Killing Navalny

"Putins värsta fiende: Aleksej Navalnyj och hans anhängare" (Putin´s Worst Enemy: Alexei Navalny and his followers) is a book by Kalle Kniivilä, a Swedish-Finnish reporter and former press attaché at the Swedish embassies in Moscow and Kiev. The book is pro-Navalny, relatively short and very "journalistic". It comes across as an extended newspaper article. I didn´t find it *that* interesting, although I suppose it could work as a teaser trailer to the Navalny phenomenon. 

Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the book deals with the poisoning of Navalny in 2020, which many suspect was an attempt by the Russian intelligence services to murder him. Navalny was treated at a German hospital. After returning to Russia, the anti-Putin activist was imprisoned and framed by the Russian authorities. Navalny is still in prison, and was recently sentenced to another nine years in a sham trial. His anti-corruption foundation FBK was one of the more important anti-Putin opposition movements until its suppression by the authorities in 2021. 

The book (published last year) gives a very unflattering picture of Russia and Vladimir Putin´s regime. It combines widespread corruption and incompetence with heavy handed repression of everyone who dares to disagree with Putin and his "power party" United Russia (which often rigs the elections and controls the main media outlets). The Russian Federation comes across as a maturing neo-Soviet Union. (Things have probably gotten even worse after the invasion of the Ukraine.) 

But what is Navalny´s alternative? Kniivilä has obvious problems with *this* part of the story. Yes, Navalny is an anti-Communist, calls for decentralization, and has spent considerable time exposing the corruption of Putin and the clique around him. Presumably, he stands for free elections, and so on. But Navalny also has other sides, which make the author (and many Western liberals) uneasy. He is a self-professed "nationalist", demands tough immigration controls directed at people from the Caucasus and Central Asia, and has made statements which in a Western context would be considered "hate speech". Thus, at one point, Navalny referred to Georgians as "rodents" (the Russian words for Georgian and rodent are similar). Kniivilä says that this "clearly borders on racism", but let´s be honest here: by Western liberal standards, this *is* racism, and the author would probably have no problem saying so if the statement came from Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen! Some wokesters at Amnesty International (AI) got cold feet when Navalny´s "nationalist" and "violent" statements became widely known (no doubt courtesy of Putin & Co) and removed him from AI´s list of "prisoners of conscience". AI then changed their mind again, perhaps realizing they were being trolled by the Russian propaganda apparatus! Combining wokeness with Realpolitik can´t be easy (compare Azov).

Kniivilä also have problems explaining away Navalny´s Western connections (which are considerable). After all, Navalny was treated at a hospital in Germany after the poisoning, and even met Angela Merkel (who speaks fluent Russian) there. He is educated in the United States, and after the poison attack, a group of investigative reporters based in the Netherlands helped him track down the Russian secret service team responsible for the assasination attempt. Apparently, the Russian intelligence community leaks as a sieve, and anyone with some daring and a lot of money can buy secret information on the black market. (This is interesting, since it proves that Donald Trump wasn´t a Russian agent. If he had been, that info would have been leaked by now and found its way to the DNC.) While none of the above proves that Navalny is a literal "foreign agent", it certainly does show that he is "one of ours" behind the Gazprom curtain. This is of course controversial to state, since Putin´s regime constantly accuses all opposition groups of being foreign assets...

The author of "Putins värsta fiende" is pessimistic about the immidiate prospects. He paints a picture of a Russian society that has become largely de-politicized. Russians are used to the system being authoritarian and based on lies. In some paradoxical sense, if everything is a lie, everything also becomes possible, at least to those willing and able to play along (and occasionally game the system here and there). Even people who defend Navalny against government repression might be unwilling to actually vote for him, in the unlikely event that Putin permits him to run for office. And yet, no other prospective opposition leader seems to exist. Putin´s power is (or was) based on the unstated proposition that as long as Russia was politically stable and had strong economic growth, people would look the other way when the perennial president strengthened his personal power, and that of his cronies. A shared Russian nationalism was also part of this picture. This understanding between Putin and the people may have been shattering when the book was published, but in favor of the previously mentioned apathy (at least according to the author). How the war in the Ukraine have affected the situation is probably too early to tell, but it will obviously be used to recreate the tacit Putinist consensus on an even more nationalist basis.

With those reflections, I close this review.