Last Saturday Grigory Mikhnov-Vaitenko, the Archbishop of Russia’s Apostolic Orthodox Church, was arrested in St Petersburg on his option to a memorial to victims of Stalinist terror, where he allegedly intended to perform a Christian memorial service for the newly departed servant of God Alexei Navalny.
Later the identical day, an ambulance was called to the police station and took Archbishop Grigory to hospital with a stroke, where he continues to be believed to be. In the meantime, one other clergyman stepped in to carry the planned memorial service, with further arrests along the way in which.
In total, tons of of individuals have been arrested throughout Russia prior to now few days for honouring Navalny’s memory with Christian services or just by bringing flowers to memorials of victims of communist terror, where the authorities have deployed 24/7 police patrols with orders to discover all those grieving for Navalny. The chain response of terror goes on.
Political assassinations have been the trademark feature of the Russian regime throughout Putin’s era. Perhaps Mr Putin (having these days acquired the taste to meditate and lecture others about his personal place in history) quietly prides himself for having excelled the good poisoning princes of the Renaissance. Yet, there’s a technique during which the death of Alexei Navalny stands out within the long line of deaths of Putin’s other opponents from Alexander Litvinenko to Boris Nemtsov: there was no real try to cover the tracks.
Navalny had narrowly escaped an infamous try to kill him by putting Novichok into his underpants in 2020, after which caught the FSB red-handed in a masterpiece of investigative journalism: Navalny phoned one in every of the assassins posing as an aide to the FSB boss and tape-recorded the assassin’s detailed report on the failure of his mission.
After a scandal like that, Navalny’s death in Russian state custody was certain to look extremely suspicious in any event. It was not for nothing that President Biden personally warned Putin in 2021 that Navalny’s death in prison would have “devastating consequences”.
Just a few weeks before his death, he was suddenly transported to a distant Arctic prison camp; his whereabouts were unknown for numerous days, causing a giant scare amongst his family and supporters, and capturing the world’s attention. Then on 15 February the Kremlin selected to point out Navalny to the entire world, attending a video-recorded court hearing by video-link, in good health and in defiant spirits. The following morning he was announced dead. The official diagnosis given by prison authorities was ‘sudden death syndrome’.
The body was promptly hidden; no meaningful excuse offered for hiding it from the family. Against that background, it’s fair to say that the Kremlin’s denials of complicity are evidently not intended to deceive, but to mock.
By this demonstrative execution of its best known political prisoner, whose death the US President had publicly vowed to avenge, the Kremlin sends a vital message each to the West and to its own subjects. To the West it says: we do not give a hoot about your “devastating consequences”. Anything you’ll be able to be reasonably expected to say or do in response to this – from verbal condemnation to further economic sanctions – won’t deter us from killing whoever we wish. Indeed, hours before Western leaders even reacted to Navalny’s death, the Russian Foreign Ministry was already circulating statements to sentence the West for condemning it.
And the message to Russians is that this: don’t hope that your opposition to Putin or to his war will merely land you with a 19-year term of imprisonment amidst worldwide protests, perhaps to be exchanged later for some Russian spies or POWs, or to be triumphantly released after the downfall of the regime. The penalty for political dissent in Russia is death.
Raising stakes in this fashion is hardly consistent with the image painted by the Russian propaganda over the past two years – the image of united fascist Russia rallied around its leader’s agenda of world conquest and Patriarch Kirill’s jihadist version of Christianity. The truth is that Russians responded to the invasion of Ukraine with an unprecedented nationwide storm of protest. When the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, seven people publicly protested on the Red Square in Moscow and were imprisoned for long terms – a pivotal moment within the history of the Soviet dissident movement which eventually finished the USSR off.
In the Nineties, rallies against the First Chechen War peaked at a number of thousand – but protesting in those times was not much riskier than in Western democracies. This time, human rights organisations have recorded as many as 20,000 arrests for anti-war street protests in Russia, which is barely a fraction of the full variety of protesters, as not everyone was arrested and never every arrest was recorded. If seven protesters in 1968 shook the Soviet empire to its foundations, how should its heirs react to tens of hundreds? This will not be to say the widespread arsons of conscription centres and dim rumours of mutinies in army units.
In a press release released from prison in response to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Navalny appealed to Russians to exit to the streets to protest, and added “if, to stop this war, now we have to congest the prisons and prison vans with our own bodies, we’ll achieve this”. This is what hundreds of Russians have been doing. If semi-public executions of leading prisoners cannot stop that process, nothing else can. Navalny was naturally top of the list; but there’s little doubt that the lives of Vladimir Kara-Murza, Ilya Yashin, Alexei Gorinov, Mikhail Kriger and tons of of other prisoners are actually in graver danger than ever before.
Navalny’s death, and other deaths which might follow, mean quite a bit greater than one in every of the numerous humanitarian issues which have arisen out of this war. It is a fateful move on the worldwide chessboard. The end result of the war and the long run of Europe depends upon with the ability to counter it effectively. Nothing lower than ‘devastating’ will do. Putin will only laugh at verbal condemnations. He can also be little question prepared for whatever still might be scraped out of the barrel of potential economic sanctions.
The only place where retaliation would really bite is the battlefields of Ukraine. The only thing that may impress and deter Putin is that if every death of a Russian political prisoner promptly results in a serious strategic drawback in combat. It is for military experts to say exactly learn how to achieve that, however the only Western response which Putin will notice is to present Ukraine something now we have never given before and maybe also to lift the restrictions previously imposed on using advanced Western weapons only in Ukraine but not on Russian soil. Anything less dramatic than that is foreseen and shall be ignored.
Doing what little I can in response to Navalny’s death, I’m setting up a standing order for monthly donations to the Ukrainian army. The amount will sharply increase each time one other political prisoner dies in Russia, until the tip of the war or my bankruptcy. I hope others will do similar things in keeping with their very own means, and that the governments will do a hell of quite a bit more. After all, this may occasionally be our last likelihood before the political terror in Russia escalates to Stalinist dimensions and the one hope of lasting peace in Europe is gone for a very long time.
Pavel Stroilov is a Russian dissident who fled Putin’s Russia to the UK in fear for his life 20 years ago. He is now a consultant to the Christian Legal Centre.Â
