A young Russian woman, living in exile, poured out her thoughts when Alexei Navalny died (was killed). She poured them out to an American. The Russian must not be identified, because of consequences to her family, back home. But here is what she wrote:
I find it hard and at times impossible to talk about the nation I was born into with people here — with people to whom I speak English. I’ll take my time now, on February 16, hours after Alexei Navalny died in prison. I want to talk about my country and a man of my country, and I want you to remember what I’ve said.
Grief comes with being a Russian. The history of all the peoples — everyone born into vast Russia (a country too vast to be motherly) or into its empire — is riddled with grief and loss, and violence, and tyranny.
We all are consumed with finding a way around this grief because if we don’t, it eats us alive. We are born into the framework of grief and we spend our lives trying to understand how to navigate it.
We were born into a country where counts, and tsars, and Politburo apparatchiks, and now a president and his oligarchs, manipulate, gaslight, exploit, and murder our peoples while we watch and watch and watch them, paralyzed and helpless. It has been going on for over a thousand years. Yup, that long: oppressed by our own, and pathetic in our attempts to stop it. We are called a nation of cowards because of that, and this assessment hurts deeply because it is as cruel as it is unjustified.
We may be cowards, but so are you, and we may be brave, but so are you. Nations are imaginary, but people aren’t, and people are the same absolutely everywhere you go, and most of us are okay, and some of us are great, and some of us are real pieces of shit. Russians are not that different from any of you. In fact, we are exactly the same, yet born into circumstances where to hide, to un-speak, to conceal, to be small, and to be petty is the way to survive. That’s how Putin lives and Navalny dies, two sons of the same nation, two men in the same predicament, trapped by Russia.
Navalny was good. He was a good, good man. He was a brave man, and a funny man. He was a smart man. The choices he made were not stupid. He didn’t expect to survive or to be saved by Amnesty International. He was absolutely aware of what was happening to him, and he did it anyway. He is no longer alive because to survive means to hide, to un-speak, to conceal, to be small, and to be petty, and he refused to do or be any of these things.
Navalny has been tormented, poisoned by the worst imaginable poison and possibly tortured, and he made his tormentors look and feel small and petty, over and over, relentlessly, with tenacity and a spark, and that’s what he was martyred for. At the end of the day, he died for mocking vile little men. And Russians grieve today. Some of us. More of us would, if the ungrieving knew what we lost today, but they don’t. There is no news and no movies and no books and no free Internet to learn anything our government doesn’t want us to learn.
A protest, unsanctioned by the people one tries to protest, is punishable by criminal law. A word against the military’s commander-in-chief (that’d be the president) is punishable by criminal law. Criticism of traditional Russian values (it means whatever they want it to mean) is punishable by criminal law. How many public statements would you make when they could and would jeopardize your livelihood?
Your ability to go to work, and have a home to go to work from, and a car to drive to work in; your ability to eat the food you want, and to keep your kids out of trouble in school, and to cover your medical bills; your ability to leave your house and see friends, and to be present when your grandmother dies or your child graduates; your ability, in the end, to survive in the country you were born into — how much of that would you give up to make a point?
Navalny did make a point. He died on his hill. And his cold and exhausted body lies in a room in the Arctic on a cold steel table with a tag attached to it. And his wife, daughter, and son are caught in that crushing grief that will, eventually, transition to a hum in the background of their lives. This grief is intensely personal, yet shared by people who come from our country. This grief is a default if you are from Russia. It is imprinted on you before you can rationalize it, and it goes where you go, and it stays where you stay, and you learn to co-exist with it, and not to talk about it, because there are other things to talk about.
This barely noticeable pain amplifies on days like this. We are grieving a good, honest person whom, somehow, we couldn’t help. But he, miraculously, wasn’t helpless. He was relentless to the point where one could only adore him. He fought the injustice that was in front of him, until the end of his life. In the years he spent in prison, he somewhat moved his focus from Putin’s regime to prisoners’ rights. He demanded books and heat, went on hunger strikes to get medical attention, spent hundreds of days in solitary. A real pain in the ass for the prison guards.
I am not too hot on the idea of a nation, so his patriotism or even his nationality, although shared, isn’t what resonates with me the most, but that’s okay because he was more than a patriot, he was a humanitarian, and I see him clearly, and understand him in nuance because he is built by the same people who built me. He stood up for all of us.
He lived and he died by a principle that many of you share: No man or entity shall consolidate a disproportionate amount of power over the majority of the people. This is what democracy looks like, and he died for it. Putin is a supporting act in Navalny’s story.
I am not proud of being Russian. Not that I am ashamed of it, I’m rather lukewarm on any patriotic shit because it isn’t too relevant to me anymore, but today, I do feel proud of being a witness to Alexey Navalny’s life. I am honored to have seen his life.
Navalny died today, in the most brutal prison one can imagine. And there will be no uprising, and the 200 people who step on the streets of Russia in protest will be arrested, and their lives will be ruined, and those who could stand by them are either in prison or in exile or in fear or dead. And the darkness will consume us, unwelcome but familiar. And Navalny will be given to the soil.
And he was good, and brave, and honest. He changed us, and he sweetened our grief, gave it fleeting meaning, sacrificing himself in the process. And it was a true and kind thing to do.
He was a flower that grew from shit.