A flame has extinguished, i will light a candle
rest in power, sir
it’s so absurd that a certain segment of the population will continue to defend putin’s russia.
It’s interesting that Russians probably know whats really going with these deaths, but simply look the other way. The way things are going in America the world might see this happening in 10-20 years (Musk first please).
I would really recommend the documentary Navalny:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navalny_(film)
I knew almost nothing about the guy prior to watching it, and what happens to him is fascinating. He’s not perfect but I do believe what he says and he really wanted a better Russia. The balls on this guy!!
Drives me a lil nuts that when something important like this is made and it gets exclusively stuck on one streaming platform.
They did make it available here https://navalny-film.io/ although without English subtitles from what I see. Hopefully this will change at some point, but feel free to watch if you understand Russian. Otherwise nobody was ever going to blame anyone for watching a ripped copy.
What’s Putin’s murder tally ip to now?
It’s over 9000!
i count ukraine war victims as murdered by putin. either russian or ukranian.
The Navalny story is puzzling from beginning to end, like mentioned elsewhere his political views were pretty wacky and basically ethnonationalist. But in the west we can not deal with anything more complicated than Good Guy - Bad Guy stories so Navalny had to be the good guy.
But what is strange to me is why Putin would want him dead, and more importantly if Putin wanted him dead why it took him so long. The Russian state has shown to be very effective at killing dissidents in the UK what made it so difficult to kill someone in a Russian prison?
The only thing I can think of is that Putin was ambivalent if Navalny lives or dies, and that the attempts were made by (minor) officials within the FSB acting on their own.
I thought I saw him explain that he wasn’t an ethnonationalist but did tolerate such people supporting him because he wanted a bigger coalition to go against Putin.
A bar with Nazis in it is a Nazi bar
what made it so difficult to kill someone in a Russian prison?
To kill quietly.
How convenient
I hope that someday the people of Russia know freedom, something they’ve never known since the Tsars.
The Russian people have NEVER known freedom. Ever. They’ve been a war like, oppressed people with Stockholm syndrome for their entire history
One of my teachers in high school (around 1986 or 1987) said that the Russian people were incapable of freedom. He said they wanted & needed an authoritarian ruler.
At the time I thought he was just buying into propaganda, but I’ve been thinking he may have been right.
But then, it’s starting to look like a huge portion of Americans don’t value their own freedom either. At least, they seem to be willing to trade their freedom for ensuring that the people they don’t like will suffer.
My personal theory is that there’s a biological split in our species. Like how some people taste soap when they eat cilantro and others don’t. I think some of us are wired to need and want a leader and others do not. The evolution of not needing a leader has not fully propagated to the whole species yet.
This is an interesting theory and begs the question… From an evolution standpoint, which one would be more likely to win out?
It looks like every 20’s we have the leader thing win against the freedom thing. Then the leader kind of turns against the followers and the freedom thing resurfacss agqin. But since the freedom thing needs a lot of responsibility thing and people eventually fail to secure themselves the leader thing naturally arises again.
Edit: fixed a thing.
You want freedom? When someone out there is chopping off their oui-oui (pardon my French) all you think about is having freedoms? I thought this was 'Merica!
They were briefly fairly free in the ‘90s, but the experience of their version of the shock doctrine was so painful that the people begged to be ruled again.
Reactionary bullshit
nah, the collective trauma of perestroika gave origin to putin. only in its chaotic environment would someone that is at the same time political leader, criminal leader and oligarch leader come to be. russian people do vote for putin and his party. criminals either work for him either get exiled(see wagner group), sometimes its even worse to them and their family. oligarchs either nut up or shut up, bought by the relative safety of their families living in western europe.
addressing the reactionary bullshit comment, i can only infer that admitting the mistake of perestroika is a disturbing experience for you. but i recommend adam curtis documentary “hypernormalization” to understand putin and a part of the russian zeitgeist.
Do you always talk down to people?
i always try not to and am always sorry if i come out as such.
Ignore him, you’re the only one talking knowledgeably
yeah the other commenter forgets that one is not only writing an answer but also engaging in a larger conversation. let that one be a constructive one.
No one begged to be ruled, let’s not be dramatic here.
Yer, they got experimented on by free market maximalist. All regulations to no regulations. All public to all private, in a big fire sale. Those with money bought everything and became a new super rich ruling class. There was, understandable push back from that mess, but it swang too far back to authoritarian; but now with a new class of super rich calling the shots. Like Putin.
That’s not really true.
That’s what Putinists say, and what Communists say, and what Western leftists surely are pleased to repeat, but in reality privatization was simply conducted the way that people closer to the “reformers” could rapidly accumulate wealth. More like mafia plundering of Soviet industries and state property.
Obviously mostly illegal even despite the fact that state institutions were controlled by people involved in the process.
“Those with money” were not that, there were no such people in USSR, rather “those with party and bureaucratic connections” and “Yeltsin’s clan”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Shleifer#Scandal
“Those with party and bureaucratic connections” = “Those with money”. Power = money. Which order you put it in, doesn’t matter. Those will one, have the other, on or off the books.
It wasn’t the kind of power people with connections in USA have today, rather the kind to make a phone call to a court or to choose who privatizes a factory central to a town. The short-lived kind, because the properties plundered wouldn’t last for long. There would also be literal mafia wars (only I think I’ve read that actual Italian mafia doesn’t have much infighting, they are rational businessmen in some sense).
The point about this having nothing to do with free market stands.
How are backdoor deals not part of the free market?? They’re a natural consequence of information asymmetry.
Former soviet leadership using their connections to consolidate wealth and power the new system is imo not meaningfully different from the revolving door between American government and private industry and lobbying firms.
You don’t get it, I’m not talking about any information asymmetry, I’m talking about a factory boss privatizing that factory with his friends, some of which would have better connections with sporty guys in leather coats and some better connections with special services, so some of those friends and their friends would benefit more.
It wasn’t any “consolidation”, you are talking in terms of actually functioning states with properties and rights protected, it was literal plundering. Similar to the Octopus series in atmosphere, one can say. With plenty of murders, gang wars etc.
The problem was basically unregulated free for all. A free market only works with regulation and law enforcement. Free market anarchists are naïve. But it was a common thinking at the time. The 2008 crash seriously dented their voice.
It wasn’t “unregulated free for all”, that’s a leftist overvalued idea about Russian 90s. Laws were similar to what there is in Russia today, give or take, derived from Soviet laws. There just was a lot of open crime.
It simply doesn’t fit in that leftist narrative no matter how you turn it, if you don’t hide the reality completely behind such abstract phrases.
Free market anarchists are naïve. But it was a common thinking at the time. The 2008 crash seriously dented their voice.
How would it dent anything, being a direct consequence of protectionism?
That would require bravery from a lot of people. Few have been as brave as Navalni. Let’s hope his death shakes people’s apathy.
Answering the first comment in this idiotic thread …
1989-1993 counts as freedom, I’d say. So does 1905-1914.
Now, absolutism doesn’t offer much in that regard, neither does late feudalism. But that wouldn’t make Russia significantly different from many European countries till somewhere around 1848. Then it became butt buddies with similar monarchies against revolutions and stuff (saving Austria from Hungarian revolutionaries in particular), only, say, Austrian monarchy still made quite a few concessions and reforms, while Russia remained a swamp till the Crimean war, and then tried to reform itself.
One can say it was finally on track to modernizing between 1905 revolution and till 1914, but then WWI happened, and then the October revolution happened.
Since before the Tsars. They kinda got wrecked by The Kahns before the Tsars.
Why now? Russian election coming up, I guess Putin wanted to (a) remind any possible opposition what happens when anyone aspires to be a leader other than Putin, and (b) remove the chance of Navalny doing something unpredictable that cascades into a problem.
Boris Nadezhdin is working on appealing the order preventing him from running.
And, since we know that Russia’s judiciary is independent and strong, we can trust that they’ll treat his appeal correctly.
I mean yeah, that’s a pretty good set of reasons. Navalny was often re-tried om trumped up charges as a threat to opposition parties.
Or they’d been starving, torturing and mistreating him for a long time and this is when his body gave out.
That man had balls of steel, going back to Russia after being poisoned. o7
And he had an amazing redemption ark from a typical neo-Nazi of the cowardly kind (no exaggerations, his LJ from late 00s and even a few amateur political ads be proof of that) to simply a hero (no exaggerations again).
But he shouldn’t have returned. It maybe was something aligning with the mood of defiance and felt right, but he really didn’t owe anyone to go back.
I have my country and my beliefs. And I don’t want to give up either my country or my beliefs. And I cannot betray either the first or the second. If your beliefs are worth something, you must be willing to stand up for them. And if necessary, make some sacrifices. And if you’re not ready, then you don’t have any convictions. It just seems to you that they are there. But these are not beliefs and principles, but thoughts in the head.
And he talks about just a month ago how his sacrifice is sitting in solitary. He either underestimated how brazen Putin is, or thought it’d eventually be some kind of martyr? A real shame he’s gone regardless.
I think he just overestimated his health and underestimated how (Russian) prison affects it. Bad nutrition, no sports, bad conditions - some place may be too hot, some too cold, there may be various fungi, and simple illnesses which you can easily treat outside prison are much more dangerous, because prison medics do not really care if you survive.
And, of course, that all is without the administration trying to kill you by sleep deprivation, sun deprivation and whatever else.
Fuck bravery, the man had a family. That’s stupidity. I rather my father be around.
and a low IQ
I never understood why he did. He had to know Putin was going to throw him in the gulag, and imo could have done a lot more influencing Russians from the outside rather than simply martyring himself and ruining the rest of his life. Now there’s absolutely no one standing up to Putin, and Nalvany is dead. Imo Russia is in a worse spot as a result.
Eh, there is more than one man with values to a country of 140mln, one would expect.
It’s just that this is not about standing up to someone. It’s like a toxic swamp. Like fighting windmills which can and will kill you.
I suppose this was an emotional decision, such a swamp breeds cowardice, and feeling cowardice in people around you (figuratively) may be unbearable. Which is maybe why he wanted to do that.
Exactly. Going back to Russia was suicide.
It wasn’t even a dramatic suicide like the Vietnamese monk who set himself on fire and drew attention to a cause. It was a suicide that didn’t really draw any additional attention to Russia, and instead just silenced one of the critics who the world was listening to.
The last time he was in Russia Putin tried to murder him with a nerve agent, and that was only about 5 months before he turned himself in. While he was in Germany recovering from the poisoning, he was able to get the poisoner on the phone and trick him into confessing what had happened and how it had been done. That drew attention to Putin because it was such a dramatic story about tricking one of the agents.
But, flying to Russia to surrender to Putin? What exactly did he think was going to happen? What a waste!
It did draw extra attention, lots of extra attention actually. Navalny’s problems in the Russian prison system made the news frequently, regularly reminding everyone what a fucked up state Russia is. Immolating himself on the red square would have been far less effective since that’s been done a few times already (there’s been a few people who have immolated themselves there already). So as a suicide with a message/martyr for a cause, it was in my perception fairly effective at getting a message across I think. Point in case: we’re talking about it again even now …
I hope there is eternal hell for people like Putin. Few deserve it like he does.
it’d be so great if someone made putty some polonium tea. he needs to go painfully.
Putin is a murderer. 400.000 + 1.
On the bright side, Russia has windows in its prisons, so that must be nice.
I never understood why the guy went back to Russia after they tried to murder him last time. There was really no other outcome that could realistically be expected. Was he really so keen on being a martyr?
It’s not about being a martyr. Check out the Navalny movie. https://navalny-film.io/ maybe they will add English subtitles at some point soon, otherwise it’s available in streaming platforms and torrents.
Yes.
Sometimes there are things a person chooses to do that are bigger than themselves.
He chose to allow himself to be a martyr. Hopefully it makes a difference, but it very likely may not.
Who knows, maybe his sacrifice paves the way for his successor.
His influence may not be obvious or immediate. We tend to think of history as being shaped by individuals, and in many cases it is, but often it’s not so simple. His actions may not inspire revolution tomorrow, but his name is going on a list that gets noticeably longer all the time, his body has been added to a pile that continues to grow into a mountain, and his actions will be remembered alongside the actions of many others that form a very strong narrative. Those things collectively will shape the future of Russia.
Also remember sometimes a revolution isn’t started by the revolutionaries it’s on their schedule. Sometimes it starts when the opportune moment presents itself. And Putin’s getting old.
I agree.
I just feel like I understand why navalny went back to Russia, despite the obvious threat to his life.
He almost certainly didn’t die a clean death. I wouldn’t want to martyr myself the way he did.
Interesting username combined with your point.
I agree, but I also can understand why he chose what he did.
So the poison worked this time
A bit hard to get to German hospital when you are in a Russian prison in the attic circle
Third time’s a charm
