Why Navalny is the luckiest man alive — but also one of the unluckiest
(Photo by Sefa Karacan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Alexei Navalny is the luckiest man alive. The Russian opposition leader appears to have survived an attempt to poison him with a toxin found in nerve agents similar to that used on the Skripals in Salisbury. Such toxins are usually lethal, even in minute doses, but in this case the victim evidently has an exceptionally strong constitution. This may not even be the first attempt on his life.
Navalny is now being treated at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, which is one of the best in the world. Though Navalny is still unconscious, doctors say his condition is no longer life-threatening; his chances of recovery are excellent.
Navalny has also escaped the clutches of Putin’s police state. He became seriously ill on a plane after drinking a cup of tea at Tomsk airport and was initially treated at a hospital in Omsk, also in Siberia, before being flown to Berlin at the request of his wife, Yulia. Security at the Charité is tight: Russian dissidents have been targeted in Berlin, too, and Navalny is by no means out of danger even there.
Everything about the Siberian episode of the story points towards the complicity of the Russian state: the fact that no staff at the café in Tomsk could remember serving such a prominent guest; the fact that doctors in Omsk denied that he had been poisoned and were reluctant to release him; and the refusal of the Russian authorities to open a criminal investigation. The Kremlin has said very little at all, but the doctors in Omsk must have been under pressure from above to have come up with such a dubious diagnosis, claiming that the patient was suffering from low blood sugar. It took the Charité a matter of hours to determine not only that Navalny had been poisoned, but what type of poison it was: an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. The best-known such toxin is Novichok.
If Navalny should prove to have been poisoned by Novichok, or any similar nerve agent, then the German government will have no choice but to work on the assumption that this was an attack by the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU. No other organisation is known to have access to such substances. The Germans will almost certainly open a criminal investigation of their own, just as the British authorities did in the case of Alexander Litvinenko, assassinated in London in 2006, and the Salisbury poisonings in 2018. New sanctions against Russia will follow, targeted on those known to be involved in the chain of command. In the Litvinenko case, a British judge eventually ruled that the only person who could have authorised such an attack was none other than Vladimir Putin himself.
Some have speculated that rogue elements in the Russian security services, rather than Putin himself, is responsible for Navalny’s poisoning. Yet it is difficult to see who else but the Russian President had the motive, the power and the opportunity to eliminate his most serious rival.
Although he has been prevented by legal chicanery from standing against Putin in a presidential election, Navalny has a huge following inside Russia, especially among the young. Putin, by contrast, is now 67 and has been in power for more than two decades. Russians know that their living standards are falling ever further behind those of their neighbours to the West, such as Poland, the Baltic states and even Ukraine. In an even partially free election, Russian voters might well decide that it is time for a change. Navalny’s campaign against corruption is not dissimilar from that led by Volodymyr Zelensky, the television comedian who triumphed last year over the incumbent oligarch to make himself a popular Ukrainian President — and a thorn in Putin’s side.
An even greater threat to the Kremlin, however, comes from the crisis in Belarus. Alexander Lukashenko’s corrupt and brutal regime has lasted since 1994, but his time appears to be up. He is not “Europe’s last dictator” — Russia is a European country — but he is certainly one of its least intelligent. Having learned from the collapse of the Soviet empire, he ensures that in every election, he gets, not 98 per cent but a mere 80 per cent of the votes. Since the latest rigged election earlier this month, large but peaceful protests are growing by the day.
Lukashenko’s attempt to drum up support at a tractor factory ended in humiliation when he was heckled. Footage of the deranged dictator brandishing a Kalashnikov and menacing his people from a helicopter suggest that he may now be looking for a way out. Only Russia is likely to offer Lukashenko asylum — but the last thing Putin needs is to be associated with a fallen despot, toppled by people power. If a pro-Western Belarus were to emerge from the chaos, the old Russian fear of encirclement would be rekindled. It is even possible that Putin would feel obliged to prevent such an outcome by force — despite the risk to his own regime.
Where does all this leave Navalny? Though he is lucky to be alive, he is unlikely ever to return to Russia — at least as long as Putin remains in power. The purpose of this attempt to silence Navalny is to deter other opponents from following his example. Another leading opposition figure, Boris Nemtsov, was shot dead outside the Kremlin five years ago. Garry Kasparov is only the best known of several past rivals to be driven into exile.
Now Navalny, too, has been given his final warning. It is in this sense that, despite having survived a deadly attempt on his life, he is yet also one of the unluckiest of men. He must now join the long list of unfortunate Russians driven into exile, from 19th-century opponents of Tsarism, such as Alexander Herzen or Mikhail Bakunin, to 20th-century dissidents, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Though some Russians have achieved great things in exile, theirs has always been a melancholy fate. They are almost always doomed to remain spectators as the destiny of their country is decided by others.
The great exception, of course, is the Bolsheviks. Aided by Russia’s German enemies, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin returned from exile to mount a putsch in Petrograd (as it then was) against the Provisional government that had replaced the Tsar. Russia is still living with the consequences of that comeback.
Putin knows that once Navalny has left Russia, even if he recovers, he will remain abroad. To return would be suicidal — even if the Kremlin were to permit such a return. Navalny knows his history: this time there is no sealed railway carriage waiting to conduct him from Berlin to the Finland Station in St Petersburg. Nor does he identify with the Bolsheviks, but rather with those who brought their brutal regime to an end — dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, the great physicist and Nobel Peace laureate, and his wife Yelena Bonner. Despite imprisonment and internal exile, they remained in Russia. This is why Alexei Navalny’s predicament is so tragic: he will live, but only in banishment.
