Alexei Navalny: a modern-day Lenin?

HITLER and the Nazi Party soon decided that gasing the Jews was cheaper and more efficient than shooting them. In Russia, Lenin prefered poisoning what he considered enemies of the State.

Thus,the Russian opposition activist, Alexei Navalny, is merely the latest Kremlin critic suspected to have been poisoned in dodgy circumstances. Over the last century a series of political opponents have fallen mysteriously ill. Many have died. All have seemingly been victims of Moscow’s secret poisons laboratory, set up by Vladimir Lenin in 1921.

Its purpose was to deal efficiently and mercilessly with perceived enemies of the state. Some were domestic, others troublesome exiles. According to Stalin’s former spy chief Pavel Sudoplatov, the KGB concluded long ago that poison was the best method for eliminating unwanted individuals. The KGB’s modern successor – the FSB – appears to share this view.

During the cold war, the KGB exterminated its adversaries in ingenious ways. In 1959 an assassin killed the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera using a cyanide spray pistol hidden in a newspaper. In 1979 another hitman murdered the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov as he waited for a bus on Waterloo Bridge in London. The weapon: a poison-tipped umbrella.

In the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin, exotic murders stopped, at a time of cooperation between Russia and the west. Once Vladimir Putin became president in 2000, however, political killings stealthily resumed. There was speculation that the poisons factory – identified as a squat, gloomy, beige research building on the outskirts of Moscow – was back in business.

Possible victims included Roman Tsepov, Putin’s bodyguard in 1990s St Petersburg, who died after drinking tea in 2004 at a local FSB office. The same year, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya fell ill on a domestic flight to Rostov, losing consciousness after sipping tea on the plane. She survived. Two years later a gunman murdered Politkovskaya outside her Moscow flat.

Up to now the most notorious poisoning of the century took place weeks later. The target this time was Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer turned vehement Putin critic. Two Moscow assassins – Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi – met Litvinenko at the Millennium hotel in London. He swallowed a few sips of green tea laced with radioactive polonium, dying three weeks later.

The murder led to a long and acrimonious period in British-Russian relations. It also threw up a grim question: whether Putin signed off on state hits, or merely set broad policy parameters for his spy chiefs to interpret. A 2016 public inquiry in the UK ruled Putin had “probably” approved the operation, together with the then head of the FSB. Some government evidence remains secret.

In March 2018, another pair of Kremlin hitmen flew into London from Moscow, in much the same way Kovtun and Lugovoi had done 12 years earlier. Their target was Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent who had spied for MI6. The assassins were colonels in Russian military intelligence, working undercover: Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin.

According to the British government, Mishkin and Chepiga applied a Soviet-era nerve agent – novichok – to the front door handle of Skripal’s home in Salisbury. He and his daughter, Yulia, collapsed hours later on a city centre bench. They survived but another woman, Dawn Sturgess, died two months later after spraying novichok on her wrists. The UK and its allies expelled more than 150 embassy-based Russian spies.

Evidence of Putin’s personal involvement in poisonings remains circumstantial. We do not know how much he knows or the chain of command. But the large number of victims, at home and abroad, suggests the Kremlin views such episodes as an unpleasant but necessary evil. They send a message to society. It says that dissent has its limits, and that unbridled opposition to the state may carry a terrible price.

The immediate problem for Putin is how to handle Alexei Navalny's popularity as currently the most serious oppostion figure in Russia. Does he risk turning turn Navalny into a martyr by locking him up and throwing away the key or does he let him go and look weak? Hitherto, Putin has tried dismiss him as unimportant but this is harder to do when the facts on the ground seem to contradict this claim.

Even the manner of arrival of Navalny in Moscow last Sunday gave rise to historical comparisons with that of Vladimir Lenin's triumphant return to his home country on April 16, 1917*. Lenin’s arrival at Finland Station marked a turning point in Russian history. From this point, Lenin would go on to take the revolution into his own hands — and by early November (October O.S.), the Bolsheviks would seize power in what is today known as the October Revolution, setting the stage for the establishment of the Soviet Union.

Since his arrival last weekend the jailed anti-corruption blogger and opposition activist Alexei Navalny has called on Russians across the country to take to the streets.

“Do not be silent. Resist. Take to the streets – not for me, but for you,” Navalny said in a short video statement released after his hearing held in a police station, where an impromptu court had been set up a day after he was detained at Sheremetyevo after he arrived home from five months in Germany.

It is believed that Navalny appears to be hoping for a repeat of the 2013 demonstrations where thousands of people gathered outside the Kremlin walls to protest against his arrest at that time. On that occasion the Kremlin backed down and released him, but this time round the stakes are a lot higher.

On the same day as Navalny was arrested, Amnesty International officially named Navalny a prisoner of conscience.

At the same time, Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, flew home with her husband and was with him, and in the camera’s focus, up until the point he was led away by police.

One scenario would be that Navalnaya stands for election in the September Duma elections in her husband's stead, copying opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya's decision to do the same in the Belarusian election.

After her husband’s arrest, Navalnaya went out on to the street to address the waiting crowd.

“Alexei is not afraid. I’m not afraid either and I call on you all not to be afraid,” she said over chants of “Yulia!”

Navalnaya has been playing an increasingly public role since her husband was poisoned. She rapidly flew from Moscow to Omsk, where he had been hospitalised in a coma in August and publically berated the doctors who were refusing to let her see her husband, after they asked for proof that they were married.

She then co-ordinated the effort to get an ambulance plane from Germany to transport her husband to Berlin, as well as fielded questions from the press corps that quickly arrived on the scene.

In perhaps her boldest move, she directly addressed President Vladimir Putin, requesting permission to let them bring her husband to Berlin. The Russian authorities dragged their heels on releasing Navalny to the waiting plane for as long as they could, but with the high tech, well-equipped plane standing on the tarmac and Navalny in a critical condition they could not refuse. Navalnaya can take a large amount of credit for forcing that decision through.

The poisoning saga represented her “moment of transition from an accompanying figure to an independent character,” said Alexander Baunov of the Carnegie Center in Moscow as cited by the Moscow Times. “Now that Alexei is arrested Navalnaya will act independently.”

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* After 17 years of exile in Europe, Communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin staged a triumphant return to his home country on April 16, 1917, with aims to seize power from the Russian government and install a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” His return journey would change the course of world history in ways that are still being reckoned with.

Arriving at the Finland Station in Russia’s former capital of Petrograd (modern-day St. Petersburg), Lenin climbed atop an armored train car to address the thousands of his followers who had gathered. In a now-historic speech, Lenin argued that the Bolshevik Party must use armed force to seize control from the provisional government that had been formed after Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication.

“The people need peace; the people need bread; the people need land. And they give you war, hunger, no bread. … We must fight for the socialist revolution, fight to the end, until the complete victory of the proletariat. Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!" he cried that night.

Lenin’s arrival at Finland Station marked a turning point in Russian history. From this point, Lenin would go on to take the revolution into his own hands — and by early November (October O.S.), the Bolsheviks would seize power in what is today known as the October Revolution, setting the stage for the establishment of the Soviet Union.