OAJ Hot Take: Alexei Navalny is Not the Hero You Think He Is
If you pay attention to the news, Navalny is a luminary. The truth is trickier than that.
On Feb. 16, the Russian government murdered Alexei Navalny, Russian dissident and fierce critic of Vladimir Putin, just a day after a court appearance. In the days that followed, Western governments and media outlets hailed Navalny as a hero for standing up to Putin’s autocratic regime. However, Navalny’s legacy is much darker and more complicated than the Western response to his death suggests.
Western media cast Navalny as the talisman of Russian democracy through high-profile “60 Minutes” interviews and an Oscar-winning documentary. Politicians have been just as complimentary. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak remembered Navalny as dying for “a cause to which he dedicated his whole life – freedom.” Similarly, American President Joe Biden memorialized Navalny by saying he “was everything Putin is not. He was brave, he was principled, he was dedicated to building a Russia where rule of law existed and where it applied to everybody.” Denmark’s foreign minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen lamented that "Russia lost someone who dared work for a different Russia.”
How different was Navalny’s ideal Russia?
Navalny had a long history of organizing and attending Russian nationalist rallies and espoused beliefs much closer to Putin’s than to the ideals of democracy and anti-corruption. In 2007, Navalny compared Muslim migrants in Russia to cockroaches and flies in a video advocating for ethnic Russian gun ownership. That same year, he worked with one of the foremost Russian nationalist groups, the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, to organize the “Russia March.” The march of skinheads, ethnic Russians, and members of the far-right chanted “Russia for Russians” in response to the perceived takeover of Russia by Muslim immigrants. A year later, he argued on YouTube for Central Asian migrants to be removed from Russia like a dentist would remove a rotten tooth.
While Navalny changed in some respects over the years, he maintained many of these beliefs throughout his life. After running for mayor of Moscow on an anti-immigrant platform in 2013, Navalny stopped attending Russian nationalist rallies and started focusing on building his Anti-Corruption Foundation. Despite his focus on corruption and his half-hearted repudiation of Russian imperialist desires, as late as 2019, Navalny continued to traffic in Islamophobia. As his star rose internationally as the de facto Russian opposition leader he continued to argue that Russia and the West were fundamentally different from Central Asian Muslims.
Navalny mainstreamed his anti-immigrant attitudes by attaching himself to the broader anti-corruption movement within Russia. Navalny and his supporters could criticize the Putin regime for its kleptocratic attitudes and frame both corruption and Muslim immigration as betrayal of ethnic Russians.
Some media outlets in the United States have tried to explain away Navalny’s racist and nationalistic past as simple opportunism. As Masha Gessen partly argued in the New Yorker, Navalny’s nationalist ties were simply his effort to unseat Putin by creating a grand coalition. This may be true, but Navalny could have done this as a member of Russia’s social democratic party of which he was a member through 2007. Even if forming a coalition with reprehensible collaborators was the only way forward, did Navalny need to continually be an Islamophobe? Certainly, you can have strange coalition partners without resorting to their extreme positions on immigration.
To be clear, Navalny and Putin are by no means equals. Putin is the leader of one of the most powerful nations on earth. He has used his position to murder opposition figures (Navalny) and imprison dissenters (Pussy Riot). Navalny never had any such position or authority. Undoubtedly, Navalny’s statements have caused harm to Muslims and Ukrainians across Europe. And his legacy ought to, at the very least, be complicated.