Freedom matters: why socialists should condemn the death of Alexei Navalny | 
Counterfire

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Freedom matters: why socialists should condemn the death of Alexei Navalny

States that clamp down on basic freedoms betray their true nature, argues 
Vladimir Unkovski-Korica Days away ...
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States that clamp down on basic freedoms betray their true nature, argues 
Vladimir Unkovski-Korica

Days away from the second anniversary of Russia’s full-blown invasion of 
Ukraine, the Russian media reported that the country’s best-known opposition 
figure, Alexei Navalny, had died while serving a 19-year sentence on extremism 
charges at the remote penal colony at Kharp, north of the Arctic circle.

The widely reported version of his death in Russian media was that the 
47-year-old went for a walk, felt unwell and quickly thereafter died. Some 
speculated about a blood clot. Like the charges against him which led to his 
arrest, the reported cause of death sounds like a sham.

Long a thorn in President Vladimir Putin’s side, Navalny had exposed corruption 
at the highest levels in Russia. Already in August 2020, he had been poisoned 
with a Novichok nerve agent and flown to Germany for treatment. 

When he returned in January 2021, he was immediately imprisoned. He would never 
get out again. Even though he was a Russian nationalist, who said he would not 
return Crimea to Ukraine if he were in charge, Navalny opposed the invasion of 
Ukraine in February 2022, which probably condemned him to death.

Whether he was assassinated for political reasons, or died under the strain of 
an incredibly severe prison system, in which he is reported to have served more 
than 280 days in isolation, placed in solitary confinement at least 27 times, 
we probably will not know for some time.

Repression

But what has been increasingly obvious that the Kremlin was unprepared to 
tolerate dissent. Last week, a court barred Boris Nadezhdin, an anti-war 
challenger to Putin in the forthcoming presidential election, from running. 
This was on spurious grounds that several thousand signatures he had collected 
for his run were invalid, making him just short of the necessary 100,000.

Just a few days ago, too, a well-known socialist, anti-war campaigner, Boris 
Kagarlitsky, was jailed for over five years. He had already been arrested in 
July last year, but then released under domestic and international pressure, in 
December, although a court fined him and restricted his internet access for two 
years. But, on appeal, the court has now ruled that the previous judgement had 
been too lenient.

Under the weight of its war against Ukraine, and its proxy battle with the 
West, the Russian regime is becoming ever more repressive. Already one of the 
most unequal societies in the world, in which 500 of the richest people own two 
fifths of financial assets in the country, Russia sees opposition driven 
underground, while social protest is forced into unofficial and apolitical 
channels.

According to sociologist Pyotr Bizyukov, neoliberal legislation from the early 
1990s has made it very difficult to go on strike in Russia, leading to 
officially very low strike statistics, even though unofficially many workplace 
protests occur: a record of 437 protests occurred in 2020. Almost three 
quarters of such labour protests occur without official trade union 
participation.

What the current situation in Russia is like is unclear, but polling towards 
the end of 2023 suggested that those satisfied with their living standards had 
fallen from 57 percent to 49 percent during that year, indicating that though 
the wartime Russian economy is growing, defying Western sanctions, people’s 
everyday lives are getting harder.

The Kremlin is clearly bent on snuffing out organised opposition in a fight to 
ensure that protests remain partial and never become a generalised, articulated 
opposition to the regime. The grim fate of oppositionists like Nadezhdin, 
Kagarlitsky and above all Navalny shows why the left in Russia has every 
interest in fighting to an end to the oppressive and undemocratic regime 
running the country and fighting war abroad.

Freedom

Socialists everywhere have a duty to fight against the limitation of democratic 
rights and for their expansion. This is why we should condemn the appalling 
attacks on freedom of speech, strike and assembly everywhere we find ourselves. 

Indeed, it has been nauseating to watch the hypocrisy of Western leaders, who 
have rounded on Putin’s regime after Navalny’s death, while literally 
simultaneously enabling the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians at the 
hands of Israel, which also holds nearly 7,000 Palestinians from the occupied 
territories in jail for alleged security offenses.

The US and UK, too, keep prisoners in conditions not unlike Navalny’s in 
Guantanamo Bay and Belmarsh Prison. The most egregious example is surely the 
appalling treatment of whistle-blower Julian Assange, who has been kept at 
Belmarsh since 2019. In May 2023, his wife Stella talked to the press about how 
the Wikileaks founder had endured 1502 days of brutal isolation in a small cell 
for ‘publishing the truth’ while fighting his potential extradition to the US.

Democratic rights to protest and strike are under attack across the advanced 
capitalist world, as we have witnessed in the UK in recent months with attempts 
to criminalise pro-Palestinian protest or to restrict further the right to 
strike. In this context, it may be apposite to remember the words of the great 
Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin: ‘without political freedom, all forms of 
worker representation will remain pitiful frauds; the proletariat will remain 
as before in prison, without the light, air, and space needed to conduct the 
struggle for its full liberation’.




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