Putin is maniacal, but nothing can stop him now
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Stalin – a dab hand at political assassination – supposedly used to say, “No person, no problem.”
Vladimir Putin’s response to denunciations of his opponents’ murders has been indignant denials via his press office. Putin does not deign to mention their names, living or dead. Though his smirk in public after their demise says it all.
The news of Navalny’s death hit Western leaders gathered in Munich for their security conference like a thunderclap. It seemed to bring the allies, fraying over Ukraine, together in shock and disgust. Some Western politicians expressed the hope that the news was a symptom of the decadence of Putin’s regime.
It is too comforting to assume that political depravity equals political decadence, however. Russian history is pock-marked with political assassinations. The murder of Rasputin in December, 1916, was a grisly symptom of the impending collapse of the Romanov regime. But let’s not be mesmerised by the mirage Navalny’s fate will arouse the Russian people from their passivity. Hasn’t political killing more often served Russia’s despots than disgusted their subjects?
Killing with impunity even an imprisoned or exiled opponent is not a sign of weakness. In August, 1940, Stalin arranged the murder of Trotsky in his remote and half-forgotten Mexican exile. The point was to show that impotence was no defence against Stalin’s revenge.
It took 51 years for the Soviet regime to implode after that. The trail of political murders in Putin’s Russia may, similarly, not lead to his downfall soon.
It is striking that on the same day as Navalny’s death, the murderer of the anti-war journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, saw his prison sentence commuted. Putin’s regime has fed itself on human sacrifice from the anonymous slaughtered masses in Chechnya twenty years ago to the Donbas today, along with high profile murders like that of Boris Nemtsov nine years ago in front of the Kremlin itself .
Fear of the regime and shame at that situation perversely stabilises Putin’s hold on power. Unfortunately, after the outbreak of the war against Ukraine hundreds of thousands of young Russians fled their country. Like the emigration of millions after 1917 helped to stabilise the new Soviet regime, so the haemorrhaging of educated people since 2022 has been “a price worth paying” for Putin.
There has been much scornful talk recently about how Russia is becoming a gigantic version of North Korea ostracised by the West. Don’t forget the Kim dynasty hasn’t just clung to power there but entrenched its monstrous regime over three generations. Putin has no lineal successor but he has created a perversely “native” regime for Russia.
After Tsar Paul was murdered in 1801, like his father Peter III forty years earlier, some joked that it was not true to say Russia had no constitution: it was an autocracy moderated by assassination. Putin’s version today is what he calls “sovereign democracy”: Russian people get to elect their president after the potential candidates have been filtered by assassination.
There is a dangerous irony for Putin as he crushes a dissident and wears down Ukraine’s defenders as the West tires of financing the means of fending off his aggression. Victory has often been a bigger threat to Russia’s despotisms than defeats. But, more likely, he will go the way of Stalin. Immediately after his triumph in 1945, the dictator began a crackdown on those veterans who expected a relaxed regime now that its enemy was destroyed.
Like Stalin, Putin needs a foreign enemy to stabilise his regime even when it seems stronger than ever as Soviet Russia seemed at the start of the Cold War.
The tragedy of Alexei Navalny is that his death is less about intimidating ordinary Russians than permanently antagonising the West. Cynics might say that a few years after murdering Trotsky, Stalin was courted by Churchill and Roosevelt. But the Western Allies then needed the Red Army to fight Hitler. Afterwards, they got the First Cold War: which was a huge asset to the Soviet leaders in their task of maintaining power.
As such, Navalny’s death secures Putin’s Russia from any risk of a détente with the West. One can only hope he has planted a seed which will one day germinate into something more fruitful.
Mark Almond is director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford
