Almost no one in Russia takes this man seriously, he is a good blogger, but not a politician.
> In early January, protests swept through neighboring Kazakhstan, an oil-rich autocracy to Russia’s south. Government buildings were set ablaze. Scores of police and protesters were killed. Kazakhstan’s President issued a shoot-to-kill order to his security forces and called for assistance from Russia and its allies. Within hours, Putin dispatched thousands of troops to help put down the uprising. The crackdown worked. The protests subsided.
These are not demonstrators, these are people who have ruined real demands that the demonstrators wanted the Kazakh government to hear. This is very different. An isolated case in a very big city and not similar to other real protesters. Probably a power play within the high authorities.
And these CSTO soldiers did not participate in any policing aimed directly at the “demonstrators”, they were here to secure strategic buildings (not to burn down another building) which are essential for the stability of the country.
Similarly, the President only talked about shooting the bandits and terrorists, you know the ones who took up arms and killed and lynched policemen/soldiers, not the unarmed demonstrators in the middle of chaos.
The demonstrations stopped because the original demands were given.
Otherwise, I liked the article.
##The Man Putin Fears
**By Simon Shuster**
*January 19, 2022 7:00 AM EST*
On a cold morning in November, the family of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, made the trip out to visit him at Penal Colony No. 2. The drive from Moscow took about two hours, though parts of it felt like traveling back in time. Coming off the highway from Russia’s high-tech capital, the roads became rutted. Apartment blocks gave way to wooden huts, and old ladies appeared near the roadside in heavy coats, selling vegetables from their gardens.
At the prison gates, Navalny’s wife and parents carried a few bags of groceries into a waiting room, where an ancient telephone allowed them to announce their visit to the guards. Before long, the inmate was led out to meet them. He looked skinny, his head shorn, a broad smile framed by a prison-issue hat. Ten months had passed since Navalny’s incarceration, and more than a year since he was nearly poisoned to death with a chemical weapon. Its effects on his nervous system no longer showed; his hands had stopped trembling. “He looked good,” his wife Yulia Navalnaya later told me. “Unchanged.”
It had been Navalny’s decision to be there. Not in this specific prison, with its silent guards and its windows papered over to create the feeling, Navalny says, of living inside a shoebox. But he did make a choice to return to Russia, fully aware of what the state would likely do to him. From his temporary exile, he decided almost exactly a year ago to submit to the custody of the regime that stood accused of trying to murder him. The poison had failed to kill Navalny. It hadn’t even really changed him.
From the confines of his barracks, he still runs a network of dissidents devoted to ousting President Vladimir Putin. Its top leaders are fugitives from Russian law, though they were not hard for me to find while reporting this story. Some met me while they were fundraising in New York City or lobbying in Washington. Others showed me the TV studio they built in Eastern Europe, just outside Russia’s border, to air broadcasts for millions of followers inside.
Through them, I began to receive a series of handwritten letters from Penal Colony No. 2. “Please, not too many questions,” Navalny told me in the first one last October. “There’s no time for writing here, and the process of getting these pages out is exhausting.” You wouldn’t know it from the volume of his subsequent answers, about two dozen line-ruled pages covered in a hurried Russian script. The first one came punctuated with a smiley face, as though the dissident were still adding emojis to the blog that started his political career.
Our exchange, which lasted through the middle of January, coincided with a tense time in Europe. Not long after Navalny’s family visited him, Putin began massing troops near Russia’s western border, enough to launch an invasion of Ukraine. The Biden Administration tried to talk the Russians down, resulting in a standoff drenched in Cold War revivalism. Envoys of the world’s two nuclear superpowers spent weeks trading threats and demands. The spectacle made Navalny cringe. “Time and again the West falls into Putin’s elementary traps,” he wrote me, in a letter that arrived Jan. 14. “It just takes my breath away, watching how Putin pulls this on the American establishment again and again.”
In its talks with Putin, the U.S. strategy has been to offer Russia a “diplomatic offramp,” while also making clear that an invasion of Ukraine would be met with “severe and overwhelming costs,” a spokesman for the National Security Council told me, adding that the U.S. considers his imprisonment “to be politically motivated and a gross injustice.”
Few people have studied Putin as long or as obsessively as Navalny. In his letters, he tries to explain what motivates the Russian President, and what Putin fears. It is not what he claims to be concerned about: the deployment of U.S. forces in Eastern Europe, or the chance that Ukraine might one day join the NATO alliance. “Instead of ignoring this nonsense,” Navalny writes, “the U.S. accepts Putin’s agenda and runs to organize some meetings. Just like a frightened schoolboy who’s been bullied by an upperclassman.”
What Putin truly fears is what Navalny’s movement seeks—a change of power in Russia, followed by cashiering its corrupt clan of oligarchs and spies. It isn’t NATO that keeps Putin up at night; it’s the space for democratic dissent that NATO opens up along his border. This fear, Navalny argues, is what drives all the conflicts Russia wages with the West. “To consolidate the country and the elites,” he writes, “Putin constantly needs all these extreme measures, all these wars—real ones, virtual ones, hybrid ones or just confrontations at the edge of war, as we’re seeing now.”
Rather than convening talks or offering concessions, Navalny wants the U.S. to pressure the Kremlin from without while Navalny and his supporters pressure it from within. The combination, he believes, will split the elites around Putin, ushering in what Navalny’s followers like to call “the beautiful Russia of the future,” one that is free, democratic, at peace with its neighbors and the West.
But that slogan elides the ugliness of how dictatorships often fall. Russians need not look far for examples. In early January, protests swept through neighboring Kazakhstan, an oil-rich autocracy to Russia’s south. Government buildings were set ablaze. Scores of police and protesters were killed. Kazakhstan’s President issued a shoot-to-kill order to his security forces and called for assistance from Russia and its allies. Within hours, Putin dispatched thousands of troops to help put down the uprising. The crackdown worked. The protests subsided.
In our exchange of letters, I asked Navalny about the prospect of such violence in Russia, and whether he sees it as the price of change after 21 years under the rule of one man. “Our path,” he wrote, “was never strewn with roses.”
Navalny was born and raised in garrison towns, moving from one to another with his father, a Soviet officer who did not have much faith in the system he served. That system fell apart when Navalny was a teenager. After studying law, he got his first taste of politics as a member of the Yabloko party, a group of milquetoast liberals that his mother, an economist, supported. “We lived well,” she once told a Russian magazine about Navalny’s youth. “That is, we were poor. Like everybody else.”
I first met Navalny in Moscow 12 years ago. Tall and stooped, with a slight paunch and ice blue eyes, he stood out as the only dissident organized and popular enough to pose even a distant threat to Putin’s rule. His headquarters back then were a cheaply furnished office in Moscow with low ceilings and a heavy metal door. Hunched over laptops in its dim rooms sat the staff of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Navalny’s activist group. He founded it in 2011 to exploit the main weakness he saw in Putin’s system: the insatiable greed of its courtiers.
On social media, the foundation became famous for exposing the garish wealth of these elites. Its reports were often based on forensic accounting and bank records. Some used drone footage of Italian villas owned by Putin’s underlings. Others plucked evidence from photos that these officials or their relatives posted online, flaunting a yacht or luxury watches. One technocrat had a habit of flying his pet corgis to dog shows on a private jet. In his videos, Navalny delivered these findings in an irreverent style, like a wisecracking detective for the YouTube generation.
4 comments
>The Man Putin Fears
Why ruin good journalism by clickbait shit.
Almost no one in Russia takes this man seriously, he is a good blogger, but not a politician.
> In early January, protests swept through neighboring Kazakhstan, an oil-rich autocracy to Russia’s south. Government buildings were set ablaze. Scores of police and protesters were killed. Kazakhstan’s President issued a shoot-to-kill order to his security forces and called for assistance from Russia and its allies. Within hours, Putin dispatched thousands of troops to help put down the uprising. The crackdown worked. The protests subsided.
These are not demonstrators, these are people who have ruined real demands that the demonstrators wanted the Kazakh government to hear. This is very different. An isolated case in a very big city and not similar to other real protesters. Probably a power play within the high authorities.
And these CSTO soldiers did not participate in any policing aimed directly at the “demonstrators”, they were here to secure strategic buildings (not to burn down another building) which are essential for the stability of the country.
Similarly, the President only talked about shooting the bandits and terrorists, you know the ones who took up arms and killed and lynched policemen/soldiers, not the unarmed demonstrators in the middle of chaos.
The demonstrations stopped because the original demands were given.
Otherwise, I liked the article.
##The Man Putin Fears
**By Simon Shuster**
*January 19, 2022 7:00 AM EST*
On a cold morning in November, the family of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, made the trip out to visit him at Penal Colony No. 2. The drive from Moscow took about two hours, though parts of it felt like traveling back in time. Coming off the highway from Russia’s high-tech capital, the roads became rutted. Apartment blocks gave way to wooden huts, and old ladies appeared near the roadside in heavy coats, selling vegetables from their gardens.
At the prison gates, Navalny’s wife and parents carried a few bags of groceries into a waiting room, where an ancient telephone allowed them to announce their visit to the guards. Before long, the inmate was led out to meet them. He looked skinny, his head shorn, a broad smile framed by a prison-issue hat. Ten months had passed since Navalny’s incarceration, and more than a year since he was nearly poisoned to death with a chemical weapon. Its effects on his nervous system no longer showed; his hands had stopped trembling. “He looked good,” his wife Yulia Navalnaya later told me. “Unchanged.”
It had been Navalny’s decision to be there. Not in this specific prison, with its silent guards and its windows papered over to create the feeling, Navalny says, of living inside a shoebox. But he did make a choice to return to Russia, fully aware of what the state would likely do to him. From his temporary exile, he decided almost exactly a year ago to submit to the custody of the regime that stood accused of trying to murder him. The poison had failed to kill Navalny. It hadn’t even really changed him.
From the confines of his barracks, he still runs a network of dissidents devoted to ousting President Vladimir Putin. Its top leaders are fugitives from Russian law, though they were not hard for me to find while reporting this story. Some met me while they were fundraising in New York City or lobbying in Washington. Others showed me the TV studio they built in Eastern Europe, just outside Russia’s border, to air broadcasts for millions of followers inside.
Through them, I began to receive a series of handwritten letters from Penal Colony No. 2. “Please, not too many questions,” Navalny told me in the first one last October. “There’s no time for writing here, and the process of getting these pages out is exhausting.” You wouldn’t know it from the volume of his subsequent answers, about two dozen line-ruled pages covered in a hurried Russian script. The first one came punctuated with a smiley face, as though the dissident were still adding emojis to the blog that started his political career.
Our exchange, which lasted through the middle of January, coincided with a tense time in Europe. Not long after Navalny’s family visited him, Putin began massing troops near Russia’s western border, enough to launch an invasion of Ukraine. The Biden Administration tried to talk the Russians down, resulting in a standoff drenched in Cold War revivalism. Envoys of the world’s two nuclear superpowers spent weeks trading threats and demands. The spectacle made Navalny cringe. “Time and again the West falls into Putin’s elementary traps,” he wrote me, in a letter that arrived Jan. 14. “It just takes my breath away, watching how Putin pulls this on the American establishment again and again.”
In its talks with Putin, the U.S. strategy has been to offer Russia a “diplomatic offramp,” while also making clear that an invasion of Ukraine would be met with “severe and overwhelming costs,” a spokesman for the National Security Council told me, adding that the U.S. considers his imprisonment “to be politically motivated and a gross injustice.”
Few people have studied Putin as long or as obsessively as Navalny. In his letters, he tries to explain what motivates the Russian President, and what Putin fears. It is not what he claims to be concerned about: the deployment of U.S. forces in Eastern Europe, or the chance that Ukraine might one day join the NATO alliance. “Instead of ignoring this nonsense,” Navalny writes, “the U.S. accepts Putin’s agenda and runs to organize some meetings. Just like a frightened schoolboy who’s been bullied by an upperclassman.”
What Putin truly fears is what Navalny’s movement seeks—a change of power in Russia, followed by cashiering its corrupt clan of oligarchs and spies. It isn’t NATO that keeps Putin up at night; it’s the space for democratic dissent that NATO opens up along his border. This fear, Navalny argues, is what drives all the conflicts Russia wages with the West. “To consolidate the country and the elites,” he writes, “Putin constantly needs all these extreme measures, all these wars—real ones, virtual ones, hybrid ones or just confrontations at the edge of war, as we’re seeing now.”
Rather than convening talks or offering concessions, Navalny wants the U.S. to pressure the Kremlin from without while Navalny and his supporters pressure it from within. The combination, he believes, will split the elites around Putin, ushering in what Navalny’s followers like to call “the beautiful Russia of the future,” one that is free, democratic, at peace with its neighbors and the West.
But that slogan elides the ugliness of how dictatorships often fall. Russians need not look far for examples. In early January, protests swept through neighboring Kazakhstan, an oil-rich autocracy to Russia’s south. Government buildings were set ablaze. Scores of police and protesters were killed. Kazakhstan’s President issued a shoot-to-kill order to his security forces and called for assistance from Russia and its allies. Within hours, Putin dispatched thousands of troops to help put down the uprising. The crackdown worked. The protests subsided.
In our exchange of letters, I asked Navalny about the prospect of such violence in Russia, and whether he sees it as the price of change after 21 years under the rule of one man. “Our path,” he wrote, “was never strewn with roses.”
Navalny was born and raised in garrison towns, moving from one to another with his father, a Soviet officer who did not have much faith in the system he served. That system fell apart when Navalny was a teenager. After studying law, he got his first taste of politics as a member of the Yabloko party, a group of milquetoast liberals that his mother, an economist, supported. “We lived well,” she once told a Russian magazine about Navalny’s youth. “That is, we were poor. Like everybody else.”
I first met Navalny in Moscow 12 years ago. Tall and stooped, with a slight paunch and ice blue eyes, he stood out as the only dissident organized and popular enough to pose even a distant threat to Putin’s rule. His headquarters back then were a cheaply furnished office in Moscow with low ceilings and a heavy metal door. Hunched over laptops in its dim rooms sat the staff of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Navalny’s activist group. He founded it in 2011 to exploit the main weakness he saw in Putin’s system: the insatiable greed of its courtiers.
On social media, the foundation became famous for exposing the garish wealth of these elites. Its reports were often based on forensic accounting and bank records. Some used drone footage of Italian villas owned by Putin’s underlings. Others plucked evidence from photos that these officials or their relatives posted online, flaunting a yacht or luxury watches. One technocrat had a habit of flying his pet corgis to dog shows on a private jet. In his videos, Navalny delivered these findings in an irreverent style, like a wisecracking detective for the YouTube generation.
*Continued …*