Death of a Russian Liberal Patriot
Why Alexei Navalny’s demise is another wakeup call for the cause of freedom in the world—and at home.
The world doesn’t know all of the details about the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison last Friday, and we may never know the full story of what happened to him that day. But U.S. President Joe Biden and other world leaders quickly blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for Navalny’s death.
A paradox exists in the reactions to his demise: on one level, it came as no surprise given previous attempts on Navalny’s life and the long string of deaths of other Russian dissidents over the past few years. Still, the news set off shockwaves around the world, including at the Munich Security Conference, where Navalny’s widow Yulia spoke just shortly after hearing of her husband’s passing.
Navalny’s death should serve as a wakeup call for the struggle for freedom in the world—and a reminder that this struggle starts here in rebuilding the vital center of America’s politics at home.
A Russian leader fighting for a different type of Russian nationalism and foreign policy
Like most political leaders around the world, Navalny wasn’t the same person at the end of his public life as he was when he started. He fought against an entrenched, corrupt dictatorship in his own country that has used brutal repression at home and prosecuted expansionist neo-imperialist wars abroad in places like Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria to maintain its grip on power. Towards the end of his life, Navalny worked to advance a new type of Russian nationalism not rooted in xenophobia or opposed to the international system.
Navalny appeared to evolve as a person and in his career as a political leader, eventually sketching out a form of Russian liberal patriotism, in four areas of his work and life.
1. Navalny fought against entrenched, corrupt elites. Starting out as an activist fighting overdevelopment in Moscow, Navalny soon targeted his efforts against state-run energy companies like Gazprom and Rosneft. He used his anti-corruption organization as a platform to expose graft and corruption, including allegations against Russia’s top leaders—including Russian President Vladimir Putin. This group helped Navalny build a network that was useful in organizing his 2013 campaign for Moscow mayor and his thwarted attempt to run for president in 2018.
2. Navalny sought to build a broader coalition inside of Russia. Navalny was a Russian nationalist, but his views and positions on how to define that nationalism evolved substantially over the years, as Masha Gessen detailed in The New Yorker in 2021. Navalny staked out anti-immigrant positions earlier in his career and some criticized him as being out of touch with working-class Russians. But his worldview evolved towards a more liberal perspective, the more that he battled with the autocratic forces inside of Russia and came into more regular contact with liberal voices in Europe and America.
In an interview in Moscow in 2018, Navalny told Trudy Rubin of The Philadelphia Inquirer that “his goal was to reach ‘blue-collar youth, not hipsters, youth who see no future’ and convince them that elections didn’t have to be hopeless, and that grassroots resistance was possible.” In that regard, he seemed to understand that a key to successful political change in Russia was found outside of the elite, university-educated elite voices and with ordinary, working-class Russians—even if Navalny’s movement never fully realized its potential with that sector.
A previous attempt to murder him by Russian authorities in 2020—detailed in Navalny, the must-see documentary film released in 2022—pushed him further into the international spotlight and perhaps made him even more dependent on international support at the expense of sinking deeper roots inside of Russia. This may have made him a bit naïve about the tough odds he faced, as some observers have noted. Part of the playbook of dictators these days is to push dissident voices into exile and then allege these figures are operating as agents for other countries.
But Navalny had the courage to face down these difficult odds and took a great risk in going back to Russia in 2021, offering inspiration to others who seek to continue the fight for freedom in the world.
3. Navalny opposed Russia’s wars of imperialism. He was strongly critical of Russia’s 2015 military intervention in Syria, saying that Russia should be fighting with the anti-Islamic State coalition assembled by the United States instead of reinforcing the Assad regime. Navalny opposed and criticized Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine again in 2022, although Navalny’s relationship with Ukraine and statements about it over the years were much more complicated, as David Herszenhorn, author of the 2023 biography of Navalny The Dissident, pointed out. Bottom line: Navalny’s worldview about Russia’s foreign policy wasn’t the retrograde, aggrieved perspective that currently fuels Russia’s efforts to gnaw away at the international system like a termite.
4. Navalny built a life and family outside of politics. One thing made clear in the 2022 documentary film as well as testimonials from friends who knew him is that Navalny also had passions and joys outside of his political career, including spending free time with his wife and two children and playing the video game Call of Duty. He had a legendary sense of humor that he deployed, including in his final court appearance. The political cause he adopted started to consume and ultimately took his life, but he still found the time and space in his life to have a life and family, an essential ingredient for building a healthier approach to political life, as The Liberal Patriot’s John Halpin has advised.
Finding meaning in the loss of Navalny to inform actions supporting global freedom
Navalny’s death serves as a vivid reminder that the true systems of repression and oppression use death and destruction to stay in power. According to Freedom House’s most recent “Freedom in the World” report, the global tides of freedom have ebbed for 17 years in a row. Things haven’t been getting much better during the past year, with flawed elections and armed conflicts among the key forces undercutting freedom around the world.
Despite these negative trends, the global picture also offers some hope—especially when compared to the past. These days, nearly double the number of countries in the world are free compared to when Freedom House issued the first edition of its global survey in 1973. Democratic countries like those in America, Europe, and Asia have shown remarkable resilience, capacity to course correct, and generate strong security and prosperity for their own peoples, even in tough times.
There are many legitimate worries about the health of America’s democracy and rule of law these days, but the system still has some ability to uphold laws and impose costs for those who don’t. Navalny’s death came on the same day that a judge in America ordered former U.S. President Donald Trump to pay hundreds of millions of dollars and placed severe limits on Trump’s ability to run his companies, the first of several civil and criminal cases the former president faces.
In thinking about Navalny’s courage against daunting odds he faced in the fight for freedom in Russia, it is easy to become pessimistic, particularly when we look at some of our political leaders here in America. Too many political voices and analysts have become cynical and defeatist about America’s role in advancing freedom in the world.
On some parts of the left, there’s a “blame America first” mentality—many of these voices are stuck in a past when the 2003 Iraq war was linked to a “freedom agenda” by President George W. Bush. On some parts of the right, there’s more of a nativist, anti-internationalist, gated community mindset that likes to pretend as if America can wall itself off from the rest of the world. As a result, there are more voices who voice a knee-jerk rejectionism about America’s engagement in the cause of freedom in the world.
Internationalists supporting a liberal patriot approach to foreign policy should consider three big-picture steps that could help reconstitute an ambitious agenda to turn around the negative trends for freedom in the world.
1. Rebuild the vital center in the domestic politics of stressed democracies to protect democracy and freedom at home and in the world. In the messy cacophony of politics in America and many leading democracies today, it is easy to lose sight of an important strategic vulnerability open societies have today: autocratic adversaries and rivals exploit these internal divisions for their own strategic advantage. The backsliding of democracy and freedom in the world directly affects America’s political system at home, as autocratic and illiberal forces overseas use sharp power tools to exploit and sow divisions in our politics and amplify illiberal voices on the left and right.
The longer-term effort of rebuilding healthier and more constructive politics in America is part of the effort to revive a U.S. foreign policy approach that recenters freedom in the world. Most of this work will take place in how politics is conducted by political leaders, but there’s an important debate over ideas and ideology amongst thinkers and analysts that needs to be had as well. For example, the hot mess that qualifies as American conservative thinking these days includes a strange love for Putin and Putinism in some right-wing quarters. In some corners of the extreme fringe left of America, voices criticize what they call U.S. imperialism and interventionism, yet all too often conveniently ignore Russia’s very deadly interventionism and imperialism.
There’s an important debate to be had over the battle of ideas, and this is a key part of rebuilding a vital center in America.
2. Construct international coalitions among those working to rebuild the vital center in other stressed democracies. The challenges to an inclusive nationalism in America are present in other key countries around the world, including Britain, France, Italy, Israel, and India. Some have started to think about ways to reconstruct the vital center in their own politics in an effort to contest those extremist voices, as Yair Zivan wrote about Israel in these two articles for The Liberal Patriot before the horrific attacks by Hamas last October.
The struggle for freedom in the world is very much linked to the health of the democracies, and building a coalition across countries and set of conversations to counter what The Economist recently called the growing peril of national conservatism, as well as the illiberalism and isolationism found on parts of the left, is essential for the next stage in the fight for global freedom.
Those working to rebuild the vital center in strained democracies should look for ways to exchange lessons learned with each other and put forward strategies to advance freedom in the world during this complicated geopolitical phrase characterized by political warfare that knows no borders.
3. Support those fighting for freedom and liberalism in places like Ukraine, the Middle East, and Asia. This includes winning current wars in places like Ukraine and the Middle East in ways that advance the interests and values of the United States—but that also includes preventing future wars through strong deterrence and engagement in the world in key parts of Asia like Taiwan.
Helping Ukraine win and Putin’s Russia lose will keep Americans safer. The second anniversary of Russia’s attack against Ukraine coming later this week comes at a difficult moment in Ukraine’s fight to defend itself against Russia’s aggression, with Russia claiming more territory as some voices on the right and left in America call for passive appeasement.
The current logjam in the U.S. Congress in funding proposals to support America’s partners in the world facing threats is a self-inflicted wound that will only inflict more damage to the cause of freedom in the world and democracy at home over time. The voices on the right parroting or trying to explain away presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s statement encouraging Russia to attack NATO allies, as well as those trying to deflect blame for House Republicans’ inaction on immigration, are rooting for America’s decline.
These three big-ticket items aren’t going to be fully resolved in 2024, but the outcomes of the November elections will have huge implications for whether America will have the resolve and capacity to remain a leader in the fight for freedom in the world.
Navalny took the ultimate risk in fighting for freedom in his own country, and sadly the same can’t be said for many political leaders in the United States. But the best response to a difficult situation is to redouble the efforts to change it, rather than to give in. In the 2022 documentary bearing his last name, Navalny was asked what his message would be to his supporters if he died, and he said:
Listen, I’ve got something very obvious to tell you. You are not allowed to give up. If they decide to kill me, then it means we are incredibly strong. We need to utilize this power to not give up, to remember we are a huge power that is being oppressed by these bad dudes. We don’t realize how strong we actually are. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. So don’t be inactive.
The best way to honor the memory of Alexei Navalny and the ideals he fought for later in life is to defeat corrupt politicians in our own system and give as much support as we can to those fighting existential struggles for freedom in their own homelands.