no more hope
"Putin has won."
When I was 12, my father came home one day and said, “I met this guy today. A very interesting fella. He wants to become the mayor of Moscow. His name is Alexey Navalny.”
Around the same time and a little earlier, I remember watching protests on familiar streets of my birth city. Roughly 150,000 people went to the streets, and this “very interesting fella” was one of the leaders of the demonstrations. Famous artists, poets, writers, and musicians went on stage to chant “Freedom to Russia!” and demand fair elections – not the “ritual” Putin’s party is conducting once every four and, for the last two times, every six years.
Then came 2014, with its own problems – the illegal annexation of Crimea, the war in Syria, a revolution in Ukraine, and the war in Donbas. And during all of this, I had no idea what was happening.
I was in the midst of it all, living in Moscow, studying at one of the best schools in the centre of the city, and I had no clue that I was witnessing history. I was never told that. The school system and propaganda machine did everything to make it seem like life kept going as it always had been. The “problems” were elsewhere. In Crimea. Ukraine. Syria.
Slowly, as I grew older, I began doing my teenage share of spreading pamphlets and putting bumper stickers with Navalny's name on them on my father’s car. (Writing this now amazes me – it was ten years ago, and it was a time when you didn’t end up in jail for a Navalny sticker. How fast things change.)
On a few occasions, I ran away from the police – not that they were chasing me, though – and I felt proud. I was a Democrat. I cared for my country. I was doing something.
Following Navalny’s work, I felt unity with people of the same passport. It was a strange feeling I only experienced in America when we sang the national anthem in the mornings. Supporting Navalny was what hipsters and normal (read: anti-Putin) people did. It was a symbol of adequacy. It gave you a feeling of brotherhood and sisterhood almost unseen in my country.
It gave you hope.
You must understand. Where I come from, the state does everything to prevent you from having that feeling of unity. (Unless it’s directed towards the state’s goals, like war with Ukraine.) Coming together is dangerous. Those 150,000 people who protested in 2011-2013 were nothing compared to the millions in Ukraine in 2014 or Belarus in 2020. But it was enough to overthrow the regime.
And yet, it didn’t happen.
I remember when Navalny was poisoned, I was already living in London. I was watching the news and feeling sorry for Alexey and his family. After all, I knew his daughter Dasha – we weren’t close friends or acquaintances, but we went to the same school (Moscow School 45) and studied in the IB programme. I saw Dasha every week and was happy to know she got accepted into Stanford but was sad to hear what was happening to her father. To me, Alexey was, first and foremost, a man. A husband. A father. He wasn’t that different from the rest of us. Apart from that one thing – he wasn’t afraid.
When Navalny decided to return to Moscow from Germany, where he was hospitalised after being poisoned by Putin’s FSB, despite any advice people gave him, it was clear that he would go to prison. I think it was clear to him, too. He decided to do it anyway. Like his wife, Yulia, said on her husband’s page in a recent video, “He couldn’t not do it.” It was very possible that Alexey’s fate would be to die in prison. Putin never forgives. But sometimes, that’s the job of a revolutionary. History is teeming with examples of sacrifice as the price of freedom.
Navalny’s death last week in prison wasn’t unexpected. And yet, it came as a shock. Of course, it did.
You know your older relatives will die soon. But that doesn’t make their death less tragic or painful. It only helps to rationalise it.
Almost immediately after I heard the news, I stopped what I was doing and went outside to the Russian Embassy, which I knew would be a memorial. In a rare moment of solidarity, I wanted to be amongst other people with my passport. A few hundred Russians living in London got together and put candles for Alexey, saying “Thank you” and “Goodbye, Alexey.”
It felt like a funeral. It was.
Nobody had any doubt – it was Putin’s fault. Sure, there wasn’t official confirmation yet, but at this point, we don’t need any. Putin killed Navalny, and that’s a fact.
People approached the microphone and spoke about their stories and what Alexey meant. To everyone, he was more than just a politician. More than just a candidate for mayor of Moscow or president of Russia. He was a symbol of hope in a place where no hope can be found.
And his death, I realised standing in front of the Russian embassy on that sad evening, was the death of all hope.
On the second day of Navalny’s death, it must have been Saturday or Sunday, a NYT article came out with the headline, “Will Navalny’s Death Galvanize Opposition?”
I didn’t even need to open it and read it. I knew the answer.
It won’t.
My Ukrainian friends always laugh when anyone mentions Navalny. To them, he’s not a real opposition leader. To them, he’s a joke. To them, Russian opposition, in general, is a joke. And I get it. Compared to the Maidan revolution in 2013-2014, anything that happens in Russia is a joke.
Many of Navalny’s supporters might disagree, but look at the numbers. Russia is home to 145M people. The largest protest in the history of new Russia organised a mere 150K people. Belarus, which is ten times smaller, had ten times more people protesting in 2020.
The truth is that Russians are not fearless. We are cowards. We are repressed and fearful and bitter and jealous. That’s in our DNA, culture, and the social structure of our country. That’s the result of decades of killings and tortures and propaganda and mass arrests and repressions, and God knows what else. And I guess that’s one thing that differentiates Russians from Ukrainians and Belarusians. These countries are similar. The culture is similar and has the same roots. But we are very different people with different problems and different psychology.
Navalny was the sliver of hope for the Russian people. Even imprisoned and tortured, he kept being a human being. He kept being someone people looked up to. He was brave, funny, and loving, and he wasn’t afraid to stand up for what he believed in. I have nothing but enormous respect for the man.
But now he’s dead.
And no matter how much the Russian (pretty much non-existent) opposition doesn’t want this to be believed, it changes everything.
Putin has won.
Back in my teenage years, I remember reading a post by an entrepreneur named Tonya Samsonova. She founded Russia’s Quora – The Question, which Yandex later bought. In one of her interviews, she was asked why she decided to leave for London. And her reply stuck with me throughout the years. She might have had a kid already at that time. And she said, “When I was in my twenties, I wanted to change my country, change the world. But as I grew older, I realised that 20 years for a country is not that much. But it’s a lot for me.”
Navalny had dedicated his whole life, his everything, to fighting Putin’s regime. He did more than anyone could, and he was not alone. He had an army of journalists, politicians, and hundreds of thousands of Russians. He had an elaborate social media strategy. He gained more YouTube views on his videos than any other Russian blogger. He sacrificed his life, his well-being, and the peace of his family, and even that wasn’t enough. This isn’t to say that his work was in vain. It just puts things into perspective for those of us who remain living.
When the full-scale war began, I knew I wouldn’t return home anytime soon. But I used to think that one day, I could still go back. It might take five, maybe ten years, but I’d be able to return and at least walk the streets of my home town.
Now, I don’t think that anymore. There’s no more home to go back to anymore.
War with Ukraine and Navalny’s death destroyed all sense of hope for a brighter future. And now I – and other Russians – need to make a choice – dedicate ourselves to fighting incomparably stronger evil or focus on living life.
Yes, this might sound defeatist. It might sound like cowardice. But think about it this way. A bully five times your size walks up to you. You know you won’t take him. If you fight, you will most probably die. If you walk the other way, you will live. There’s a fine line between cowardice and rationality.
I used to hesitate about this subject. Out of pride, patriotic feelings, or a general sense of morality. But now I don’t. I choose life. My life.
I am almost 26 now, I was born in 1998, which means I lived 90% of my life with Putin. If Putin lives to the age of Gorbachev, that means he has 26 more years to go. I may be 52 by the time he dies. And when he dies, it’s not a guarantee that things will get better. Things will probably get much worse before they get better.
Russians abroad today resemble house pets thrown into the wilderness more and more. We used to have a home, but now we don’t. Putin and his cronies have taken home, and they are objectively winning.
So fuck them. Let them rot and steal and kill and suck each other’s dicks until nothing is left.
We’ll build a new home elsewhere. What else is there to do?
As for Alexey Navalny, he was more than a person. He was more than a political figure. And more than an era. He embodied hope for Russia that we never saw and didn’t even know could be possible. Now that hope is dead, along with Alexey.
And quite possibly, it may be the beginning of the end for Russia.
But maybe that’s for the best.
Dear Serge,
I feel the same way about Julian Assange, and he's not even a U.S. citizen. His "crime" of reporting on U.S. war atrocities should be protected by the first amendment to our constitution, but only corporations have protection any more. It's probably no comfort to you that our president is a more barbarous war criminal than Mr. Putin, but the Democrats who prefer him to Trump are shedding tears over Navalny, so you'd get some sympathy here. You would not get health care, decent housing or clean air here, but we citizens don't have that, either. I like your writing, and hope you find some good companionship, on whatever continent you can.