The world is such shit these days that my tolerance for awfulness has gotten absurdly high. It takes a lot to get me to shout back in surprise and horror at a breaking-news alert… and that happened today, when my phone blew up with the announcement that Alexei Navalny — Russian anti-corruption loudmouth, political renegade, and the biggest pain in Vladimir Putin’s ass — was dead.
Putin had Navalny killed. Of course he did. Either directly — Navalny had been poisoned before with the nerve agent Novichok, a favorite weapon deployed against the Russian dictator’s enemies — or indirectly, by sentencing him to a harsh Arctic Circle prison, “one of Russia’s toughest penal colonies.” Navalny was only 47 years old. (On the other hand, Navalny’s wife says she’s not sure she can even believe that her husband is dead, since the news comes only from state sources and Putin is not to be trusted. So who the hell knows what’s going on?)
In my review of the 2022 documentary Navalny, shot secretly by Canadian documentarian Daniel Roher, I said that “the more people everywhere know about Navalny,” who hadn’t been widely known outside Russia before, “the more difficult it may be for Putin to do him ultimate harm.” I appear to have been wrong about this.
But Navalny the film remains essential viewing. The hope that Navalny the man will continue to represent for a Russia beyond Putin is even more necessary now than it was two years ago. This is a terrific film, as gripping and as suspenseful as a finely wrought fictional thriller, and a sheer delight as a portrait of the man himself. Films don’t get much more daring or more crucial than this. And that’s even truer today.
UK: rent/buy on Prime, Apple TV, and Dogwoof on Demand; rent on Curzon Home Cinema
See Navalny at Letterboxd for more viewing options.
I’m kicking myself for just now learning that Navalny was also a xenophobic far right nationalist. He opposed the immigration of Central Asians into Russia, ran for Moscow mayor on an anti-migrant platform, and attended the annual right-wing Russian March that featured slogans like “Russia for ethnic Russians.” He compared Muslims to flies and cockroaches, likened migrants to tooth cavities that needed “full sanitization” and should be “carefully and decisively removed,” and made a video showing himself “shooting” an actor wearing a keffiyeh. Amnesty International stripped him of “prisoner of conscience” status based on his comments (before they were guilted into restoring it). He never renounced his past positions, and I wouldn’t trust a racist to be truly “reformed” even if he claimed to be so.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/25/navalny-has-the-kremlin-foe-moved-on-from-his-nationalist-past
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/alexei-navalnys-far-right-racist-past-back-in-spotlight-after-putin-critics-death-150644657.html
As a brown person I say: screw that. If he wasn’t fighting for the equality, dignity, and liberation of EVERYONE — if he claimed to want to free “the people” from Putin’s tyranny but still considered someone who looked like me to be subhuman and thus unwelcome — then he wasn’t fighting for me, and I’m not going to shed tears over him. The white supremacists can squabble for power amongst themselves without my support.
And here’s a thread tracking Navalny’s other imperialist views. He supported Russia’s invasion of Georgia and called Georgians “rodents.” He said Crimea belongs to Russia and that he wouldn’t give it back to Ukraine. And so on.
https://twitter.com/OstapYarysh/status/1619028911786180609?lang=en
So it appears he was anti-Putin, but a supremacist and colonialist in his own right — someone who wanted to change the face of empire without questioning the empire itself. No thanks. Putin has to go, for sure; but the more I learn about Navalny, the more I doubt he would have been the solution.
Yes, I only just learned this too. I think I need to add something to my review of the doc. 🙄