Defying Putin: Remembering Navalny, and my Gift from Ukraine
Flowers laid in memory of the Russian opposition politician, Boris Nemtsov, at the site of his murder near the Kremlin in 2015. Photograph from March 2019 © James Rodgers
THE DEATH IN PRISON THIS WEEK of Alexei Navalny, the highest profile critic of Vladimir Putin, has reminded the world that Russia is living through a murderous period in its history. Dissent can result in death for those who, like Navalny, see it as their patriotic duty to challenge the Kremlin from inside the country, rather than from the relative comfort of exile.
I only met Navalny once, when he spoke in London some years ago to a small group of people studying and writing about Russia. But from the last pictures of him alive–characteristically funny and defiant as he addressed a court via a video link from prison in the Russian far north–I recognized the wit, intelligence, humour, and determination I had seen that day.
After the news broke on Friday 16th February, I spoke both to the BBC Radio 5 Live, and to the YouTube channel of the British newspaper The Sun.
On my last visit to Russia, in March 2019, I saw tributes (photograph above) to the murdered opposition politician, Boris Nemtsov, whom I had interviewed several times when he was a member of Boris Yeltsin’s government in the `1990s. I thought of him when I heard the news of Navalny’s death, and of Anna Politkovskaya, the courageous journalist whose writing I now encourage my students to read. I met her twice too, once spending an afternoon talking to her about her work in Chechnya.
These three figures–among many others–show what post-Soviet Russia might have been, and still may one day be.
Their deaths are symbols of the Russia that Ukraine is fighting so hard to resist, as the second anniversary of the escalation of Russia’s war on its neighbour approaches.
This week The New European published an article of mine in which I tell the story of a present I received from a Ukrainian soldier I have never met, ‘a small photo frame that contained three items: two military patches, one of them the Ukrainian flag, and a postage stamp.’
You can read the whole article, and the story of the gift and what it means to me, and all of us, here.