The death of Navalny, and other thoughts

Mainly some brief thoughts on Vladimir Putin, Russia and the murder of dissident Alexei Navalny, with some other nuggets thrown in

For a number of reasons—lots of stuff to think about, too much in the news, lots of annoying takes, Russian apologists, bad week—I haven’t constructed a long-form essay but there are some things I wanted to set down for people’s interest and so I have written them down. You will, therefore, forgive if this is a little disjointed or doesn’t dwell in as much detail as I often do. But here we go anyway.

Alexei Navalny

There isn’t a great deal to say here. It is a a tragedy but not a surprise that he has died, I have no reason to think that anyone but the Russian authorities were responsible, he was not a saint or a perfect human being but he was a brave man who gave his life to oppose the brutal, kleptocratic, autocratic, violent, murderous, internationally aggressive, possibly genocidal régime of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Owen Matthews, increasingly one of my favourite scribes on Russia, writes well on Navalny in The Spectator.

He had been poisoned in 2020 with Novichok, just before a flight from Tomsk to Moscow and was temporarily placed in a coma. The Russian government refused to allow a criminal investigation on the grounds that they had no evidence of a crime being committed, and denied any involvement in the crime-that-wasn’t, but, given the Kremlin’s track record with Novichok to kill Ivan Kivelidi and attempts to kill Emilian Gebrev and Sergei and Yulia Skripal, and Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned with polonium in 2006, it does not take an enormous intellectual leap to point the finger of blame at Putin.

I have equally no reason to think that Navalny’s death, announced yesterday, was the work of anyone but the Russian government. The prison service announced that Navalny had “felt unwell” after a walk, then “almost immediately lost consciousness”, and, despite attempts to resuscitate him, the “emergency doctors declared the prisoner dead. Cause of death is being established.” Of course there are denials making the rounds on social media. It was, argues one, the work of the CIA to encourage the US Congress to authorise military assistance for Ukraine.

Simona Mangiante, an Italian lawyer who is the wife of Donald Trump aide and foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos (convicted then pardoned, by Trump, of lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian individuals during the 2016 presidential election), concluded that Navalny must have been killed by the Ukrainian government or the CIA. Her reasoning is that his death comes so soon after Tucker Carlson’s long TV interview with Putin, in which the Russian president “came across to the world as a rational leader”. Well. I have already expressed my firm views about that ahistorical mess of an “interview”—really, Putin was on ‘transmit’ and Carlson essentially gave him a few prompts—but anyone who thinks it made the president look “rational” did not, I suggest, approach it with a mind that was open so much as empty of critical thought and chock-full of a desire to boost Putin.

I think Mangiante’s theory is nonsense not because of who she is or to whom she is married, though I’d observe that she spent some time working for the London Center for International Law Practice, a prima facie strange organisation, before which she stalked the corridors of Brussels working for Mairead McGuinness, an Irish vice-president of the European Parliament, and her predecessor Roberta Angelilli; don’t get excited, the European Parliament has 14 vice-presidents, though McGuinness did go on to be first vice-president, after Mangiante’s time. Our heroine was also an administrator for the EP’s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee during the time it was chaired by German Social Democrat Martin Schulz.

As someone who has run the private office of the deputy speakers of the House of Commons and acted as clerk of the Home Affairs Committee, I will speak with as much authority as she does. I think her view is nonsense because it rests on two enormous improbabilities: the first is that the CIA (or the Ukrainian government, presumably its foreign intelligence service, the SZRU) would decide that it needed to discredit or demonise Vladimir Putin, which seems a supremely pointless exercise, as the only serious foreign observers siding with him are immune to argument or persuasion.

The second improbability is a classic, almost textbook invocation of Occam’s Razor. Alexei Navalny, a known opponent of the Kremlin who had suffered a previous assassination attempt and had spoken openly of the strong chance that he would be killed for his opposition to Putin, dies in a maximum security Russian prison in the Arctic of western Siberia, 1,200 miles north of Moscow. Do we think it is more likely, simply given the circumstances, that he was (finally) murdered by the Russian state which absolutely controlled his environment and access to him, or as an elaborate false flag operation of dubious utility by either the CIA or the SZRU, assuming they could somehow get to him at FKU IK-3, the facility known as “Polar Wolf”? I think how you answer that question says a lot about you.

Anyway, Navalny is dead, almost certainly at the order of Putin. The United Nations covered itself in glory again when its Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights bravely demanded that there be a “credible investigation”, presumably to be conducted by the Russians, and that the régime “end the persecution of politicians, human rights defenders & journalists, among others”. Aye right, as they say in Glasgow. This is appeasement of a kind so wet it recalls Jeremy Corbyn’s suggestion, as leader of the opposition, that samples of the Novichok intended to kill the Skripals should be sent to Russia while also demanding a “robust dialogue”.

Was he perfect? No, I don’t think so. Was he a Russian nationalist, of quite an uncompromising stripe? Very possibly. (I have no problem with the concept of nationalism because it is wracked only by labels: when we approve we call it “patriotism”, and when we dislike it we call it “nationalism”, but I’m much more interested in the set of beliefs than the taxonomy. The SNP amusingly get tangled in knots insisting they are the Scottish National Party, not the Scottish Nationalist Party, which formally is quite true; but 20 years ago or so we happily described the SNP and Plaid Cymru as “nationalist” parties and meant only that they wanted some kind of independence, which “nationalist” in Northern Ireland was for many years the constitutional, law-abiding, peaceful cousin of the dark stain of Republicanism. John Hume and Seamus Mallon, both great mean, were Nationalists, and the Nationalist Party was simply the successor to the old Irish Parliamentary Party, which Parnell and Redmond had led. Frankly, if a man of Hume’s calibre and moral weight was content to talk about “all of us—North and South, Unionist and Nationalist—in Ireland”, then I see no reason to shy away from the word. But the SNP is sensitive these days.)

There are darker accusations against Navalny, particularly concerning a speech he made in 2007 in which he talked about “cockroaches”, apparently in reference to Muslim immigrants. I have read the argument that he was referring specifically to terrorists (who, in Russia in 2007, were likely to be Muslim Chechens), but I say freely I don’t know. If he did talk in those terms, it was bad 17 years ago, and still bad if he did not repudiate those views. However, I have said before that foreign policy, and indeed politics of all kinds, is often a matter of choosing between options of varying unattractiveness, and what I can say without even a second’s hesitation is that I would choose Navalny over Putin. Even if he called Muslims cockroaches and meant it plainly, he did not oversee a years-long military campaign which left maybe 50,000 Chechen civilians dead and involved widespread torture and rape, as President Putin did in the 2000s. So he’s an easy one-up.

Let’s just remind ourselves of a few things for context, shall we? Vladimir Putin has controlled Russia for nearly 25 years now, as prime minister and acting president (1999-2000), president (2000-08, 2012-) and prime minister during the bureacratically necessary presidency of his puppet Dmitry Medvedev (2008-12; Putin had served a then-maximum of two consecutive terms by 2008). When Putin assumed the presidency again in 2012, and Medvedev became prime minister, the arrangement was described by the media as Rokirovka, the Russian term for “castling” in chess. He was “re-elected” in 2018 for a fourth term, Medvedev remaining as prime minister.

In 2020, Putin introduced a number of changes to the Constitution of the Russian Federation. These allowed him two more six-year terms of office, extending his rule potentially to 2036, when he will be 83 years old. He faces his penultimate re-election next month, and currently enjoys a lead in the opinion polls over Boris Nadezhdin (A Just Russia), Nikolay Kharitonov (Communist), Leonid Slutsky (Liberal Democratic Party of Russia) and Vladislav Davankov (New People) which is realistically insurmountable (Putin polls between 60 and 75 per cent). Nadezhdin, who opposed the war in Ukraine, has been ruled ineligible by the Supreme Court, so it will be a four-way contest and Putin will win handsomely, but perhaps not too handsomely to preserve a degree of seemliness or plausibility. Navalny had urged his supporters to vote en masse at noon on the final day of polling, 17 March, and to “go vote against Putin and the war, and urge everyone to do the same”. His supporters noted “it doesn’t really matter what you do at the polling place: vote for any candidate except Putin, spoil the ballot, or take it with you”.

Let’s be quite clear: almost all of these elections have been biased or rigged, to a greater or lesser extent. In 2000, observers from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) found that the elections were free but “the campaign cannot be considered to have been as fair as we would have liked to see it happen”, there were “a number of shortcomings in the polling process, which should be improved for forthcoming elections”, and the elections for the Duma the previous December had been “neither fair, clean nor honest”. In 2004, PACE observers judged that the presidential race “reflected the consistently high public approval rating of the incumbent president but lacked elements of a genuine democratic contest”. In 2008, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) refused to send monitors to Medevev’s election victory because of restrictions imposed on them, while PACE judged it “neither free nor fair”. In 2012, the OSCE found that Putin was given undue prominence as he returned to the presidential fray: he was:

given a clear advantage over his competitors in terms of media presence. In addition, state resources were mobilized at the regional level in his support. Also, overly restrictive candidate registration requirements limited genuine competition.

Before the 2018 election, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Navalny’s 2014 conviction for fraud, which disqualified him from running for president, was “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable”, and that the state should pay him compensation. Navalny therefore called for a boycott of the election, which Putin won with 77.5 per cent of the vote. OSCE observers reported that, while voting was orderly, secrecy was often compromised, there was a “variety of measures, some inappropriate, aimed at increasing the voter turnout”, the election process was heavily monitored by representatives of the president, often in defiance of electoral law, and election officials “disregarded mandatory procedures during the vote count, detracting from transparency”. Overall they found that the “election lacked genuine competition”, “the process of handling election complaints lacked transparency” and “several instances of harassment of campaign workers, including by police were reported”. Putin stacked the deck in his favour, and it worked.

I dwell on this at more length than I intended to make the point that Putin is a dictator preserved in office by sham elections and a supine political establishment. Even if we are incredibly generous and allow that his initial election in 2000 was absolutely legitimate, every subsequent poll has been marred and compromised. He is, understandably, unwilling to give up power and will do anything to retain it, including amending the constitution to amend term limits. If he makes it to 83 in 2036, I see no reason to think he will relinquish power on anything but terms with which he is wholly comfortable.

A lack of democratic legitimacy is very far from the worst item on Putin’s charge sheet, but it is one which is often questioned or concealed. But there are many indictments. He has overseen invasions of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine from 2014 onwards, in both instances backing separatist movements as well as using direct military force, and in both cases allowing, if not actually conducting, ethnic cleansing and huge civilian casualties which probably amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. In 2023, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of forcibly transporting children from Ukraine to Russia, the first time the ICC has ever issued a warrant for the head of state for a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Russia withdrew from the ICC in 2016, and it is only fair to note that the US, India and China, among others, are not members. Medvedev, who is now deputy chairman of Russia’s National Security Council, pulled on his best blowhard trousers and warned:

Everyone walks under God and missiles. It is quite possible to imagine the targeted use of a hypersonic Onyx missile by a Russian ship in the North Sea strikes in the Hague court building. Unfortunately, it cannot be shot down... So, judges of the court, watch the skies closely.

One can reasonably draw conclusions about Putin’s and Medvedev’s approach to legal accountability from a braggart’s threat to destroy the physical court building.

I could go on about human rights abuses in Russia, the way Putin conducts foreign policy as if Russia has a right to a supervisory role over its neighbours in what is often referred to as bližneye zarubežye, the “near abroad”, the appallingly bloodthirsty conduct of the suppression of separatism in Chechnya and his repressive policies towards all sorts of minorities. Freedom House has rated Russia as “not free” since 2005, for nearly two decades, Putin threatens his neighbours and has openly talked of the use of nuclear weapons as (presumably to him) an acceptable part of conflict, and maintains a constant whining complaint of Russia as the victim of every other country’s machinations. He has made it clear that he does not believe Ukraine even exists as a concept, and the gradual escalation of conflict with Ukraine, which lies wholly at Putin’s feet, despite his paper-thin victimhood-drenched protestations, and which will commemorate its 10th anniversary on 6 April, has now claimed something like a quarter of a million lives, and counting.

I drive this point home again and again because it seems such an obvious moral an political judgement that, whatever your opinion of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, or Alexei Navalny, or Joe Biden, or any other opponent of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president is a seriously bad guy. He is a ruthless dictator whose hands are steeped in the blood of the Russian people and others. Is he like Hitler, or Stalin, or some more minor murderous tyrant like Idi Amin or Mengistu or Saddam or his pseudo-predecessor Ivan the Terrible? I cannot honestly see that it matters. The numbers can wait for posterity, but the Putin who controls Russia here and now is bad, very bad in contemporary terms, up to his neck in moral turpitude, aggressive, unpredictable, dangerous and expansionist.

A question for another time, but I really am at a loss to see why so many right-wing US politicians and commentators are so fawningly adherent to Putin. I understand Trump’s liking, I think: in the Russian president he sees the kind of no-nonsense, cut-the-crap, results-orientated leader, unfettered by the tedious flim-flam of democracy, that he would like to be himself, or, worryingly, imagines that he is. Trump also has a cruel child’s delight in shocking others, of saying and doing transgressive things, even when they make no sense and serve none of his interests, and cosying up to a murderous dictator like Putin annoys what he regards as all the right people.

Other notable Americans? I struggle to see. Some, of course, are just riders of the MAGA current, and have as little interest in where it’s taking them as they have control over its destination. They simply don’t want to be alone, and want to be with what they perceive as the cool kids. Partly, perhaps, they’re frustrated by “received wisdom”, tired of being talked down to or ignored or taken for granted, and if they have to do something shocking to register their unhappiness then that’s a small price to pay. That was part of the complex motivations behind the Leave vote in 2016, yet much less so, curiously, in the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. It was the a major factor in Donald Trump’s presidential victory in November 2016, and certainly played a role in the coalition Boris Johnson was able to assemble in 2019 (though I think sheer fatigue is an underestimated component of that too).

What will the effect of Navalny’s death be? In the short term, probably not that much, to be honest. The murder was, I regret, largely a matter of time, though I am desperately sorrow for his widow, Yulia, and their children Daria and Zakhar. They muts navigate loss, the glare of publicity, no doubt pride at Navalny’s courage and duty but also a sense—and I am ever so slightly guilty here—of the world feeling they “owned” a part of him, when of course he was wholly theirs. Mrs Navalnaya spoke at the Munich Security Conference yesterday, obviously hollowed out and harrowed, but she spelled out a clear message.

I want Putin and all of his entourage, Putin’s friends, government to know they will be held to account for what they have done to our country, to my family and to my husband. And that day will come very soon.

I am not particularly optimistic about Russia. I hope the country can shed itself of its dictator, but it is not a country or a society like ours and yet we try to treat it as one. If we are exceptionally generous, it has enjoyed perhaps 11 years of proto-democracy before the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, but realistically more like eight or nine months from March to November that year, from the February Revolution to the proclamation of the second Congress of Soviets. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, you can see some kind of accountable or semi-accountable government from the aftermath of the October Coup in 1993 to Putin’s re-election as president in 2004 and the centralising reforms and changes to the State Duma’s system of election which followed the horror of the Beslan School Massacre that year. In any event, we re looking at less than 20 years of any kind of operative democracy in Russia’s history.

Some will scoff at the arrogance of the West in assuming that our interpretation of representative democracy is the only or even best way or administering a polity fairly and justly, and I freely concede that what we call democracy is looking rather shop-soiled at the moment. I happen to think it is the best, fairest and most enlightened, if imperfect, system we have yet to conceive, but we must certainly be clear about what we want. In 1855, Abraham Lincoln, then state legislator in Illinois watching the demise of his Whig Party, wrote to his friend Joshua Fry Speed that if slavery were to continue:

I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

One might reflect how far Russia has travelled in the intervening 169 years, but more than that, there is for me something resonant in the honesty of Lincoln’s determination (I wrote about honesty last month): if something is not a democracy, has no prospect of becoming a democracy and perhaps no desire to become a democracy, well, at least let us face that, rather than squinting and pretending.

This has been far more on Navalny, Russia and Putin than I intended, yet I feel I’ve hardly said anything. Ah well. Consider it preparatory work, Holbein’s cartoon for his portrait of Henry VIII and the rest of the Tudors at Whitehall Palace.

By-elections in Wellingborough and Kingswood

On Thursday voters in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, and Kingswood, south of Bristol, went to the polls to choose new Members of Parliament. In the former constituency, the previous MP, Peter Bone, an increasingly eccentric and absurd Brexiteer, fell victim to a petition under the provisions of the Recall of MPs Act 2015, after the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Daniel Greenberg, and the House of Commons’s Independent Expert Panel found him guilty of a series of allegations of bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct. On 25 October, the House voted to suspend Bone for six weeks, opening the way for his constituents to force a recall petition, and on 19 December it was announced that the necessary 10 per cent threshold had been met and Bone was unseated. The displaced MP chose not to stand again, as would have been his right, but he reportedly threatened to enter as an independent candidate if the constituency Conservative association did not select Councillor Helen Harrison, his girlfriend, as their candidate. Shamefully and stupidly, they promptly did so. It was probably not to determining factor, but running the partner of the ousted MP certainly made it vanishingly unlikely that the Conservative Party would hold the seat. Duly, Labour’s Gen Kitchen secured a swing to her party of 19.4 per cent and took the seat by more than 6,000 votes.

In Kingswood the circumstances were a little less grubby: Chris Skidmore, a former minister who had chaired a review of net-zero policy for Liz Truss, had decided in January that he could not support the government’s Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill. He had already announced that he would leave the House of Commons at the general election, as Kingswood will disappear as part of the Boundary Commission changes, but last month he decided to go straight away and trigger a by-election. There was a fractious sense of weariness in the Tory camp, as Sam Bromiley, a local councillor, was selected for a death ride in a seat which had a lifespan of months. Damien Egan, until January mayor of Lewisham, born in Cork but raised in Bristol, won the Labour nomination and scrambled to victory by 2,501 votes on an 11.5 per cent swing.

No doubt those who are interested will have drunk deep of psephological analysis, but I will give you what I think are the headline messages: each result was very bad for the government and for Rishi Sunak; taken together they are pretty disastrous; the party made its own defeat worse in Wellingborough by selecting Harrison and therefore being perceived in some way to reject the verdict on Peter Bone; Reform UK did better than they might have expected, getting into double figures in both seats (with two candidates, Ben Habib in Wellingborough and Rupert Lowe in Kingswood, who had been Brexit Party MEPs); there is nevertheless no sign that Reform will get anywhere near an elected representative at the general election and will principally drain votes away from the Conservative Party, potentially thereby amplifying a Labour win; and, finally, none of this is really surprising. The government is declining, quickly, and the prime minister seems unable to arrest that decline. We have entered that phase, familiar to those who remember the mid-1990s, where winning a by-election is a plain impossibility. It is worth bearing in mind that after William Hague bounded into Parliament for Richmond ay a by-election in February 1989, the Conservatives would not win another contest of the kind until Uxbridge in July 1997, by which time Hague was leader of the party. Thirty-seven by-elections went past, 15 of them in Conservative-held seats.

In short, we have learned little new from the two by-elections, but the expectation of a heavy Conservative defeat at the general election has been reinforced. Next we go to Rochdale for a by-election on 29 February: among the candidates are former Labour MPs George Galloway, ever in search of a Muslim community among whom to sow dissent and division, and Simon Danczuk, who held the seat from 2010 to 2017, was suspended by his party for exchanging sexually explicit text messages with a 17-year-old girl and then lost a bid to be elected as an independent; the Labour Party’s official candidate was forced to apologise for peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories then was disavowed the following day; and the Green Party candidate, Guy Otten, was also disowned after social media messages highly critical of Islam and the Qu’ran came to light. In such chaos, one might suggest a side bet on the apparently blameless Conservative candidate, Paul Ellison, a landscape gardener and ambassador for Keep Britain Tidy who was Man of Rochdale in 2019-20 and created Rochdale’s Got Talent; but the Conservatives have not held the seat since Lieutenant-Colonel Wentworth Schofield died in 1957, and a Conservative has no hope this year, no matter how mad the circumstances.

Ephemera

• The 1958 Rochdale by-election following the death of the last Conservative MP was the first ever to be televised. The Liberal Party’s candidate, who ran a strong second to victorious Labour man Jack McCann, was journalist and broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy: educated at Eton (where he “loved and lusted, separately and together, boys and girls”) and Christ Church, Oxford, the son of a captain in the Royal Navy killed in action commanding HMS Rawalpindi in the early months of the Second World War, he was a thoroughly disruptive but wholly Establishment figure of the kind on whom British Liberalism once relied.

• “Novichok”, the family of nerve agents favoured by Vladimir Putin’s assassins, simply means “newcomer” or “newbie”. The chemicals generally come in solid or liquid form, rather than gas or vapour, and kill by inducing respiratory and cardiac arrest through involuntary contraction of the skeletal muscles, leading to heart failure or suffocation as the lungs fill with fluid secretions. The West’s knowledge of and experience with Novichok comes largely from samples obtained by Germany in the 1990s.

• I am repeating this message again and again but I’ll keep doing so until people listen: our armed forces are hopelessly ill-prepared for a major conflict or even a medium-sized deployment, an argument made with quietly but firmly devastating effect in a recent report from the House of Commons Defence Committee, Ready for War? I have made a similar point more briskly in this week’s Spectator, which you should all therefore go out and buy, and distribute copies to your Friends-and-Relations.

• Never underestimate the cost of war. By January 1945, only the most deluded and ardent Nazi thought Germany could do anything but lose catastrophically, yet between New Year’s Day 1945 and the surrender of the Wehrmacht on 8 May, around 265,000 German service personnel were killed and over a million were taken prisoner or went missing in action. Prior to that, around two million had been killed and 1.8 million taken prisoner during the Second World War. But then, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, 19,240 British soldiers were killed. In a day. If you prefer your slaughter shorter, at Cold Harbor in Virginia, on 3 June 1864, General Ulysses S. Grant ordered his Union forces into battle against fortified Confederate positions at 4.30 am. Roughly 7,000 young Americans were killed or wounded in half an hour.

… and finally

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As you know, I am on Twitter (I know, it’s shameful deadnaming, but I can’t call it X because it’s just a crap name) under @EliotWilson2, and if you want to find everything I write and have written, more or less, it’s all collated here by the marvellous people at Authory. (I assume it’s automated.)

But definitely finally

Mention of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, above, reminds me that my first proper piece of fiction was published nearly six years ago, in the wake of the Novichok poisonings. It is a short story published by The Spadina Literary Review (I know, you subscribe already) and you can read it here.