I define followers by their rank – not by their behavior. In my lexicon followers are subordinates who have less power, authority, and influence than their superiors, and who therefore usually, but not inevitably, fall into line.
My Follower of the Year 2023 is Alexei Navalny. No single individual is so strikingly lacking in power, authority, and influence as is Navalny – and is nevertheless leaving such a significant imprint. Navalny’s years-long resistance to Russia’s dictator president, Vladimir Putin, is destined forever to linger.
I’ve been writing about Navalny on and off for years. I pointed out in my 2012 book, The End of Leadership, that Navalny was Putin’s most prominent and politically dangerous opponent. In 2017, in a post titled “Alexei Navalny – The Real Deal,” I observed that Navalny remained at the forefront of Russian dissent, that he had been repeatedly denounced and arrested by the Russian regime, and that those who dared to follow his lead were themselves vulnerable to Putin’s corrosive corruption and overweening power.
Since then, Navalny’s situation has gone from bad to worse. In August 2020 he was poisoned – government agents were implicated in the near successful attempt to murder him – and flown for treatment to Berlin. After his recovery several months later, Navalny voluntarily returned to Russia where he was immediately arrested. Since then, he has not been a free man. His prison terms get ever longer – this year he was sentenced on charges of extremism to 19 years in prison, these in addition to the 9 previously assigned – and harsher. And just this month he disappeared for three weeks, his whereabout unknown, only to resurface in a different penal institution, this one remote from Moscow, deep in the Artic.
When Navalny reappeared two days ago, he used X to announce that he was “relieved” that his journey to the gulag was over, and that he was in a good mood. This raises two questions: First, why is Putin not silencing him once and for all? Second why did Navalny choose to return to Russia from Germany when his fate, permanent imprisonment under harsh conditions, was almost certainly sealed?
My responses are obviously speculative. Still, as to why Putin hasn’t done him in – especially since other of Putin’s diehard opponents are long since six feet under – recall that he did try. Putin did try at least once to have Navalny done away with, an occasion on which he came close. But given Navalny survived the attempt to poison him, and given the attempt received worldwide attention, it has become difficult for Putin to murder him without looking like, well, a murderer. In this case not of a blatant bad guy, such as Yevgeny Prigozhin, but of a world-famous good guy, Navalny. (Prigozhin, a notorious thug and ultimately an enemy of Putin’s, died recently in a plane crash, widely understood to have been engineered by the Russian president.) For now, at least, Putin seems to have concluded better to lock Navalny up and throw away the key, than to kill him and make him a martyr.
As to Navalny’s choice to deny himself a good life – his freedom, family, and friends, his health and welfare – clearly it was deliberate. Made with full forethought, with the near certain knowledge of what was to come. When in the wake of the Russian government’s attempt to assassinate him by poisoning him, he returned from Germany to Russia he knew it might well mean his martyrdom.
Alexei Navalny has no power, no authority, and nearly no influence. Over the years some Russians followed his lead, publicly dissented as did he, but not many. Navalny is therefore a follower who however has refused to follow – which means he remains entirely at Putin’s mercy. Mercy is not, however, Putin’s strong suit. Just yesterday a court in Siberia sentenced an ally of Alexei Navalny’s – her name is Ksenia Fadeyeva – to nine years in a penal colony for running an “extremist organization.” After the verdict was announced one of her lawyers said it would be appealed. Fat chance the appeal will succeed.
Some of the world’s greatest leaders once were followers in that they spent time behind bars – Mohandas Gandhi, Alice Paul, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King to name some. But each of these was eventually released – even Mandela who was locked up for more than 27 years. Whether Navalny will ever again be free man is, at best, uncertain. Meantime he can take solace from his mission which has already been accomplished. The near successful attempt on his life, his relentless tribulations and repeated trials, and now his apparently unending captivity are charges against his captor that will stand forever.