Navalny’s friends knew he was willing to become a martyr if that’s what it took to stand up to Putin.

Navalny’s friends knew he was willing to become a martyr if that’s what it took to stand up to Putin.

Alexei Navalny’s long struggle against President Putin began with a humorous blog and culminated in repeated demonstrations of his willingness to risk his own life. According to the Russian authorities on Friday, he has now died in prison.

Russia’s leading opposition voice has been silenced.

Other dissident figures went into exile or died in mysterious circumstances over the past decade, leaving Navalny as the last national figure with a dedicated following.

Though he had been arrested many times before, Navalny’s defining moment in the eyes of many Russians came after the attempt to assassinate him with Novichok. He recuperated in the sanctuary of a German hospital but chose to defy Putin and return to Russia in January 2021, knowing full well he would end up in prison.

  • mellowheat@suppo.fiEnglish
    42·
    9 months ago

    If I may quote https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/16/obit-navalny-putins-archenemy-and-anti-corruption-champion

    Beginning in the late 2000s, Navalny used racial slurs when describing ethnic Georgians, called for the deportation of Muslim migrant workers and delivered speeches at Russian Marches, annual rallies of far-right nationalists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

    “It was a long time ago,” Alexander Verkhovsky, head of the Moscow-based Sova hate crimes monitor, told Al Jazeera in 2021, describing Navalny as “a different man now”.

    https://www.rightsinrussia.org/aleksandr-verkhovsky/ doesn’t seem like a pro-fascist (although I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody made such a story up, now that he has defended Navalny), so I’m supposing his opinion in this is good enough. Calling Navalny a fascist at this point seems like a tankie talking point specifically designed to denounce the message he was putting out in his last years.

    “We become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.” – Aristotle

    • Iceman@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      Call me a cynic, but that just screams “I am in Russian prison, my hopes for a Russian uprising uprising didn’t happen and my only hope is appeasing the west”. No world leaders have made such drastic changes in ideology over merely a decade.

      • mellowheat@suppo.fiEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        I guess that’s possible, but also possible that your own country poisoning you and then imprisoning you can do wonders for your nationalistic tendencies.