On the morning I heard that the Russian political activist, Alexei Navalny, had died in a Siberian prison, I was mournful but not surprised.
“So they killed him,” I said to my husband. “They finally just killed him.”
How did the Russian prison authorities achieve it? We aren’t sure. His mother, when she finally received his body, was told her son died of “sudden death syndrome.” She didn’t authorize an independent autopsy. What Russian coroner would have dared perform it? But we don’t need an independent autopsy to know that Alexei Navalny didn’t die of “natural causes.” He died as a result of the appalling conditions he was living under: the cold, the hunger, the lack of physical activity, the illness left untreated. We don’t know that they poisoned him, but they could have (they tried it before), either slowly or all at once, or both.
When I think of Navalny’s death, and his life, the life he chose to give up for the dream of a democratic Russia, I think of many things. I think of his startlingly blue eyes, of the charisma he possessed that Putin was certainly jealous of. I think of the physical and moral courage it takes to return to a country that may be your own, and which you love, but where you know that you will almost certainly meet your death. Mostly, however, I think of poets, of Russian poets. I think of Mandelshtam and Akhmatova.
In 1933, Osip Mandelshtam composed a poem about the then Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin. Mandelshtam, who was not naïve, didn’t write his poem down. He only recited it at a few private gatherings in Moscow, but someone at one of these gatherings put his words on paper and handed them in to the authorities. The poem was critical of Stalin. Criticism of Stalin in 1933 was a death sentence.
When Mandelshtam was arrested and presented with his uncomplimentary words about the Soviet leader (in his poem, among other things, he’d described Stalin’s fingers as fat and slimy), he didn’t deny that he’d written them. As an artist, he didn’t believe that you should repudiate your work. Mandelshtam was tortured, of course, but then miraculously, he was released. Stalin fancied himself a poet too, and he had evidently listened to other poets who had interceded for Mandelshtam. But these poets couldn’t stop Mandelshtam’s banishment, and Mandelshtam and his wife had to leave the capital and live in provincial cities until he was re-arrested in 1938. He wrote throughout these years of exile, but he was exhausted by the ordeal and didn’t survive his re-arrest. He died in a transit camp on the way to Siberia.
In the last picture anyone ever took of Mandelshtam, he was barely recognizable. The toll of illness and stress had made him a husk of his former self. This was the same toll that started to emerge in Alexei Navalny in the few photos of him that the Russian government permitted to be released these last months, mostly standing in the cage the Russians use for defendants in their trials. Looking at Navalny, we could see the gauntness of chronic illness, the gray skin, his sunken eyes, but we never saw a broken man. Alexei Navalny laughed and told jokes from his cage. His eyes might have been sinking into his skull, but they were still crystal blue, and his charisma was intact. How that must have grated on Putin.
What did it cost Navalny to put on these performances? What did he look like when he was alone in his cell? Did he let his head drop then? Did his eyes lose their sparkle?
The other poet I think about when I think about Navalny is Anna Akhmatova. She was a coeval of Mandelshtam, a friend and a colleague. Akhmatova’s life, which started out triumphant as a pre-revolutionary star of St. Petersburg literary society, grew bleak in a different way. For long periods of her life, she wasn’t allowed to publish. She never disappeared into a camp, but both her husband and her son did. Her son made it out, but her husband perished, like so many others, from the conditions that made it impossible to survive.
Akhmatova wrote many poems, but what comes to mind when I think of Navalny is “Requiem.” It begins with her standing outside a prison in Leningrad in a long line of other women clutching packages that they hope to get to their men. Many of the women aren’t even sure that their husband or son, their father or brother, is in the prison they’re standing in front of because there were many prisons and the Soviet prison authorities were notoriously parsimonious with information about who was or wasn’t in them. The poem is set in the deepest winter, and the women are hungry and blue with cold.
One woman turns and recognizes Akhmatova.
“Can you describe this?” she asks her. Akhmatova looks around and nods, “I can.”
It is this poem I thought of as I watched the pictures of Alexei Navalny’s mother trudging through the Siberian snow, being turned away from one grim-looking institution after another. The time of food packages for her son had passed, but she was just as cold and lacking in information as Akhmatova and the other women outside the prisons were in the 1930’s.
As we received the reports of Navalny’s death and its aftermath, the two-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine came and went. Navalny returned to Russia and went into prison in 2021, a year before this invasion began, but his arrest and incarceration and the invasion of Ukraine are all of a piece. A dictator trying to silence the voices of any individual or country he feels threatened by.
A month after Navalny’s death, the Russian presidential election took place. Putin won of course. He had no serious rivals. Though large groups of Navalny supporters did appear at noon on the third day of voting to express their support for Navalny and their lack of support for Putin. They did this for Navalny. They risked arrest and imprisonment for a dead man, for what he had meant to them.
It was on the day of this election victory that Putin finally spoke of Navalny. His death was “an unfortunate incident.”
“This happens. That’s life.”
The life that is now being lived in Russia by people who couldn’t leave or didn’t want to. Like Mandelshtam. Like Ahkmatova. People who long for a more democratic society, but who love their country, their language, and their culture, people who don’t want to live in exile even if this means living in danger and fear.
Navalny is gone, but Ukraine fights on, albeit with dwindling ammunition and weakening support from a key ally. How will the war end? No one knows, but no matter what happens in Ukraine, Putin will continue to consolidate his power in Russia, and his methods will increasingly remind people of what happened in the Soviet Union in the 1930’s.
Yet despite all of the grim news, hope survives. Akhmatova and Mandelshtam’s poems were all published in the end, and these poets became icons of Russian and world literature. Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, has stepped forward to continue her husband’s work. And Alexei Navalny? He continues to stare out at us from the posters of street memorials and the screens of our devices, from movies and book covers, and from the pages of history, those blue eyes that Putin’s persecution couldn’t dim, the steady gaze that told us that truth is worth dying for.
Image: Alexei Navalny đź’” by Nikita Pishchugin, Unsplash, licensed under CC 2.0.
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Great piece, Linda!