The Evolution of Alexey Navalny’s Nationalism
ByMasha Gessen <https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/masha-gessen>
The New Yorker, February 15, 2021
Alexey Navalny speaking with journalists during a rallyThe Russian
opposition politician has placed the right to self-determination at the
center of his politics.Photograph by Maxin Zmeyev / Getty
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For years I have been content to be conflicted aboutAlexey Navalny
<https://www.newyorker.com/tag/alexey-navalny>. On the one hand, I
thought he was an extraordinarily brave, inventive, and committed
opponent of Vladimir Putin’s regime. On the other hand, he had allied
himself with ultranationalists and had expressed views that I found
extremely objectionable and potentially dangerous. Over the years, I’ve
had a couple of arguments with Navalny and a few with my friends whose
support for him flummoxed me—a mentor of his who is Jewish, a tireless
campaign volunteer who is Armenian—but I felt I could respect him and
disagree with him at the same time. Nationalist leaders have,
historically, often played key roles in building democracies. And it’s
not as if I had to decide whether to vote for Navalny.
Now Navalny is in jail, facing years behind bars. (His current sentence
of two years and eight months is likely just the beginning.) He has
survived more than one Kremlin-backed assassination attempt, and people
close to him fear that he will now be killed in prison. The Kremlin,
which for years banned his name from the airwaves, has accused him of
staging his own near-death and unleashed a propaganda offensive against
him, deploying, among others, the accusation that he is a far-right
ethno-nationalist. In the English-language press, the socialist
magazine/Jacobin/published anarticle
<https://jacobinmag.com/2021/01/alexei-navalny-russia-protests-putin>branding
Navalny an “anti-immigrant” nationalist who cannot be trusted; the
British journalist Anatol Lieven, who covered Eastern Europe in the
nineteen-eighties and nineties, haswarned
<https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/02/02/what-putin-nemesis-alexei-navalny-is-and-what-he-is-not/>against
idealizing Navalny; and the N.Y.U. professor Eliot Borenstein, one of
American academia’s most prolific commentators on contemporary
Russia,wrote
<https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10110680039826379&id=838044>on
Facebook, “He’s not Nelson Mandela. He’s Aung San Suu Kyi.”
On the other hand, severalacademics
<https://www.facebook.com/erofeev/posts/10157897685838061>, politicians,
andpolicy experts
<https://twitter.com/RichardHaass/status/1353686461367767040>have
nominated Navalny for the Nobel Peace Prize—an initiative that
nowincludes
<https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210204-poland-s-walesa-nominates-kremlin-critic-navalny-for-nobel>Lech
Walesa, the former Polish President and leader of the Solidarity
trade-union movement, who received the prize in 1983. The effort was
launched last September byAlexander Etkind
<https://www.eui.eu/DepartmentsAndCentres/HistoryAndCivilization/People/Professors/Etkind>,
a Russian exile, professor at the European University in Florence, and,
in my opinion, the single most insightful scholar of contemporary
Russian culture and politics. Etkind is Jewish. A nomination for the
Nobel Peace Prize is not something one undertakes while holding one’s
nose. I called Etkind and other prominent and decidedly anti-nationalist
Navalny supporters to learn why they didn’t seem conflicted about him. I
learned a few things about Navalny’s personal and political evolution
and also about the workings of the Kremlin propaganda machine. I also
realized that I should have undertaken this research sooner.
Navalny’s reputation as an ultranationalist stems from statements and
actions that are more than a decade old. In 2007, he left the
socialist-democratic party Yabloko, where he had served as the deputy
head of the Moscow chapter, to start a new political movement. He and
his co-founders called their movement/narod/, the Russian word for
“people” and, in their case, also an acronym for National Russian
Liberation Movement. Navalny recorded two videos to introduce their new
movement; they were his début on YouTube. One was a forty-secondargument
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVNJiO10SWw>for gun rights. The other,
a minute long, featured Navalny dressed as a dentist, presenting a
slightly confusing parable that likened interethnic conflict in Russia
to cavities and argued that fascism can be prevented only by deporting
migrants from Russia. Navalny closed his monologue with “We have a right
to be [ethnic] Russians in Russia. And we will defend this right.” It is
decidedly disturbing toview
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICoc2VmGdfw>. Around the time Navalny
released the video, and for a couple of years after, Navalny took part
in the Russian March, an annual demonstration in Moscow that draws
ultranationalists, including some who adopt swastika-like symbols. In
2008, Navalny, like an apparent majority of Russians, supported Russian
aggression in Georgia. In 2013, he made illegal immigration from Central
Asia a central theme of his campaign for mayor of Moscow. In 2014, after
Russia occupied Crimea, he said that, while he opposed the invasion, he
did not think that Crimea could be just “handed back” by a post-Putin
Russian government. In the past seven years, though, Navalny appears to
have not made any comments that could be interpreted as hateful or
ethno-nationalist. He has publiclyapologized
<https://echo.msk.ru/programs/conditional/2612055-echo/>for his comments
on Georgia.
Yevgenia Albats, a Russian investigative journalist and a close friend
of the Navalny family’s, told me that she persuaded Navalny to attend
the Russian March. In 2004, Albats had returned to Moscow after
defending her doctoral dissertation in political science at Harvard. In
the preceding four years, Putin had taken control of the media and
dismantled the electoral system, effectively destroying Russian politics
as it had been constituted. Older, experienced politicians were
disoriented. But a crop of younger activists, who had not experienced
party politics in what had been a somewhat functional electoral system,
were rearing to go. Albats, who had researched grassroots organizing
during her years at Harvard, started gathering the young activists in
her Moscow apartment. About twenty people of different political
stripes—from social democrats to libertarians to religious-rights
activists—attended Tuesday-night seminars with Albats for about a year,
she told me by Zoom from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is wrapping
up a research fellowship. Albats was in her late forties and an
observant Jew. Navalny, in his late twenties, was the oldest among those
who gathered at her house but also the least articulate and least
educated: most of the others had gone to prestigious colleges, while
Navalny was a military brat with an undergraduate law degree from a
decidedly second-tier school. For as long as she has known him, Albats
told me, Navalny has been teaching himself how to be a politician: he
taught himself public speaking; while he was under house arrest a few
years back, he taught himself English.
In the absence of politics, in the absence of any public conversation,
little remained to form political alliances around. Putin was
trafficking in nostalgia for the Soviet empire. The only alternative
seemed to be broadly ethno-nationalist ideas, which also addressed a
sense of humiliation—and these were emerging both on what could be
roughly described as the left and vaguely designated as the right.
Activists who didn’t share ethno-nationalist ideas believed that they
had to form alliances with Russia’s emerging nationalist movements. The
chess champion Garry Kasparov, for example, who quit the sport in 2005
to launch a political career, created a joint movement with the
National-Bolshevik Party. At the time, he told me that only a united
front could overthrow the Putin regime, and only after that should
pro-Western liberal democrats like him hash out their differences with
the ethno-nationalists. Albats recalled that it was in this context that
she told Navalny that he should attend the Russian March. They went
together. “I wore a giant Star of David that I made sure could be seen
from a distance,” she told me. “He took a lot of shit for walking with a
kike.” Their efforts to engage people in conversation failed, and after
three years they gave up.
VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER
A Daughter and Her Mother Reconnect Over Chinese Dumplings
<https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/the-new-yorker-documentary-a-daughter-and-her-mother-reconnect-over-chinese-dumplings>
Navalny has often said that he saw the Russian March as a form of valid
political expression, that in the kind of Russia that he and his
supporters are fighting for—a free, democratic society—the Russian March
will be afestive annual event
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43b2hKT2oG8>like the St. Patrick’s Day
Parade. “He believes that if you don’t talk to the kind of people who
attend these marches, they will all become skinheads,” Leonid Volkov,
who runs the political-organizing part of Navalny’s organization, told
me over the phone. “But, if you talk to them, you may be able to
convince them that their real enemy is Putin.” Volkov, who is Jewish,
lives in exile in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.
In 2015, the Polish journalist and former dissident Adam Michnik and
Navalny recorded a series of conversations that Michnik compiled into a
book. “My idea is that you have to communicate with nationalists and
educate them,” Navalnytold
<https://www.colta.ru/articles/specials/8715-chto-takoe-natsionalizm>Michnik.
“Many Russian nationalists have no clear ideology. What they have is a
sense of general injustice to which they respond with aggression against
people with a different skin color or eyes of a different shape. I think
it’s extremely important to explain to them that beating up migrants is
not the solution to the problem of illegal immigration; the solution is
a return to competitive elections that would allow us to get rid of the
thieves and crooks who are getting rich off of illegal immigration.”
According to Volkov, Navalny now regrets making the 2007 video in which
he advocated for deporting Central Asian migrants, but he has not
deleted it from YouTube “because it’s a historical fact.” Navalny stands
by his support for gun ownership, an issue on which he and Volkov
disagree. On immigration, Navalny has refined and reframed his position:
when he advocates for a visa regime with Central Asian countries now, he
emphasizes the need to protect the rights of migrant laborers. “Russia
definitely needs immigrants,” Volkov said, “but ones who receive work
permits and pay taxes.” This position is part of a broader economic
platform worked out with the help of another Navalny political mentor,
the brilliant Russian economist Sergei Guriev. Guriev, who is now a
professor at Sciences Po, has lived in exile in Paris since 2013. Under
Guriev’s influence, Volkov told me, “we have moved significantly to the
left economically.” In 2018, Navalny added a federal minimum wage to his
platform: he believes it should be twenty-five thousand rubles a month,
roughly twice the current legal requirement.
ADVERTISEMENT
Another Russian academic in exile, Sergei Erofeev, a professor of
sociology at Rutgers University, told me that he sees Navalny as a
consistent civic nationalist who has been unfairly portrayed as an
ethnic nationalist by the Kremlin’s propaganda machine. “He aims to
establish a nation-state in modern Russia with clear-cut democratic
institutions,” Erofeev told me over Zoom. Erofeev has organized a number
of Russian luminaries to sign an openletter
<https://meduza.io/en/feature/2021/02/02/the-situation-could-well-lead-to-a-national-uprising>in
defense of Navalny and other political detainees. He has also been
urging more people to back the Nobel Peace Prize nomination. (University
professors and former laureates like Walesa are among those who can
serve asnominators <https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/peace/>for the
prize.) Erofeev suggested that, rather than focus on Navalny’s brand of
nationalism, I explore his “subtle, realistic, and dialectical”
positions on issues such as the occupation of Crimea. Navalny hasargued
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zj4qZdxAons>that the people of Crimea
should decide the fate of the peninsula by holding a free and open
referendum. He has also said that Ukraine will likely refuse to
recognize the results of such a referendum, were it ever held, and the
conflict in and over Crimea will probably drag on for decades.
What Navalny has been trying to imagine is a post-imperial Russian
national identity. Putin’s brand of nationalism is founded on nostalgia
for the Soviet empire. The nationalist opposition to Putin, when it
existed, was isolationist and xenophobic. Navalny’s position is rooted
in a belief in the fundamental right of self-determination. His realist
position on Crimea angered both sides: Kasparov dissociated himself from
Navalny because of Navalny’s failure to state that Crimea is and should
remain a part of Ukraine; the far more numerous supporters of the
annexation were taken aback by Navalny’s statement that it was illegal
and wrong. For seven years, Navalny has stuck to his positions.
Navalny’s political views have developed in an unusually public way over
the past decade. He has never apologized for his earliest xenophobic
videos or his decision to attend the Russian March. At the same time, he
has adopted increasingly left-leaning economic positions and has come
out in support of the right to same-sex marriage. This strategy of
adopting new positions—without ever explicitly denouncing old ones—is
probably the reason the suspicion of ethno-nationalism continues to
shadow Navalny.
Still, Etkind argued, “Russia and the entire world know Navalny as
someone who fights against corruption. And corruption is the leading
threat to the global world.” Etkind’s latest book, “Nature’s Evil: A
Cultural History of Natural Resources,” focusses on extractive economies
in Russia and around the world. “The global world is founded on
adherence to certain rules, both formal and informal,” Etkind told me
over the phone from Florence. “And if you have a country that is getting
rich on the back of its own people, then these mechanisms stop working.”
Such is the nature of corruption. Etkind and many others believe that,
for recognizing corruption as the biggest political problem of our
times, and for risking limb and life to fight it, Navalny deserves the
Nobel Peace Prize—or, at the very least, the full and unconflicted
support of decent people.
<https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/masha-gessen>
Masha Gessen <https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/masha-gessen>, a
staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author of eleven books, including
“Surviving Autocracy
<https://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Autocracy-Masha-Gessen/dp/0593188934?ots=1&slotNum=0&imprToken=f2bbd2ea-cfa4-cc16-9fb&tag=thneyo0f-20&linkCode=w50>”
and “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/159463453X/?ots=1&slotNum=1&imprToken=f2bbd2ea-cfa4-cc16-9fb&tag=thneyo0f-20>,”
which won the National Book Award in 2017.
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