In this special collab episode between Obscuristan and The Fire These Times, Karena Avedissian and Anna are joined by Daniel Voskoboynik to discuss the life of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and what his death means for those of us not quite at the heart of the Russian empire. Plus, Anna and Karena announce that they’re joining the wider TFTT collective!
Obscuristan is available wherever you listen to podcasts.
About: Join political scientist Karena and total civilian Anna on a trip to Obscuristan. Each week, Karena and Anna dive into a truly bizarre story from Eurasia in its full political, social, and imperialist context. Join us, and you’ll find out why Obscuristan isn’t so strange at all when you consider the sh*t it’s been through.
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Episode Credits:
Hosts: Karena and Anna
Producer: Anna
Guest: Daniel Voskoboynik
Music: Sarven Yapar
Sound editor: Anna
Episode designer: Elia J. Ayoub
Team profile pics: Molly Crabapple
Original TFTT design: Wenyi Geng
Transcript via Antidote Zine:
How do you crumble the Russian empire? I have no idea. People have been struggling with this question. But if there’s any hope, it’s the fact that people have been migrating and smuggling and getting ideas out and sharing links across communities. Different diasporas and different nations inside the famous “graveyard of nations” have been with each others’ backs all the time.
Anna: Hello friends, this is Anna from Obscuristan. Before we get into the episode, we have a few announcements: we’re really excited to be back from hiatus. We’re working on growing this project from where we started as a way to tell stories about Eurasia, to really grappling with our place in the broader leftist movement and resistance against imperialism, and what role we play and what we can learn from each other in trying to combat these issues that are so very important to us and affect our daily lives.
We wanted to let you know that Obscuristan is joining a larger network started by The Fire These Times podcast. Definitely check them out. We’ve had a few guest appearances which you may have heard. We plan on continuing to collaborate, and this episode is a part of that larger collaboration that’s starting. We’re really excited about what this larger project means for dialogue and solidarity-building across regions.
We’re here today with our wonderful friend Daniel Voskoboynik from the very exciting upcoming podcast Hidah, which will be joining the same network hosted by The Fire These Times. Daniel, I would love it if you could introduce yourself and your background, and then Karena will tell us all what we’re here to talk about.
Daniel Voskoboynik: My name is Daniel; I’m a journalist, writer, and campaigner, and I come from a Jewish family in the post-Soviet space, so this topic is very dear to me. It’s an absolute joy to be with you.
Karena Avedissian: Thank you Daniel, thank you Anna. Today we’re going to be talking about Alexei Navalny. His death has obviously sparked some reflection about his legacy, and that’s something that the three of us, who have family ties to Russia and have had different life experiences either living or working in Russia, wanted to draw on that and flesh out Navalny’s legacy from this peripheral experience that we have—Daniel coming from a Jewish background, and Anna and I coming from an Armenian background.
It’s an interesting topic. Navalny was on the one hand this brave dissident who stood up against perhaps the most powerful autocrat out there today, Putin. On the other, there are these very problematic vestiges of Navalny’s nationalist roots—his expressions of racism, his lack of criticism of Russian imperialism over the years—that complicate that legacy.
That’s what we’re discussing today. We’re super excited to have Daniel on; this is the first time Anna and I have had a guest, so we’re really honored and privileged. As Anna mentioned, having joined this larger platform with other folks of different backgrounds like Daniel, we will be having similar conversations, getting insights from some of the people in this network to help us explore some of these bizarre and fun and grim and dark events and developments in this part of the world.
I want to begin by acknowledging that while our discussion today pertains to Navalny, we also want to acknowledge the violence the Russian state is inflicting on Ukrainians in its now two-years’ war of aggression. As we consider Navalny’s legacy and the difficulties faced by those challenging Putin within Russia, we also recognize the Ukrainian people suffering under this nationalist, imperialist, chauvinist invasion, and we express our solidarity with Ukrainians who are giving their lives resisting that same Russian state violence that ultimately killed Navalny.
With that, a brief background of Navalny. He was probably the most prominent Russian opposition leader of the last twenty years. He gained widespread recognition for his investigations into high-level corruption, using social media and his blog to mobilize public support. He was a vocal critic of president Putin and the ruling United Russia party. And despite facing legal challenges and multiple arrests, Navalny continued to be a prominent figure in Russian opposition politics, advocating for transparency, accountability, and democratic reforms.
He was last imprisoned in 2021, eventually ending up at a particularly brutal prison in the Arctic circle, where he was frequently subjected to solitary confinement. How did he end up there? He was poisoned in August 2020; he fell critically ill during a flight from Siberia to Moscow and was later transferred to a hospital in Berlin for treatment. The German government where he received medical care announced that he was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent, which is a type of chemical weapon developed in the Soviet Union. He eventually recovered, but not before spending several months in a coma. According to the EU, the poisoning of Navalny was possible “only with the consent of the presidential executive office and with the participation of the FSB.” An investigation by Bellingcat also implicated agents from the FSB in this poisoning.
Once he recovered, he returned to Russia, in January 2021, where he was promptly arrested by Russian authorities for supposedly violating parole conditions in a previous case, and he was sentenced to thirty years. This is when he ended up in this penal colony in the tundra. His death was officially explained as “sudden death syndrome,” which is a vague term for different cardiac syndromes that cause sudden cardiac arrest and death. But as with lots of cases in Russia, we just don’t know what ultimately killed him. Obviously if he hadn’t been in prison, he would probably still be alive. Russian prisons in general are brutal, and especially in this particular one he was in, life expectancy is quite short.
Going back to who he was—if we delve into his identity, it’s really different depending who you ask. For Russians who oppose (or are at the very least disheartened with) Putin, especially younger people, Navalny was a rare figurehead for anti-establishment feeling. People outside of Russia, especially in the West, liberals in the West who espouse democratic values, saw him as this brave Oscar-winning guy who dared oppose Putin. Then there are people like us: non-ethnic-Russian people in the region who generally know him for his racism.
Obviously I’m doing broad strokes here—but just to paint a different picture from the generalities, Navalny was known for expressing his racist views on Muslims in the Caucasus in particular, on Georgians, and on central Asian migrants in Russia. This is where I turn to Anna and Daniel for any thoughts, insights about Navalny and his racism, his roots in the nationalist movement.
A: I wanted to ask Daniel specifically, because me and Karena have been talking about Navalny and planning to do an episode about him for several years. So I’m wondering, Daniel: even before his death, even before we decided to record about him, what was your impression? What were your general thoughts about Navalny?
DV: Thank you very much. I start with a tiny bit of hesitation in the sense that as we speak—we’re recording this on 29 February—the news from Moscow is that not a single mortuary, not a single funeral home is currently willing to transport the hearse with Navalny’s body, under pressure from the Russian government. So just the context that the conversation is happening in makes a lot of reflections quite difficult.
But as for many non-ethnic-Russians, for me Navalny was this figure with a question mark around him because he emerged from, or definitely in his youth had affinity with, the Russian nationalist movement. Navalny is someone who, at least from my perspective, has been on multiple political journeys. If there’s one thing we can’t criticize him for it’s for not changing approaches and changing minds. There are many things that he’s never apologized for in the way that many of us would require, but he’s someone who’s gone on a journey.
Especially in the early days, this is someone who went on Russian nationalist marches, and I think the most generous interpretation of that is he wanted to reach Russian nationalist masses. In the more realistic interpretation, this is someone who resonated, who made campaign ads playing on ethnic Russian populist sentiments around the idea that Russia is overly providing for communities that aren’t ethnic Russians, being an “empire of generosity” that isn’t standing up for its own people (a common Russian nationalist narrative).
In any case he represents the problem with Russian liberalism, which refuses to look too askance or too deeply at what the systematic problems are with the Russian empire as a whole and how it does not meet the needs of its own colonial subjects and even the people it claims to support. What are the root causes of that? And are those causes found in just one regime, or in a pattern of an empire? Rather than looking critically at these things, Navalny was more readily interested in putting the blame on some of the most vulnerable and marginalized communities in the Russian federation.
Even in his main slogan, that United Russia (the ruling party) is a group of crooks and thieves, is a diagnosis insufficient to explain why Russia hasn’t been able to shed its totalitarian and authoritarian legacy and present. So from the beginning, beyond analysis, as a non-ethnic-Russian, I’ve always been skeptical of Russian liberalism, just in my instincts.
For folks listening outside, we can talk together, and you two might be able to tell this better: why is making this distinction between ethnic Russians and Russians as a whole so important? How can we frame that for a wider audience?
KA: I can speak to that with a personal anecdote, a series of happenings when I was interning a long time ago in Moscow as part of my Russian language training. I grew up in America and I went there as an American citizen, as a college student. I went in and I was like, I’m American and I’m learning Russian, and people would just look at me, trying to figure out my face. They would probe further, and when I said I’m Armenian, they would be like Ah, okay, and suddenly the relationship would change. On the one hand, it was warmer and closer—but the other side of the coin was that I felt like a little sister. The hierarchy was evident, whereas before, as an American, I was equal—either misunderstood or just weird. As soon as I was Armenian, all of my American-ness just melted away.
I was a student, I was all these things. But in Russia, they never let you forget your national roots. It’s partly because these primordial ideas about ethnicity are so—because I’m Armenian, I’m this or that; I grew up like this and have these ideas about how to act because I’m Armenian. It’s this natural thing.
A: I want to be clear what we’re talking about when we talk about Navalny’s history of racism. He called Georgians “rodents;” he called for the deportation of Muslim migrant workers; he spoke at Russian marches that brought together Russian nationalists, far-right nationalists, white supremacists, even neo-Nazis—and this was in the late 2000s. It wasn’t in the heyday of skinheads and neo-Nazis in Russia, but it wasn’t long after it. The history is pretty severe.
But I wanted to address some of the narratives that have arisen about him. I see two very opposing narratives. One is being presented in the European parliament and the American news: this was a hero to the Russian people, someone who stood in principled opposition against Putin, and who was murdered in cold blood. The other narrative is that he’s a violent white supremacist, a fascist, a nationalist, and I’m not sorry he’s dead! This I see primarily from a lot of the left. This isn’t to say this is a majority opinion held on the left—god knows how you would even poll that. But it is a narrative that has arisen, and there’s not a lot of dialogue about it, even if not everyone is participating in it. I do see some people saying, I’m on the Russian left (or, I’m on the Ukrainian left) and I supported Navalny.
But there isn’t a strong narrative that is “in between” these two—that’s not how I want to say it, because it’s not about finding a middle ground at all. It’s just about reconciling very real realities about this person. The conclusion that I came to was that half the people are overestimating his politics, and the other half are underestimating his importance. To me, it brings up the broader question of what role neoliberal or liberal opposition leaders play for the left. In what context can they even play a role? That was the framing that I walked into this with.
I also want to be clear that Navalny was very clearly a liberal or neoliberal figure. His primary battle was against corruption, and when he talked about migration or immigration, his solution was to standardize a system in the style of European countries, to be able to manage it with a visa program. When you’re familiar with migration and immigration, you’re like, That doesn’t help a ton; it creates a standardized program to institutionalize abuse, in a lot of instances. But is it better than the Russian system, which is also extremely exploitative of central Asian workers, leaving them without any rights? And not just central Asian workers: Armenian workers, Georgian workers—there are a lot of migrant workers into Russia, and they’re all left without any status and without any rights. They’re exploited in pretty severe ways.
These are all questions that I’ve been trying to grapple with in my own head and that we’ve been talking about for years.
KA: What both of you just said goes into my thinking when I was reading about Navalny to refresh my knowledge. On the one hand, he was an activist; on the other, he was a politician. While these two roles kind of overlap, the expectation that he more effectively embodied social-justicey anti-imperialist aspirations and goals completely neglected how he saw himself as a political leader. Yes, he was an activist, but he was also trying to get elected, and that means that he was not likely to be anti-imperialist.
Obviously his contributions to the Russian opposition and Russian movement building are significant, and even within the Russian marches that he would attend in the Russian nationalist movement—as Anna explained, this was a movement that had its heyday in the late 2000s but started becoming more mainstream. When Putin came back to power after Medvedev, in late 2011-2012, the protests that it sparked across the country were diverse. It was Russian marches, but it was also environmental activists, it was also ethno-nationalist movements in the regions, before things crystallized and people realized: If Navalny is going to be the leader of this anti-Putin movement (which at the time he wasn’t; he was just one of the prominent guys), we can’t get behind this.
I was doing my fieldwork in the north Caucasus at the time, and there were so many non-ethnic-Russians, in this case Muslims, telling me they were tired of Putin and his politics, and they were really waiting for somebody to come along—and they just couldn’t get behind Navalny because of his racism. You could see this lost opportunity. Whereas Navalny probably saw it in a different way: he was just trying to appeal to the mainstream.
He stopped attending the Russian marches in 2011 or 2012, though he didn’t condemn it—he actually said he supported the Russian march, and Good for them, I hope it’s good, I’m just not going to join. The explanation he used was: I’m trying to get elected. At that point he had come in second for Moscow mayor, and he was saying because of that electoral success, he felt like he still needed to appeal to the broadest possible segment of Russian society, and that he had this responsibility, with that success, to eschew that explicit association with the nationalist movement.
DV: Both of you raise one crucial skill, especially in navigating Eurasia or any complex context: can we have the capacity to hold multiple things at once? Can we understand that confronting the intense authoritarianism of Putinism takes an enormous amount of courage and skill? Navalny is one of the most talented populist communicators I’ve ever seen—it’s hard to understand for non-Russian-speakers, but he was someone with a level of charisma, and an ability to pierce through. The landscape of media conversation in Russia is so different to other media landscapes—it takes a lot of skill to pierce through the nonsense. This is someone who had a remarkable ability and had a level of courage that many other people did not.
And at the same time he represented a politics that was highly exclusionary and highly racist. What I find most interesting in the conversation on Navalny after his assassination is that some of the people who are most excluded from the conversation, mainly leaders from minorities within the Russian federation, from Indigenous communities, actually said: We salute this person as someone who struggled against the regime, but our condemnation is one of naiveté. We know this is an empire. We know you’re facing an empire. Join with us. If you would have joined with us more…
If anything, this naiveté is the same naiveté that Indigenous movements have criticized in the Belorussian protests, for example: that liberal politics can’t dismantle an empire. I’ve seen some of the most nuanced, interesting, and complex perspectives on Navalny come from the communities he most alienated. They very much saw his bravery, and saw in his bravery the bravery of their own struggle, their own people. And yet they saw also that the model of communication and expression that Navalny used wasn’t enough.
If anything, I honor his bravery (and we can talk more about what that bravery means; it was also quite a macho, patriarchal bravery), but the naiveté was real as well, the assumption that through anti-corruption communication, through bravery alone, that would be enough to push people into taking up the kind of liberal civil disobedience that would push this regime over the edge—that hasn’t really proven true.
Who knows what time will say. But I’m curious on how we can cultivate holding multiple truths at once and not just jump into this anti-imperialism-of-idiots spiel that I’ve seen so many of the Kremlin/RT-funded outlets say: that “a Russian racist politician has died.” To me, that’s such a disservice to so many activists from different minorities who joined the Navalny movement from the perspective that it was the best thing in town. I don’t want to put them all into one category, if that makes sense.
A: People don’t always conceptualize the way activism can manifest under a regime as oppressive and violent against its own people as the Putin regime. That’s not to say there isn’t oppression—I’ve seen very clearly, for example, the ways the US government is oppressive against people speaking out against it, especially in the past several months after the genocide in Palestine started. But that being said, coming out in protest in Russia won’t just get you beaten by cops, it could get you killed. This has been shown very clearly for a long time. It’s a different paradigm.
For people to choose to go and protest, the level of risk is inherently very high. If you’re an activist in this space, every action you take, you’re putting life and limb on the line; the calculations you make are going to be different. You might say, I fucking hate this guy, but he’s gathering a movement, and there’s inertia, and for that, my risk is worth it. I’ve never had to make a calculation like that. I see with my own eyes: as you were saying, Daniel, a lot of minority groups in Russia, and a lot of people from those minorities, supported Navalny.
I see it in my own community too: Navalny News is on all the time among Armenians and a lot of former Soviet people who I interact with. That’s something they consume a lot; it’s where they get their information about the war on Ukraine. The network that he built is incredibly powerful. Honestly, some day we should do an episode about the broader sprawling network of activists, commentators, and smaller local political leaders that Navalny TV and his broad network created.
But I still find myself struggling with it. Maybe this is touching fire, but I’m also coming from the perspective of the 2018 revolution in Armenia, which bore out a lot of destruction in some ways. I remember speaking to friends and leftists in Armenia who understood that this was not a leftwing movement, but it was one of their first opportunities to be heard en masse about the repression they were facing in their country. I also see now the results of that revolution, which include an expanded police state, for example. To me, it really is an open question, what role genuine liberal opposition leaders have for leftist movements.
The thing I think everyone has to acknowledge is this was a genuine opposition movement. It wasn’t folded into a state apparatus; it was not convenient for Putin or his government. It wasn’t convenient for Russian empire either. Should Navalny’s movement have been able to gain power, it would cause genuine disruption to the Russian regime. That is obviously clear. But that being said, in causing genuine disruption to the Russian regime, I ask: what would have been disrupted? And what is the movement that he has now left behind?
I was listening to Yulia Navalnaya’s speech in the European parliament. The first speech she gave after her husband was murdered—Karena and I were both blown away. It was incredibly emotional, incredibly strong. It’s impossible not to empathize and sympathize with this woman and see her strength. But in the speech she gave in the European parliament, she said something very interesting: My husband understood that Putin is a gangster, he has a criminal gang. To me, hearing the language of criminality used, and not the language of politics (she was saying, This is not a politician, this is a criminal), is accurate to how Navalny saw Putin. And I know for a fact that many people agree with that. But to me, that indicates this idea that We are all in the law, and this is an outlaw. If feels like the anger is at the de-institutionalization, at the haphazard way the Russian state kills. It’s at the lack of institutions versus the violence and the murder itself.
I do think a lack of institutionalization does increase violence, often, that’s true. But it’s very disorienting. The other thing she said was that We need your support from the European parliament, and the way you deal with a criminal gang is you root out its co-conspirators in your countries. And I immediately thought of Nancy Pelosi, who called pro-Palestinian protesters “Russian agents.” Because on the one hand, there are Russian activists screaming this was their one shot; they believed in this man and this movement because they’re tired of this fundamentally imperialist state; but on the other hand there is also Western imperialism, which is ready to fold this movement into its own goals.
Honestly, figuring out how to be in opposition to that is fucking insane. I really resent people who treat it like it’s simple, because I’m finding it genuinely difficult.
KA: What you just said is so interesting, Anna. I just realized as you were speaking, a lot of the tactics Navalny used were emblematic of the Russian liberal elite opposition, and I found that a lot of movements, even in the regions, took that and borrowed it because that was the conceptual framework that everyone was operating under. I wonder to what extent that is conditioned by this non-democratic context and the lack of formal channels for dissent. Even when you look at social movement literature about mobilization, there are certain conditions required in order for movements to be able to mobilize. One of them is a free media, and the other one is lack of state repression. This just wasn’t true in Russia.
What he was doing was this classic, standard Russian protest tactic. He would do things through the formal political system, like lawsuits against prisons. I think he thought he was subverting the system, holding a mirror to the system to show how contradictory it is. For example, he sued the penal colony he was in for not being allowed books. He makes these formal appeals fully knowing the judge is not going to rule in his favor. But he does it as this protest tactic, to lay bare the system’s indiscriminate cruelty—not just to Russians, his audience, but also to the system itself, holding that mirror.
When he was suing the penal colony, his court speech—that was performance. That was his protest speech. But again, he does it from within the system’s framework. I just want to briefly go through this speech. He recounts how a priest visited him in his cell and gifted him a book on divine law. The priest tells him, Alexei, it’s pointless to read the bible without reading divine law. Please, read them together. But due to new rules in the penal colony he was only allowed to have one book. So he points out how unusual this is, given that historically, more books were allowed, even during the Soviet era. He mentioned Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky (who he was writing letters to while he was in prison): That guy was permitted five books!
He makes a really well-founded argument about an absurd rule about not being allowed books, and then turns it into a broader argument about how that rule was in place to discourage the study of Islam. It’s this Islamophobic rule—and he was right about that.
A: Which is wild, because his past on Islam was insane.
KA: It was horrible. And without going into it, but maybe for audience members who aren’t aware: Russia waged an imperialist “war against terror” of its own for over a decade starting in the 1990s in the north Caucasus, against Chechnya in particular.
But Navalny makes the argument that this rule affects Christians like him, and it was infringing on his rights to practice his religion in prison. It’s uncommon, probably, to witness such revelations, where the fundamental contradictions in logic of this cruel, stark state system, and the utter senselessness of the penitentiary system in particular, are laid bare by arguably the second most powerful politician in the country.
A: I wonder if the Navalny who came out of incarceration would have been politically the same as the one who entered incarceration. Probably not.
But you were saying about tactics—I read a book which documents a conversation between Navalny and a Polish dissident named [Adam] Michnik. It talks about some of his tactics and the framework they fall into. I’m so glad you brought this up.
In 2007, he began to buy small numbers of shares in large state companies, and to turn up at their annual meetings and ask embarrassing questions. In a widely-read blog, he exposed the corrupt activities of the regime’s insiders, and heaped ridicule on the Kremlin’s explanations. Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation soon became a kind of incubator for online civic activism projects. One site enables Russians to quickly and painlessly demand road repairs. All the user has to do is print out and mail the forms.
So his goal, as he said, was to make it easy for everyone to spend fifteen minutes a day struggling against the regime. This is interesting, because there’s something perfectly American about that. He was modeling after Amnesty International. And there’s a lot about capital in there. But at the same time, this fell into a form of dissidence that rose in Czechoslovakia, the philosophy of the playwright Václav Havel, who wrote “The Power of the Powerless.”
The main idea behind “living within the truth,” in Havel’s phrase, and “living in dignity,” in [Polish dissident Leszek] Kołakowski’s, was to behave as if one were in a free country. The goal was to create a free public sphere to substitute for the one controlled by the authorities. Instead of complaining about censorship, citizens should publish their own books and newspapers. Rather than accept historical distortions, they should write and teach their own history. And unlike the spiritual movements of the past, they should do all this openly and, where possible, invite their police handlers to the conversation.
It’s very Soviet. It makes sense in the context of what the Soviet Union looked like, how to struggle against the kind of repression faced there. I wonder if that legacy of struggling against Soviet repression has hindered the ability of Russians and people living in other former Soviet states to organize opposition. Because you’re used to opposing a specific kind of regime—to me, states now look very different. I wonder if the same use exists.
KA: At least in terms of tactics—from 2012, there was a lot of innovation in tactics. There was a lot of performative stuff (maybe not in content, just in terms of style) like fake funerals. I think one of the main things that changed was the use of the internet. In 2011-2012, the burgeoning mass anti-Putin protest activity across Russia was due in large part to the fact that these activists and movements had figured out how to use the internet to reach broader audiences and gain support: Hey, this thing is happening; join us on Saturday at 3pm at the main square, and people would show up. It was a really interesting window that soon closed, when the Russian state started getting smart to those tactics and started using the internet for its own state repression, for surveillance or co-optation. This, in a sad way, ultimately ended with where we are now, with Navalny being dead, and this sense of despair.
I had an interesting conversation with someone, talking about the difference between when Navalny was killed versus when Boris Nemtsov (who was maybe number two in terms of prominence) was killed years ago [in 2015], quite provocatively, right outside the Kremlin walls. Back then it seemed like a potential trigger for something bigger: This could trigger something big; there’s going to be change here and it could be good. It ended up not being good. Whereas Navalny’s death is kind of a nail in the coffin. There’s no window here that I see. That’s my non-optimistic take on things.
I wanted to ask Daniel—earlier you said something about the political maturation that people talk about when they talk about Navalny’s journey as a political figure. You said you were skeptical of that. The speech that he gave in court about the books and the Quran, almost defending Muslims, as Anna said—would he have said that if he weren’t in prison? That’s kind of the question—I’m wondering what your take is on this positive look on him, on his self-reflection, his looking at his tactics and apologizing for some of his racist statements in the past (maybe not all of them). How do you see that?
DV: It’s a really good question. Look, I can only speak from where I stand. Not being in Russia right now, it’s a stance of privilege. I am interested in politics because I believe in transformation, and I believe that people, all people, have the capacity to transform. I don’t think anyone is born a Russian imperialist nationalist. You’re born into a society, a family that normalizes that. When I see that someone, towards the end of their life, before their assassination, was defending the rights of Muslim political prisoners, to me, it’s not just symbolic. Smarter people than me, people like Masha Gessen for example, have looked at him; his nationalism did change, and moved away from a much more ethnic nationalism towards a more civic nationalism.
With all the critiques of Navalny, the intense xenophobia softened in the discourse and in the organizing—and in fact I would say that some of the bigger criticisms you can make towards the later Navalny is that there wasn’t enough of a vision. When it comes down to it—I recently heard Omar Barghouti, the Palestinian activist, reflect on despair as the colonization of the future. And in Russia the sense of despair, the way the future has been so intensely colonized by the Putinist regime—Navalny was one of the few people who allowed people to think there was another kind of future.
I’m not going to say Navalny is some kind of decolonizer. But in a context as brutal as Russia, we have to be very sanguine sometimes about who is actually shaping people’s capacity to even acknowledge that the limits of the possible are there to be moved. In a state where the government relies upon people’s forced complete paralysis and complete desire to do nothing, and seeing that so many people, especially in Russia’s most peripheral regions, especially given that we need Russians to shake the system up, for the benefit of Ukrainians, and Syrians, and all those affected by Russian imperialism—
I’m not sure what he would have been like outside of prison, it’s a very hard question to answer. But I’m sure that a Navalny who was more plugged in to the narratives of organizers on the ground, for example now in Bashkortostan (if any place is shaking things up in Russia it’s Bashkortostan)—what could it have looked like, a Navalny radicalized by a penitentiary experience, in touch with the brutality of what that system has looked like? Since the tsarist era, the Russian penitentiary system has been the weapon of silencing all dissident voices. Seeing the latest liberal hope being extinguished in a prison in Siberia, in the Arctic—it’s so familiar to anyone familiar with radical revolutionary movements from across the Russian empire, from even before the Soviet era.
So I’m not sure. I want us to always be in touch with hope, because despair, once again, is the colonization of hope. And there is a parallel universe in which lessons are learned, and the liberal Russian movement becomes more playful in its repertoire of tactics. I don’t want to tap into a narrative where it was all hopeless from the start. I want us to imagine: in honoring the best parts of the memory of Navalny and Navalnism, what could it have looked like? And is there anything about that question that can help us in the now?
In a time when the Russian empire marches on, and the situation in Ukraine looks horrifically grim, and the situation in Armenia also looks horrifically grim, what is it that we can learn at this moment? Is there anything worth keeping from Navalnism that we want to keep the fire alive of, the deep, deep lessons from other territories that are frequently not listened to, but actively ignored, by the Russian intelligentsia and the Russian liberal circuits?
That’s a question I’m curious on from both of you.
A: Daniel, that’s brilliant.
KA: I’m just humbled into silence right now, just chewing on what you said and the question you posed.
A: From that same book documenting that conversation I was mentioning, there’s a section where Navalny talks about nationalism and imperialism. He says something I think is interesting. Daniel, you said you wouldn’t describe Navalny as some kind of decolonizer, although he is providing a space in which people can imagine a different future. I think you’re right; that’s enormously important and powerful. You said you wouldn’t describe him as a colonizer; I certainly wouldn’t, and I’m not even sure I’d describe him as an anti-imperialist. But I think he would describe himself as an anti-imperialist. Because he says:
Imperialist nationalism is the most toxic and dangerous of all the varieties of nationalism. It has to be combated. We have to understand there cannot be a vacuum; everywhere you go, there will be a conservative national-oriented segment of the population, and these people need to be provided with an alternative project: a civic nationalism predicated not on physiology or a sense of national superiority, but on universal civil rights and freedoms, and the potential to determine the fate of our country together. This is a real possibility. I’ve invested a lot of effort into this, and hope to re-establish some kind of dialog.
KA: Anna, can you tell me when he made that statement? That’ll help me understand it.
A: Yes. It was written in 2015.
KA: Interesting.
A: He talks a bit about his image as a nationalist, and how he’d shot himself in the foot because people see him as a nationalist, and the actual nationalists don’t actually care. To me, it became clear that he had some internal sense of anti-imperialism when he stood very clearly against the war in Ukraine. That was something I didn’t fully expect from the Russian opposition, I’ll be honest. I was quite pessimistic. I did not expect the kind of mobilization against this war that was evident.
That being said, I don’t think he’s actually positing a vision that I would consider anti-imperialist, because I don’t think he realizes the full scope of empire, period, but specifically of Russian empire. He talks at length about introducing a visa regime for central Asian migrants, and he says this is to ensure their rights, because if someone were required to have medical insurance, they’d be able to go get treatment for work injuries. That’s totally true—but he also says, I think we should learn from the civilized nations of the world how this is done.
You see the blind spot, and the goal, all in one. Yes, migrant workers need to have explicit protections written into law that protect their ability to seek medical care, be able to find housing, not be discriminated against in housing, have their salaries and their paychecks protected and their identities protected, and all these things. But the visa regime itself is the process that excludes people. It’s the other protections that give them abilities to do these things.
I think frequently about how much the Soviet Union’s legacy of socialism poisons socialism for opposition, forever. Hopefully not forever. But it poisons the idea of being decolonial, anti-empire. These are words that were weaponized by an imperial state; they talked so much about “being in solidarity against empire.” For people living in Armenia, Georgia, we’re kind of like, What the fuck?
I wonder—like you said, he is a politician. He had goals of getting elected, of gathering coalitions and all of these things. But where does that leave the left? Where does that leave us in organizing, and how to organize around him? Is he right? Is this calculation that he’s made right, that you can’t be a leftwing activist in Russian spaces or in post-Soviet spaces, because of the history of the Soviet Union? Is it just impossible to gather a coalition like that? If we’re going to engage in this project he left us, the ability to imagine a future, I wonder how we can preserve leftism for the former Soviet Union. How can we preserve it in a truly principled way, in a way that can actually push it forward?
KA: Especially since the war in Ukraine, decolonial discourse has really taken off in this space, particularly in central Asia. Anna and I have a podcast episode about that. I wonder, if Navalny wasn’t imprisoned again—thinking about the what ifs is kind of a pointless exercise, but sometimes I wonder, because you clearly see his limitations in contradictory statements. That is, he wants to be the good guy, he wants to say the good thing, but you see the limitations in his framework, in his worldview. He’s like, almost there. He’s so close, but he’s not quite getting there.
In other cases, I’ve found that even in statements made close together, the sentiment doesn’t match the immediate thing he’s saying. It’s almost like he can’t figure it out, and you’re watching him struggle with it. Just as an example, in 2014, just after the annexation of Crimea, he gave an interview and was asked to whom that region belonged. He responded:
Crimea belongs to the people who live in Crimea. The peninsula was seized in blatant violation of all international norms, but it is now part of Russia and will remain so. It will never become part of Ukraine again. Is Crimea a sandwich with sausage to be passed back and forth?
The avoiding, the trying to placate and please as many people as possible, while at the same time not saying the thing!
He also frequently deployed the notion of Russkiy mir, “Russian world,” which is a key component of Putin’s foreign policy. And he wasn’t critical of it at all. For our listeners, the “Russian world” concept represents this broad area of Russian political, military, economic, and cultural influence, mainly within the former Russian empire and the Soviet Union territories. It’s based on the Russian Orthodox faith, Slavic roots, Russian language as a unifying factor. And in 2018 he criticized Putin for allowing Ukraine to create its own autocephalous church, and he called him the “enemy of the Russian world.” So it’s not that imperialist policy is what was wrong, it was the way that Putin didn’t wield it in an effective manner, that’s what was disappointing!
Going back to your broader question about where this leaves leftist discourse, thought, and movement-building in this post-Communist, post-socialist space that let so many people down—I see it in the obstacles of the structural movement-building: the way people relate to one another, the institutions that exist that you have to navigate. It just seems like the obstacles are so many.
A: I wonder if instead of being left with the limitations of Navalny’s politics, it makes sense, like Daniel said, take from him the fact that opposition exists, discomfort exists, possibility exists, but remember that the organizing and maybe even the political awakening that needs to happen, hasn’t happened yet. I think about this frequently, when I think about how many Russian dissidents went to Israel to escape Russia’s imperialist war in Ukraine, and how vapid and empty that is, and how it’s still predicated on a civilized-world-versus-uncivilized-world sense of things.
Maybe it’s showing us where the awakenings haven’t happened yet. But I also think of all the Russian emigrés and immigrants in Armenia, and I start to think of the people who have stayed, and how I’ve observed their politics change, or become a little more awakened to the actual detailed and nuanced realities of Russian imperialism in surrounding areas (and also in parts of the state of Russia). And I wonder if real organizing that needs to happen is in looking at the groups who were activated by Navalny’s activism, but not satisfied by it.
DV: That’s a really interesting approach. In the long term, I’m really curious how the experience of exile for a lot of Russian emigrés, especially in contexts like Armenia—I’ve also heard some really bad stories, of people bringing that imperialist attitude. You all know much better than me about it. I’ve heard about terrible things in Georgia. But I’m also hopeful. First of all, we are commanded to be hopeful. One source, to me, of immense despair and hope at the same time is reading testimonies of some of my political heroes resisting the Russian empire 130 years ago, feeling like I’m reading the same thing right now. So much hasn’t changed, but so much is possible, and things collapse in all sorts of moments and in ways that we can never predict.
When I think of Navalny, what I stay with is that this person had an incredible gift for being a populist, which is a loaded word, but when I look at how he communicated—the brazenness! Navalny is a shareholder activist: bought some shares, looked into the accounting reports of companies like Transneft and Rosneft, and drove a truck through them, because they were so sloppy.
A: He cut off his own ankle monitor and just went walking around Russia! Literally took a photo of it and went walking around Russia until his police handlers just gave up.
DV: The chutzpah, in the best sense. The FBK [Anti-Corruption Foundation] people just bought some drones and flew the drones over the houses of—! Also, the level of corruption that we’re working with in the Russian empire is not some low-key somebody-took-some-money-under-the-table. We’re talking about people buying the most obscene, ridiculous levels of luxury when an entire public health system is collapsing, when people are spending money invading Ukraine and completely ignoring these populations.
The big mistake of Russian liberals is what you were hinting at: this turn to “civilized Europe.” It’s a mistake I’m hearing on the Ukrainian left as well. The model is Europe, or Israel. This idea that there’s a civilization, and we’re living in barbarism. In fact, I think the hope, if anywhere, lies in the diasporas, in the regions, in the minorities who know what it is like to resist empire, and have for centuries. It’s not just the Russian Federation, it’s not just the Soviet regime. It’s a storied legacy especially from Indigenous communities, from diasporas, and survivors of genocide from the Russian empire. What does it mean to endure this for centuries? There are practices there that the Russian opposition have rarely tapped into, because of this Eurocentrism.
I think if we’re able to take the best of Navalny’s populist communication tactics and braid it together with some of the really fascinating conversations on decolonizing the Russian empire that are taking place in Armenia and Georgia and Kazakhstan and so many places—what does that do for us? Could something be there? I don’t want to be naive, because that’s repeating the mistake of Navalny. But could we look at other ways?
You two in Obscuristan have already looked at other ways, and I’m curious if we can keep on doing that.
KA: Many of us non-Russian people who are from or have ties to Russia and the region have a skepticism towards Russian liberals. In a broader sense, the liberals of former empires often struggle to shed those chauvinistic attitudes, whether they’re ethnic or religious, towards neighboring countries. This is the case in the Middle East, where the liberals of many countries abandon their self-professed values to justify ethnic cleansing and dehumanization of often Arab Muslim peoples, like in Palestine.
This raises important questions, and having that liberalism out there, having those elites out there doesn’t give us any reassurance—to us, to the peripheral nations, to the minorities and similar groups—because it inherently lacks humanizing characteristics: it fails to offer solidarity, it overlooks our lived experiences, and it falls short of corrective measures against the mass violence that we see being perpetrated by their states, whether it’s Russia or Israel or Azerbaijan. The need for alternatives becomes evident.
Especially with the war in Ukraine, I feel that a door has been opened to start talking about this stuff. One of the interesting things that I find in central Asia, because the Russian language has been so dominant there (which is not the case in Armenia, for example), is how much of this stuff is being done in non-Russian languages. It’s funny, because Russian, being the unifying language as a result of these imperial policies, was a way for us to talk to one another. But it somehow wasn’t happening horizontally, it was always through the Russian lens. I hope that might be something we change, whether through discovering or learning or centering our national languages more, or speaking another language.
There’s a critique of using English as an alternative, because it’s also potentially problematic and colonizing in and of itself. But in this context, practically speaking, that world isn’t what has colonized us in the past and has subjected people to violence. I think about these things and think about how we can foster these conversations across these divides in more ways, different ways.
A: I’m ambivalent about the speaking or not-speaking of Russian. My guiding principle is, How can I be most annoying in this situation? But something that has been powerful for me has been hearing and speaking Russian in decolonial contexts, actually, because that is not a context in which I’d ever heard Russian in my entire life. If I was speaking Russian, it was usually, almost always, with somebody who thought they were better than me—or it was with my family, with whom it was Russian/Armenian (I almost see our family’s Russian as separate from Russian altogether, sometimes).
But now I’m getting to speak Russian in contexts that are not like that, that are explicitly decolonial. Starting to try and find anti-imperialist voices in Russian, and hearing them, has been really nice for me, I really enjoy it. I’m glad to have a language which I can speak to people from Kazakhstan in. I’m glad to have a language which I can speak with Georgians in. There’s a lot of work to be done to create solidarity not through the Russian lens, but whatever connection I have to Tatar people, Kazakh people, I’m taking it. I’m really grateful to be able to do that.
Daniel, I keep thinking about what you said about the creation of a space in which you can hope. The thing I kept asking myself was why I was so affected by Navalny’s murder, in a way that I don’t think I would have been had a Democrat in the US died, for example. Even if they were murdered, I’m not sure I would be quite as affected by it. And I realized (I think you made me realize): it was because the particular manifestation of repression in Russia, its primary focus, is taking away the ability to think of alternatives or alternative futures.
In the US, the focus is slightly different, in that it’s just a limitation of the alternative futures instead. In Russia, there’s a real hard hammering on the Nah, you’ve got one future and this is it. That removal of choice, as opposed to the illusion of choice, creates a depression of imagination that’s really hard to snap out of. I think that’s why 2018 in Armenia was so powerful for people, and why the disappointment was so deep. It’s because we were given permission to think beyond, and to feel that taken away is really horrific. So maybe his death—it feels like that’s been taken away.
But Daniel is right. We can use whatever we have learned from the success of his ability to rally support, but apply to it our own politics, our own goals and our own vision for what this region is going to look like. Our vision for our region beyond Russia. Because something Karena and I have been discovering as we talk about Obscuristan is that, talking from an Armenian perspective, we reach into Russia, or reach towards Russia, as often as we reach towards the Middle East or as often as we reach towards Anatolia. The Russian world cut off so many people from their broad, far-reaching histories. So Navalny may have seen his movement as in the Russian world, but I’m beginning to realize it’s beyond it.
Obviously it’s global—I don’t want to be cliché. But there are specific connections that were not being tapped into that we’re starting to now. We can use what we’ve learned, but move beyond it, too.
DV: I love that so much, and also it’s why I love this conversation. Because inter-diasporic conversations mean that borders lose their power. When we’re talking about Navalny, we’re talking about who the people are breaking through forces of authoritarianism, anywhere in the world. Diasporas allow you to think in multi-rootedness all the time. To me, this is why this is like being with family. I really appreciate that.
A: I’m so glad you said that, because we shit on diasporas so much! It’s nice to see them as a place for something better.
KA: Amazing.
DV: To me it’s the only hope, really. How do you crumble the Russian empire? I have no idea. People have been struggling with this question. But if there’s any hope, it’s the fact that people have been migrating and smuggling and getting ideas out and sharing links across communities. Different diasporas and different nations inside the famous “graveyard of nations” have been with each others’ backs all the time.
I’m not going to romanticize diasporas. There are all sorts of things going on. But for every story of betrayal there are stories of salvation, of different people saving each other along the way. The activists in my diasporic tradition who I value the most are the ones who say, I am with the Bashkir people, I’m with the Armenian people, in imagining a future beyond imperialism, building, as Masha Gessen says, the Birobidzhan in my mind. Birobidzhan is a famous Jewish autonomous oblast—the Soviet Union wanted to put Jews in Siberia—instead of imagining this as a territorial place, what is the Birobidzhan in my mind?
I think about the Soviet Union of my dreams—the real Soviet Union, not the nonsense that was real. The Soviet Union where peoples were united and supportive of each others’ liberation—I dream about that sometimes, and I’m curious what it looks like. And it doesn’t involve a state, it involves a way of being. If the Russian language helps us get there, then it’s useful. If the Russian language becomes a machine of colonization as it has been, then it’s useless.
But to me, when I think of what Eurasia is in the best sense, the thing that brings me together is humor. There’s a Russian-language comedy night in Barcelona which is the most surreal experience: it’s a mixture of Ukrainians, Armenians, Georgians, and wealthy Russian emigrés who just cropped up from Dubai. It’s a space where Ukrainians can make fun of Russians, in Russian, in their face, and the Armenians can make fun of Ukrainians, and the Russian Jewish comedian can go up and start talking about what it’s like to be a Russian Jew, and we all laugh and we realize that we have far more in common than is being taught in any nonsense nationalist textbook—that’s the utopian diasporic liquid nation that I want to be part of.
That’s the hope. That’s my hope, at least.
KA: That’s amazing and beautiful, and I can’t think of a better way to conclude this episode.
A: I was not expecting this one to end up being hopeful, actually.
KA: And heartwarming and cozy, somehow.
A: Thank you, everybody, for listening.
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