Navalny: lights and shadows of a dissident
The disappearance of Alexei Navalny has caused a great impression worldwide, as he was the main Russian dissident and proud opponent of Vladimir Putin. The government speaks of “natural causes”.
The Russian politician was in the Siberian prison of Kharp, in Northern Siberia (40 degrees below zero), a punitive and impervious place in itself, after having initially been imprisoned 200 km from Moscow.
Technically the penal colony is called IK-3, better known as “Polar Wolf”, where he had been locked up since last Christmas. The blogger had been sentenced to 19 years in prison and had spent 300 days in solitary confinement with accusations deemed specious such as: “the prisoner had not fastened the last button of his jacket”: 15 days of punishment in solitary confinement. Or: «Navalny insulted Lieutenant Nejmovich by calling him that instead of using his name and patronymic»: another 15 days.
And again, «The prisoner cleaned the courtyard badly»: another 15 days and so on.
Kira Yarmysh, his spokeswoman, then spoke about the poor and poor quality food he was provided with and the fact that in these special punishment cells the prisoner could not even lie down or sit down due to the bed being pulled up and stuck against the wall. .
A further restriction of the spaces available.
His wife Yulia, from Munich where she lives, launched a courageous challenge to the Head of the Kremlin, as reported by the LaPresse press agency:
“We cannot believe Putin and his government, because they lie all the time. But if this news is true, Putin and all his staff, all his men, will pay for what they have done. They will be brought to justice and this will happen soon “.
But who really is Aleksei Navalny?
Let us attempt a reconstruction “out of the box” beyond the consolidated hagiography of the hard and pure “opponent of the regime”. Born in 1976 – therefore in the middle of the Soviet era – in Butyn in the Moscow Oblast, he was the creator of the Anti-corruption Foundation. With liberal and nationalist positions, he was in the past a supporter of the reunification of Ukraine and Belarus under Moscow.
In February 2021 Amnesty International collected the “prisoner of conscience” award from Novalny because of his pro-nationalist videos that were not convenient for Ukrainian affairs, later giving it back to him in an embarrassing dance.
When Navalny called Caucasian militants “cockroaches” and his Azerbaijani colleague “black ass”
On Wikipedia we read that: “In 2007 he founded a political movement called Narod (People), which had the issue of immigration as its priority. The movement has been criticized for its xenophobic positions, as when, in a video of the organization, Navalny himself compared the dark-skinned jihadist militants of the Caucasus to cockroaches, asserting that while cockroaches can be killed with a shovel, for human beings he recommended using guns.”
And then again:
“In another video, Navalny appears to support the idea of nonviolent ethnic cleansing through deportation. Dressed as a dentist, as video clips of migrant workers play, he says to the screen: “No one should be beaten. Everything that bothers us should be carefully, but uncompromisingly eliminated through deportation… A tooth without a root is considered dead. A nationalist he is the one who does not want the root “Russian” to be erased from the word “Russia”. We have the right to be Russian in Russia and we will protect this right […] Think about the future, become a nationalist.”
Still:
“The deputy editor-in-chief of the Moskovsky Komsomolets, Ayder Muzhdabaev, in an open letter to Navalny to which no response was given, reports racist episodes that allegedly involved him, such as addressing his Azerbaijani colleague (or referring to her) with terms as chernozhopaia (black ass). Engelina Tareyeva, who fought with him in the Jabloko party, considers him a nationalist and accuses him of habitually using racist insults.”
Yesterday an interview with the writer of Russian origin Nicolai Lilin, author of the famous novel “Siberian Education”, which was also made into a film directed by Gabriele Salvatores, was also published in Mow Magazine.
To a question from journalist Diana Mihaylova about who Navalny really is, the writer responded:
“The West has transformed Alexei Navalny into yet another symbol of freedom, as if he were a “Patron Saint” of democratic values, crushed by Vladimir Putin; but for me Navalny always remains what he was from the beginning of his career: a Nazi, xenophobe and communication genius, who for years worked for the Russian oligarchs. For me he was not a politician, but a media product capable of offering himself to the highest bidder.”
A narrative therefore different from the one that is currently being celebrated in the Western media which we report for completeness of information, without taking anything away from what could have happened in that prison in the Siberian Deep North.
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