Alexei Navalny is being mourned as Russia\u2019s most daring, sophisticated and Western-looking politician. Yet Navalny\u2019s political struggle with tyranny, which ended in an Arctic penal colony in what looks like state-sponsored murder, makes his \u2018life and fate\u2019 very Russian \u2013 part of a tradition of moral defiance against cruel and deceitful autocracy.<\/p>\n
A fated opponent<\/h2>\n
Navalny would have been a successful politician in a democratic country. But he was a political opponent in Putin\u2019s Russia, which has evolved from a corrupt authoritarian state into a thuggish, brutal dictatorship. One cannot pursue a political career in present-day Russia: you can either be the Kremlin\u2019s loyal servitor or part of the ever-silent narod <\/em>(common people). Any sign of disloyalty or opposition is suppressed. Navalny was aware of this better than anyone else: back in 2020, he was poisoned with a nerve agent by Putin\u2019s secret police goons. Yet he returned to Moscow from Germany after life-saving treatment, knowing full well that he would be immediately arrested and thrown behind bars.<\/p>\n What might explain this seemingly irrational move? Navalny\u2019s return to Moscow \u2013 that fateful day \u2013 marked the veritable beginning of his Russian<\/em> story. The history of Russian intelligentsia, Russian literature, traditions of political dissent and truth-telling, and the quasi-religious quest for a virtuous life are elements of its plot.<\/p>\n Russian writer Dmitry Glukhovsky observes that Navalny, the real man of flesh and blood, warts and all \u2013 full of all sorts of contradictions given his flirtation with Russian ethnic nationalism \u2013 had turned into an \u2018irreproachable hero, part of a religious myth\u2019. His deeds, courage and moral choices, Glukhovsky adds, are perceived as symbolizing \u2018the life of a saint; the death of a martyr\u2019.<\/p>\n The Russian intelligentsia, which emerged as a social group in the 1830s, pursued moral perfectionism. Their strong aspirations were born of two confluent intellectual traditions: one religious, stemming from Eastern (Byzantine) Christianity; the other, a secular legacy of Enlightenment moralism. The notion of sovest\u2019<\/em> (conscience) was at the heart of the early Russian intelligentsia\u2019s ethos. Having a \u2018clear conscience\u2019 \u2013 living unflinchingly according to the precepts of truth \u2013 was a deep-rooted, social ideal of the intelligentsia.<\/p>\n Historically, the Russian intelligentsia arose out of confrontation with Tsarist autocracy. Opposition to the bureaucratic institution shaped the intelligentsia\u2019s rules of conduct and beliefs about what was right or wrong. As Russian cultural historian Boris Uspensky writes, \u2018It is precisely the intelligentsia\/Tsar dichotomy that lies at the origins of Russian intelligentsia.\u2019 A Russian intelligent<\/em> is always in opposition, their moral values contrasting with the workings of a repressive state system.<\/p>\n With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the intelligentsia may have left the historical scene. However, their moral principles did not disappear: many Russians internalized intelligentsia ideals by reading classic Russian literature, which in its turn had been the product of Russian intelligentsia\u2019s creative efforts. Not unlike medieval Old Russian literature, which is thoroughly religious in nature, the great Russian nineteenth and early twentieth century novel performs a didactic function: it expounds on a life of dignity, the never-ending struggle between Good and Evil, and the choice between Truth and Falsehood. In many memoirs and interviews, prominent members of the Soviet dissident movement confirm that the subversive, \u2018quasi-religious\u2019 essence of Russian literature had shaped their moral principles and negative attitude towards the \u2018immoral\u2019 Soviet system.<\/p>\nResolute moral standards<\/h2>\n
The martyr\u2019s rule<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.eurozine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/Alexey_Navalny_in_2020.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\nAlexei Navalny, born in 1976, belonged to a new Russian generation: he was a teenager when Communism fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated. Yet the factors that formed his moral outlook appear to be the same as those that were at work during previous decades. Russian literature seemed to have played an important role. In a letter he sent to Russian opposition journalist Sergei Parkhomenko not long before his death, Navalny discussed some Russian classics. He focused on Chekhov\u2019s stories and compared the dark realism of some pieces with Dostoevsky\u2019s oeuvre. The letter ended with a telling exhortation: \u2018One has to read the classics. We don\u2019t know them well enough.\u2019 It is also difficult to avoid the direct parallel between Navalny\u2019s passionate desire for truth and the Russian literary and dissident tradition of truth-telling, best epitomized by Alexander Solzhenitsyn\u2019s 1974 essay Live Not by Lies<\/em>; all of Navalny\u2019s live streams invariably ended with the phrase: \u2018Subscribe to our channel: here we tell the truth.\u2019<\/p>\nAlexei Navalny\u2019s moral rectitude, personal courage and fearless determination to stand by his principles, no matter what, put him on par with a long line of Russian victims of political repression, who have defied the Russian Leviathan over the last two centuries. The fragmented Russian opposition now has a powerful hero myth and symbol to rally around. Putin (or \u2018bunker grandpa\u2019, as Navalny used to mockingly call him) was afraid of his most prominent political opponent when he was alive. Now that Navalny is dead, Putin arguably finds himself in a worse situation. The Kremlin tyrant should be reminded of S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard\u2019s famous maxim: \u2018the tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.\u2019<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n[ad_2]\nSource link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[ad_1] Alexei Navalny is being mourned as Russia\u2019s most daring, sophisticated and Western-looking politician. Yet Navalny\u2019s political struggle with tyranny, which ended in an Arctic<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":206778,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[154],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206777"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206777"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":343327,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206777\/revisions\/343327"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Alexey_Navalny_in_2020.jpg\"){kind=link}