The imprisoned Kremlin opponent Alexei Navalny attacks President Putin with an explosive film. He still doesn’t mention his name.
OfInna Hartwich
Of Russia
president Vladimir Putin has found many names for Alexei Navalny over the years. Sometimes this is a “simple blogger”, then “a well-known accused” or “the Berlin patient”. The 68-year-old never says the name of his greatest adversary. As if the utterance of the few letters cast an evil spell over the president, yes over the country, and Putin had to face this spell.
Instead, the Kremlin pretends that Navalny, who can be described as the second most important politician in Russia, is a nobody. The method has the opposite effect: the 44-year-old’s demonstrative ignoring shows how important the Kremlin takes Navalny. The Putin system involuntarily did what he denied the opposition politician from Navalny: a danger to the Kremlin.
The Russian power apparatus sees Navalny as a national traitor
The power apparatus sees Navalny as a national traitor and denies him any right to act as a politician. However, the system with parties, elections and open discussions has long been dead. Navalny fights with unorthodox means and vehemently attacks the leadership. The power apparatus feels threatened. So the Kremlin operates on the principle: oppress and deny. The Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov described the allegations that Putin was afraid of Navalny as “absolute nonsense”. The man is a Russian citizen who does not obey the law, the actions of the judiciary against the returnee have nothing to do with the president.
On January 29, a court was due to decide whether Navalny had violated the suspended sentence. But no sooner had Navalny returned to Moscow than he ended up in prison. The next day, a court at the police station sentenced him to 30 days’ arrest. The Moscow lawyer Alchas Abgadschawa calls it “a political decision” – all the events surrounding Navalny’s arrival, his arrest and his trial would ultimately violate Russian laws. Even the required conversion of his probation into a real punishment does not stand up to the matter in itself. “But he will most likely still be convicted,” said Abgajava.
Navalny points out the grievances in Russia with unveiling videos
Navalny has been fighting for years to be allowed to call things by their names. He transcends the limits that Putin’s authoritarian system sets on Russian society. The reaction of the state: also border crossings – with threats, an attempted murder and imprisonment. Navalny says: “I am not afraid” and his fearlessness alone poses a threat to a system that prides itself on its stability.
The self-confident Moscow Navalny – more than two decades younger than Putin – exposes corruption, shows with unveiling videos how the political elite enrich themselves at the expense of their people, how they turn critical spirits into foreign agents with laws, but live a Western life themselves – and so exposes the hypocrisy of “power”. That brings him sympathy. Recognition which, however, did not yet earn him the trust of the broad masses.
Navalny has called for protests on Saturday
In Nawalny’s new film – the almost two-hour work “A Palace for Putin. History of the greatest bribery ”- he attacks the President directly for the first time. Within one day, 25 million YouTube users clicked on the video. With the film, Navalny’s team wants to fight for the freedom of the opposition politician and also fuel the protests announced for this Saturday, which Navalny had called for from the police station.
The fight on the street is likely to be even harder than it always was. Because of the corona pandemic, any mass gathering is prohibited, many in the country are busy with their own survival because of the economic situation. Indifference has long since spread, the TV propaganda of “foreign interference” is having an effect.
Surveys by independent institutes show that the majority of people in Russia consider Navalny’s poisoning to be a staging. And even if they suspect the state behind it, they accept it. “It’s easy to explain psychologically,” says the political scientist Andrej Kolesnikow from the Moscow Carnegie Center: “People have to continue to live with and in this state, they push everything negative away from themselves.”
Put on the moral map in the fight against the elite
Navalny and his colleagues do not want to come to terms with this situation. In his fight against the elite, the lawyer relies on the moral card; that’s all he has to oppose Putin’s monopoly of power and violence. He would have forfeited this option if he had stayed in Germany. Navalny consciously accepted the risk of losing his freedom again in order not to leave the regime in peace. “The villains in the Kremlin,” he writes on Instagram, divided the people in Russia into three categories: the idiots, those who understand everything but keep quiet, and those who refuse to keep quiet and fight as best they can. He himself tries with all his might to stay in the third category. But the system doesn’t like anyone who is loud.
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