Navalny’s death is a message to all
The fact that Alexei Navalny’s death was easily foretold does not make it less heroic nor less sad. It does not reduce the value of his sacrifice, nor the importance of the warning that it sends to the Russians and the rest of the world – Vladimir Putin will act in this way until he is forced to stop. Navalny’s elimination allows no further illusions that the Russian president will one day permit any democratization in his country, nor that his imperial delirium will stop if he is not defeated on the field of battle. The problem is that though Putin knows well that this game has no rules, those who ought to stop him are divided and hesitant, as if they do not get the messages that he keeps sending.
Managing fear has always been integral to exercising power, the primary weapon for encouraging friends and disheartening enemies. In autocratic regimes, the leader (who, on his own, is weak and vulnerable) acquires supernatural force through the mechanisms of power and its symbols. And there is no stronger symbol than the humiliation of the enemy and his death. From Assyria and Rome, through the Reign of Terror of France, the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia and the videotaped executions of the “Islamic State,” to today’s Iran and Russia, the leader’s power is measured in severed heads and public hangings, in brutality, in indifference towards “rights” and conventions, in effectiveness. These “qualities,” in turn, depend not only on terrorizing the people but also on selling them a “positive” myth – restoring lost greatness or chasing utopia – where nothing can stand in the way of fulfilling the people’s wishes and destroying their enemies. For Putin, it would not have been enough for there not to have been a Navalny in his way: Navalny had to exist, and he had to die.
Putin is pushing the myth that he is leading Russia to the restoration of its empire, not only to the borders of the Soviet Union but to the limits of Orthodoxy. In this way, there can be no hesitancy in exercising absolute, tsarist power. Nor will he give account to any other power, whether this is part of the international system of governance or some idea inspired by the Enlightenment and other “Western” fads. God, the people and the leader are in absolute alignment on the need for the great scheme to be fulfilled.
As dissidents disappear, the leader is able to impose an infantile, irrational mentality on the citizens. He can make them feel both superior to their enemies and, at the same time, constantly threatened. He molds them in his image, in other words. But without the power which, in this way, they hand over to him alone.
