Posts Tagged ‘Alexei Navalny’

Several years ago, I remember a long languorous afternoon at the Stanford Shopping Center, having coffee with Varya Gornostaeva, editor of the prestigious Corpus Publishing house in Moscow, and her husband Serguei Parkhomenko, a senior advisor at the Kennan Institute. How times have changed. Today I connected with Varya on a grimmer matter.

The whole world is outraged by the unexpected and unexplained death of Alexei Navalny, a heroic Russian opposition leader, lawyer, political activist, and freedom fighter. He died a political prisoner in the Arctic today. We know no more.

Here are Varya’s comments about the new and shocking events surrounding a man who was a personal friend, posted on Facebook in Russian:

No words for a long time. None at all today. But I have to find a few; it seems like it’s my duty. A duty to the man who was the hope of a huge country, although the country did not know about it or think about it. At best, it spat on him – and on itself at the same time; at worst, it oppressed and ridiculed him. A duty to the man I considered to be my friend and my personal hope, the man I trusted completely and in whom I had complete confidence. He wrote me amazing letters from prison – after reading them I would have been ashamed to break down and whine, ashamed to complain, ashamed to feel sorry for myself.

I have no words, but I have to find them. This is such terrible grief, such terrible loss, such terrible helplessness. Today we said to each other – that’s it, we have no more hope. And we immediately thought that Lyosha [Alexei] wouldn’t approved of us, he would be ashamed of us. No hope, really? He lived only for this hope of ours. He almost died for it once, but he survived for it, and he returned to Russia for it. And now he has died for it. No, that’s the point. Not died, you can’t say that. Not died, but murdered. Just like that – he was murdered, and many participated in this murder. The main murderer is Putin. And those who carried out his orders are murderers. And those around him are murderers. And those who were silent – they covered it up and protected the murderers. Yes, it’s scary to talk, it’s been scary for a long time. It’s scary to talk out loud, but at least tell yourself this truth, tell your children, tell your mom and dad. You cannot go out to the public square, now no one asks that of you anymore. If you did not go out before – it’s on your conscience. But now at least admit it to yourself – we live among murderers. I live among murderers. Murderers of the whole country of Ukraine, murderers of Russia, murderers of its best people. Say this to yourself. That’s already a lot.

Grief, grief. Feeling helpless, powerless in front of terrible evil. And also rage. And also burning hatred, so unusual, unknown even a few years ago. I never knew what hate was before. And now it is with me every day. There’s something about this hate. No, it does not destroy you, it does not eat you up inside, there is nothing to be ashamed of, there is no need to think that it is giving birth to a new hate. I gave myself permission to hate. This is noble hate. Hating evil is necessary for mental health. And also gratitude. That we lived nearby, that such a human example was shown to us. Such impeccable sense of language, intonation, such selfless dedication without pathos, such wit. And such fearless confidence in his own rightness. This is what hope is – it happened to us once and it can still happen again.

And it will.

Some time ago I wrote about the remarkable award-winning novelist, essayist, playwright Maxim Osipov, who is also a cardiologist at a small-town hospital in Tarusa, 90 miles outside Moscow. I’ve also written about Russian activist Alexei Navalny, who is now in prison once again, after a failed government attempt at poisoning. Now the American government is considering sanctions. Last week, Navalny’s legal defense team made public for the first time the full text of a Russian court ruling that outlawed Navalny’s political network as “extremist.” Meanwhile, the world is amazed at his heroism and wonders: How long can he go on? Day after day, month after month in captivity?

So what does the famous Russian writer have to say the Russian hero? From The Los Angeles Review of Books, translated by its editor, the gifted poet and writer Boris Dralyuk (we’ve written about him, too, here.)

An excerpt:

On January 13, 2021, when I learned that Alexei Navalny intended to return to Moscow, I posted the following to my Facebook page: “Once, at the circus, I saw a highwire act. The orchestra fell silent, and the audience did too. High up above our heads, a teenage boy was making his way along a nearly invisible tightrope. I was so afraid for him that I grew dizzy. And then a child’s voice burst through the silence: ‘Good boy! Hold on!” Today’s news inspired the same sense of dizziness, as well as the urge to shout like that child. …

Heroism as a gift, as a form of genius that cannot be faked or imitated — this is what elicits such admiration from one segment of the population and such envy from another (mostly male). It’s strange to envy a gift for politics as one might envy a gift for music or poetry, but it’s quite natural to envy personal heroism — natural and shameful. People, including those who nominally belong to the political opposition but haven’t discerned this envy in themselves, are now writing manifestos, expressing their disagreement with Navalny’s views. They fail to understand that this is no longer a matter of views. “I’m going out!” countless brave young people posted on social media after the Navalny trial, and then immediately took to the streets of their cities. Theirs was the only healthy way to respond, though it could land them in serious trouble.

Now the cheerfulness has evaporated, ceding way to profound despair. Navalny is in prison, being tortured with sleep deprivation, refused medical assistance. Every day brings darker, more depressing news. The political world has turned black and white. It’s pointless to reason in terms of right vs. left, parliamentary vs. presidential republic, nation state vs. empire. The nature of the conflict is plain as day: life vs. its absence, light vs. darkness. Society has been plunged into a state of moral catastrophe, of impotence, once again especially pronounced among men. Neither immersion in our work, nor retreat into our private lives, nor emigration can save us. Sure, there’s your small circle of friends, there’s Facebook — which has taken the place of real social institutions and fostered the illusion that we’re among our own kind — but take a closer look and you see Russian life shrinking, growing faint. First one, then another decides to leave: but how will that help Navalny and hundreds (if not thousands) of other political prisoners? No, even if you leave, even if you distance yourself from the tragedy, you won’t stop watching it. “We’ve got to do something…” “Well, we lived through the Soviet era…” “What does the Soviet era have to do with it? If you’re going to draw comparisons, then let’s talk about Germany in the mid-’30s…” These are the conversations that make up the whole of Russian life.

He ends as he begins, quietly, under his breath, whispering: good man, hold on… Read it at all at the LARB here.

Thousands took to the streets of Russia in anti-Putin demonstrations, and several thousand of them were arrested. The flashpoint is the recent arrest of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was poisoned with a nerve agent while traveling last August and barely survived. On his return to Russia a week ago, he was immediately detained by the government. A message was smuggled out of his detention center: “I am of sound mind. So if something happens to me, don’t believe it was suicide.” The petition below from P.E.N. in Moscow has been making the rounds, most recently in The Los Angeles Review of Books:

We, the members of PEN-Club Moscow and the Free Word Association, in according with the principles formulated in the Charter of PEN-International — an obligation to champion the ideal of one humanity living in peace and to oppose any form of suppression of freedom of expression — call for the Russian government to stop the persecution of Alexei Navalny under trumped-up and inadequate charges. The proclamations of the biggest Russian functionaries and politicians who called Navalny “a traitor, a turn-coat, and an agent of the US State Department,” testify to the fact that Navalny is being persecuted because of his civil actions and not because of any transgressions against the law. Firstly, these proclamations are in themselves an offense against the rule of law, being an extrajudicial accusation and, what’s worse, a call to lynching. Secondly, these texts make obvious the government’s real motivations and goals: an unprecedented pressure is being applied on civil society for the purpose of political manipulation.

War is being declared: not just on Navalny, but on the whole of Russian civil society. The actions of the power structures clearly express their barefaced desire to intimidate anyone who dares to criticize the existing regime. The moral atmosphere of the worst era in the history of our motherland is coming back.

We demand protection of the falsely accused and of the dignity of the country, which is humiliated and disgraced by the regime’s actions.

We demand freedom for Alexei Navalny!

The members of PEN-Club Moscow and the Free Word Association, St Petersburg PEN-Club, and other individuals have signed the petition, which has been translated by author and PEN-Club Moscow member Maria Rybakova.

From Twitter below. НЕ МОГУ ПЕРЕСТАТЬ СМОТРЕТЬ – “Can’t stop looking.”

бля щас посмотрел это видео и испытываю смешанные чувства pic.twitter.com/HzgFPCrwwo

— саша сырников) (@alexskryll) January 23, 2021