Vladimir Putin has silenced his country. With Alexei Navalny, Russian society is now losing the most important remaining voice for a better future.
A young woman who calls herself Polina stands on the side of the road in Moscow and carries a bouquet of red roses in her hand. For minutes she has been thinking about whether she should go over to the memorial stone that lies on the other side of the square, in a small, snow-covered park. Traffic rushes by, it’s Friday evening, the news of Alexei Navalny’s death is only a few hours old. From a distance she can see police cars used to transport prisoners parked on the side, dozens of police officers guarding the mourning for the most important opponent of the Putin regime. As if even flowers are now dangerous in Russia. “They really killed him,” says Polina. “It’s a shock.”
The memorial was built in 1990 to commemorate the victims of political repression when Mikhail Gorbachev wanted to change the Soviet Union. Today the organization OWD-Info is publishing advice for Russians who want to lay flowers there and elsewhere in memory of Alexei Navalny: take water, a copy of your passport, a cell phone and a power bank, read police reports carefully in the event of an arrest, stay calm and do not resist. “If you have to serve a prison sentence, you have the right to food, water, a place to sleep and 15 minutes of telephone calls every day.”
On the evening of his death, citizens in St. Petersburg laid flowers in memory of Alexei Navalny
© IMAGO/SOPA Images
Polina has to pass the secret service headquarters and reaches a group of mourning Muscovites who look in disbelief at the memorial stone. “Keep going,” says a police officer, “don’t stop!” People are being admitted to the monument one by one, and this is generous compared to what is happening in other Russian cities these days.
In Nizhny Novgorod, a large city on the Volga, a memorial was cordoned off with adhesive tape; in Novosibirsk the memorial stone was allegedly mined. 366 people were taken away by police across the country last weekend, some brutally dragged away for nothing.
There is dead silence in Putin’s empire
“Three days ago, Vladimir Putin killed my husband,” Yulia Navalnaya said last Monday. The prison conditions may have cost his life: almost 300 days in a tiny punishment cell, often hungry and sick, in the cold and between damp walls. A death in installments, deported to one of the northernmost penal colonies in the country. But he could also have been murdered, a second attempt after the 2020 poisoning.
President Vladimir Putin appears noticeably relaxed at an event on the day the news of his death was announced
© Polaris/laif
For the film “Navalny” he was asked what message he would leave to the Russians in case he was killed. That was more than three years ago. Navalny laughed at first. “Don’t give up,” he then said. “We’re only under the thumb of these bad idiots because we don’t realize how strong we are.” The rule of the bad guys only works if the good guys don’t do anything about it. “That’s why you can’t remain idle.” Today that seems like a message from another time.
In recent years, Putin has silenced an entire country, crushed the protest movement, and pushed opponents abroad or had them imprisoned. Just a few years ago, Navalny mobilized tens of thousands of people to demonstrate across the country. After his death, there is dead silence in Vladimir Putin’s empire.