NEW YORK – Back in 2013, when Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was facing bogus criminal charges, I recalled when my great-grandfather, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, compared Russia to a tub full of dough. “You put your hand down in it, down to the bottom,” and “when you first pull out your hand, a little hole remains.” But then, “before your very eyes,” the dough returns to its original state – a “spongy, puffy mass.” Navalny’s death in a remote Arctic penal colony more than a decade later proves that little has changed.

The prison where Navalny died is a particularly brutal one. Nicknamed “Polar Wolf,” it is a freezing cold gulag for violent criminals. But Navalny – an anti-corruption lawyer and blogger – was not known for violence. In 2013, he was fending off trumped-up embezzlement charges, and the convictions that got him sent to Polar Wolf in 2021 were for parole violations, fraud, and contempt of court. While in prison, he accumulated more convictions on fabricated charges, including supporting extremism.

Navalny’s real crime, of course, was challenging President Vladimir Putin. From leading protests against the rigged parliamentary elections of 2011 to investigating the corruption of Russia’s elites to seeking to unseat Putin (in a presidential election from which the authorities excluded him), he was relentless in his nearly two-decade-long campaign against Putin and his circle. The many legal proceedings were Stalin-style show trials – intended to give the illusion of justice, while getting a high-profile critic off of ballots and television screens. But whereas the Stalin-era trials made liberal use of the death penalty (as well as gulags), no case against Navalny, no matter how trumped up, warranted it – at least not officially.

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