Navalny’s death was grimly predictable

It wasn’t enough that Russian courts had convicted dissident politician Alexei Navalny on bogus corruption charges, sentenced him to 19 years in jail and sent him to a penal colony 1,200 miles from Moscow near the Arctic Circle where he recently mysteriously died.

Or that government agents tried to poison him with a nerve agent known as Novichok in 2020. Now, the authorities are tormenting his mother, 69-year-old Lyudmila Navalnaya, by not allowing her to see and retrieve his body.

The ongoing display of state cruelty under Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a sudden eye-opener. Rather, given the history of Putin’s 30 years of political dominance, Navalny’s death was almost to be expected.

“It’s shocking but it is not surprising,” flatly remarked Maria Popova, a political science professor and expert in Russian politics at McGill University, during a television interview.

The events showed that Putin’s authoritarian regime is, even while it has made inconclusive war on Ukraine and faces hostility from European neighbors and the United States, self-assured enough not to hide domestic atrocities.

“He is confident he is firmly in power,” Popova said of the Russian leader. “If he was afraid of instability, he would try to make sure that Navalny would remain well and in prison.”

The sense of shock may simply come from the suddenness of Navalny’s still-unexplained death— hospital officials are calling it a result of “sudden death syndrome,” a term used in Russia when the authorities are unsure how to frame a controversial death.

Conversely, the lack of surprise reflects a kind of resignation – a knowledge that, after all, Russians have seen this picture before.

Bloody examples run a century from Lenin’s order to kill