February 16, 2024

Less than a week after Russian President Vladimir Putin put on an intelligent, reasonable, face for visiting American journalist Tucker Carlson, the bloodsoaked visage of a Russian boyar or vozhd appeared, with a report from Russian officials that top dissident Alexei Navalny was dead in an Arctic prison.

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According to the Associated Press:

Alexei Navalny, the fiercest foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin who crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests, died in prison Friday, Russian authorities said.

Dissidents said they didn’t believe it because nothing the Russian government says is to be believed.

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But it doesn’t help the Russian government any to report this, given the global condemnation that has followed. Joe Biden, for one, vowed “devastating consequences” for Putin in 2021 were Navalny to die in prison.

For a lot of us, there was faint hope that Navalny’s high profile would keep him alive, somehow, despite the terrible conditions he was enduring in the GULag-like prison camp 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle in the dreaded Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, which one of the world’s coldest places.

It didn’t.

That he did die is almost unprecedented.

Not even the Soviets killed off Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn when he was the biggest thorn in their side, winning the Nobel prize for literature for his mighty GULag Archipelago as well as the rest of the body of his work.

Up until now, modern dictators have always kept the “big” dissident alive if in horrific prison conditions. They killed the little dissidents, but not the really big ones.