The news about Alexei Navalny’s death came as a shock to anti-Putin Russians like myself – he’d been a central figure of opposition in Russia for more than 15 years. Yet in other ways, not a surprise at all – for three years he’d been in the claws of a regime with a long-established history of getting rid of its better-known opponents. Navalny himself was realistic about his chances, saying in court he was ‘under the total control of men who adore applying chemical weapons to everything, and no one would bet three kopecks on my life now.’

But still, with Navalny you held onto the irrational hope it might turn out differently. After surviving that attempt on his life in 2020, he had an almost Harry Potterish ‘Boy That Lived’ aura of ultimate triumph which seems cruelly ironic now. Of course, for those hostile or indifferent to him, his death only bore out their deepest conviction: whatever you do in life, don’t cross the authorities.

Some events since his death have a distinctly Soviet feel to them

In Russia, the state media informed us of Navalny’s death as a piece of ‘breaking news’. Yet the public reaction to it they’ve tried to hide at all costs. Not only Moscow – where he lived and came second in the 2013 mayoral elections with 27 per cent of the vote – had Navalny supporters. Following his death, tens of thousands of people in more than 190 towns and cities came out with flowers to express their grief, most often laying them at monuments to victims of political repression – a legacy of the 1990s confrontation with the past, ever more relevant (and yet incongruous) in Putin’s Russia.

This commemoration of Navalny is something the authorities were clearly prepared for, quickly sending out their tonton macoutes to sweep the flowers away and prevent people gathering in memory – as of now, 400 have been detained, some of whom instantly received call-up papers.  When a TV channel showed in its weather report a rogue clip of people outside the FSB headquarters bringing bouquets to the Solovki Stone – the monument to victims of repression which in the 90s replaced the statue of secret police founder Felix Dzherzhinsky – it was quickly taken off the air. The Kremlin – for whom Navalny was always a nameless ‘that citizen’, ‘that character’, ‘that person’ – is now trying to erase all memory of him. The disappearance of his body has been ignored, as has his significance to swathes of people in Russia. Some events since his death have a distinctly Soviet feel to them. One church minister – son of Soviet dissident poet Aleksandr Galich, who died abroad, suspiciously, in 1977 – announced plans to hold a memorial service for Navalny. He was soon detained near his home in St. Petersburg and suffered a stroke in police custody.

Unlike the Soviet times, much communication has taken place on social media, which for several days has been a battleground between people expressing their sorrow and those attacking them. Amidst inevitable comparisons with Christ and of bodies mysteriously disappearing from the tomb, there have been occasional piercing statements.

‘Jesus went to the cross for people,’ wrote journalist Yuri Abrosimov on Facebook. ‘Navalny went for sheep. And this is his fatal mistake.’ Writer Viktor Shenderovich, who knows his Shakespeare, said the late Navalny would turn into a Birnam Wood reaching up to the Kremlin walls, though the comments which followed disagreed vehemently. Nothing of the sort would happen, they said: just as with previous assassinations, nothing would happen at all. Cutting through the hubbub, someone remarked poignantly: ‘At least we have learned to grieve in style after all these years.’

Well, perhaps. But there has been a strong troll-contingent in evidence, sent out to neutralise anything resembling a tribute to the man. Tactics here have been well worn: ‘It’s quite common to die unexpectedly in your prime actually’ or (even more numbingly familiar) ‘How does Navalny’s death benefit Putin in any way? Quite the reverse etc.’, suggesting the finger should be pointed elsewhere. This same approach – a trope in pro-Kremlin propaganda – was used after the assassinations of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov (‘a provocation’) or journalist Anna Politkovskaya (‘carried out on Putin’s birthday merely to compromise our president’). Likewise, this time around politician Viktor Bondarev (First Deputy of the State Duma Defence Committee) claims Navalny’s death was of benefit ‘only to the collective West, and British, American and Ukrainian special services might be involved.’ Mikhail Delyagin, Deputy Head of the Economy Committee, adds that: ‘For the West this news will become a tool in the information war and an excuse for more sanctions. They could confiscate $300 billion (£240 billion) in frozen Russian assets.’ So it goes.

But the longest-standing smear of Navalny – and that most insulting to his memory – is that he was just an actor playing a role or the mere brainchild of shady forces (the West or the liberal wing in Russia). ‘His colleagues in the Anti-Corruption Foundation are sitting safely in Europe,’ they scoff on Facebook, ‘His daughter’s at Stanford University…You’re telling me he’s not someone else’s project and really takes decisions on his own? Give me a break!’ The modern times, it seems, are not for heroes. Your average citizen focused on paying the mortgage or buying a Kia on credit cannot conceive of anyone ready to sacrifice their life for concepts like ‘democratic Russia’ or a Russia ‘free of the power of crooks and thieves.’

A policeman stands guard after two young women lay flowers for Alexei Navalny in Moscow (Credit: Getty images)

Yet there are exceptions. One girl interviewed by a Western news-network remarked that Navalny was ‘the only one doing what we are all afraid to do – the right things.’ And aside from Navalny’s haters and supporters, there’s a huge group of people who accept in theory that his struggle for Russian democracy was broadly right – but that his return to Russia in 2021 showed terrible political judgement. ‘He is partly to blame [for his own death],’ remarked one young man on YouTube, ‘because he returned after finding out that he’d been poisoned.’

‘It just goes to show that fighting the state in our country is doomed and futile,’ said a friend, speaking for many anti-Putin Russians now. There’s a widespread feeling of helplessness before awful, destructive events, of being powerless to do anything but simply watch it unfold. It’s a fatalism expressed vividly by Russian director and dramatist Yevgenia Berkovich, arrested in May last year, who wrote a poem on the day of Navalny’s death, its opening lines as follows:

“Sweeping, sweeping all over the earth

A wolfish plague.

Sit like a fly in February

In darkness and silence.

And don’t utter a word

In a human language….’

They say that it’s always darkest before the dawn. But this surely doesn’t apply to what we’re currently seeing in Russia. On the contrary, Navalny’s death, just like the recent successes of the Russian army in Ukraine, seems a foreshadowing of far worse things to come. Both Russia and the Western world have failed to recognise and truly support their heroes, and now must face the consequences.