Political consequences of Navalny’s death – MK
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In short: in the sphere of real politics they will not exist.
Three years ago, this political figure really tried to take the highest power in Russia, acting according to the method of the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979: a triumphant return from political exile – jubilant crowds at the airport – the current government is folded like a house of cards. And on February 16, 2024, Alexey Navalny (listed in Russia as terrorists and extremists) died in a colony above the Arctic Circle, and the real impact of this event on the real Russian political process is close to zero. Of course, this zero is somewhat relative. Just a few minutes after the official message from the FSIN, the main pages of the websites of leading Western media were full of headlines with the hint “Navalny, a critic of Putin, has died.” But the times when the Kremlin paid attention to disapproval and hints from the West are gone and will definitely not return under Putin. Navalny’s death is also big news for those Russian circles in whose eyes he never ceased to be a leader and an idol. But the inhabitants of these circles either have been living outside the perimeter of Russian borders for a long time, or – if they remain inside Russia – are in a state of complete political defeat.
At the time of his death, Alexey Navalny was a politician from the era before yesterday. An era that was very recent and ended a long time ago. An era in which the political struggle was not actually a struggle, but was waged with the help of scathing statements, poisonous posts on social networks and “revealing” films. In all this, Alexei Navalny, being a brilliant polemicist by nature, has succeeded a lot – especially in the status of an instrument of intra-elite disputes and a politician who seems to oppose the authorities, but at the same time is, from their point of view, an element that very successfully complements the domestic political landscape. Let us recall, for example, an episode that, when viewed from today, seems both phantasmagorical and completely impossible: the authorities are actively pushing Navalny to participate in the 2013 Moscow mayoral elections and artificially creating preferential and hothouse conditions for his candidacy.
But then Navalny made a mistake, which besides him in the modern period of Russian history was made by, for example, such figures as Mikhail Khodorkovsky (recognized as a foreign agent) and Yevgeny Prigozhin – he stopped adequately assessing the real structure of Russian politics and began to perceive himself as a person who is literally in two steps away from the highest power. A mistake, a fatal mistake. The Russian political system is structured in such a way that if the government maintains control over the security forces, if it is self-confident, if it is ready to make tough and unpopular decisions, then it is absolutely impossible to defeat it.
This fundamental political mistake was followed by an equally fateful local political miscalculation. In modern Russia, there is a political tradition well known to insiders: if this or that figure becomes an enemy in the eyes of the authorities, she is first gently hinted at the desirability of leaving for foreign lands. If this hint is understood and accepted, then the “understanding” politician is given the full opportunity to formulate plans for building a “post-Putin Russia” in the comfort of a foreign country (they say that Anatoly Chubais, for example, is now very keen on this). But if the hint is ignored, then what happens next brilliantly illustrates, say, the misadventures of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Having refused in 2003 to leave and become a “pique vest”, he received the next offer of this kind only in 2013.
In January 2021, Alexei Navalny had the opportunity not to return to Russia and settle in the West. But he not only did not take advantage of this opportunity, but committed, in the eyes of those who make decisions in Moscow, a sin that is completely unforgivable: he entered into a political alliance with the West, tried to take the Russian political Olympus by storm, relying on massive information and political support from the United States , the EU and other elements of the “civilized world”. Apparently (or better yet, without apparently), from Navalny’s point of view, the Russian government consisted of a bunch of weaklings scared to death, incapable of making any decisions and ready, having resisted for the sake of order, to hand over the managerial levers to him. The calculation turned out to be incorrect – just as a similar calculation of another famous “returnee”, ex-President of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili, turned out to be incorrect.
The destruction of the network political structures created by Navalny took the Russian authorities only a few weeks. And then the SVO began altogether – an event that further changed the structure of Russian politics and the rules of the political game in the country. As a convict in several criminal cases, Navalny himself fell out of the Russian political and information field. And his team, which managed to “relocate” abroad in time, quickly showed that without a boss it was capable of little. Under these conditions, Navalny’s only potential political trump card was his age, which theoretically gave him a chance to try to rebuild his career after a certain number of years. But fate had other plans.
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