Navalni, a year of democratic involution in Russia

The Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalni, was imprisoned this January 17 a year ago, twelve months in which the Kremlin has toughened the campaign of repression against the democratic opposition, human rights organizations and the free press to unsuspected limits, condemning many dissidents into exile.

“Just a year ago I returned home to Russia. I could not take a single step in my country as a free person. I was arrested before passport control”, Navalni wrote in a blog published this Monday by the Echo of Moscow radio station.

Poisoned in August 2020 with a Russian-made chemical weapon (Novichok), Navalni, who accuses the Russian secret services of the assassination attempt, returned to his country after several months of convalescence in Germany.

Within two weeks he was arrested, jailed and sentenced to two and a half years in prison. The odyssey of the number one enemy of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, began.

An endless odyssey

Navalni himself, 45, admits that he does not know when what he calls “space travel”, since last Friday he learned that he will go to trial again for a new criminal case against him.

“And in the queue there is still another (criminal case). One in which I am an extremist and terrorist. So I am one of those cosmonauts (inmate) who do not count the days until the end of their sentence. To tell? Some have already spent 27 years behind bars“, he pointed.

However, the opponent, who called the largest anti-government protests since the fall of the USSR and challenged the Kremlin with high-profile allegations of corruption and vote campaigns against the Kremlin party, does not regret “not for a second” the path taken.

“This is our country and we have no other. The only fear there should be is letting our country be plundered by a bunch of liars, thieves and hypocrites. In Russia there are many honest people, tens of millions of people. There are many more than is usually believed“, he pointed.

For this reason, after his first year in prison, he assured that he can say “exactly the same” that he shouted to those who were concentrated next to the court when they drove him in the police van.

“Don’t be afraid of anything!”, he added.

Putin’s big shot

There is no appearance before the foreign press that Putin is not asked about Navalni, whom he never cites by name and limits himself to the term “citizen” or a person to whom “allegedly poisoned.

“We have sent several requests from the Russian Prosecutor’s Office for them to give us materials that confirm the fact of poisoning. And nothing. There is not a single material. Not a single one about that Novichok or whatever they call him”, Putin said at the end of December during his annual press conference.

He recalled that he personally offered the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, and the then Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, “to let our experts go to take samples.”

“And nothing, zero. So no need to talk about it. Let’s turn this page if there’s nothing to answer”, he reiterated.

Repression and exile of dissidents

Amnesty International (AI) denounced this Monday that the Kremlin has unleashed a “ruthless pursuit” against the structures and followers of the Russian opposition leader, the Sakharov prize for freedom of conscience from the European Parliament (EP) that his daughter had to collect last December.

“Some of Alexei Navalni’s colleagues managed to flee the country, but now they fear that their relatives in Russia will be persecuted and could go to jail. In the year since his arrest, the life of Navalni and the political activists linked to him has become hell”, the organization noted.

His co-religionists maintain that the poisoning and subsequent imprisonment of Navalni opened an unprecedented campaign of persecution of all voices critical of the Kremlin, whose initial objective was to guarantee a parliamentary majority for United Russia in the legislative elections in September.

If the fabricated accusations prevented many opposition candidates from participating in the elections, the label of “foreign agent” handcuffed many politicians, lawyers, journalists and human rights defenders, who in many cases had to stop their work and emigrate abroad.

The last victim was the oldest NGO in Russia, Memorial -which defends the memory of those repressed during the Soviet Union and included Navalni on its list of political prisoners-, liquidated by the Justice at the end of 2021.

“If I had been on the committee I would have voted for who everyone was betting on. But I think that person has everything ahead of him. I speak, of course, of Alexei Navalni”, said Dmitri Muratov, the director of “Novaya Gazeta”, after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in October.