Navalny’s friends knew he was willing to become a martyr if that’s what it took to stand up to Putin.

Navalny’s friends knew he was willing to become a martyr if that’s what it took to stand up to Putin.

Alexei Navalny’s long struggle against President Putin began with a humorous blog and culminated in repeated demonstrations of his willingness to risk his own life. According to the Russian authorities on Friday, he has now died in prison.

Russia’s leading opposition voice has been silenced.

Other dissident figures went into exile or died in mysterious circumstances over the past decade, leaving Navalny as the last national figure with a dedicated following.

Though he had been arrested many times before, Navalny’s defining moment in the eyes of many Russians came after the attempt to assassinate him with Novichok. He recuperated in the sanctuary of a German hospital but chose to defy Putin and return to Russia in January 2021, knowing full well he would end up in prison.

  • rottingleaf@lemmy.zipEnglish
    02·
    9 months ago

    But USSR definitely had an empire-like thing going on.

    … important parts of which were (declared and even attempted) meritocracy, scientific and social progress, and a promise (which seemed realistic enough) for the future of the whole world.

    This doesn’t have anything in common with any big state’s ideology now.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.zipEnglish
        21·
        9 months ago

        I meant 60s and 70s.

        The point is that even aggressive attitudes of Soviet leadership were constructed very differently.

        Politburo really made collective decisions.

        The Communist party and the ministries and local councils and all that could function in obscure, weird and undocumented ways, but they did generally follow laws and rules.

        I mean … it really was an empire. Very inefficient and it eventually failed, but still.

        Today’s Russia is just an entity of a lower order.

          • rottingleaf@lemmy.zipEnglish
            3·
            9 months ago

            Anything is a legacy of what was before. I’m just saying that it’s not a rebuilt and changed USSR or even its part, it’s something new built from the same bricks.

            Putin was a KGB man,

            Not of the “expected to be anywhere near leadership by intelligence” kind from what I’ve read.

            and repeatedly mentions how he thinks the fall of USSR was one of the greatest geopolitical tragedies.

            He repeatedly mentions anything he thinks will make him popular. Loved a few antifascist, centrist and legalist lines too.

            BTW, he himself apparently still thinks his power is somehow dependent on popularity, while in fact it’s dependent on apathy only at this point.

            He worries about what people will think, however weird that may sound.

      • rambling_lunatic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        Man, Lenin set fire to a good chunk of his own dreams during the Civil War.

        The betrayal of the SRs and Makhnovists, the butchering of Kronstadt, the subjugation of local soviets and trade unions to centralized top-down rulership, and nationalization of previously independent cooperatives all helped bring down the dreams of equality and liberty. Lenin created all of the infrastructure that Stalin then used to horrifying ends. IMO this is an inevitable outcome of vanguardism and a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, but that is a topic for another day.

        Some of the things mentioned above did manage to survive post-Stalin. There was immense scientific progress in the USSR and the education was the best in the world. Everyone got food, though it was poor-quality and standing in line for it was universal (again, post-Stalin).