The past few weeks have seen an outpouring of both grief and tributes following the death of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny. And rightfully so. Navalny’s death in a Siberian gulag effectively snuffed out what many viewed as the clearest path to Russia’s eventual democratization.
The past few weeks have seen an outpouring of both grief and tributes following the death of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny. And rightfully so. Navalny’s death in a Siberian gulag effectively snuffed out what many viewed as the clearest path to Russia’s eventual democratization.
No one had fooled themselves that Navalny would, somehow, win Russia’s upcoming election, with President Vladimir Putin’s reelection all but confirmed. But there were plenty, especially in the West, who still viewed Navalny as a figure akin to Nelson Mandela, emerging from a lengthy prison tenure to lead his nation into a bright, democratic future. Now, that dream is dead. And any potential for Russia’s eventual democratization appears even more distant, and even less likely.
But while Russia’s remaining opposition continues to look for new strategies to employ in the wake of Navalny’s death, one clear lesson has hopefully emerged for those in West. It is too risky to place all hopes of a nation’s eventual democratization on a single person.
It’s not just that a singular figure can, as seen with Navalny, be killed. It’s also that for as much bravery as Navalny exhibited—and, to be clear, Navalny illustrated more bravery than most people will ever know—there were clear faults and frailties within his politics. While Navalny arguably proved to be Putin’s most able political opponent, he also shared many of the same revanchist tendencies that propelled Russia into Ukraine in the first place—a reality that far too many in the West preferred to ignore or downplay.
But it is a reality that can no longer be overlooked. After all, if it is Russian nationalism that has unleashed Europe’s most destructive conflict since the Second World War—and pushed the world closer to potential nuclear conflict than anything in decades—then anyone exhibiting these tendencies, as Navalny did for years, must be treated cautiously. And if the clearest lesson to emerge from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is that Western interlocutors need to listen more—far, far more—to warnings and analysis from former Russian colonies, then it’s long past time to listen to what Ukrainians have been saying about Navalny and other leading lights of Russia’s anti-Putin opposition.
All of which points to one clear takeaway from the past few weeks: With Navalny’s death, the time has come for the West to move beyond the idea that some Mandela-type figure will emerge in Russia. Instead of placing its hopes in a singular future leader, the West will be far better served by facing the threats of Russian irredentism head-on, and finally focusing on eliminating Russian nationalism as a political force, once and for all.
Ironically, the West’s willingness to place all hopes on a single, conspicuous figure in Moscow—while turning the other way when that figure’s imperialistic tendencies came to the fore—hardly began with Navalny. Such a phenomenon can be tracked all the way back to the late Soviet Union, when the administrations of both former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush tacked hard toward supporting Mikhail Gorbachev and his domestic reforms.
Of course, Gorbachev’s policy portfolio, including achievements such as glasnost (or “openness,” which referred to increased transparency and the loosening of state censorship), was a sight better than that of any of his predecessors. But when Gorbachev’s forces slaughtered anti-regime protesters in places such as Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Lithuania, the West hardly blinked, embracing Gorbachev ever closer—and blinding the West to the anti-colonial movements emerging across the Soviet Union. Those movements, which the United States actively tried to tamp down, eventually toppled the Soviet empire entirely, catching Washington flat-footed and leaving Gorbachev as a man without a country.
Under the Clinton administration, Washington followed the Soviet collapse by heaving its hopes for Russian democratization onto newly elected President Boris Yeltsin. And understandably so; Yeltsin was, amidst the Soviet rubble, the clear leader of the emerging Russian Federation, and a man who at least gestured rhetorically toward democratic aspirations.
But then, in just his first term, Yeltsin’s authoritarian nationalism roared to the fore. Not only did he shell parliament and implement the super-presidential system that Putin later inherited, but Yeltsin also refused to remove Russian troops from eastern Moldova and oversaw armed interference efforts in northern Georgia—all while he threatened to redraw Russia’s borders with both Ukraine and Kazakhstan if the former colonies didn’t follow Moscow’s writ. And most notoriously, after Chechens voted for independence from Moscow, Yeltsin launched a devastating campaign in 1994 to crush Chechen separatists—an invasion that he and Putin would reprise again toward the end of the decade, leaving hundreds of thousands dead.
All the while, U.S. officials’ criticism of Yeltsin was effectively nonexistent. As one academic analysis of the era summed up, the “Clinton administration saw no alternatives to Yeltsin and was prepared to support him no matter what.”
To be sure, there are yawning differences between Navalny and these predecessors, not least the fact that Navalny never came anywhere close to power. Yet there were unsettling similarities between them, which the West continually played down—but which those in both current and former Russian colonies alike readily recognized.
Navalny, for instance, was a clear Russian nationalist. Not only did he back Moscow’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, describing Georgians as “rodents,” but he also used additional ethnic slurs to describe others from the Caucasus. He further framed himself as someone who would remove “non-White immigrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus by ruthlessly deporting them,” as journalist Terrell Jermaine Starr wrote in 2021.
Most notoriously, Navalny spent years not only refusing to condemn Moscow’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, but then dodging questions about whether Russia should return the Ukrainian region of Crimea to Kyiv’s control. Even if elected president, he said in 2014, he’d still retain Moscow’s control of Crimea. It was only in 2023, nearly a decade after the Kremlin first barreled into Ukraine, that Navalny called for a restoration of Ukraine’s circa-1991 borders.
That shift was, of course, welcome. But the fact that it took a crushing war—one in which the Kremlin has spilled more blood and treasure than anything that Moscow’s been involved in in nearly 80 years—was a testament to how ingrained such revanchist views still are, not only in Navalny but even among his supporters. And the fact that so many in the West willingly overlooked such retrograde views is hardly a testament to Western policymakers’ willingness to wrestle with just how deep Russian nationalism truly runs.
But that was then. With Navalny’s death, an opportunity has opened for the West to finally move beyond the idea that a particular political figure, even amid the Russian opposition, can lead Moscow out of its imperialistic delusions and into a democratic future. It is a tragedy that it’s taken Navalny’s death to open this possibility—but it is a possibility that the West cannot afford to pass by yet again.
Put another way: There is no Russian Mandela coming. And if we continue to refuse to tackle the issues of Russian nationalism head-on—even among those who are opposed to Putin—then we risk seeing even a post-Putin Russia return to imperialistic footing, tossing Europe into catastrophe once more.
Which is why, in this post-Navalny world, the West must focus on snuffing out Russian nationalism, wherever it finds it. This means elevating the insights and advice from former Russian colonies, such as those in Kyiv, even more; after all, it is those former colonies that proved more prescient about Russia than policymakers in places such as Washington or Berlin ever were.
This means recognizing Russian irredentism as a phenomenon that extends far beyond even Putin’s base, and one that has far more cachet among the Russian body politic than the West realizes. (As scholar Mark Galeotti recently noted on his podcast, even among parts of the populace opposed to Russia’s expanded invasion in 2022, “pretty much every single Russian, for or against Putin, thinks [Russia’s initial annexation of Crimea in 2014] was okay.”)
And this means, finally, moving beyond the idea that some singular figure will rally Russians to their cause and toss off the yoke and appeal of Russian expansionism once and for all. Not that the West shouldn’t support anti-Putin opposition; so long as Putin remains in power, the war will continue, with the potential for far worse to come.
But whenever Putin leaves office, the West cannot put all of its chips on a single reformer—especially if it means eliding said reformer’s nationalism and ignoring their previous support for Putin’s invasions.
It is a legacy that Navalny may well have been proud of. And it’s a legacy that will, perhaps for the first time, finally lead Western policymakers on the right path—and, at some point, result in the democratic Russia that we all long to see.
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