An epoch of cowardice and cynicism

“A free, peaceful, happy Russia, a Beautiful Russia of the Future, which my husband dreamed of so much — that is what we need,” Yulia Navalnaya, wife of the murdered Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, said Monday morning. “I want to live in this Russia. I want our children to live in it,” Navalnaya said in a message broadcast to Navalny’s supporters. “I want to build it with you.”

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After joking and laughing during a court appearance where he appeared fit and healthy last Thursday, Navalny died mysteriously on Friday in the Arctic penal colony where he was sent last December to serve out the remaining 27 years of a 30-year sentence for the crime of “extremism” among a variety of fabricated offences. He was 47.

Four years ago, Navalny was hospitalized in the Siberian city of Omsk. He had been poisoned, for the second time, and his supporters managed to have him airlifted out of Russia to Berlin, where German doctors concluded that he’d been poisoned with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok, a weapon Putin’s regime has used against its enemies several times.

In 2021, Navalny chose to return to Russia, risking his life and sacrificing his liberty in the fight for that “free, peaceful, happy Russia” Navalnaya spoke about on Monday. Navalny was arrested upon his arrival in Moscow, “a model of what civic courage can look like in a country that has very little of it,” as the writer Anne Applebaum put it.

The thing that is so striking about Navalny’s death is that it is the denouement of immense courage and optimism in an epoch of cowardice and cynicism that the liberal democracies can’t seem to find it within themselves to transcend. It’s a paralysis that allows Vladimir Putin’s gangland oligarchy of warlords and corrupt........

© National Post