - not even hatred - in the way Putin treated Navalny individually and collectively.
It is tempting to think that Putin was afraid of Navalny. But this is probably nothing more than a projection. Putin, apparently, is quite confident in his own messianism, as well as in the love of the people - why would he be afraid of anyone?
Putin and Navalny lived in different worlds. Many people knew Navalny personally. And even if they didn’t know, they could easily imagine that they knew. You could meet him on the street, come up and say hello. You could argue with him on Twitter. He lived in the same world with us. Naturally, for many his death is a personal loss .
The last time Putin really communicated live with people was on August 22, 2000. It was in the officers' house in Vidyayevo, Murmansk region. His interlocutors were relatives of the sailors of the Kursk submarine, which sank in the Barents Sea ten days earlier. They interrupted the president, shouted at him, and he either made excuses or interrupted people and shouted at them.
Since then, Putin has met only with specially selected and trained extras - be it “straight lines”, rallies or spontaneous “visits to the people” . He was never yelled at again, at least not publicly. All his external contacts are carefully orchestrated.
Russian elites also communicate almost exclusively among themselves, having lost any connections with the outside world. Then they lost interest in others, compassion, the ability to listen, argue, quarrel, and make peace.
This is not to say that they are all exclusively evil people. More than one and a half thousand years ago, St. Augustine wrote that evil does not have its own nature and its own essence. Evil is simply the absence of good, just as darkness is the absence of light.
Therefore, the question “why” will not lead us to the answer. It is not surprising that officials, having ceased to be social beings and abandoned everything human, ultimately killed Navalny. They lacked everything that could save his life.
What will happen now?
Normal people - including the hundreds of thousands who have come out to protest for many years - are not like officials. It was to them that Alexei Navalny said in Daniel Roher’s film: “Don’t give up. Don't, don't give up. If this [death] happened, it means that we are unusually strong at this moment, since they decided to kill me. […] All that is needed for the triumph of evil is the inaction of good people. Therefore, there is no need to remain idle.”
Navalny was not only a protest leader and a symbol of the opposition. First of all, he was and in any conditions remained a Politician with a capital P.
A politician is a person who responds to a demand that already exists in society. And Navalny, since the beginning of the 2010s, has responded to requests for “something else, just not all this.”
Navalny constantly repeated the words “we cannot put up with”: theft, incredible inequality, palaces of officials, centralization, arbitrariness of the security forces, political isolation and an almost established monarchy. Later it was added to this list - aggressive war cannot be tolerated.
Simply put, he knew that people wanted to live to see the beautiful Russia of the future - and he turned this image into words, social force and a set of political ideas.
Political ideas, unlike people, cannot be killed. They can only lose relevance. It is important to understand: Navalny’s death did not cross out the list of things that cannot be tolerated. On the contrary, the main political emotion - the simple desire to live in a peaceful and free country with a fair government - has become even stronger.
But the darkness, which many people tried not to notice, after Navalny’s murder cannot be ignored. Neutrality, the belief that everything will work itself out, you just need to be patient and stay out of politics - this idea may have fewer supporters.
Political logic is inexorable - important ideas do not remain abandoned. We do not know the name of the next builder of the beautiful Russia of the future. But everything that Navalny fought for awaits the next strong politician, who will again take it upon himself to say: we cannot put up with this.
P.S
So far, very little is known about the death of Alexei Navalny. Our colleagues from Meduza have issued an editorial statement and are collecting all the information about what happened here . You can see how memorial events take place in Russia and around the world here .
Here are some more materials about Alexei Navalny that seem important to us:
● Main photographs from the life of the main opposition politician in Russia;
● Meduza tried to figure out when Navalny’s body should be returned to the family, whether it would be possible to conduct an independent examination, and where, according to the law, the funeral could take place;
● Grigory Yudin and Maxim Trudolyubov reflect on what the death of Alexei Navalny will bring to Russia - and what the country has lost.
Now, in the first days after the death of Alexei Navalny, it is very important to talk to each other. Read stories from Russians about the place Navalny occupied in their lives—and tell other Meduza readers how you feel now.