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Whistleblowers are usually relatively powerless employees who disclose damaging information about their relatively powerful employers. Such as, for example, workplace practices that are unsafe, illicit, or fraudulent. Think of whistleblowers as Davids going up against Goliaths – which is why, in the United States, they have legal protections which tend, however, to be insufficient.

Robert Barnett was a whistleblower. After having worked at The Boeing Company for 32 years, in 2017 he left. Two years later he blew the whistle against his former employer. He charged that the once iconic company was regularly engaging in shoddy practices that were compromising the safety of the airliners it was making and then selling worldwide. Five years after that – earlier this month – according to the coroner’s report Barnett shot himself dead in the head. He died a week after having given a formal deposition against Boeing, and on a day that he was scheduled to undergo further questioning.

We can never know why Barnett killed himself or even for certain if he killed himself. Conspiracy theories being rampant these days, no surprise there are rumors that instead of his gunshot wound being self-inflicted he was shot by someone else. What we do know though is that within days after Barnett died, the CEO of Boeing, David Calhoun, announced that before this year was out, he was out. He was leaving the company. Same with Larry Kellner, chair of Boeing’s board who similarly announced his pending departure.

Neither Calhoun nor Kellner can be said to have retired voluntarily. At least indirectly they were pressured to do so by airlines and regulators on account of a series of events that instead of salvaging Boeing’s already tenuous reputation, under their leadership it was damaged further. In his resignation statement Calhoun admitted as much, referring to the now infamous incident on January 5 when a door plug blew off an Air Alaska Boeing 737 Max, which left the aircraft, while it was still aloft, with a gaping hole. Amazingly no one was seriously hurt in the incident. But it was yet another in a recent series of Boeing close calls including multiple malfunctions and fuel leaks. In his resignation statement Calhoun wrote, “As you all know, the Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 accident was a watershed moment for Boeing. We must continue to respond to this accident with humility and complete transparency. We must also inculcate a total commitment to safety and quality at every level of our company.”

Though presumably unintended, Calhoun’s statement was a supreme irony. Because just four years earlier he was hired as chief executive to do just that: to inculcate at Boeing “a total commitment to safety and quality at every level.”

When Calhoun came on board, in January 2020, the pressure on the company to up its game could not have been greater. For his immediate predecessor, now former CEO Dennis Muilenburg, had presided over a period during which the company had endured not one but two catastrophes, and not one but two crises.

Boeing is not the focus of my new book, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers. But I do briefly describe what happened to the company in 2018 and 2019. First were two deadly crashes of its 737 Max airliner: one, in October 2018, off the coast of Indonesia in which everyone on board, 189 passengers and crew, died; the other just a few months later, in March 2019, in Ethiopia, in which everyone on board, 157 people, also died.

Crisis number one was, then, a crisis of performance, of Boeing’s performance as a manufacturer of aircraft that were supposed to be of the highest quality and unimpeachable safety. And crisis number two was one of public relations. While the company was enduring a PR nightmare it became evident that its chief executive, Muilenburg, was miserably ineffective at calming the waters. In December 2019 there was for instance this headline in the New York Times: “At Boeing, C.E.O. Stumbles Deepen a Crisis.” I wrote in Leadership from Bad to Worse that, “By then the 737 Max had been grounded, but Muilenburg’s leadership during this period was in every way also badly lacking.” Moreover, his expressions of regret seemed not to make things better but worse. They were described as “clumsy” and “only prolonging Boeing’s reputational pain.”

Enter in early 2020 the man ostensibly on a white horse, the leader who would save Boeing from its badly injured self, Calhoun. But instead of saving Boeing, under Calhoun questions of quality control, of “shortcuts”, of workers with insufficient experience and expertise persisted. Which makes his somewhat ignominious departure painful not only for those within Boeing but for those without. For Boeing is one of just two plane makers – it shares a duopoly with Europe’s Airbus – that produces and sells large commercial jets to airlines.

In recent years Boeing has by every measure and wide agreement lost ground to Airbus. Which raises key questions: Can Boeing be restored to its previous place at the pinnacle of performance excellence? Can the company recover from what has become an onslaught of damage to its once vaunted reputation? What kind of leadership team is required to enable Boeing to fulfill its ostensible mission, to commit totally to “safety and quality at every level”? How to get everyone in the company on board, to persuade every Boeing employee that they are integral, critical to finding enduring solutions to enduring problems?

Last Thursday, United Airlines flight 990 was on its way from San Francisco to Paris. But because the crew reported a problem with an engine the plane was diverted to Denver. 273 passengers and 12 crew members got safely off the plane and the flight was simply cancelled. A scare? Perhaps. An inconvenience? Absolutely. But why was the incident newsworthy? Because the aircraft was made by Boeing. And because it was made by Boeing was serious concern about the performance of its product.

Boeing must persuade both the experts and the flying public that its planes are as safe as any now flying the skies. Until it does, Barnett’s ghost will continue to haunt the company’s corridors. For whatever the truth of what happened before he blew the whistle, and after, his warnings about Boeing proved prophetic.

When will they ever learn that leading isn’t what it used to be? That leading in 2024 is not like it was in 2014 not to speak of 2004 or a decade or more before. In 2024 leaders in America risk being upended if their followers are strongly, not to speak of virulently opposed. This applies to all leaders – especially to those with followers who themselves are prominent and powerful.  

Six days ago, NBC News announced that it had hired Ronna McDaniel as an on-air contributor. McDaniel had recently stepped down from her post as chair of the Republican National Committee. She was to provide the network, including its left leaning cable outlet, MSNBC, with commentary that would be reliably conservative.

McDaniel did not, though, come to the network as a conventional political operator. Because to survive in the Time of Trump she had to be his lacky, his toady, her appointment to the ranks at NBC could have been predicted to raise eyebrows – and trigger anger.

Which it did – and then some. People, enough people, at NBC/MSNBC were outraged that now among their colleagues was a woman who had associated herself with the most outrageous, and dangerous of former President Trump’s numberless lies – that the 2020 election was rigged. That it was Donald Trump who ought rightly to be sitting in the Oval Office not Joe Biden.

Within 48 hours of the announcement that McDaniel had been hired by their superiors, subordinates at the network lashed out. NBC’s leaders were taken to task by their followers – in public. These though were not ordinary followers. They were network stars with high visibility, and with voices certain to be heard loud and clear.  

The revolt started with longtime NBC anchor Chuck Todd. 48 hours after McDaniel was hired Todd went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” bitterly to charge that she was completely untrustworthy. A day later Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski opened their popular show, “Morning Joe,” with a similar verbal fuselage. They referred to McDaniel as “an anti-democracy election denier” and made clear their strong objection to NBC’s decision to hire her. Similarly, another network anchor, this one a former Republican operative herself, Nicolle Wallace. She accused her bosses of having signaled to election deniers that they could now go about spreading falsehoods “as one of us, as badge-carrying employees of NBC News, as paid contributors to our sacred airwaves.”

No one spoke out more forcefully and at greater length than MSNBC superstar Rachel Maddow. She used nearly all of the first half of her hour-long Monday night prime time show to talk about what happened. “The fact that Ms. McDaniel is on the payroll at NBC News to me is inexplicable,” Maddow said. She went on to charge that her bosses had put on the payroll “someone who is part of an ongoing project to get rid of our system of government. Someone who is still trying to convince Americans that this election stuff doesn’t really work. That this last election wasn’t a real result. That American elections are fraudulent.”       

In less than a week, it became clear that NBC’s leaders’ fate was sealed. That they had no choice but to surrender to their followers, most prominently those within the network but, as messaging on social media made clear, also those without. Said Cesar Conde, Chairman of the NBCUniversal News Group, “After listening to the concerns of many of you, I have decided that Ronna McDaniel will not be an NBC News contributor.” He added, “I want to personally apologize to our team members who felt we let them down.”

What brought about this debacle is as plain as the nose on Mr. Conde’s face. He and other members of his management team thought they could do what they wanted to do when they wanted to do it. But those days are dead and gone. In the here and now leaders who ignore their followers, whether wittingly or unwittingly, do so at their peril.

My most recent book – Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers – was just published by Oxford University Press.

The book has a simple message simply stated. Bad leaders and their bad followers – you cannot have the former without the latter – do not stay the same. Over time they change. They go from bad to worse. Bad gradually digs in, digs in deep and then deeper unless it is somehow, by someone or something, stopped or at least slowed.

As the book describes, the progression, which unfolds in four phases, is invariable, inexorable. Unless, again, there is an intervention. Unless, again, the bad leader is somehow stopped from going from Phase 1 (“Onward and Upward”); to Phase 2 “(Followers Join In”); to Phase 3 (“Leaders Dig In”); and finally, to Phase 4 (“From Bad to Worse”).

As I write in the book: “The process of going from bad to worse tends to be steady, not sudden or hasty.” But once bad has burrowed in, once it has been permitted to progress, it becomes “finally very difficult to extract or excise. In other words, once the system is close to being completely corrupted, it’s late, maybe even too late. By then bad leaders and their follower are so entrenched that they control the system itself, which is why at this point the only way to totally get rid of bad is to totally get rid of everyone involved.”

This truism, the inevitable progression from bad to worse, applies across the board. To leaders in every sector, in every context and culture. It’s the nature of the human condition – which raises the key question. Who, or what is “bad”? Clearly who I consider a bad leader might be, or it might not be, who you consider a bad leader. In the book I make at least some of my biases clear. For example, that I write from the vantage point of a liberal democrat. Which means that in my view a leader like Vladimir Putin – and, yes, Donald Trump -is “bad.” Similarly, because I take integrity seriously, I label a leader “bad” if he or she is demonstrably and frequently fraudulent, such as Sam Bankman-Fried.

Because our conceptions of good and bad can be as elusive as contentious, there is a chapter in the book on “Making Meaning of Being Bad.” I argue however that just because a subject is fraught does not mean we should steer clear. Given bad leadership is as ubiquitous as pernicious, the leadership industry has an obligation to tackle it as it pertains to both theory and practice. We should be as dedicated to stopping bad leaders as to growing good ones.

Moreover, because if it is not stopped or at least slowed bad leadership invariably gets worse, we should not be even a smidgen surprised when worse occurs. In 2020 President Xi Jinping decided to impose on Hong Kong a national security law that gave the government a powerful tool to silence its critics. They could be and mostly were rounded up and threatened with arrest. It was entirely predictable then that a few years later (in 2024), another law was passed that further enhanced and expanded the government’s control. It was, or it should have been foreseen that in time most of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists and lawmakers would be either in prison or self-imposed exile.

Similarly, should we be in the least surprised that Russia recently ratcheted up its online censorship?  The Russian regime is doing nothing different from what it has been doing for years. It is increasing the level of its suppression and oppression. The New York Times reported that “Internet censorship has grown in Russia for more than a decade, but the scale and effectiveness of the most recent blocks have surprised even experts.” Why? Why was any Russian expert “surprised” in the slightest? The trajectory was entirely predictable. So long as Putin was in charge there was, there is, no question: censorship in Russia will go from bad to worse.    

The syndrome – leadership from bad to worse – is not just of theoretical interest. It is of practical importance. Pay attention and act if you can or you too could be screwed.

There are more women leaders and upper-level managers in the United States now than fifty or even twenty years ago. But over a half century after the start of the modern women’s movement, progress toward equity at or even near the top of the professional ladder remains slow.  

Only about ten percent of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are women. Women constitute slightly under a quarter of equity law partners, about a quarter of U. S. Governors and Senators, and just over a quarter of members of the House of Representatives. Never has a woman been president of the United States. Moreover, in the last two decades the gender pay gap has scarcely budged. Women still earn only 82 cents for every dollar earned by men.

Of course, in many parts of the word the professional plight of women is far worse. In China for example is only one woman among the 25-member Politburo, the leadership body of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the CCP’s standing committee has no women on it at all. Similarly, because women in South Korea usually feel they must choose either between family or career, the country has the lowest fertility rate in the world.

But the United States is not China, nor is it South Korea. In America have been considerable changes to promote and accommodate women – in the law; in public policies; in workplace accommodations; in teachings and trainings promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion; and in attitudes and behaviors considered professionally acceptable. Which raises the question of why, after many years of considerable, perceptible, change, has the number of women leaders and managers remained stubbornly low?

To this question is one answer that remains largely undiscussed and therefore unaddressed. It’s that men and women are different. There are enormous physical and psychological differences between being a woman and being a man.

We pretend that the distinctions between the genders either do not exist or do not pertain. But they do. Women’s minds, and their bodies impact what they, we, want to do and can do, our entire professional lives.

To be clear, not all of us are the same. Not every woman has menstrual cramps; or gets pregnant; or is exhausted or nauseous while pregnant; or chooses to breast-feed her baby; or feels more responsible for her child than her partner; or has symptoms of menopause. But many or even most women do. To pretend, then, that being in the body of a woman has nothing whatsoever to do with being in the world of work –with both the level of our ambition and, yes, sometimes with our capacity to perform – is to be in denial.

We women openly discuss how having to care for our children affects our work. We do not, however, openly discuss, certainly not with our leaders and managers, the effects on us of dysmenorrhea and hormonal changes; of baby blues and postpartum depression; of swollen breasts and nipple discharges; of night sweats, weight gains, and mood swings.

Menstruation is an illustration. The average woman menstruates about once a month, for about five days, for about forty years. Over ninety percent of women report they have some premenstrual symptoms such as headaches or bloating. More than half of women have menstrual cramps; and some of the time monthly bleeding is heavy and unpredictable. Additionally, somewhere between five to fifteen percent of women report having menstrual pain so intense it interferes with their daily activities.

Does it make sense then to assume that menstruation has no impact at all on women at work or on women’s promotion to positions of leadership and management? Similarly with menopause, a transition that can last between four and ten years and that begins on average at age 47. About 80 percent of women report having symptoms associated with menopause, which is experienced in the prime of their professional lives. Is our physical and psychological well-being entirely irrelevant to our professional status and performance?

Given the gender differences, hybrid work seems on the surface a boon to women. But is it an asset to women ambitious to lead or manage? Not necessarily. Some are reluctant to work from home for fear of being branded a slacker. Others want to set an example – “Do as I do, come into the office.” Still others feel they cannot lead or manage from home as well as from the office.

There are reasons why women as well as men choose even now to ignore the enormous gender differences. They relate to religion and tradition; to feelings of embarrassment and shame; to perceptions of delicacy, fragility, and weakness; and now, to concerns about political correctness. It’s why women usually decide it’s best for professional purposes to pretend they never have a menstrual camp. To pretend they are not drained and depressed by in vitro fertilization. To pretend they do not vomit while they are pregnant. To pretend pumping is fine even when their breasts hurt, and they are obliged to pump in a small room set aside for this purpose. To pretend they do not have menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes and night sweats; headaches and sleeplessness; anxiety and palpitations.

Granted times are changing. Lactation, menopause, and even menstruation is slowly being destigmatized. Moreover, some companies are trying to accommodate what women particularly want and need. But the changes fall far short. So long as any aspect of women’s health and well-being remains a subject that’s taboo, so long will it impact negatively especially on their rising through the ranks.

The curtain of decorum does not excuse anyone’s silence – including our own – on this obvious but still obviously discomfiting issue. High time then we claim our bodies, ourselves. Given we are physically and psychologically radically different from men we must speak openly, honestly, and yes, loudly about what we need and want when we need and want it.

I get that women who are forthright are at personal and professional risk. At risk of being labeled pushy or demanding, or, heaven forefend, aggressive. But if we don’t speak truth to power, who will?

There’s a new film out, “The Teachers’ Lounge.” For anyone with an interest in leadership and followership I strongly recommend it.

The film is German and on the surface it’s about a teacher who loses control not just of her classroom, but of most of her sixth-grade students. A series of events turns traditional conceptions of power and authority on their head, essentially leaving inmates running the asylum. At one point the teacher, Carla Nowak, runs literally as well as metaphorically away from her students.

It matters that the film is German because until after the Second World War, no Western country was more closely identified with authoritarian leadership, with leaders (including teachers) who ruled with an iron fist than Germany. Obviously, those days are long gone. Still, it’s weird for a person of a certain age – in this case me! – to see a German classroom become bedlam. Whatever Ms. Nowak’s good intentions, whatever her efforts to teach, later to tame her students, there came a point in the film when all hell broke loose.

It’s no stretch to suggest that “The Teachers’ Lounge” is not just about keeping a modicum of order in the classroom. It’s a metaphor for keeping a modicum of order in society more generally, especially in societies that are liberal democracies.

Good democratic governance is hard to affect these days precisely because there’s a resemblance between the students in the film and the public at large – all of whom ostensibly are followers expected to follow those who ostensibly are leaders. This applies whether these leaders are teachers, ministers or managers, presidents, prime ministers, or chancellors.

But instead of following, of going along, we resist. We resist in the United States, and we resist in Germany. Too many of us lean too far right; vent our testiness and nastiness online; carp and complain even amidst abundance; resist and resent contributing to the commonweal; knowingly spread misinformation and disinformation; and remain seemingly deliberately uninterested and willfully uninformed.

Democracy is always good in theory and sometimes good in practice. But when communitarianism is sacrificed at the altar of individualism it leads straight to The Teachers’ Lounge.

Mitch McConnell was on his way to becoming not only the longest serving Senate Republican Leader in American history – a record he can still claim – but one of the most successful. In an alternate universe he would’ve announced his retirement this week with mixed pleasure but immense pride.

Instead, this once enormously powerful legislative leader veritably slunk off the political stage (though formally not until November), admitting that the ground had shifted under his feet. That the Republican Party “at this particular moment in time” not only had changed nearly beyond his recognition but was inhospitable to someone of his moderate temperament.

To be clear, McConnell was a right-wing politician who did what he could to shape American politics in his image. For example, he is credited with shaping the Supreme Court in a way that will drive the left and most of the center crazy for years if not decades. But in his temperament, he is and always was moderate. Soft spoken, tending to taciturn and courtly in his manner; willing, sometimes, to compromise, to work across the aisle; and an internationalist; he was always far, very far, from being a right-wing nut job.

One measure of McConnell’s moderate temper was his well-concealed loathing of the man who finally swallowed him whole, Donald Trump. But notwithstanding how McConnell felt about Trump in private, for reasons of his own the senator did what he could to enable the president. First to escort Trump into the White House, and then to keep him there. Until the January 6^th insurrection, McConnell was so supportive of Trump that he was labeled by Jane Mayer, in an April 2020 article in The New Yorker, “Enabler in Chief.”

McConnell – whose wife, Elaine Chao, was, not incidentally, a member of Trump’s cabinet – plays a similarly important part in my 2021 book, The Enablers. In the book I wrote that McConnell “personally and politically protected Trump during the first impeachment trial.” It was McConnell then who “made it possible for the president to finish his term without the proceedings upending or even significantly impairing him.” Further, as Mayer pointed out, McConnell stayed “largely silent about the president’s lies and inflammatory remarks,” and propped up the administration with legislative and judicial victories.

McConnell though had a fatal flaw – that led to a fatal error. He was so hungry for power he could not see straight. He could not see that Trump would stop at nothing and no one to get his way and save his skin. Which meant that unless something or someone stopped him, Trump would inevitably, inexorably, go from bad to worse.  

And so it came to pass that the monster swallowed his creator.

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It’s well known that being president of the United States has quickly and visibly aged virtually all men – Ronald Reagan is an exception – who have occupied the Oval Office. This includes Joe Biden who looks and sounds perceptively older and frailer now than he did three years ago, when he was inaugurated.

But my point is not that being an American president is inordinately taxing. It’s that being any American leader of any enterprise of any size is the same. Being a leader in 2024 is, by every account and every measure, more demanding and draining than it was a generation ago.

• In 2023 more CEOs – nearly 2,000 – exited their posts than ever before.
• In a recent survey 37% of C-suite executives reported that avoiding professional burnout is a consistent, significant challenge.
• Nineteen chief executives died in office last year, the most in more than a decade.
• 65% of leaders experience symptoms of wear and tear such as stress and anxiety.
• According to a 2023 study conducted by Deloitte, 33% of leaders regularly have “feelings of being overwhelmed, lonely, or depressed.”

All of which raises the question of why. Why is being a leader evidently more difficult in the present than it was in the past?

Here four important reasons:

• Followers in the present are far more demanding now than they used to be. By “followers” I don’t just mean subordinates, such as employees. I mean stakeholders of every sort, all of whom leaders must keep in tow to get their work done. For example, presidents of universities have multiple followers, or stakeholders, or constituents – call them what you will – including students, faculty, staff, boards, parents, donors, the press, and the public. Each is more demanding, more clamorous, and contrary than they were in decades, even in years past.
• Leading, literally leading, is harder to do than it used to be. In the old days leaders could count on command-and-control. Superiors simply told their subordinates what they wanted them to do, and their subordinates did it – lest they be punished. Now it’s not so simple. Now most leaders are expected to use not their power or even their authority – such as it now is. Instead, they are expected to use their influence. To persuade others of what they want them to do rather than to order them, or even simply to tell them to do it.    
• Technology has reached the point of intimidating leaders. It makes them – for good reason – fearful of being caught on a smart phone behaving in a way that’s somehow untoward. It makes them – for good reason – fearful of being subjected to a viral attack. It makes them – for good reason – fearful that it, technology, will get ahead of them. That it – AI is the obvious example – will be cleverer than they and faster than they, and that it will evolve in ways that they cannot even begin to understand. That tech will control them rather than the other way around.
• Politics lurks – much as they might like to, even leaders other than political ones can no longer avoid at least sometimes weighing in. In the old days, only political leaders were expected to get embroiled in domestic or foreign politics, or in domestic or foreign policies. Leaders of other institutions or organizations could easily skirt controversy. They could even stick their heads in the sand, act as if differences among Americans either did not exist or did not pertain. Now pretending that politics is irrelevant is impossible. Leaders of different stripes are being pushed to weigh in on everything from identity politics to the culture wars, from sanctions to vaccines, from taxes to tariffs, from to Argentina to China. Worse, when they do, they usually end in a no-win situation because of how fragmented and fractious the American people.

None of this is of course to say that leaders are not well rewarded. They are. In the private sector especially, compensation has never been higher – those at the top of American business and finance are generally rich as Croesus. Moreover, leaders have levels of autonomy and control that the rest of us are usually denied.

Still, there are tradeoffs. Leading is more difficult than it used to be, less fun than it used to be, and more punishing than it used to be. Don’t believe me? Just ask Claudine Gay. Or Bob Iger. Or Mark Milley. Or Kevin McCarthy. Or for that matter Joe Biden.       

We’re so caught up by Nikki Haley sticking her finger in Donald Trump’s eye that we’re losing sight of the big picture. We’re so caught up by Nikki Haley declaring she’s not afraid of Trump’s “retribution” that we’re losing sight of the big picture.  

What is the big picture? Trump is a man. And, by far his most durable and formidable challenger for the Republican nomination for president has turned out not another man – not Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, Mike Pence, or Vivek Ramaswamy – but a woman!

When Hillary Clinton ran against Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign the fact that she was a woman in a man’s world – presidential politics – was a large if not dominant part of the story. Clinton herself wrote with pain and anger – especially in her subsequent book, What Happened – about the discrimination she faced for being female. She felt obliged to spend “what added up to a month of time on the 2016 campaign trail having her hair and makeup done; if she showed up without having those things done, she got slammed. She even hired a linguistics expert so could learn to rev up a crowd by shouting while not sounding too high pitched.”*

Eight years later the female angle has disappeared from coverage of the campaign nearly entirely. It seems part of our past, not our present. For this sea change credit where credit is due: Haley herself has contributed significantly to what has been not a revolution but an evolution.

Haley looks entirely feminine without being cloying or too girlie-girlie. She sounds tough but not intimidating. She has come to attack Trump in a way that she did not earlier in her campaign – but she might have benefited from her gradualist approach. Had she taken him on too strongly and stridently at the outset she could easily have been seen as too assertive, too aggressive. Instead, she is relaxing into her role. She now appears both likable and competent, impressive but not so formidable as to be off-putting.

Whatever Nikki Haley accomplishes in 2024 she is positioning herself for the future. She is also playing a pivotal role in advancing women in leadership at the highest level of American politics.

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*Time, September 14, 2017.   

During the entirety of Vladimir Putin’s presidency women have been some of his most vocal and visible critics. And even now – when repression in Russia, and Putin’s zeal for control beyond his borders are far more toxic than a decade ago – women remain prominent, and painful thorns in his side.

In the past was, for example, Pussy Riot, a “Russian feminist protest and performance art group” known about a decade ago for its political and musical deviance – deviance that included strident, overt opposition to Putin and his policies. For their troubles three members of the group were convicted of “hooliganism” and sentenced to two years in prison.  

In the past was also the groundbreaking and muckraking Russian journalist and activist, Anna Politkovskaya. For her relentless insistence on truth telling, especially from Chechnya during the Second Chechen War in the early 2000s, she was harassed, arrested, and poisoned. Withal, Politkovskaya refused to shut up and behave like a lady, a crime for which she was ultimately (in 2006) shot to death in the elevator of her apartment. 

And, in the present are mothers, wives, girlfriends – Russian women whose sons, husbands, and lovers were sent well over a year ago to fight in Ukraine and are, if not dead or injured, still in the field of battle with no end in sight. Some of these women have dared to question, even to protest the Russian regime for effectively nabbing their kin not since to be seen. They do not of course pose a threat to Putin or to his regime. The fear factor is far too great to expect anything resembling a broad political movement. Still, it’s worth noting that especially in the wake of the death of Alexei Navalny are still some souls in Russia who dare, if gingerly, to speak their minds.   

In the present is also the widow of Alexei Navalny, Yulia Navalnaya, in her own right a force to be reckoned with. In the immediate wake of her husband’s death she made an emotional appearance before Western leaders at the Security Conference in Munich. And in a subsequent video she vowed to hunt down those responsible for her husband’s death and to keep fighting the good fight for truth, freedom, and justice. “By killing Alexei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul. But I still have the other half and it tells me that I have no right to give up. I will continue Alexei Navalny’s cause.”

Navalnaya will haunt Putin to the death – either his, or hers.

In the present is also Estonia’s formidable Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas. No leader is clearer than she that the West must, with force, if necessary, stand up to Putin.

Kallas has the dubious distinction of being the first political leader to appear on a Russian “wanted” list. She is being persecuted by Russia’s interior ministry for being consistently critical of Russia’s war against Ukraine. For presiding over Estonia’s symbolically important removal of Soviet-era war monuments. And for repeatedly insisting that the time is now to seize Russia’s large cache of frozen financial assets – and to use the funds to rebuild Ukraine. While other leaders such as France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olof Scholz continue to dither on this – they worry that Moscow will retaliate legally and financially, if not also militarily – Kallas remains unbowed and uncowed. She argues that “This is economic pressure we can place on the Russian economy to hasten the breaking point of this war.”  

Kallas appears fearless. She says that Russia’s move against her was “nothing surprising,” and makes clear that she will not be deterred. “This is yet more proof that I am doing the right thing.”

When Adolf Hitler threatened all Europe by, among his other blatant aggressions, annexing Austria in March 1938, there were no women in positions of power who dared to tell him no. No, Germany could not swallow Austria whole without fear of immediate and meaningful reprisal. Mercifully are now a handful of women with, if not power then authority, or influence, who might stiffen the spines of some men.   

At the end of December, I posted a piece about my choice for “Leader of the Year – 2023.” And I posted a piece about my choice for “Follower of the Year – 2023.” The latter was Alexei Navalny who, according to Russian sources, just died in a Siberian prison. His age was 47.

As indicated in the earlier piece – the link for “Follower of the Year – 2023” is below – I have been writing about Navalny for over a decade. No need to reiterate what was in my previous posts, except to point out that it has long been obvious he was exceptional. Even early in his career as an impossible, ultimately intolerable thorn in Vladimir Putin’s side he stood out for being clever and handsome, daring, defiant, and original. Navalny was also much bolder and braver than ordinary mortals. Over time he became in fact so bold and brave it was to the point of being, arguably, reckless. To the point where he seemed to be courting a martyr’s death at the hands of the despot, Putin. If this was his goal, he achieved it.        

In life, Navalny was, for various reasons, not much of a leader. First, Putin wouldn’t permit him to lead, nor would he permit Russians to follow anyone but himself. Navalny was then more of an episodic activist than he was an effective resister. He was not – while he was alive – able to effect change.

But in death it will be different. This is not to predict that Navalny’s dying will cause Putin tomorrow to topple. Not hardly. But it is to point out that because the former died on the orders of the latter, the name Alexei Navalny will endure.

He will not be like others of his ilk, such as South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and Czechoslovakia’s Vaclav Havel, both of whom were dissidents and similarly spent years in prison. Navalny cannot now emerge from his cell to take a place in politics. He will, however, live forever in the hearts and minds of people everywhere who fervently believe in politics that are clean not corrupt. And in lives lived in liberty not chains.

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Follower of the Year – 2023