Steve Gutterman's Week In Russia

I'm Steve Gutterman, the editor of RFE/RL's Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.

Welcome to The Week In Russia, in which I dissect the key developments in Russian politics and society over the previous week and look at what's ahead.

Aleksei Navalny, President Vladimir Putin's most formidable opponent, has died in suspicious circumstances at an Arctic prison at the age of 47. His body has not yet been buried but his legacy is beginning to unfold, with his defiant widow taking up the mantle of his anti-Kremlin activism.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

The Toad On The Oil Pipe

On July 18, 2013, after a court sentenced him to five years in prison following a trial on embezzlement charges he dismissed as punishment for his opposition to President Vladimir Putin, Aleksei Navalny sent out a tweet.

"OK. Don't be bored without me. And most important, don't be idle -- the toad won't jump off the oil pipe itself."

The brief post mixed several elements of Navalny's public persona, using an upbeat tone to combine a sense of resignation about his own fate with a clear call for Russian to take peaceful action against Putin and allies, whom the opposition politician often described as a corrupt cabal clinging to power by sucking up Russia's oil riches for themselves.

It's a message Navalny delivered countless times over more than a decade as the most prominent of Putin's opponents.

But no more. Navalny died in a harsh Arctic prison last week, three years and one month after he was arrested upon return to his country following treatment for a near-fatal nerve-agent poisoning he blamed on Putin and the Federal Security Service (FSB).

Navalny was 47 years old -- the age at which Putin, now 72, first became president.

The Russan authorities have refused to release Navalny's body to his family a week after his death was announced on February 16, deepening suspicions raised by the fact that he had no obvious health problems and seemed to be in good spirits when he spoke at a court hearing by video link one day earlier.

In a video she recorded on February 22, Navalny's mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, said that the authorities want to bury his body in secret, without handing it over to her and without a funeral. "I don't agree with this. I want those of you who valued Aleksei and take his death as a personal tragedy to have the chance to say farewell to him," she said.

Many supporters, Kremlin critics, and observers in Russia and abroad are certain that Navalny was killed by Putin and the state he heads, whether through mistreatment over his time behind bars or with a single fatal attack of some kind at the prison known as Polar Wolf.

'It Is Shameful To Surrender To Your Fear'

Days after his death, the message Navalny had delivered over the years was repeated by his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who vowed to take up the mantle and urged Russians to stand beside her.

"I'll remind you of Aleksei's words.... 'It isn't shameful to do too little. It is shameful to do nothing. It is shameful to surrender to your fear,'" she said.

Fear in the face of the state's actions against him and its spiraling clampdown on dissent across the country was something that Navalny, if he felt it, never showed in public.

The state, on the other hand, seemed to show repeatedly that it feared him: that Putin saw Navalny as a threat to his grip on power.

For one thing, there was the flip-flop by the authorities in 2013. After the embezzlement trial, Navalny was initially sentenced to five years in prison, which would have been his first long-term incarceration -- until then, he had spent many days and night in jails over street protests, but never been convicted of a major crime and sent to prison.

Hours later, in a highly unusual reversal that followed sizable street protests over the verdict, Navalny was freed pending an appeal, and the sentence was later suspended -- evidence, many believed, that the Kremlin feared locking him up long-term would make him into a martyr.

In the meantime, Navalny was able to run in the Moscow mayoral election and received more than 27 percent of the vote, according to the official count -- far less than the Kremlin-backed incumbent but a level of support that may have worried Putin by suggesting an alternative to his long rule.

To supporters, that was perhaps the main thing Navalny represented: the idea that an alternative existed -- and might someday be within reach.

The Kremlin took an array of steps to stifle that in several ways, from multiple prosecutions to the ruling that barred him from challenging Putin in the last presidential election. Not to mention the fact that Putin and his main spokesman avoided uttering Navalny's name in public.

'Putin Never Faced A More Serious Threat'

To supporters and some analysts, the Kremlin's efforts to show Russians that Navalny was a minor figure belied its fear of him, and the increasingly dramatic accusations that prosecutors piled on him seemed to support that view.

"It was cool among a certain class of pundits to pooh-pooh Navalny, to say he was never a serious threat," Sam Greene, a professor at the Kings Russia Institute in London, wrote in a thread on X, formerly Twitter, on February 17. "Let me put it this way: Putin never faced a more serious threat."

Eventually, the Russian authorities apparently abandoned any qualms they may have had about putting Navalny away for years -- or getting rid of him forever. His poisoning in August 2020 stands out as a marker of a shift in the state's approach to Putin's most vocal foe, as does his arrest upon arrival in Moscow on January 17, 2021.

Once he was detained at Sheremetyevo airport that day, Navalny never walked free again in Russia or anywhere else. At the time of his death, he was serving a 19-year sentence following an extremism conviction that came amid the intensified clampdown the state has imposed in conjunction with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The outcome of the war could go a long way to shaping Navalny's legacy. If Russia prevails, those seeking to keep his cause alive may face an even steeper uphill climb.

In an interview with RFE/RL, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg suggested that Navalny's death underscored the need to ensure that Putin's authoritarian rule does not go unchecked.

"I strongly believe that the best way to honor the memory of Aleksei Navalny is to ensure that President Putin doesn't win on the battlefield, but that Ukraine prevails," Stoltenberg said in the interview on February 21.

In his thread on X, Greene wrote that the main message Navalny leaves behind is one he repeated often: "Don't surrender."

'Those Who Are Needed The Most'

"Navalny is not the first of Putin's political opponents to die. He will not likely be the last. But it is up to those who care to find a way -- any way -- to keep Russia's other political prisoners alive," wrote Greene, who also heads a democracy-support program at Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington. "The pressure must always be on."

The prominent Russian human rights group Memorial, banned in its own country, says that Russia is currently holding 679 people the organization has designated as political prisoners.

One of them is Vladmir Kara-Murza, who was arrested in April 2022 -- shortly after returning to Russia following a speech in the United States in which he accused the "dictatorial regime in the Kremlin" of committing "war crimes" in Ukraine -- and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

In a post on X on February 20, Kara-Murza wrote that while the circumstances of Navalny's death were not yet clear, Putin bears "personal responsibility -- because Aleksei was his personal prisoner."

Kara-Murza wrote that there was little news about Navalny on the single-channel radio in his cell, and that he had heard a song by the Soviet-era bard Vladimir Vysotsky -- a folk hero whose ruggedly subversive lyrics spoke of pain, loss, and the harsh reality beneath the lies of the state.

"Everyone comes back," goes one line quoted by Kara-Murza, "except those who are needed the most."

That's it from me this week.

If you want to know more, catch up on my podcast The Week Ahead In Russia, out every Monday, here on our site or wherever you get your podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts).

Yours,

Steve Gutterman

P.S.: Consider forwarding this newsletter to colleagues who might find this of interest. Send feedback and tips to newsletters@rferl.org.

I'm Steve Gutterman, the editor of RFE/RL's Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.

Welcome to The Week In Russia, in which I dissect the key developments in Russian politics and society over the previous week and look at what's ahead.

Familiar narratives and a severely skewed version of history were on display once again in President Vladimir Putin's interview with Tucker Carlson. There were also some moments that shed additional light on his motives in the invasion of Ukraine and other matters.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

'Largely Fictional'

For some, the biggest takeaway from Tucker Carlson's interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin could be summed up in a single word: Boring.

Partly because Putin started off with a long history lecture riddled with falsehoods and factual errors that did little, for many ears, to make it more interesting. It spawned multiple memes mocking what one commentator called a "largely fictional" account that stretched back to the 9th century. Ninth -- that's not a typo.

At one point, Carlson reassured Putin that his lengthy sojourn into the past was "not boring," but many who watched the interview -- or wrote about it -- disagreed.

Another potential source of tedium: Putin's re-reiteration of several of his well-worn narratives -- most of them, in this case, meant to justify Russia's aggression against Ukraine over the last decade, from the seizure of Crimea in 2014 to the full-scale invasion that will hit the two-year mark this month.

Carlson and the Kremlin posted the interview on the Internet on February 9. In addition to what Bloomberg Opinion columnist Marc Champion described as Putin's "usual string of half-truths and outright falsehoods about the war in Ukraine," it featured some of his familiar bugbears, from Lenin to NATO.

But while there was nothing much new -- as there often isn't in Putin's interviews, speeches, and other public statements -- there were some revealing remarks, comments that seemed to shed light on Putin's motives in the war against Ukraine and other matters.

Resentment And 'Obsession'

Despite Putin’s criticism of NATO and its enlargement, for example, his focus on the past added to the already voluminous evidence that he is obsessed with Ukraine and that, as Champion put it, he invaded the country "out of the apparently sincere belief that he's retaking lands that rightfully belong to Russia."

One could argue with the suggestion that Putin sincerely holds that belief, but it may not matter much -- in any case, the remarks seemed to throw the thinking behind the invasion into sharper relief. "Resentment over NATO's expansion played a part for sure, but it was a supporting role," Champion wrote.

Also of note: Resentment over the Western alliance taking in former Warsaw Pact states and ex-Soviet republics is not the same as a genuine belief that it poses a threat -- let alone an imminent threat -- to Russia's security.

'Hitler Had No Choice'

Another telling remark -- one that seems particularly striking in the context of the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine -- came in his comments on World War II, which began when Germany invaded Poland days after reaching an agreement with Moscow to carve up parts of Eastern Europe in a secret annex to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939.

By refusing to cede territory that Hitler wanted to Germany, Poland "forced Germany to begin the Second World War," Putin said, adding that Poland "turned out to be intractable. Hitler had no choice in implementing his plans other than to start precisely with Poland."

"The idea that the victim of the attack serves as its instigator by forcing the hand of the aggressor is central to all of Putin's explanations for Russia's war in Ukraine," Masha Gessen wrote in The New Yorker. "To my knowledge, though, this was the first time he described Hitler's aggression in the same terms."

Striking, particularly given the enormous focus Putin has placed on the Soviet role in World War II, and given the Russian state's refusal to countenance any comparison between Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany.

Jailed Journalists

Another moment that seemed revealing came near the end of the two-hour interview, when Carlson asked about Evan Gershkovich -- who, along with Alsu Kurmasheva of RFE/RL, is one of two American journalists jailed in Russia last year and still being held on charges that they and their employers say are unfounded.

Asked whether he was prepared to free Gershkovich as a "goodwill gesture," Putin repeated the Russian claim that the U.S. journalist was "caught red-handed" in an act of espionage, without providing evidence, and said Russia was open to -- and involved in -- negotiations with an eye to a prisoner swap.

Nothing new there. But Putin also clearly identified one Russian held in the West as a desired candidate for an exchange -- a former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer who is in prison in Germany after being convicted of fatally shooting a Georgian former separatist fighter in Russia's North Caucasus in a park in Berlin in broad daylight in 2019.

And of Gershkovich, the only American journalist arrested on espionage charges in Russia since the Cold War and the Soviet collapse, Putin said that it "makes no sense, more or less, to hold him in prison in Russia."

The comments were seen as the clearest sign yet that Putin and his government view U.S. and other Western citizens held in Russia as bargaining chips for potential prisoner swaps.

"Russian President Vladimir Putin is using Gershkovich as a pawn, holding him hostage in order to gain leverage over -- and extract a ransom from -- the United States," The Wall Street Journal’s parent company said in September.

That's it from me this week.

If you want to know more, catch up on my podcast The Week Ahead In Russia, out every Monday, here on our site or wherever you get your podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts).

Yours,

Steve Gutterman

P.S.: Consider forwarding this newsletter to colleagues who might find this of interest. Send feedback and tips to newsletters@rferl.org.