Alexei Navalny’s death: a dark culmination of Putin’s dictatorship // Vorwärts 20.02.2024
The death of Alexei Navalny in the IK-3 prison camp in the permafrost region behind the Arctic Circle is a dramatic, sinister event. Hardly surprising, and yet hard to believe. A few days before the Ukrainian withdrawal from Avdiivka and shortly before the anniversary of Boris Nemtsov’s murder, the news of Navalny’s death reads like a bad joke.
Navalny’s death is the third shake-up of the late Putin system in a short space of time. Almost two years after the invasion of Ukraine and eight months after the Wagner revolt, these days are yet more proof of the extent to which public events in Russia are dominated by sudden, shocking, clandestine events. Violence seems to be the last remaining mode of politics. Russian society has no choice but to watch Putin, Prigozhin and Navalny in their triumphs and tragedies.
The Kremlin has been manipulating for 25 years
For a quarter of a century, the Kremlin has been working to conceal the real mechanisms of power behind a thick smokescreen of staging and manipulation, first and foremost from its own citizens. Politics is theater in Russia. A tried and tested strategy that feeds cynicism and promotes apathy. However, the aforementioned frequent shocks are too powerful to be kept under control by censorship and propaganda. Each time, a hitherto underestimated weakness of the system is revealed nolens volens.For a long time, people believed in the collective nature of decision-making in the Russian leadership. A popular thesis was that Putin was so long-lived and unchallenged above all because he was able to skillfully manoeuvre and mediate as an arbiter between different groups in the elite. After February 24, 2022, however, Russia and the world have learned that landmark decisions are made in a much narrower circle than generally assumed, possibly even entirely autocratically. A system dominated by one man in this way is fatally tied to its life cycle.