His cell measures two by three metres. It is made of concrete, icy in winter and torrid in summer. Is there a window? I doubt it, but his lawyer won’t tell us. The prisoner, with back problems and a cough, does not receive medical treatment. Thanks to international pressure, he won a privilege: a kettle. For ten hours a day, he must be under the observation of sadistic guards. Occasionally, the prisoner is taken out and subjected to hard labor—sewing while sitting in a chair too low for his large, emaciated body. And so your condition worsens.
the prisoner is Alexei Navalny, an opponent of Vladimir Putin, apparently the only well-known survivor outside Russia. Putin has tried to poison him, a method he likes, but to no avail. Navalny, who had gone to Germany for medical attention, voluntarily returned to be tried by a puppet court and sentenced to decades in prison. Why did he come back? In order to demonstrate the corruption of Russian justice, it seems. Does Navalny seek martyrdom? He supports it, but does not pursue it. I say this based on my own encounter with him. He belongs to a class of human beings, along with Mahatma Gandhi, Liu Xiaobo (Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner) and Nelson Mandela, who have staked their lives for the causes they embody. I had the honor of meeting all of them, except Gandhi, and I remain shaken by the encounters. How is it that they are not afraid, especially in relation to torture and death? They seem almost inhuman to me and I don’t pretend to understand them fully.
Navalny’s current struggle, like Liu’s before him, is aimed at both the outside world and national public opinion, which often remains ignorant of his plight and even his existence. What Navalny has to tell us is important: Russians are not born to be slaves, neither by nature nor by culture; they aspire, like all peoples, to freedom. They do not voluntarily abandon themselves to servitude, as if they were bound by some mysterious fate. Instead, they are submitted; they are Putin’s prisoners. They are like those other prisoners, recently released from their cells, sent to be slaughtered on the Ukrainian front. What Navalny tells us, and what he embodies, is the authentic Russian, free and dedicated to democracy, running counter to European prejudices about Russia’s supposed destiny.
It might be objected that Russia’s history is a litany of arrests — nothing new under Putin. This is not right, as Russian prisons evolved as reflections of the regimes that used them to muzzle opposition. We know this from literature: many Russian writers endured imprisonment and lived to tell about it. Dostoyevsky, in ‘Remembrances of the House of the Dead’, relates his experience: collective detention rooms, with their fleas and their filth, but also the sharing of tea and alcohol. The horror was tempered by a kind of camaraderie. If Navalny had the choice, he would certainly go back to Dostoevsky’s time. Putin’s regime is much more cruel than that of the czars. And by the end of the 19th century, the Tsars were becoming more humane under European influence. Chekov traveled to the Sakhalin Island penal colony to assess the condition of the prisoners. Each had his own stone hut and garden. The air was pure, as Chekov reports, and the prisoners’ main complaint was that Sakhalin was far from home; they didn’t want to be buried in Asia, so far from their European homeland. Navalny would probably like to go back to Chekov’s time—or even Solzhenitsyn’s time. To be sure, the Gulag Archipelago was an inhospitable place, where it froze over in winter. But Solzhenitsyn was treated for cancer in the Gulag, where he recovered. And he had the necessary paper and pencil to write his memoirs. The Russia of today, revealed by its prisons, is therefore crueler than previous regimes.
Of course, arrests are not the only measure. Stalin massacred many people, especially Ukrainians. But Putin also massacres Ukrainians, after having exterminated Chechens. What’s more, he is adding to the arsenal of previous tyrants a kind of cold scientism that doesn’t even seek ideological justification. The Tsars saw themselves as God’s elect, and Stalin imagined that he was building the true communist society. Putin, as far as we know, believes in nothing but himself. He doesn’t care much about historical or intellectual references. He is sometimes identified with Peter the Great, who built St. Petersburg on the corpses of 100,000 workers; Putin, for his part, will not even have a St. Petersburg in his favor. In fact, there is nothing Russian about Putin — he is just a terror machine, a postmodern machine, beyond all thought.
It didn’t take the invasion of Ukraine to understand that there was nothing Russian about Putin. I met him once, about ten years ago. If he were Russian, he would have embraced me and offered me tea, vodka and an assortment of cakes, smoked salmon and other common delicacies that define the so-called Russian tea service. I didn’t get a hug, Putin didn’t move from his chair and I was only offered mineral water. He immediately jumped into an endless, vociferous rant justifying the Chechen war. He was just fighting Islamic terrorism there, he said. He didn’t mention the Chechen people’s desire for independence, a centuries-old struggle — no, only Islam was at stake. So Russia and the West had a common enemy: terrorism. In hindsight, this was a prelude to Putin’s “anti-Nazi war” in Ukraine. His speech lasted two hours straight: I was not allowed to ask questions.
Navalny, on the other hand, is truly Russian, as is his comrade-in-arms Boris Nemtsov, murdered in 2015. These are the types you might find in a Tolstoy or Dostoevsky novel. But no Russian writer could have conceived Putin. And I hope, dear reader, that you, like me, will have trouble sleeping tonight, because you will be thinking of Navalny in his concrete tomb.
Guy SormanContributing Editor of City Journal and French public intellectual, is the author of many books, including ‘Empire of Lies: The Truth About China in the Twenty-First Century’ [Império das Mentiras: A Verdade Sobre a China do Século XXI].
©2023 City Journal. Published with permission. original in English.
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