“For us, for the country of Russia, for its political future, this death, this murder, will have irreversible consequences.” This is how Boris Belenkin responds to La Stampa, from his exile in the Czech Republic, immediately after learning of Alexey Navalny’s death. Belenkin, who in 2022 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with Memorial, recalls how Navalny represented “the voice that more than any other had managed to reach a large majority of the country” and his death “has certainly weakened the power of Vladimir Putin”, while “at the moment” there is no person capable of taking up Navalny’s political legacy, dejectedly stating that it is “another tragedy of Russia”.
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“They started killing him many years ago, yesterday they simply decided to carry out the mission,” claims Belenkin, who states that he does not believe that now “there will be mass protests” in Russia and that “only those who are ready will come out into the open to pay the price for his freedom” because in Russia “every ‘outing on the streets’ is equivalent to entering a prison”. And, he continues, “I don’t think that his death can in any way change the outcome” of the next elections because “the result is predetermined” and “all the opposition has already been eliminated”. But Belenkin also finds a small glimmer of hope for the future in his conversation with the Piedmontese newspaper: “One day, in a free Russia, this death will influence the outcome of the vote for a long time. Because before being a symbol of the opposition he was a symbol for the Russians. His presence, even from prison, testified to the existence of free thought, of hope.”
