In the three years since his return to Russia, the former lawyer and blogger made occasional appearances by fuzzy video link from remote Russian jails to respond to absurd charges. His emaciated body showed the signs of extreme suffering. Russia’s kolonii — penal colonies for hardened criminals — are brutal places at the best of times. But Navalny received a special diet of inhuman torture. Months spent alone in solitary confinement in freezing conditions and on meagre rations destroyed his health. The state even refused for long periods to turn his cell’s lights off, and blasted political propaganda into his room for hours on end.

Yet Navalny, astonishingly, seemed to remain in rude psychological health. In court the day before he died, the political prisoner was seen laughing and joking — he rarely took the regime’s show trials seriously, choosing to mock rather than participate in them — and he regularly wrote searing critiques of the Putin regime and its wars from his jail cell. When his lawyers were able to reach him, they shared these materials through Navalny’s popular social media feeds. Navalny’s body may have been broken, but he remained conscious of both Russia’s politics and, presumably, the terrible fate that awaited him.

When Navalny burst onto the political scene in the early 2010s, he used social media to bring hundreds of thousands of Russians to protest on the streets against the Russian state’s corruption and criminality. Writing on his personal blog, Navalny laid into the elites and gave voice to the opposition: “We are not cattle or slaves. We have a voice and the strength to defend it.” This handsome and youthful lawyer spoke in the language of the young, using the communications platform of the young, to rile up opposition to Vladimir Putin’s criminal regime. And Navalny’s overarching message, broadcast at a time when mass oppression was only just beginning in post-Soviet Russia, was simple: anybody but Putin.

A skilled political operator, writer, and orator, Navalny appealed to Russians from across the spectrum to band together and give Putin the boot. In those early marches, which centred on opposition to the undemocratic presidential election of 2012, Navalny called on everyone from greens to communists, liberals, and nationalists to join his campaign. Showing little regard for who he worked with, Navalny soon found himself the leader of an informal grouping whose leaders are today, like Ilya Yashin, in jail — or, like Boris Nemtsov, long ago killed by the regime. Nobody at the time knew how to speak to or unite such a broad spectrum of Russia’s disparate opposition as Alexei Navalny.

Yet it was this very strategy of unity that provoked the greatest criticism of Navalny. The leader’s alignment with the far-Right and earlier support for nationalist policies — he would later apologise for alluding to Muslims as “cockroaches” in a 2007 video — has tarnished his reputation with Ukrainians in particular. Photographs of Navalny marching alongside the far-Right haunt any mention of the leader in online fora, and critics regularly accused him of equivocating over the fate of Crimea in 2014. Navalny was never the liberal white knight that some in the West may have hoped he would be.

Nonetheless, Navalny was the only opposition leader in the last 24 years of Putin’s increasingly totalitarian rule to offer a serious path out of dictatorship, oligarchy, and extreme nationalism. While Navalny’s poll ratings in the abortive electoral campaigns he was involved in never suggested that he had garnered mass support — indeed, his approval rating among the Russian public was actually falling fast in recent years — his publicity team reached a huge online audience and, through their campaign efforts abroad, built serious political links with policymakers around the world. For example, the team’s expose of Putin’s opulent palace on the Black Sea Coast, built with embezzled funds, has been watched over 100,000,000 times on YouTube.

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Putin may have controlled the mass media, but Navalny’s team deftly skirted official restrictions to reach a huge audience. Almost everybody in Russia had heard of Alexei Navalny and knew he represented genuine opposition to Putin (whom Navalny christened “the old man in his bunker” — an out of touch, cranky grandpa bent on destroying Russia). In a country whose politics has been littered with fake opposition candidates, Navalny was, for better or worse, the most recognisable and the only alternative to Putin for the majority of Russians.

It may be a coincidence that Navalny’s tragic death in Russia’s far-flung Yamalo-Nenets region comes just a month before the country goes to vote in a presidential election — or, more accurately, participates in the latest coronation of Vladimir Putin. However, it also follows both last week’s news that Putin challenger and soft opposition candidate Boris Nadezhdin has been barred from the ballot paper. These stories only add to the countless reports of the arrests, beatings, and killings of opposition journalists and politicians all over Russia over the past two years. The 2010s generation of opposition leaders and supporters are broken, battered, and destroyed. Now their greatest hope has been killed.

The days when opposition candidates could be allowed to operate in Russia’s peripheries, or even to make a brief appearance in election campaigns, are long gone. Those “vegetarian times”, as Navalny’s former press secretary Anna Veduta once described them to me, have been replaced by oppression that harks back to the darkest days of the 20th century. Now the regime is using new media to turn the screw even tighter, constantly disrupting and diminishing any sparks of opposition before figures like Alexei Navalny are allowed to fan the flames of revolt. Whenever a new campaign is launched, it is instantly drowned out with the noise of bots, trolls, and Putinist true believers — and its proponents are tossed into Russia’s rotting jails. In these circumstances, how can a new, untarnished, and popular Navalny emerge?

Navalny’s greatest achievement was to unite the opposition under the “everyone but Putin” banner in the early 2010s. He built bridges between opposing, fragmented groups. Without Navalny, it would have been impossible to imagine communists marching alongside greens against Putin. The Russian opposition today desperately needs a figure with the psychological fortitude and self-sacrificial character of Alexei Navalny: somebody who is brave enough to stay in Russia, speak the truth without regard for the consequences, and to create new momentum for an “anybody but Putin” campaign. As of today, both analysts watching from abroad and the many Russians who knew Alexei Navalny’s name would agree that no such figure exists.

Perhaps that figure might be Navalny’s wife, Yuliia, who made an uncompromising and powerful public speech calling for revenge against her dead husband’s murderers shortly after hearing news of his passing. Perhaps it will be an unknown, a young Russian who will take TikTok or some other new technology by storm, as Alexei Navalny did in 2011. But in a world where Putin’s control of mainstream and social media looks stronger than ever, and where the regime is using ever more extreme means to oppress its population, Alexei Navalny’s death signals a newer, bleaker future for Russia.

In the late 2000s, we drifting twenty somethings took our freedom for granted. You might have a friend doing something unclear in Shanghai. Somebody else appeared to be rather bored learning Arabic in Aleppo. You could go to any of these places. Never realising we were living in a low-key golden era: a time when things were more or less open and alright. 

It felt so easy. We went so casually to these places. Now, never again will we spend long afternoons smoking in the French Institute moaning how dull it is in Damascus. Or get drunk in the hutongs by the Drum Tower in Beijing talking big money dreams and see Hong Kong for the first time and think — I could live here forever. We might go back there, someday, and stroll, like we did, through Aleksandrovsky Sad. But never will the ground feel solid beneath our feet.

Because that Moscow I knew — nocturnal, daring, drunk — has finally been destroyed completely. Since we watched him — there’s only been one “him” in Moscow for a very long time — declare “a special military operation”  at 5:45 in the morning. Half of those characters I used to drink with were all WhatsApping in shock: He’s actually done it. Now we are watching a map turn from one country’s colours to another. It’s so horrifyingly simple. It’s happened so many times. And even tweeting that what he’s doing in Ukraine is a war could mean fifteen years in prison. But then: even with all those MAs in Russian Studies we couldn’t conceive of it.

Minute by minute the collapse of Russian capitalism is coming through in Telegram alerts. Apple leaves Russia, Netflix suspends operations, so has Louis Vuitton, brand after brand after brand pulling out until, even though my job is to analyse this stuff, I can barely make sense of the sanctions and capital controls that have cut Russia off from the world. And somehow I’ve ended up at a think-tank Kremlin labelled an “undesirable organisation” and that means I can’t even phone half the people I want to because I’m nervous what it might mean for them. Russia has gone through the looking glass and I can only see my time there like Stefan Zweig. A world of yesterday. 

Now, a decade of obsessions make sense. Vladikavkaz. Vladivostok. I would look at these places on that incredible map and know I had to get there. I’ve often wondered why I let that emotion carry me for so long but only now, belatedly, do I realise I was running out of time. I kept on going back to this spot in the Urals, pulled by some force, shuttling on the platskart wagon onwards to Siberia, to stop at this monument, the obelisk on the Europe-Asia border.

I kept wanting to stand there, each time I went east, at this point in the forests. Almost like a premonition. I’d read a story (I didn’t even care whether or not it was true) in a history book that grabbed me. It was about the Decembrists, those officers, exposed to Europe and the enlightenment, in the afterglow of the Napoleonic War, who rose up in St Petersburg for something like a constitutional monarchy. It was a moment Russia could have turned — who knows who she would have been had they succeeded — but of course, she didn’t. And they were exiled, so many of them with everything they had to give, to Siberia. They had stopped here: by the cross on the continental border and wept. Knowing they would never see Europe again. 

Now people can barely even get there. Friends are booking flights to Tashkent. The FSB are interrogating them at the border. Others are panicking; there are hardly any flights left: they’re all booked up, everything’s grounded, sanctions have closed allied airspace in every direction. And these are same people, the same generation, who only ten years ago, were marching happily through Moscow, raising money and fighting corruption, only to dash their heads, just as the Decembrists had, when it frightened Him, when it enraged Him, when He turned out not to be this pathetic topless clown — he was Gollum in all of the memes — but truly a beast. Those were the protests that set it in motion: the squeezing of freedom, the arrests, the filetting of journalists, until now we have this.

Why did I refuse to see it at the Tretyakov Gallery? The whole of Russian history is laid out in wall-sized gold rimmed portraits of autocrats: Nicholas I to Joseph Stalin. Each saying: there is something both very fragile but very durable about repression in this state. Something undying about the spooling “organs” as you say in Russian: security forces with shifting names like the Cheka, NKVD, KGB — who have always supported these tyrants, more or less, since they were founded as the Oprichniki of Ivan the Terrible for the task. Men just like him.     

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Millennials were Putin’s Decembrists. Back in 2011, young Moscow crackled with a kind of giddy excitement that it was happening — that this generation, if it just tweeted, if it just Facebooked and posted enough — could topple Him. This energy that youth, technology, the world as it was and was becoming — would simply prevail. Because who was He really? Just some squinting little bureaucrat in a pinch. Alexei Navalny, he looked so young, he was far away from prison, yelling at the big protest on Prospekt Sakharova, flanked by liberal celebrities screaming: “Rossiya Budet Svobodna” — Russia will be Free. I believed him. 

What is Russia’s future? I must have asked everyone, every EU think-tanker, every sallow faced-Western diplomat I met in Moscow the same question. Like it was the only one that mattered. The answers came in a hundred and one theories, not one of them, it pains me to say, as mad and dark and pornographic as where we are now in Ukraine. I was swamped with academic gibberish such as “competitive authoritarianism” or “mimetic institutions”. They didn’t say that Napoleon is always with us, that in every generation, there’s a leader who has grabbed such control over his society, whose mind is so set on glory, he has to invade somewhere. Like it’s a role coded into the human species in some way we’ll never understand.

Instead, I was told Russia was a “BRIC” or a “normal middle income country” and now all I see is the absolute intellectual poverty of looking at things only in data sets. We should have listened to the one thing — in that language of Fyodor Dostoevsky — that Russian culture has always revered as holding that gift of vision. That is to the prophetic power of art. 

The writer Vladimir Sorokin, with his long, flowing grey hair, was one of the first people who “knew”. He was woken up one morning to be told, His creepy but still little comic youth movement, were chucking his books into a giant toilet. One placed right outside the Bolshoi Theatre. Then they started harassing him. A strange woman came to his house saying she’d got an order to fit his windows with prison bars. The doorbell rang and there was a sack of his books: each stamped porn. Then the prosecutor called. They’d opened a case against him, this satirical novelist, who’d written these weird, funny scenes, about a Stalin clone fucking a Khrushchev one — for pornography. 

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Then something came over him like a fugue state. He got in the car, with his wife, and they drove north, out of Moscow, out of Russia, until they were in Estonia, in the woods. And then after that he wrote. It was like a trance. Like he was vomiting bile. It had taken him five years to write a novel and this one had come in one month. Published in 2006. 

I read it around then on one of those trains, The Day Of The Oprichnik, those swamps and forests, flashing past on a visa run: my mind half seeing tanks that had been there in the second war world between the birch trees. In this book, The Tsar, at last, has been restored. The country walled off behind a Great Russian Wall: only pipelines sticking out of it. It’s this latter-day Opritchnik’s hours: this fured agent hard at work murdering a boyar, gang raping his wife, then visiting a clairvoyant in the name of The Tsar. One day in 2028. But it’s a fake Empire: utterly dependent on China. Their characters have crept onto everything and even the Tsarina makes sure to educate her son in Mandarin.

I put this book down but it never left me. A feeling like I had seen the future. And now — its pieces falling hour by hour — everyone I know in Moscow is living in it. I don’t know for how long.

A running commentary on the criminal nature of the administration has been silenced: what is now happening is less dramatic, less easily grasped, without a dominant figure pointing to its venality.

The pressure comes in two forms. One is wholly willed by the regime, aimed at discrediting dissidence of all kinds. The other, less apparent, is a by-product of the economic and social policies of a government which has set its face against economic reform of any depth, on the grounds that it risks destabilising the form of governance which has developed under the Putin presidency.

The latter of these is the subject of an excoriating report, published at the end of last month, under the title of The Coming Deluge (a reference to the remark — “After us, the deluge” —  said to have been made, several decades before the revolution, by Louis XV of France in 1857 to his favourite, Madame de Pompadour — or by her to him). The highly regarded commentator Andrei Kolesnikov, who with Denis Volkov wrote the report based on interviews made over the past six months with a number of leading business figures and economists, argues that “the prevailing attitude among members of the ruling class appears to be that there is enough oil and gas to keep the state coffers full, buy voters’ loyalty, and control civil society and the media for as long as the country’s current leaders are in power (until 2036, when President Vladimir Putin may at last have to step down). What comes after that does not concern them: ‘After us, the deluge.'”

The governing class, secure in their control of the rents derived from oil and gas, “are mired in inaction by feelings of complacency and a widespread reluctance to engage in any long-term strategic planning or change… Unless something drastically changes, stagnation in the broadest sense of the word — from economic depression to social apathy — is the only possible medium and long-term scenario for Russia.”

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One result, largely ignored by the administration, is what one respondent to the Kolesnikov report termed a pervasive “inequality of rights”, arising from “vastly different access to healthcare, education, state services and other infrastructure”.

The longer term outcome, however, is one which is presently degrading Russia’s once formidable intellectual capital, and which helps solves the elite’s problem of discontented young protestors — by persuading them that change was impossible.

Sergei Guriev, once head of the New Economic School who chose to leave Russia after “a frightening and humiliating interrogation” in 2013 because of his support for Navalny, told Kolesnikov and Volkov: “Russia’s main problem is the deterioration of human capital. Russia inherited an important competitive advantage from the Soviet period, but this advantage — its education system and respect for human capital — is constantly being demolished; educated people are leaving; colleges and schools are falling behind their peers. It’s possible that, in ten or fifteen years, Russia will not have obvious sources of economic growth or be catching up to its neighbours.”

The more direct assault on the Russian mind, increasingly evident over the past decade, has been focussed on leading figures in the remaining institutions of liberal education and culture. Over the past year, some 20 leaders of universities have been replaced, in nearly all cases by academics who are also members of Putin’s United Russia party — which won the parliamentary elections in September and thus two thirds of the seats in the Duma, a result attended by protests from most parts of the country of fraud, ballot stuffing and intimidation.

The three most prestigious academic centres, created after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, are the Higher Economic School, the New Economic School and the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. Guriev fled from his post in 2013; and in July this year, Jaroslav Kuzminov, who had struggled to keep his School out of the Kremlin’s disfavour,  resigned as head of the Higher Economic School after the arrest of several of his students, who had produced a magazine critical of the government.

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Also this year, a unique joint programme between St Petersburg University and the US’s Bard College, conceived in 1994, whose fruit was the founding of Russia’s first liberal arts programme at Smolny College, was abruptly terminated. The Russian Prosecutor General’s office declared Bard an “undesirable organisation” under a recent law aimed at banning foreign institutions and influences, calling it “a threat to the foundations of Russia’s constitutional order”.

The most recent assault, and the most obviously ruthless, zeroes in on the Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences — universally known as the “Shaninka”, or Shanin’s place. Teodor Shanin born in 1930 to a Jewish family, in Wilno, now Vilnius, survived the a spell in Siberia, reached Israel in time to fight in the Arab-Israeli war, worked and studied in Israel until 1964, joined the academic staff of the University of Birmingham in 1965 and in 1995, returned to Russia and founded, with others, the “Shaninka”, which he directed from its foundation in 1995 until his death in 2020. Energetic and non-conformist, his School became the first place of study of sociology, including a clear-eyed  view of Putin’s Russia, a tradition carried on by his successors, including the present rector, Sergei Zuev.

In October, Zuev, who has a serious heart condition, was taken from hospital for a 30-hour interrogation; returned to house arrest, then taken back to prison once more. He was charged with embezzling 21m roubles ($300,000), linked to a broader case against a former deputy Education Minister, Marina Rakova, also now imprisoned. In an analysis of the case, Nikolai Petrov, himself an alumnus of the Higher School of Economics, argued that the Zuev, Rakova and other arrests are part of intense manoeuvring within the Kremlin elite, in which individuals are used as pawns — the more so, if they are thought to be “disloyal” because of liberal sympathies. Petrov writes that “the brutality meted out has now become the norm… the current wave of arrests are unrestrained, and enfolding in full view of the nation and the world”.

Andrei Zorin, a close friend of Zuev’s and chair of Russian at Oxford University, has organised letters, now being signed by hundreds of scholars, protesting the inhumanity of Zuev’s treatment and warning that his health is now precarious. Both Zorin and Petrov believe Zuev, and the Shaninka, are targeted because of their liberalism in an increasingly authoritarian state — but also judge that many of the complex moves within and between the power groups involved are aimed as much at securing finance streams, especially from the Education Ministry, as in combatting anti-regime figures.

The Zuev case is similar to that of Kirill Sebrennikov, the most highly regarded ballet director in Russia — confined to house arrest since mid-2017, on charges of embezzlement of over 60m roubles, after producing “Nureyev” at the Bolshoi Theatre (he has since been released but cannot leave Russia while the charges remain pending). Wildly acclaimed, it is built around the dancer’s defection from the Soviet Union in 1961 — but with the dancing broken up by readings, including from a letter to Nureyev after his defection lamenting that Russia “does not value its heroes”.

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This case, as others, is opaque, with no information released, supporters certain of innocence and an impression of the law being used to punish and warn. The Moscow-based journalist Joshua Yaffa writes that “many observers see his case as a sign of a deeper and troubling turn in Russian political life, a symbol — and a warning — of a state that has grown more inflexible, rapacious, and unpredictable, liable to turn even on those it once fêted”.

The deliberate closing of the Russian mind, and the deliberate choice to eschew reform while rents from fossil fuels sustain a kleptocratic elite, raises the possibility of Russians, in a decade or so of continued decline,  joining the ranks of migrants, escaping poverty and oppression, These migrants should be more welcome than the oligarchs and their retinues who use London as a money laundry, a means of burnishing their public profile and a legal space with strict laws on libel and slander from which several have benefitted. But it will leave Russia increasingly stripped of reformist and brilliant talent, more inclined to see the West as malevolent and thus requiring increased aggression in return.

Such a description no doubt evokes memories of the worst years of the 20^th century, an era of totalitarian horror that is fast fading from living memory. It is certainly not an image that one would immediately associate with anywhere on the modern European continent. But the truth is that, thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, such places continue to exist in Russia — as Alexander Navalny, Putin’s most prominent political enemy, is currently finding out.

Last week, the opposition politician was transferred to Penal Colony Number 2 in the small provincial town of Pokrov, roughly two hours’s drive east of Moscow. It will be his home, if you can call it that, for the next two and a half years after he was found guilty of breaking a parole violation from a previous charge of embezzlement in 2014 — although the European Court of Human Rights has described the allegations as “arbitrary and unfair”.

Unlike in Germany, where the death and concentration camps of the Nazi regime have become monuments to the sins of fascism, the spirit of Stalinist oppression so vividly described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn has survived in modern Russia, with penal colonies constituting an integral part of the country’s correctional system. In fact, these “corrective labour colonies” are the most common type of prison in the Russian Federation.

Some of the modern labour camps — including the notorious Penal Colony Number 14 in Mordovia — exist on the sites of their Gulag forerunners. Indeed, in many cases all that has changed is their name: from falling under the auspices of the Gulag, a Russian acronym for “Main Camp Directorate”, to today’s Federal Penitentiary Service. Little else has changed, with many of the buildings and facilities in the penal colonies dating back to the time of the USSR.

The offences that lead to incarceration also bear some resemblance to those of the past. Just as the Gulag system imprisoned enemies of the Communist regime, the penal colonies of today are home to dissidents who have dared to criticise the rule of President Putin.

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Similarly, the ways in which anti-establishment figures are treated have also stood the tests of time. Navalny hinted at this in a message posted on his Instagram account last week: “I had no idea that it was possible to arrange a real concentration camp 100km from Moscow,” it said. “I think someone upstairs read Orwell’s 1984 and said: ‘Yeah, cool. Let’s do this.’” Navalny went on to clarify that, so far, he has “not seen any violence”, but can still “easily believe the numerous stories that, not long ago, people here were beaten to within an inch of their lives with wooden hammers”.

Such stories are, of course, indeed “numerous”. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a member of the activist group Pussy Riot, was sentenced to two years in the Mordovia camp in 2012 for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”, after her group staged an illegal performance in a cathedral in Moscow. Tolokonnikova later recalled how, on her arrival, the camp administrator assured her that they would “break” her will.

Whether Tolokonnikova’s forced labour of stitching police uniforms was intended to humiliate her — she is also an anti-police activist — remains unclear. But that almost seems irrelevant when you consider she was fed rotten potatoes, worked seventeen-hour days, lived in freezing conditions and often had her “privileges” — which included the “privilege” to wash or visit the toilet — removed.

In many ways, even more cruel was the Catch-22 built into her forced labour: fill your work quotas and the quotas themselves will be increased; yet fail to meet them and you’ll be punished. Tolokonnikova learned this the hard way when, disgusted by the appalling conditions facing her work brigade, she demanded that their working hours be reduced to twelve hours per day. The commandant agreed, knowing that this would mean Tolokonnikova’s would not be able to meet its work quota, and subsequently be further punished. As a result, Tolokonnikova twice went on hunger strike over the course of her incarceration. She was ultimately hospitalised due to severe headaches, and given an early release of several months.

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Yet Tolokonnikova, perhaps due to her significant public profile, was arguably more lucky than most; hospitalisation for illness is not the norm for Russian penal colonies. Less fortunate was Ildar Dadin, another anti-Putin activist and supporter of Navalny. After publicly protesting the Putin regime, Dadin was arrested and jailed. Although his original sentence was only for two weeks, Article 212.1 of the Criminal Code dictates that three violations of Russia’s protest laws can result in a prison sentence of up to five years: Dadin was sentenced to three.

On one occasion during his time in a prison camp in Segezha in the far north of Russia — an area which was home to some of the earliest Soviet Gulags, with winter temperatures as low as -15 degrees — Dadin was hung by his handcuffed wrists for over half an hour. On another, he was beaten and kicked by no fewer than twelve prison guards. Like Tolokonnikova, Dadin responded with a hunger strike. But in response, the guards merely stripped him to his lower garments and assured him that another inmate would rape him if did not resume eating.

Dadin doubtless knew that this was no idle threat. Instances of guard-instigated rape in Russian prisons are hardly rare: in 2011, seven prison staff in St. Petersburg were themselves imprisoned for torturing prisoners and forcing other inmates to rape them.

The Russian authorities predictably denied Dadin’s allegations. But his experiences are in keeping with a number of investigations carried out by Novaya Gazeta, an anti-Putin newspaper which has seen at least six of its journalists murdered, including Yuri Shchekochkin (poisoned with radiation for investigating government corruption) and Anna Politkovskaya (shot in an elevator after years of criticising the President).

Novaya Gazeta‘s research uncovered approximately 4,500 of systemic torture in 2018, with the worst instances reserved for political opponents like Navalny. Dmitry Pchelintsev, a member of an anti-Putin Left-wing group dubbed a “terrorist network” by the authorities, last year described how he was repeatedly electrocuted by members of the FSB (the Russian state’s successor organisation to the KGB): “They [electrocuted] me maybe five times without questions – probably to suppress my will. Then they said: [in case] you don’t understand, you’re in the hands of the FSB. We will not play, you have to answer the questions now.” The electrical cables had originally been attached to his feet, but Pchelintsev said that he ultimately gave a false confession when they threatened to relocate the wires to his genitals.

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Does such a fate await Navalny? I am not so sure. Navalny is arguably too prominent to be subject to the worst of the human rights abuses that Russia’s prisons have to offer; international attention on his case is significant enough that even the Putin regime might refrain from murder or torture. Moreover, an increasingly combative Joe Biden seems to have taken a personal interest in the case.

And so, as was the case with Tolokonnikova, it is likely that it will be the people around Navalny who will suffer; she related how her fellow prisoners were discouraged from befriending her for fear of being singled out for punishment.

Yet though Tolokonnikova was undoubtedly a troublesome activist for the Kremlin, Navalny is arguably in a different league. He is, after all, a serious political challenger and a direct threat to the regime, and so it is reasonable to conclude that his treatment could be worse. The guards themselves may refrain from harming Navalny directly, but the system’s prior form suggests that they might encourage other inmates to assault him, perhaps even at the promise of a reward; this would give the Russian authorities the best case of plausible deniability.

In 2010, President Putin declared that The Gulag Archipelago should be essential reading for Russian students. Whether he intended Solzhenitsyn’s work to be read as a lesson in Soviet history or a warning to would-be dissidents has long been a matter of speculation. But which reading is true? Navalny, I fear, could be about to find out.

Then I learned that the moral philosophers at Amnesty International had discovered a distinction between “nice” dissidents and “not nice” dissidents, and that “not nice” dissidents do not deserve the title of “prisoner of conscience”. They are, it seems, simply prisoners — like people who get done for robbery or arson, presumably. I learned this, like so many others, when Amnesty stripped Alexei Navalny of the title of “prisoner of conscience” after it discovered what anybody who pays a modicum of attention to Russian politics has known for a really long time: that Vladimir Putin’s most indomitable opponent is a Russian nationalist who has used unsavory rhetoric when talking about immigrants. Not to worry, Amnesty explained in a rather desperate-sounding press release; they would continue to support Navalny, despite having just denounced him as an extremist and, in doing so, providing Putin with some rather excellent propaganda.

I suppose it’s theoretically possible that the good folks at Amnesty don’t read newspapers and know nothing about Russian politics. More likely, however (and despite their protestations to the contrary) they were caught off guard by a coordinated online campaign to discredit Navalny and panicked. Regardless, the fact that Navalny really is a Russian nationalist, and really did call for the expulsion of Georgians from Russia during the war in Ossetia, raises interesting questions. Who exactly do we in the West think we are cheering on when we venerate the opponents of despots we despise? And what do we think would happen if they ever came to power?

Navalny, unsurprisingly, is a product of his own culture, which makes it unlikely he would ever be a liberal democrat. Yes, the Russian opposition includes principled liberals, but most of us have not heard of them because their platform is incredibly unpopular within Russia. Anybody seriously looking to rally opposition to Putin is unlikely to latch on to ideas that were so thoroughly discredited by Yeltsin, the oligarchs and their Western enablers in the 1990s, when the president shelled his own parliament and male life expectancy dropped from 65 to 57.

At the start of his political career, Navalny joined what was possibly the “nicest” of all the liberal parties, Yabloko, which was led by Grigory Yavlinsky, a vocal critic of Yeltsin’s disastrous policies. Navalny was thus granted the privilege of drinking deep from the cup of abject failure: he was a member in 2003 when Yabloko fell just short of the 5% threshold that would have won the party seats in the Russian Parliament. He might still have been in 2007, when the party’s share of the vote fell to 1.6%, had he not been kicked out of the party a few months earlier for “nationalistic activities”.

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By Daniel Kalder

Whether or not Yabloko were the victims of election fraud, as many argued, was beside the point: they were the poster children for the idea that nice guys finish last, especially in a system controlled by a ruthless operative such as Putin. And with the other opposition parties coopted by the Kremlin’s “managed democracy”, Navalny’s choices for political ideas around which to rally opposition to the corrupt elite were limited: either revanchist communism or some kind of nationalism.

Communism was a non-starter: not only was Navalny old enough to remember the rotted, senile variant of the ideology which had prevailed during his formative years, but the post-Soviet communist party was useless. Like Yabloko, it could never be mistaken as a serious vehicle of opposition, even if it was still able to rally armies of angry grannies to turn up for protests against the government.

Instead, he turned to nationalism. The field here was more open, with several parties vying for territory. Russia’s most famous nationalist politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, was a buffoon fully integrated into Putin’s corrupt system, and not to be taken seriously. Another nationalist, the scandalous author Edward Limonov of the National Bolshevik party, established his oppositional bona fides after a stint behind bars in the early 2000s for allegedly attempting to raise a militia to invade Kazakhstan.

Limonov, however, was too weird to become a mainstream phenomenon; he was a political provocateur who glamorised both Che and Khomeini, chanted “Stalin Beria Gulag!” at rallies and called for the introduction of polygamy to Russia. He also wrote lyrical memoirs, including one structured around his memories of bodies of water that had won a prestigious literary prize. Despite his weirdness, however, he succeeded in attracting young people to his party, and they won a reputation for their fearless opposition to Putin and his cronies.

Putin was also casting around for a founding ideology around this time, and likewise saw the attraction of nationalism. When he started to resurrect Soviet symbols, and “Volgograd” was replaced with “Stalingrad” at the eternal flame monument outside the Kremlin walls, this immediately led to anxiety among some Kremlinologists that Putin was out to restore the old USSR. This was naïve; Putin had no interest in taking back the Baltics or Central Asian Republics. He was, however, looking for a unifying idea that could inspire pride in all Russian citizens, and settled upon the USSR’s victory over Hitler in the Second World War.

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Aside from the fact that “We beat Hitler” is always a winner, there was another appeal to this idea. Soviet propaganda had always stressed the multinational aspect of the Soviet war effort, that it was the combined forces of all the Soviet peoples that had brought down Nazism. If you visit the Republic of Kalmykia in southern Russia, for instance, you will see that the war monument in Elista, the capital, features not Slav faces but Mongolians — and this despite the fact that Stalin actually deported much of the population to Siberia during the War for fear that they were untrustworthy. It was easy for Putin to take this pre-established model and apply it to multiethnic Russia as the successor state.

With Putin having annexed the “imperial nationalist” position, and all other positions discredited in the eyes of voters, that left ethnic nationalism as the last powerful idea up for grabs. And that is what Navalny began to advocate, and continues to advocate unapologetically, because his main constituency is not Amnesty or western liberals but people inside Russia who are disgusted by Putin.

If Navalny’s politics were transplanted to the UK or US, they would most certainly offend all good progressive people — and so it was that Amnesty suddenly found itself embarrassed to be associated with them. But is it so surprising that dissidents we admire for their bold opposition to tyrants also hold ideas that would not win them invites to dinner parties at Martha’s Vineyard?

Consider the most celebrated of Russian dissidents, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He was a man of ferocious principle and extraordinary bravery; but he was also a conservative Russian Orthodox nationalist who lambasted the West for its decadence and lamented the loss of Ukraine and Belarus following the dissolution of the USSR. Then there’s Lech Walesa, a devout Catholic and trade unionist who hated communism but may also have been a secret police informant. And this is to say nothing of the once-saintly Aung San Suu Kyi, or the once-upon-a-time heroic freedom fighter Robert Mugabe, or the Ayatollah Khomeini who was memorably described as “a Gandhi-like figure” by the US ambassador to Iran. We all know how well that one aged. In fact, with a few notable exceptions such as Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel, great dissidents often prove to be disastrous national leaders, at least as bad if not worse than the system they overthrew.

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This is not to say that Navalny would be worse than Putin. In fact, Yevgenia Albats, a Russian liberal who has known Navalny since 2004, argues that his main political goal was always to win over moderate nationalists, and that he has expressed regret for his past rhetoric. But there can be little doubt that ethnic Russian nationalism is a potentially destabilising force in the country. The multinational USSR died in ethnic violence, and multinational Russia was born in ethnic violence, and when Putin came to power, he inherited the war in the Caucasus. He bought off some separatist leaders and killed others, but their submission is not permanent, and it is almost certain that once he exits the scene there will be some in the regions who will want to test the new leader.

How would a president Navalny handle that? Amnesty, of course, has done its bit to help Putin and make sure we never find out. But the truth is that even were he to be released from jail, Navalny is unlikely to ever be leader of Russia, and not just because of his criminal convictions. According to independent polling, the Russian public’s trust in him remained at a lowly 3% between 2017 and 2020.

Yet Navalny keeps on going, despite harassment of his family, a poisoning attempt, and now imprisonment. His hatred and contempt for Putin’s regime is so all-consuming that it exceeds his concern for his own safety. To become a dissident — a real, outspoken, vocal dissident — is an extreme act. Navalny is not some keyboard warrior or posturing faux-radical; he is hardcore. And that is the role of the Navalnys of the world — to be hardcore, to tell the truth, regardless of the consequences, while the rest of us keep our heads down. And given all the suffering that being a dissident entails, perhaps it’s asking a bit much that they make us like them too.