Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption crusader, is the staunchest critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has painted Putin’s United Party as a place of “crooks and thieves”. In his public speeches, he accused the Putin’s system of “sucking the blood out of Russia”. Thus he has committed to the Russian populace that he is all out to demolish the “Feudal State”. However, he has not been able to challenge Putin in the election so far. When in 2018, he tried to contest the presidential poll, his candidature was banned by the state over his conviction by a Russian court in an embezzlement case. His Anti-Corruption Foundation is known for exposing cases of graft and corruption by Russian politicians, oligarchs and top bureaucrats. He has been jailed in the past for bringing out unauthorised demonstrations. Navalny was forced to close down his foundation in July after it was badly crippled by a multitude of fines and charges. Before this move, the Kremlin moved to froze his bank accounts, and those of his family members, including his children.
Last month, on August 20, he suddenly fell unconscious aboard while travelling from the Siberian city of Tomsk to the capital city Moscow. Hence an emergency landing was arranged on the way in the city of Omsk and he was admitted to hospital with suspected poisoning. As per his staff, he was poisoned in the airport café where he had tea just before flying. His supporters believed that the hospital at Omsk was under pressure to delay his transfer to a German facility as his wife Yulia Navalny demanded. The intention was to prevent a detailed investigation into what caused his sudden illness. Interestingly Alexander Murakhovsky, the head of the medical team that attended Navalny, stated that Navalny had not been poisoned but diagnosed with a metabolic disease caused by low blood sugar. And this may have caused his immediate collapse onboard the flight. But he failed to explain why Navalny could not regain consciousness even after a day. Finally, the Russian Government allowed him to be transferred to a German healthcare centre based in Berlin known as Charite Hospital. The doctors in Berlin said the test results suggested he had been poisoned with a “cholinesterase inhibitor”. It is a group of chemicals that are also used to treat diseases like Alzheimer’s.
Cholinesterase’s use ranges from pesticides and medicines to nerve agents. But when used in nerve agents and pesticides, that can be really harmful to human beings. Further, the worst part is that the cholinesterase inhibitors block a crucial enzyme that circulates messages from nerves to muscles. And this particular enzyme is called acetylcholinesterase. And the inhibition of this enzyme interferes in nerve-to-muscle messaging process. Once it happens, the muscles fail to contract and relax. Thus this leads to the muscles into a stage of spasm. Looking all these complexities, Navalny demands a fair treatment and post-medical care too. Currently, he has been given an antidote called “atropine”. In fact, the same antidote was used in the case of former KGB spy Sergei Skirpal and his daughter Yulia Skirpal by the doctors in the UK after their poisoning with the nerve agent called Novichok in Salisbury in the year 2018. But both of them had a miraculous recovery in the UK.
Jaka Bijilz of Cinema for Peace Foundation, the German group that airlifted Navalny to Berlin, revealed that initially his condition was very critical and worrying. But now the moot question is that whether Navalny will survive the attack without lasting damage. However, the German doctors say that the recovery may take long.
The recent attack on Navalny, the sixth such attempt on a Russian dissident in the last five years, invited Putin a slew of scathing criticisms from the international community. Meanwhile the Russian Government denied the accusation that Navalny was poisoned. And the state apparatus has dismissed the accusation of the Kremlin’s involvement simply as “empty noise”. However, what comes from the allies of Navalny is a secret planning of the state to kill another Putin baiter. Vladimir Milov, a former Russian Deputy Energy Minister, who currently advises Navalny, said, “It’s essentially an attempt to remove him as a threat. They consider this with a classic KGB mentality: no man, no problem.”
At the moment, the top European leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have demanded Moscow to launch a full investigation to this incident. In fact, both the leaders stood side by side at a news conference to assure the Kremlin critic medical services and asylum. Finally, the Kremlin ordered for a thorough and objective investigation. Around the same time, Merkel said Navalny had been poisoned with a Soviet-style Novichok nerve agent in an attempt to murder the critic.
Protests in authoritarian nations like China, Russia, etc, can simply be branded as either a brave act or foolhardy. In reality, Putin has embarked on a repressive path to consolidate his power. The Opposition in Russia works under absolute pressure and surveillance of Moscow. Precisely, the law enforcement agencies and secret agents are too cautious not to allow the Opposition a Maidan-style revolution that emerged in Kyiv, the capital city of Ukraine, in the last part of the year 2013 and continued till the beginning of 2014. Therefore, simply to prevent such uprisings, the Russian authorities are too alert to deal with any unauthorised protests very swiftly and decisively.
Remarkably, unlike the Kiev protests wherein the demonstrators demolished the statutes of Lenin and even started occupying some government buildings, accompanied by clashes with the security forces, Muscovites have remained peaceful so far. These protesters at times only block traffic flows and occupy public spaces. They are not even like the Jilets Jaunes in Paris (who almost created a total chaos for Macron Government) and the pro-democracy young protesters of Hong Kong (who occupied government buildings just before the coming of the draconian National Security Law in June this year).
Navalny’s has been a sustained attempt to raise the banner of protests for long. Good that till date he is alive. It’s not only Navalny, someone or the other in the past, has been trying to topple Putin and his allies. But then why the Opposition is not been able to dethrone Putin so far? The excessive forces used by the Kremlin are continuously frightening off people at times to come out in open against the Putin regime. Secondly, the hardcore Opposition groups are not a big worry for Putin and his administration. The reason behind is these forces can hardly gather some thousands only in major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg. Thus, radical Opposition is not an immediate threat for Putin. The authorities are apprehensive about mass protests. But so far Moscow has not encountered a scenario like the Arab Spring.
But today, the grandiose support for Putin is gradually declining. One of the primary reasons for this is years of declining real wages and fiscal tightening by the Putin Government. In an atmosphere like this, radical political forces and activists should have mustered more public support by now. But it is not becoming a reality as of today.
With Putin, you don’t see any dynamism and change. Only change that you overwhelmingly witness is dwindling grace and pace of Russia accompanied by a top down administration full of nepotism and corruption. The commoners are fast fading from the public square. Kremlin reprisals of the critics are a regular affair. Putin is quite unique in carrying out these attacks. But, Russia’s Putin era will not come to an end so easily. Resistance to Putin in public may lead to bloodbath. However, the Russian people cannot just seat idle.
What David Thomson wrote in his “Europe Since Napoleon” once again reminds all of us of the agony of the Russian people under the current Putinista. He rightly stated: “History offered no warrant for either complacent optimism or black despondency. It offered no simple answer: only a challenge to reasonable hope and strenuous, unremitting endeavour.” If people want change, they should throw weight behind Navalny.
(The writer is an expert on international affairs)
