Call written shortly before death
Colleagues publish Navalny’s last message
March 14, 2024, 5:56 p.m
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Shortly before his death, Alexei Navalny wrote an article about the upcoming presidential election in Russia. He doesn’t know that it will be his last essay. He asks his fellow campaigners to publish the text shortly before the vote. Now the time has come for it.
The team of opposition activist Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian prison in mid-February, has published an article that the politician is said to have written shortly before his death. By text now published writes Navalny about how Russians should vote in the upcoming presidential election. The politician asked his companions to publish the post shortly before the vote, which will take place from the 15th to the 17th, according to Navalny’s website.
In the article, Navalny calls on his supporters to install the “Foton-2024” app developed by his colleagues on their smartphones and to come to the polling stations on March 17 at 12 p.m. sharp. Russians should vote for any candidate – except Vladimir Putin. The app is therefore a kind of random generator that is intended to help people decide who don’t know which name to put a cross next to.
“Walrus Mother” should decide
“Depending on your worldview, you can assume that God, nature, chaos, cosmos, chance or the walrus mother made the decision for you,” Navalny writes about the app. The Walrus Mother is a deity said to be worshiped among shamans of the far eastern Chukchi Peninsula.
“You are suffering, and I am fine. I don’t have this problem – prisoners are not allowed to vote,” writes Navalny ironically, referring to the upcoming election, in which not a single Putin or war opponent was allowed to take part. Three candidates seeking to challenge the Kremlin chief are little-known officials who support Putin’s policies and the invasion of Ukraine. War opponent Boris Nadezhdin was excluded from participation because of an allegedly high error rate in the signature lists required for candidacy.
“Vote for everyone who isn’t Putin”
Navalny emphasizes in his article that in his opinion “it would be wise to vote for everyone who is not Putin, evenly, without singling out anyone.” He hopes that the new app “helps you decide what to do at noon on March 17th if you have already voted,” the post says. The application is intended to “dissuade us from the pointless discussion about who we should vote for. It will prove how many there are in Russia who do not want Putin for a fifth term in office,” Navalny continued.
Navalny’s colleagues have been calling on Putin opponents for weeks to gather in front of the polling stations next Sunday at 12 p.m. “We have to use election day to show that we are here and that there are many of us,” says Yulia Navalnaya, the opposition activist’s widow, in a video. The action is intended to show “that Putin is not synonymous with Russia, that there is no support for the war in society,” explained Navalny confidant Leonid Volkov in an ntv.de interview at the beginning of February. Volkov, who lives in exile in Lithuania, was attacked and seriously injured by an unknown person in Vilnius on Tuesday evening. Lithuanian intelligence believes that it was probably “an operation organized and carried out by Russia.”
According to Russian authorities, Navalny died on February 16 in a Russian prison camp in the Arctic, where he was serving a 19-year prison sentence. According to Russian information, the 47-year-old died of “natural causes”, although the exact circumstances remain unclear. Navalny’s supporters and numerous Western politicians blame the Russian leadership and President Putin for the opposition figure’s death.