VSis the opinion of many activists from the Russian human rights organization Memorial, scandalized by the xenophobic remarks of Alexeï Navalny castigating the “cockroaches” Caucasians and asking their “deportation”Arseni Roginski (1946-2017), its charismatic leader, decided, on May 11, 2008, to invite Alexeï Navalny to the celebration of the 70e anniversary of the great lawyer Henri Reznik, the tireless defender of Memorial. “Alexei will evolve, he is too intelligent a man, and fundamentally honest, to remain in such nauseating positions”, said Arseni Roginski. He won’t be wrong.
From his entry into politics in 2000, at the age of 24, in the small liberal-democrat party Yabloko, until his death, at 47, on February 16, in an Arctic penal colony, similar to that of so many other deaths of political prisoners in Soviet camps whose circumstances we will never know – how can we not remember that of the great dissident Anatoli Marchenko, who disappeared at the age of 48, on December 8, 1986, after eleven years of detention ? –, Alexeï Navalny traveled a complex political journey, strewn with pitfalls, until the ultimate sacrifice of his own life, in a country marked by disarray, radical social disorientation and a profound rejection of politics by society.
How can we wake up a people anesthetized by ever more aggressive official propaganda in times of war and when nationalist passions are inflamed? How can we lead it into the fight against massive corruption at the very heart of the mafia-like functioning of power, towards the establishment of a rule of law and democracy?
Alexeï Navalny quickly understood that the Western-style liberalism carried by Yabloko, a small party bringing together intellectuals and wealthy cultured circles from Moscow and Saint Petersburg, was massively rejected by the people, traumatized by the economic catastrophe of the 1990s. He then decides to try to capture popular support by exploiting the nationalist fiber of a population adrift, in search of a new identity and a new pride.
Popular support
In 2007, he created the Russian National Liberation Movement, whose acronym, Narod, means “the people”. But the movement lost its way and merged into the vast nationalist nebula which, from the skinheads to the sulphurous National-Bolshevik Party by the writer Edouard Limonov (1943-2020), surfs on the xenophobia of the “little people” and their rejection of “black asses” from the former Soviet republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia who came to work and be exploited on the pharaonic construction sites of Moscow, St. Petersburg and other big cities, while the economy is recovering after a decade of recession .
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