Navalny

This is less about the man than about the country Russia and the people of Russia and their departed saviour, Alexei Navalny.

As to the overflowing praise of and for him, pause.

Incipient in the conundrum of his death, an inevitable one once he decided to return to Russia after recovery in a German hospital from poisoning by Russians, are these questions.

What was he, what would have happened if he had been allowed to live – which he could be not be allowed, at least not in Russia, all of which, of course, he knew?

In life, death and in Russia’s history in all ways a classic Russian dissenter, Navalny knew that over and over, again and again, throughout time, Russians submit to one-man rule like sheep.

Call him Tsar or, as in the cases of Elisabeth and Catherine the Great, Tsarina – with only the checks of a simmering nobility and/or plotting spouse to threaten assassination as a last resort – or actually do it as in the deaths of Tsars Peter III in 1762 and Paul I in 1801 – Russia’s emperors ruled with absolute authority.

With their absolute authority they absolutely ruined their nation and their mostly enslaved people – enslaved by them – sheep with no more freedom than the livestock they were, maybe less since unlike sheep they were not mute, dumb animals.

The last Tsar, Nicholas. II, was overthrown in 1917. In 1918 along with his German wife besotted by mindless superstitious religion, with their hemophiliac son and heir apparent, and with their three daughters, he was murdered by the Bolsheviks in the basement of a small house in Yekaterinburg as the Russians fought a civil war.

Their intention went beyond killing the last Tsar. The Bolsheviks meant to kill Tsarism for good and all.

The civil war pitted the Russian White Army, allied with up to 100,000 Czech mercenaries, the British and, yes, 13,000 American troops on one side, and a score of other nations, against the new Red Army led ruthlessly by Leon Trotsky for the Bolsheviks.

It ended with the Red Army victorious in Russia though the Poles defeated the Reds in 1920,forcing Russia to settle for eastern bounaries of the restored Polish state favoring Poland. In August 1939 the Nazi-Soviet Pact dissolved those boundaries.

Victorious against the Whites, the Boleheviks then gave what to Russia? They gave it a new Tsar after all. First Lenin, then after him out of the lunacy of divisions among the Bolsheviki, a new title emerged to embody their new, improved auotcratic, insular despotic repression.

From their internecine struggle emerged triumphant Joseph Stalin, nee Joseph Dzhugashvili, born not in Russia but in Georgia in the Caucuses, a man ruthless beyond ruthlessness.

The new title of this non-Russian new Tsar? General Secretary – not of the nation but of the ruling Communist Party. First taken by Stalin, the title and the power survived until Mikhail Gorbachev. He, the last General Secretary, was discarded because he tried modestly to change the rigid, totally despotic, very failed Russian state the party ruled.

After the fall of the last General Secretary for a short time, as short as after 1917, came a void that gifted Russia with a chaotic, drunk, Boris Yeltsin, with the title President, an honorific born of Russia’s sudden pretense of democracy.

He was quickly overcome by the old party apparatus as it moved surreptitiously under the guise of democracy, fomented by the scheme of a schemer, a former secret police officer, a onetime mid-level KGB functionary from Petersburg Vladimir Putin:

In the vaccum, a momentary void of history, the wholly imoral, thoroughly corrupt and corrupting Putin took all power driven by his demonic, demagogic determination to restore the Russian/Soviet empire and rule it as – as Tsar.

In such momentary voids, history has a way of vomiting up the worst men and standing aside as they seize power or try to – Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Orbin, Putin, Trump.

As devious as Stalin, as imperious as Lenin, as performative as Kruhschev, more single minded than Brezhnev, Putin became the new Tsar/General Secretary with, again, a different title. Like Yeltsin, he calls himself and the world calls him president. He isn’t. He is the general secretary, qua Tsar.

He is 71. After him comes what in Russia? No one knows, but it is a reasonable bet that whatever it is in very short order will resolve into a new statism, a new reign of the strong man as despot, who is the law, the one and only law in Russia.

Had he lived, would Navalny, who in his way begged to die, have led Russia into democracy, liberty and freedom? Or? Or cloaked in that aura would he have become the next strong man of Russia?

We can never know because his death wish is fulfilled. But we do know that he tempted that wish, having returned there with the certainty that by going back he did not merely beg his fate, he determined it. He would die – or he would survive to be enshrined in some new fashion in the Kremlin. Most likely he would die, murdered as he is now.

There is no real movement in Russia for those things we praise – democracy and liberty. There are dissidents, very much mostly in exile. It has been ever thus. Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky spent decades outside Russia looking and wanting in until, arriving there, they sent others into exile or to the same prisons where they had been sent or, worse, to death in untold thousands.

Russia has a population of 143 million. The opposition there had one face, one name, that of Navalny. So now what? Don’t promise yourself you know. The only thing history knows is that despots wear Russia like a tight glove inside which, the fingers that are the Russian people barely wiggle but otherwise hardly move.

Was Navalny, a man very much about himself, a Democrat, was he a liberal? Or was he the next autocrat? Given the firmly settled history of Russia and Russians to seek and submit to an autocrat, we should not assume Navalny represented a different Russian. But, given his choice to return to his death, neither we nor history can know or will know.

What we can glean from all of it and more is this. Never expect different or better from Russia or Russians.

You will be disappointed.