{"id":15718,"date":"2024-02-18T12:56:41","date_gmt":"2024-02-18T12:56:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/18\/putin-saw-an-existential-threat-in-navalny-the-opposition-leader-whose-name-he-dared-not-mention\/"},"modified":"2024-02-18T12:56:41","modified_gmt":"2024-02-18T12:56:41","slug":"putin-saw-an-existential-threat-in-navalny-the-opposition-leader-whose-name-he-dared-not-mention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/18\/putin-saw-an-existential-threat-in-navalny-the-opposition-leader-whose-name-he-dared-not-mention\/","title":{"rendered":"Putin saw an existential threat in Navalny, the opposition leader whose name he dared not mention"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Alexey Navalny once represented an alternative future for Russia: an optimistic, forward-looking place, free of the one-man rule of Russian President Vladimir Putin. <\/p>\n

With the death of the opposition leader in a prison north of the Arctic Circle, Russia\u2019s bleak political landscape is now many shades darker. <\/p>\n

It would be hard to overstate how profoundly Navalny symbolized Putin\u2019s relentless drive to erase the last remnants of political opposition from Russia. During his many years of activism, Navalny and his supporters saw their protest rallies shut down by riot police; their offices raided; and countless arrests that landed activists in jail, or forced out of the country. <\/p>\n

Navalny himself paid an extraordinarily high price for his activism. Under constant surveillance by Putin\u2019s security services, Navalny survived a near-lethal poisoning by the nerve agent Novichok, yet defiantly returned to Russia instead of remaining in comfortable exile. He was immediately arrested on his return to Moscow. <\/p>\n

What followed was a parody of criminal justice, as Russian prosecutors heaped on charges against Navalny, who continued to rail against Putin. In one court appearance by video link, a gaunt Navalny \u2013 emaciated by a hunger strike \u2013 heaped scorn on the president, saying,\u00a0\u201cI would like to say that your king is naked, and more than one little boy is shouting about it \u2013 it is now millions of people who are already shouting about it. It is quite obvious. Twenty years of incompetent rule have come to this: there is a crown sliding from his ears,\u201d Navalny said. <\/p>\n

\u201cYour naked king wants to rule until the end, he doesn\u2019t care about the country, he is clung to power and wants to rule indefinitely.\u201d <\/p>\n

But even during a brutal tour of Russia\u2019s penal system, Navalny maintained his composure \u2013 and his extraordinary sense of humor. In a post on Telegram in January, he joked about the ghastly music of the pro-war pop-star Shaman being blared over prison loudspeakers at the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets region. <\/p>\n

\u201cImagine the picture: Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug,\u201d he wrote. \u201cPolar night. In the barracks for punishment in a special regime colony, A. Navalny, sentenced to 19 years in prison, whom Kremlin propaganda has been rinsing for years for participating in Russian protests, has to do exercises to the song \u2018I am Russian,\u2019 which is played for him as educational work for the purpose of correction. <\/p>\n

\u201cTo be honest, I\u2019m still not sure that I correctly understand what post-irony and meta-irony are. But if this isn\u2019t it, then what is it?\u201d <\/p>\n

More touchingly, Navalny posted a photo of himself with his wife Yulia on Valentine\u2019s Day, his last post on Telegram. <\/p>\n

\u201cBaby, everything is like in a song with you: between us there are cities, the take-off lights of airfields, blue snowstorms and thousands of kilometers,\u201d he wrote. \u201cBut I feel that you are near every second, and I love you more and more.\u201d <\/p>\n

Navalny\u2019s death comes as Putin, who has been in power since New Year\u2019s Eve 1999, heads for a fifth term in office. The March presidential election will be an act of political theater:\u00a0Boris Nadezhdin, the sole candidate opposed to Putin\u2019s war on Ukraine, has been barred from running, and the vote will send a message to Russians and to the world: The Russian people are behind Putin, and behind the war on Ukraine. There is no room for giving air to Navalny on state media in the run-up to the election carnival. <\/p>\n

The opposition leader\u2019s death also marks the end of an era for Russia. Navalny had emerged as the most prominent leader of the Russian opposition following the assassination of outspoken Putin critic Boris Nemtsov in 2015, in plain view of the Kremlin.\u00a0That killing also shook Russian society profoundly, but it was a very different time. At the time of his murder, Nemtsov and his team were investigating the deployment of Russian troops to the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, something the Russian government officially denied. <\/p>\n

Now that war is in the open, following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. And Russia has introduced draconian new laws that make it illegal to criticize the military. The massive anti-corruption protests that Navalny once managed to mobilize before the invasion now seem unlikely to reprise in Putin\u2019s lifetime.\u00a0The investigative articles and videos Navalny and his team once published online \u2013 reaching millions of Russians \u2013 face ever-more stifling digital censorship. <\/p>\n

The Kremlin\u2019s response to the death of Navalny,\u00a0then, will be telling. Putin famously refused to utter Navalny\u2019s name, hinting at the deep unease about the legitimacy Navalny commanded as opposition leader. <\/p>\n

Asked in a 2017 press conference about why his government was afraid of competition from Navalny, Putin again refused to utter Navalny\u2019s name, dancing around the matter by referring to \u201cthe figures you mentioned\u201d and \u201cthose you named.\u201d And he made it clear that he saw Russia\u2019s democratic opposition as an existential threat. In his warped retelling, Putin said Navalny was the equivalent of former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili \u2013 or the equivalent of Ukrainians who rallied in Kyiv\u2019s Maidan Square to oppose Ukraine\u2019s pro-Russian president, who fled the country in early 2014. <\/p>\n

\u201cAbout the\u00a0figures you mentioned,\u201d he said. \u201cA\u00a0question about Ukraine was already asked. Do you want dozens of\u00a0people like Saakashvili running around here? Those you named are a\u00a0Russian version of\u00a0Saakashvilis. Do you want such Saakashvilis to\u00a0destabilise your country? Do you want us to\u00a0live from one Maidan to\u00a0the\u00a0next? To\u00a0survive attempted coups? We have been through this already. Do you want all this to\u00a0return?\u201d <\/p>\n

Navalny\u2019s response, again, showed his potent sense of humor.\u00a0\u201cTo my collection of \u2018words used not to say Navalny\u2019 is added \u2018those you named,\u2019\u201d he joked on Twitter. <\/p>\n\n

This post appeared first on cnn.com<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alexey Navalny once represented an alternative future for Russia: an optimistic, forward-looking place, free of the one-man rule of Russian President Vladimir Putin. With the death of the opposition leader in a prison north of the Arctic Circle, Russia\u2019s bleak political landscape is now many shades darker. It would be hard to overstate how profoundly <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":15719,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-15718","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15718\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}