Hari Kumar | Red Phoenix international correspondent —

On Feb. 16, anti-Putin opposition leader and Russian nationalist Alexei Navalny was found dead at the Kharp high security prison near the Arctic, to which he had been transported recently in secret. The Russian state authorities claim his death was from “Sudden Death Syndrome.” Quite a ridiculous diagnosis, as his detention since 2021 has been marked by repeated evidence of maltreatment and sleep deprivation, constituting slow torture. It was not a ‘sudden’ death, or without prior signals at all.

Let us briefly reprise who the main characters in the drama were. 

First, Vladimir Putin (1952-).  We need to return to the final victory of the capitalist take-over of the formerly socialist USSR. While the destruction of the socialist USSR began with the death of Stalin, the shell of the USSR remained until its liquidation in 1991.

There ensued a huge private profiteers grab for the assets of the state. 

But two factions of the Russian ruling class emerged clearly. The first capitalist grouping was manifestly aligned with Western capitalism. Its clearest representative was the multi-billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had formed the Yukos oil giant. He had fervently bought up state issued vouchers and used them to buy major components of the oil and petrochemical industry at fire sale prices. They worked to open the doors of the now defunct USSR to Western capital.

But they were opposed by the second and opposing faction of capitalists, a Russian national capitalist class. They were based largely in the gas industry and weaponry. Their economic nest was gas in the shape of the privately owned Gazprom. 

Putin was the Chief of the KGB in Dresden during the late days of the GDR. It is likely that in the GDR’s final days Putin was involved in moving cash stores of the Stasi into the West. Nevertheless, after the GDR’s collapse, Putin returned to Russia, supposedly resigning from the KGB in 1991. He emerged as a politician in St. Petersburg in 1994. In 1997 he was appointed by President Yeltsin as deputy chief of the presidential staff. He helped organize the corrupt sell-off of former Soviet industry to the hands of favored collaborators. By 1998 Putin had become Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB. By 1999 he was appointed as acting Prime Minister by President Yeltsin, whose resignation led to Putin becoming Acting President.

There should be no illusions that Putin had any sympathy for socialism or communism, saying in an interview that the Bolsheviks “destroyed what glues, molds the people of civilized countries – market relationships. They destroyed the market, emerging capitalism. The only thing that they did to keep the country together within common borders – was a barbed wire.”

Putin rapidly surrounded himself with the Siloviki (‘strong men’ or so-called KGB Inc.) led by Igor Sechin. These men had no interest in selling Russia to the West, instead wanting to keep Russian capital to be used for dubious purposes. The first target they went after was the section of the oligarchs who were the entry point for foreign capitalists into the Russian economy. This especially applied to Khodorkovsky, who had been lauded by Business Week. They jailed him for years, expropriated his companies and drove him into exile. This model was to be followed against all other challengers to Putin, such as Berezovsky. In 1999 Putin then framed “Chechen terrorists” for terror created by his secret service and used that to ensure his hold on the presidency.  

The second player to mention is the victim, Alexei Navalny (1976-2024). Navalny was a lawyer who was trained in the USA and became an oppositionist. In 2021 he was described thus:

“Navalny started his career as a lawyer before studying finance in Moscow and Yale. Rapidly becoming an oppositionist, Navalny regularly organizes demonstrations against corruption and Putin. Now according to Wikipedia he has ‘more than six million Youtube subscribers and more than two million Twitter followers.’ In 2000 he joined the Russian United Democratic Party Yabloko. Again, just like his predecessor he formed a social movement, but this time with perhaps more of a directly political edge – ‘The People’s Movement’, and also the ‘Movement Against Illegal Immigration’ (MAII) and Great Russia, to form a new coalition, the Russian National Movement. In 2012, Navalny attempted to form a new party, ‘The People’s Alliance.’ He has stood for elections several times under severely hampered circumstances and has widely published about Putin’s corruption.”

No doubt Navalny became the new hope of Western capital to re-enter the Russian stage. He showed himself to be a Russian racist and chauvinist despising the other nationalities in the Russian federation. Nonetheless he developed the opposition ‘Smart Vote’ as a clever platform to unite people in voting against candidates of ‘United Russia’ (Putin’s vehicle – the largest party holding 75% of the 450 seats in the Duma). It overcame Putin’s strategy of denying any standing right for independents at elections, by simply finding alternative electable candidates to unite around. It helped elect some independent candidates to power including high profile United Russian players. It also was one strand of the opposition to Putin’s Imperialist war.

Navalny was attacked by Putin’s agents with a paralyzing agent. Unexpectedly, he was brought to medical assistance inside Russia. Doctors then arranged a spectacular flight to emergency treatment in Charité Berlin. Upon his recovery, Navalny exposed in a ‘sting’ the Russian secret service’s attempt to murder him. Then, remarkably, he quite knowingly flew back to Moscow. It was a foregone conclusion that he would be arrested:

“Navalny flew back to Russia in January 2021. He fully understood that he would be arrested on a number of somewhat spurious charges. He had in the meantime exposed the secret service attempts to poison him with a taped ‘sting’ telephone call to one of the FSB operatives while posing as an operative. He had also openly goaded Putin. In these very public statements, and in his courting of arrest – Navalny has behaved just like Khodorkovsky did in his day. On January 17 2021 Navalny was arrested. However, in sharp contrast to previous arrests of anti-Putin agitators, there was now a reservoir of heightened, near-organized discontent in the Russian people. Moreover, social media enabled wide-spread demonstrations.”

In a vindictive attempt to silence him, Navalny was subject to slow torture since 2021, which no doubt led to his death, although it remains possible that his corpse may ultimately reveal even more acute violence:

“At the time of his death, Navalny was due to serve a cumulative three decades in prison. It was made clear he would remain in jail as long as Putin remained in power. In jail, Russia’s most famous opposition leader faced some of the worst excesses of the Russian prison system. He said the Kremlin wanted to break him, as a punishment for staying alive. His team feared worse. Navalny went on hunger strike after being denied urgent medical treatment in prison. He said the authorities subjected him to psychological pressure and sleep deprivation, detailing a fellow inmate to wake him every hour on the pretext of making sure he had not escaped.”

We should grieve for the ill-effects on any progressive anti-Putin movement in Russia. However Navalny’s character as a pro-Western capitalist should not be denied. Despite this, he had mobilized a wide movement:

“While Navalny is offensively anti-immigrant, anti-Chechen, and is supported by Western capitalism, he has undoubtedly been a major part of a wide grass-roots democratic movement. Critical support for his ‘Smart Voting’ movement as a first step to rebuilding a socialist movement is the only way forward for progressives inside Russia.”

His death is not unmourned in Russia, with many courting arrest:

“At least 359 people have now been arrested at rallies in memory of the late Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny. This would be the largest wave of arrests in Russia since the arrest of more than 1,300 people during demonstrations against the partial mobilization for the Ukrainian war in September 2022. A number of people were arrested, especially in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, as the online civil rights platform Online-Bürgerrechtsplattform OVD-Info announced. In total there were arrests in 32 Russian cities.”

The body count of the Russian army invading Ukraine continues to rise. Guarding his rear, Putin has suppressed more dissidents who might become a focus against him – whether from the right-wing, the center, or the left-wing. 

For example the right-winger, oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin. Previously we noted his similarity to Coriolanus: “Similar to that Roman general in an arrogant hubris fueling a spectacular turn-coat-ism, he now only awaits his own murder.”

Indeed Prigozhin’s murder duly came. More recently other Putinite-suppressions silenced the center. Putin removed the potential candidacy of Nadezhdin in the forthcoming elections. This removed a significant, but largely symbolic, challenge:

“Russia’s election commission has rejected anti-war challenger Boris Nadezhdin as a candidate in next month’s presidential vote. Mr. Nadezhdin has been relatively critical of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale war in Ukraine when few dissenting voices have been tolerated in Russia. Election authorities claimed more than 15% of the signatures he submitted with his candidate application were flawed… The Central Election Commission said that of the 105,000 signatures submitted by Mr. Nadezhdin, more than 9,000 were invalid. They cited a variety of violations. That left 95,587 names, meaning he was just short of the 100,000 required signatures to register as a candidate, commission member Andrei Shutov said.” 

It might not be irrelevant that even from the Arctic, “Navalny had called for a nationwide protest on the day of the March presidential election and for voters to gather at the polls at noon as a sign of dissent against Putin.”

From the left-wing, Putin removed the potential ‘socialist’ force of Boris Kagarlitsky:

“Leading left-wing Russian thinker Boris Kagarlitsky is facing up to seven years in prison on charges of ‘justifying terrorism’ even though it is clear to everyone – including supporters of Vladimir Putin and his aggression in Ukraine – that he was arrested for his anti-war views. Kagarlitsky is perhaps the most prominent Marxist thinker in the post-Soviet space… he was arrested on 25 July after stating in a social media post that the attack on Russia’s Crimean Bridge in October 2022, believed to be the work of Ukraine, was understandable ‘from a military point of view.’ His case is just one of hundreds of police investigations into anti-war Russians.”

Navalny’s death further prolongs the Russian imperialist aggression into Ukraine. Members of the United Communist Party in some Russian ‘communist parties’ openly repudiate their own leadership for refusing to condemn this imperialist war of Russia’s. Meanwhile the USA and Western imperialist powers try to lever Navalny’s death into ensuring further funds to Ukraine.

Despite the risk to themselves, the war continues to arouse many Russians into confronting Putin’s state. While no clear leadership or formal movement has yet to emerge, it will.

Categories: International, Russia

Tags: Imperialism