“A walking skeleton”
It’s really like this? He knows no fear, the great accuser. From prison he resumed undaunted launching his torpedoes at those who hold him. It is too early to realize whether the courage, if Navalny’s sacrifice – reduced, as he describes himself, to a walking skeleton, after the hunger strike decided to demand medical treatment – will be able to convince the many Russians that even if they sympathize with him they still mistrust the nationalist positions taken in the past, the lack of experience, the many questions about who is behind Navalny and who finances his foundation.
“He’s not another Sakharov”
«The sentence they have inflicted on him is terribly unfair – a friend from Moscow confided some time ago -. Yet Navalny does not seem to me a figure comparable to Sakharov or Solzhenitzyn. He does not have a positive program: he knows how to destroy, but would he be able to rebuild just as well? For some reason, I’d rather never see him tested, in power. ‘
The battle, however, is now on a higher plane. It is here that Anna Zafesova leads the two protagonists of her book: and here, the country that seems destined to prevail in the future is that of Navalny’s supporters. A Russia, the author writes, which “overturns two centuries of Slavicism” because it no longer sees itself in eternal opposition to the West, “us and them”, has no inferiority or superiority complexes and loves itself for what it has of beauty and good without being ashamed of criticizing oneself, of contaminating oneself with the rest of the world.
The real revolution
Navalny has no problem recognizing the backwardness of his country, he talks about its corruption and degradation without despair: “He refuses to consider it a curse of fate.” Navalny’s charge of optimism is his real revolution. The difference with Putin’s Russia – an increasingly detached and isolated man, perhaps now at the mercy of his own inner circle, unable to interact with his own people – “is becoming a chasm,” writes Zafesova.
Paradoxically, both Navalny and Putin are moved by the conviction that they are called to a mission, to save the country: but that of the current president, who took Russia in hand in the chaos of the 90s and made it more stable and more prosperous without, however, allowing it to take the next big step towards a democratic model, it is slipping more and more towards the sole intent of preserving the regime. Ended up in a dead end, holding only the weapon of an increasingly rigid authoritarianism. Excluded from the spirit of the times, aligned with the old generations, unable to offer proposals for the future to the new ones.