There’s shoddy work everywhere. Even great publications suffer ridiculous failures.
This is the cover of the new issue of the New Yorker.
What ridiculous crap.
(You can probably guess who that is supposed to be.)
Source: Sergei Parkhomenko (Facebook), 12 October 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader
I wouldn’t want Navalny to be remembered the way he has been remembered this past year.
I haven’t read the book Patriot yet, but I was quite upset by Mikhail Zygar’s review of it. Zygar compares Navalny to Jesus and concludes that by dying, Navalny bequeathed us an idea that would rid future generations of cynicism and teach them to believe.
This is feeble sentimentalization, in my opinion. Navalny didn’t not dream up any particular ideas. He called for action, not faith. The meaning of his sacrifice, in my mind, is practical and political, not abstract and ideological. It can and should benefit the current generation, not some future generation.
Navalny didn’t dream up a new ideal. The “beautiful Russia of the future” is a feeble image, but Navalny understood better than anyone how tyranny operates on the mechanical level. I often complain that the FSB understands better how Russian society functions than do opposition politicians, sociologists and psychologists. Navalny couldn’t be accused of this shortcoming.
He was the only person in Russian politics who talked about power relations as a two-way street. He didn’t talk about the enormous resources Putin has, but about the fact that we give Putin power. It is not the security services, the army and the tanks that give Putin power. We give Putin power.
This view evolved over the course of Navalny’s career, becoming more and more central. As time went by, it separated Alexei more and more from his colleagues in the opposition. Toward the end of his life, Navalny’s writings centered on the idea that power consists in consenting to obedience, in “obeying in advance.” We say to ourselves: I cannot disobey, because if I don’t obey, they will (notice me/file administrative charges against me/fire me/banish me from my profession/send me to jail/kill me).
Only by obeying in advance can governing by unfulfilled threat be scaled up indefinitely, to a country of 140 million people, because this means of governing doesn’t require any resources. We obey without taking resources from the state. Putin’s estimates for the war in Ukraine include every dollar, euro, and pound spent on Ukraine’s defense. They are what counts against Russian budgets, not “faith in democracy” or “anti-war sentiment.” I understand Alexei’s decision to return to Russia in this sense; I see it as logical and unusually tenderhearted on the personal level. By returning to Russia, Alexei was able to provide Russians with one more example of tyranny’s limits: Putin never had power over Alexei. Had he stayed in Germany, Putin’s power would have extended to Navalny.
At the end of his life, Navalny did not call for faith, he called for deeds: “If your convictions are worth something, you must be willing to stand up for them. And if necessary, make some sacrifices. And if you are not willing, then you don’t have any convictions. You just think you do. But they are not convictions and principles. They are just thoughts in your head.”
Navalny was concerned not with the thoughts in our heads, but with whether our deeds matched our thoughts. I appreciate Christian philosophy, but I could never accept the postulate that a second of faith can save a person, no matter their actions — “Now thou shalt be with me in paradise,” and so forth. The Russian opposition, for as long as I’ve been watching it, wants to get to democracy approximately the same way the thief gets to paradise — by believing in it. The notion that we are democrats and decent because we believe in democracy while all remaining Russians are slaves and awful because they don’t believe in it is the main obstacle to democracy in Russia, in my mind, and the Koshchei’s egg of tyranny. A “democracy” in which only “democrats” have a stake and which only they want is an oxymoron that makes democracy impossible and tyranny in Russia perennial. Democracy cannot be for Muscovites alone. It cannot be built via media outlets in which only Petersburg and Moscow have a voice. It cannot be built without equal representation of activists, issues, and interests from other regions and ethnicities.
Late in life, Navalny hated talk about the “freewheeling ’90s” and the good Chekists/bad democrats dichotomy, which doesn’t prevent his supporters from remaining stuck in this selfsame paradigm.
Navalny was able to cringe at his former self: “I repeat that back then I vigorously supported all that stuff. Not election fraud, of course — I didn’t like that even then — but I did everything I could to ignore it, and the general unfairness of the elections didn’t fluster me one bit. Now we are paying for the fact that in ’96 we thought that election fraud was not always a bad thing.”
Alexei started his career in Russia’s faux democracy project, which was unfair from the get-go. He entered politics as a “democratic nationalist,” desiring greatness and a better elite for Russia. It was within this same paradigm that he pursued the most successful project of his life: “fighting the regime by legal means.” By the end of his life, however, he came to realize that Russian power is held by a hypocritical elite which justifies its obedience by talking about white coats, and is not willing to share power. It is not even willing to think about being the equals of other Russians, let alone the equals of Ukrainians, for example.
This, in my opinion, is what Navalny left behind. It pains me to see how the legacy he left at such a high cost is being frittered away by films about traitors, stupid speeches, and sentimental religious comparisons.
Source: Vladimir Ponizovskiy (Facebook), 23 October 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader
