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Alexei Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021. Proper earlier than he boarded the airplane, he posted a movie titled “Putin’s Palace: The Story of the World’s Largest Bribe” on YouTube. The video, practically two hours lengthy, was a unprecedented feat of investigative reporting. Utilizing secret plans, drone footage, 3-D visualizations, and the testimony of building employees, Navalny’s video instructed the story of a hideous $1.3 billion Black Sea villa containing each luxurious {that a} dictator might think about: a hookah bar, a hockey rink, a helipad, a winery, an oyster farm, a church. The video additionally described the eye-watering prices and the monetary trickery that had gone into the development of the palace on behalf of its true proprietor, Vladimir Putin.
However the energy of the movie was not simply within the photos, and even within the descriptions of cash spent. The facility was within the fashion, the humor, and the Hollywood-level professionalism of the movie, a lot of which was imparted by Navalny himself. This was his extraordinary present: He might take the dry details of kleptocracy—the numbers and statistics that often bathroom down even the very best monetary journalists—and make them entertaining. On-screen, he was simply an abnormal Russian, typically shocked by the dimensions of the graft, typically mocking the unhealthy style. He appeared actual to different abnormal Russians, and he instructed tales that had relevance to their lives. You have unhealthy roads and poor well being care, he instructed Russians, as a result of they have hockey rinks and hookah bars.
And Russians listened. A ballot carried out in Russia a month after the video appeared revealed that one in 4 Russians had seen it. One other 40 p.c had heard about it. It’s secure to guess that within the three years which have elapsed since then, these numbers have risen. To this point, that video has been seen 129 million instances.
Navalny is now presumed lifeless. The Russian jail system has stated he collapsed after months of sick well being. Maybe he was murdered extra instantly, however the particulars don’t matter: The Russian state killed him. Putin killed him—due to his political success, due to his potential to succeed in folks with the reality, and due to his expertise for breaking via the fog of propaganda that now blinds his countrymen, and a few of ours as effectively.
He’s additionally lifeless as a result of he returned to Russia from exile in 2021, having already been poisoned twice, understanding he could be arrested. By doing so he turned himself from an abnormal Russian into one thing else: a mannequin of what civic braveness can appear to be, in a rustic that has little or no of it. Not solely did he inform the reality, however he wished to take action inside Russia, the place Russians might hear him. That is what I wrote on the time: “If Navalny is exhibiting his countrymen the way to be brave, Putin needs to point out them that braveness is ineffective.”
That Putin nonetheless feared Navalny was clear in December, when the regime moved him to a distant arctic jail to cease him from speaking along with his associates and his household. He had been in contact with many individuals; I’ve seen a few of his jail messages, despatched secretly through legal professionals, policemen, and guards, simply as Gulag prisoners as soon as despatched messages in Stalin’s Soviet Union. He remained the spirit behind the Anti-Corruption Basis, a group of Russian exiles who proceed to analyze Russian corruption and inform the reality to Russians, even from overseas. (I’ve served on the muse’s advisory board.) Earlier this week, earlier than his alleged collapse, he despatched a Valentine’s Day message to his spouse, Yulia, on Telegram: “I really feel that you’re there each second, and I really like you an increasing number of.”
Navalny’s resolution to return to Russia and go to jail impressed respect even amongst individuals who didn’t like him, didn’t agree with him, or discovered fault with him. He was additionally a mannequin for different dissidents in different violent autocracies all over the world. Solely minutes after his loss of life was introduced, I spoke with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the Belarusian opposition chief. “We’re frightened for our folks too,” she instructed me. If Putin can kill Navalny with impunity, then dictators elsewhere may really feel empowered to kill different courageous folks.
The big distinction between Navalny’s civic braveness and the corruption of Putin’s regime will stay. Putin is preventing a bloody, lawless, pointless warfare, wherein tons of of hundreds of abnormal Russians have been killed or wounded, for no motive aside from to serve his personal egotistical imaginative and prescient. He’s working a cowardly, micromanaged reelection marketing campaign, one wherein all actual opponents are eradicated and the one candidate who will get airtime is himself. As a substitute of going through actual questions or challenges, he meets tame propagandists comparable to Tucker Carlson, to whom he affords nothing greater than prolonged, round, and utterly false variations of historical past.
Even behind bars Navalny was an actual menace to Putin, as a result of he was residing proof that braveness is feasible, that fact exists, that Russia could possibly be a distinct type of nation. For a dictator who survives because of lies and violence, that type of problem was insupportable. Now Putin can be compelled to struggle towards Navalny’s reminiscence, and that could be a battle he won’t ever win.
