How Alexei Navalny differed from Vladimir Putin

Following Alexei Navalny’s suspicious “sudden death” in an Arctic prison camp last Friday, two scenes immediately come to mind featuring Vladimir Putin, who almost certainly mandated it.

The first is from December 2018 and his meeting, at the G20 Summit, with Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, suspected at the time of involvement in the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident journalist (a suspicion lent weight by a US intelligence report released in 2021). Though bin Salman was a virtual pariah at the time, felt to have blood still hot on his hands, Putin high-fived him shamelessly, the warmest of smiles on his face, and quickly they sat down to laugh and banter. Like meeting like, it seemed, utterly relaxed, one ruthless leader congratulating the other for playing the same game so adeptly. “Wickedness loves company,” as the Biblical proverb puts it, “And leads others into sin.”

The second is a meeting Putin held with the press in 2020, soon after the failed Novichok poisoning of Navalny in Siberia and his subsequent convalescence in a Berlin clinic. Putin was always superstitiously reluctant to say Navalny’s name — he was always “that citizen,” “that person,” “that character” — and here he keeps up the habit. Speaking of “that patient in the Berlin clinic,” Putin mutters about the CIA and then goes on to scoff unconvincingly. “Who cares about him?”

If the FSB had really wanted to kill Navalny, Putin laughs scoffingly, “they would have finished him off…The person doing this is striving to elevate himself to a certain level, and get attention, as if to say ‘Look at me, look who my opponent is. I’m a person of equal calibre. Treat me as a person of significance.’” They are words bitterly ironic since the announcement of Navalny’s death on Friday.

Putin and Navalny: the comparison makes itself. Putin has never publicly debated an opponent, never (barring a fleeting and stage-managed visit to a Kherson military base in 2023) visited the front line of his army and, during the Covid crisis, entertained guests reputedly showered in disinfectant at the longest of tables, in each case taking every possible precaution to protect himself.

Meanwhile, Navalny’s life — whatever its occasional missteps — was a model of self-sacrificing courage. Whatever the state threw at him — house arrest, dreamt up embezzlement charges, prison sentences and a ban on running for political office (he was invariably treated, whatever Putin’s feigned indifference, as a “person of significance”), Navalny doggedly kept up his crusade against the Kremlin’s “party of crooks and thieves.” Following his poisoning, offered the chance to lead the opposition from abroad, he instead trained hard to recover his health and flew recklessly home to almost certain incarceration (and, as we now know, far worse).

“Everything is OK,” he wrote from prison to a friend in April that year. “We’ll make it (probably). I am fine and I have no regrets. And you shouldn’t either. Don’t despair. Everything will be fine. And even if it isn’t, we can console ourselves that we were honest people.”

It’s in his public statements one sees the man most clearly. Over time an overriding theme developed: “Be not afraid.” In 2022, at the end of his first year in prison, he wrote that “I want to say the same thing I shouted to those who gathered outside the courthouse when they took me to the police van: don’t be afraid. This is our country, and we only have one.” It was the government, he said repeatedly, who were instead ruled by fear: “The authorities fear those who aren’t afraid — or more precisely, those who might be afraid but who are able to overcome their fear.”

When his trumped up three-and-a-half year initial sentence was increased to nine years, and his appeal against it failed, Navalny was more explicit: “I am not afraid of this system. Certainly, I don’t want to sit in this cage instead of doing some useful things and watching my children grow up. But man is not given life to be afraid of the crazy old man in a bunker and this system he has built. That’s why I’m not afraid of you! And again, I urge everyone else not to be afraid.” When in August 2023, a further nineteen years was added to his jail-term, he was unsurprised. The sentence, he wrote on Instagram, had a single purpose: “To frighten. You, not me.”

The courage and sense of humor (another clear difference from Putin) he displayed throughout his incarceration seemed to have a single purpose too: not to frighten others. Much has been made of his joking with a long-familiar judge a day before his death, but less publicized are the games Navalny played in prison to pass the time. Denied letters from his family, he entered into a comic correspondence with the authorities, requesting a kangaroo, a kimono and a balalaika, and then sitting back and savouring the official replies. Suggesting an honor for a fellow-prisoner who had displayed lethal fighting abilities, he received a typical response: “Regarding your demand that a black belt in karate be awarded to your cellmate who killed a man with his bare hands, we report that the question of bestowing martial qualifications is not within the competency of this facility.”

“When you are in a punishment cell and don’t have much entertainment, you can always amuse yourself by corresponding with the prison administration,” Navalny wrote drily on Instagram. It seemed, said one journalist “to show that Navalny remains unbowed, almost above the fray, and that one can always do something, regardless of one’s circumstances.” Or that courage in the face of death, as Philip Larkin put it, means “not scaring others.”

One of Navalny’s last actions was to recommend that in this March’s national elections, citizens should flock to the voting-booths at exactly noon to demonstrate antipathy to the regime. “It doesn’t really matter what you do at the polling station,” said a message on the campaign website, “Vote for any candidate except Putin, spoil the ballot, or take it with you.” The “Noon against Putin” action, Navalny said, would be “completely legal and safe” and “could be a strong demonstration of national sentiment.” It remains to be seen how many will heed his advice.

But with those elections, their final outcome drearily assured, now imminent, and Orthodox Easter falling a few weeks later — the first Easter since the fall of communism Navalny will not be alive to see — it’s perhaps appropriate to finish with a tweet of his from the same season last year:

“Christ is risen. This day reminds us that we should not despair, and that no matter how hard it is now, the time will come when evil is defeated and people will once again say with a smile: ‘O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’”

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.