Collision course: The Return of Alexei Navalny

Collision course Moscow: The Return of Alexei Navalny Five months after he was poisoned, the opposition leader is headed back to Russia. By Eva Hartog in POLITICO January 15, 2021

MOSCOW — The last time a plane carrying Alexei Navalny landed on Russian soil, the Russian opposition leader was unconscious and pilots had to make an emergency detour to save his life.

Five months later, after a miraculous recovery, a lucid Navalny plans to board a flight to Moscow this Sunday that will bring him back to the country where he suffered a near-fatal attack.

“I ended up in Germany, in an intensive-care box, for one reason: They tried to kill me,” Navalny said in an Instagram post announcing his arrival at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport this weekend. “Russia is my country, Moscow is my city, I miss it.”

For Navalny, his return to Russia from Germany where he underwent treatment for poisoning from the military-grade nerve agent Novichok is at once a personal risk and a political boon. Notably, he is choosing to fly back with the airline Pobeda, Russian for “Victory.”

For the Russian authorities, however, his return spells nothing but trouble at the start of an important election year — trouble they were hoping to avoid by piling on the legal hurdles for Navalny and his entourage.

Most recently, in January, Russia’s penitentiary service asked a court to rule Navalny had breached the terms of his suspended sentence by staying in Germany. In a statement on Thursday, a day after Navalny’s Instagram post, it vowed to do “everything possible” to detain him upon his return to Russia.

It had all the semblance of a last-minute warning: Stay put, or else.

Pointing at Putin

That warning — or threat — seems to have fallen on deaf ears. As Russia’s No. 2 politician after President Vladimir Putin, Navalny has built his brand on refusing to be cowed. If anything, the poison attack has made him redirect his arrows at the very top of Russia’s pyramid of power.

From the moment he woke up from a medically induced coma in Berlin’s Charité Hospital in September, Navalny has accused Putin of personally being behind the poison attack (which the Russian president has denied). And he hasn’t stopped there.

Last month, building on an investigation by the journalism collective Bellingcat, Navalny prank-called a man whom he claimed worked for the FSB, tricking him into admitting the supposed involvement of the security services in his poisoning. A YouTube video of the call has been viewed more than 22 million times.

“No one has humiliated the FSB in this way in a long, long time — if ever,” said political commentator Konstantin Gaaze. “His return will be interpreted as an explicit challenge, there’s no doubt they will want to put him away.”

There are other reasons than revenge to want Navalny sidelined.

This autumn, Russians are set to vote for a new parliament to serve during the so-called power transition in the run-up to the end of Putin’s presidential term in 2024. Pundits are unsure about what will follow — will Putin hang on to the presidential seat, or appoint a successor while maintaining his grip on power? But whatever the preferred option, the Kremlin will want full control over the process.

Ahead of that election — and amid an economic downturn because of the coronavirus pandemic — commentators have pointed to a tangible tightening of the screws against dissent, including the hurried passing of a law late last year that allows individuals to be labeled as “foreign agents.”

Navalny’s “smart voting” strategy against the ruling party United Russia, which coordinates protest votes in challenges to their biggest contenders, and his ability to organize large street protests threaten to throw a spanner into the works.

Conspiracy theories

Russia has a tradition of dissidents returning to their homeland. Sometimes — as with Vladimir Lenin’s train ride in 1917 — they have triumphed. But then there is also the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, who returned to Russia in 2003 only to disappear behind bars for a decade.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, there has been a flood of speculation as to how the Russian authorities will thwart Navalny’s arrival.

Theories have ranged from the conventional (Navalny could be refused boarding on the pretext of COVID restrictions or detained on the runway and placed under house arrest) to the outlandish (the air carrier could be shut down, his flight canceled or a freak snow storm be used as an excuse to divert the plane).

Rather than a rich imagination, the speculation reveals a general sense of lawlessness after a summer that included a controversial vote on constitutional reforms which will allow Putin to stay in power beyond 2024 and Navalny’s brazen poisoning.

“If before we understood that Navalny could be jailed at any moment, now the scenario we have in mind is that he could be killed,” Ilya Yashin, an opposition politician and a close ally of Navalny’s told the Dozhd television channel.

Moreover, most commentators agree that political unrest in the United States ahead of the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden plays into the Kremlin’s hands by drawing international attention away from Russia.

Touchdown

Presumably in an effort to prevent his immediate arrest, Navalny has called upon his supporters to meet him at the airport on Sunday. A large turnout could convince the authorities to hold back — temporarily at least.

Then again, a low turnout could backfire and convince the hardliners in government that punitive measures against the opposition politician will go largely unprotested.

A poll by the independent Levada Center late last year showed that fewer Russians believed the Kremlin was behind the poisoning than those who suspect the West — echoing the Kremlin’s own claims of a foreign conspiracy. Most Russians, however, were indifferent or believed the entire poisoning was staged.

But the authorities have to tread carefully: Jailing Navalny could risk making a martyr out of him and be interpreted as a sign of weakness. But leaving him free practically guarantees he will be a nuisance. In deciding how to respond to that conundrum, the Russian authorities are like a character in a fighting video game, forced to pick a weapon before entering into battle.

“Тhere are a million different options of how it will play out, but Sunday will undoubtedly be a very sharp start to the political season,” said Gaaze.

Or, in the words of political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya on Telegram: “The situation with Navalny is very similar to two trains rushing towards each other, doomed to collide. There will be many victims.”

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Trouble at the Greek border crossing

by Brian Bamford

IN March1997, I stood on the Greek border at the Albanian Kakavijë frontier crossing near the Greek town of Ioannina, and watched as wagons driven by the Greek police emptied Gypsies out of the back onto Albania territory.  That was during the political crisis set off by the Pyramid sales* scandal, and all pretense of State power had collapsed in Albania.  

Later a Greek customs officers tried to explain to me why he was turning back middle-class Albanians, and he told me in English: 'this is just like the problem in the USA with its border with Mexico -- we can't keep letting people through'.  

One young lass who'd been turned back that day had traveled from her home further north to the Kakavijë frontier, and the guard said she had tried to cross three-times and each time with a different father.  When I spoke to the Albanian consul in Ioannina, he told me that there was nothing he could do for these people, and that I could have more influence by connecting the Greek Embassy in London.  This I did and I reported incident in Freedom at the time.  

That was in 1997, but as I write today with the enforced Turkish pressure on emigrants from Syria now being pushed up against the Greek frontier, according to the Politico website:

'Greek authorities [have] said they had intercepted around 4,000 people attempting to cross at points along the 50-mile border on Friday night. Some estimates suggested more than 1,000 made it to Greece on Friday, although the government denied these estimates. After 66 people were arrested Friday night, another 70 were arrested on Saturday. Officials said Saturday night more than 10,000 people were at the border.'

This weekend about 1,000 people are reported to be stranded between Turkey and Greece.

And the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reiterated Saturday that the country no longer intended to work to prevent migrants from entering Europe. 'We will not close these doors ... Why? The European Union needs to keep its promises. We don’t have to take care of this many refugees, to feed them,' he said.
 
The Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has suggested that Austria could soon consider closing its border if the situation worsens.

Kurz tweeted Saturday that Austria is ready to provide additional police support to other countries but added, 'If the protection of the EU's external border is unsuccessful, Austria will protect its borders.'

A statement by European Council President Charles Michel read: 'The EU is actively engaged to uphold the EU-Turkey Statement and to support Greece and Bulgaria to protect the EU’s external borders.'

On the eve of the Serbian Parliamentary elections, which were to be held in the Republic of Serbia on 23 December 2000^[1], I was in Achau in the Baverian Alps, and there I boarded a train for Saltzburg which ultimately connected with a train bound for Belgrade via Budapest.  Owing to visa problems I was held up at Subotica in northern Serbia, and sent back to the Serb Embassy in Hungary to get authentication for my Freedom Press credentials which was soon sorted.  But not before I was briefly detained by Hungarian police as I was on my way to the railway station, who demanded my passport and accused me of being a Iranian.  At that time Hungary was anxious to affiliate to the EU, and there was a fear of an invasion of immigrants from Serbia and Kosvo.

What was interesting was that while I was being held by the frontier guards at Subottica, a Kosovan migrant was brought out, and we exchanged greetings before he was taken off somewhere.  I managed to give him some sandwiches which he ate greedily before he was hauled off by armed guards.  Kosovans are Muslims. yet this didn't prevent him eating and apparently enjoying the ham butties.

One can't spend time in the Balkans** without becoming concious of the importance of frontiers to those people who don't live on islands as we do.

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*  A pyramid scheme creates the illusion of financial success by paying off early investors with funds provided by later investors.  The scheme eventually collapses when no more investors can be found.  When the schemes began to collapse in Albania [in 1997] and the money vanished, Europe’s second-poorest country (ahead of Bosnia-Herzegovina) erupted into violent riots that left one person dead, scores injured and city halls, courts and police stations in flames.
High-risk, get-rich-quick pyramid schemes have popped up in Poland, Romania, the former Yugoslav federation and the former Soviet Union, where transition economies, lax regulation and vulnerable populations have created fertile ground for abuse.

But only in Albania did the schemes reach such mammoth proportions and operate with the tacit blessing--some say complicity--of the government.
Suddenly Albania, a country that seemed to be emerging successfully from decades of brutal Communist rule and numbing isolation, was plunged into a crisis that has undermined both its wobbly economy and chances for the government’s survival, exposed a false sense of prosperity and led to profound questioning of the nominally democratic system that Albania adopted after the belated fall of Stalinism in 1991.


**  The First Balkan War began when the League member states attacked the Ottoman Empire on 8 October 1912 and ended eight months later with the signing of the Treaty of London on 30 May 1913. The Second Balkan War began on 16 June 1913. Both Serbia and Greece, utilizing the argument that the war had been prolonged, repudiated important particulars of the pre-war treaty and retained occupation of all the conquered districts in their possession, which were to be divided according to specific predefined boundaries.

Len McCluskey states the obvious about Labour

Media Bias & Public Taste
by Brian Bamford

Len McCluskey Hits the Deck! (photo - Daily Telegraph)

THE leader of the Unite union, Len McCluskey, in a telephone interview with POLITICO magazine*, was merely stating the obvious when he says that it would be 'extraordinary' if Labour won, and went on to say that it was the Labour party leader's problem of his public image that was to blame, and for this he accused the media of 'media bias'.

He blamed all this on the media's 'constant attack' on Corbyn, internal party divisions, and on the consequences of the public support for the Prime Minister Theresa May when she was 'jumping on the bandwagon of hard Brexit.'

He said he was not holding out much hope for an upset victory despite the popularity of many of Labour’s left-wing policies, unveiled at the party’s manifesto launch in Bradford, West Yorkshire, today.

McCluskey claimed the working class voters who say they are going to vote Tory for the first time are doing so 'because their mind is being turned by the constant attack of the media on Jeremy Corbyn and the image that they’ve pinned on Jeremy.'

For McCluskey it is the same old story, as it is for most of the left, blame the media when things go wrong.  How can they be so surprised about media bias?

Meanwhile, today in the New York Times the novelist Joan Smith writes about the sexualisation of British politics in which 'Mrs May lounged on a sofa in a pair of leather trousers for an interview at the end of a momentous year that saw her move to No.10 Downing Street.'

Joan Smith, a feminist, justifiably suggests;  'The public probably knows more about what she wears than it does about what she wears than it does about her policies, confirming just about every sexist stereotype'.

Only a mediocre Marxist mind or a feeble-minded feminist, would expect that the public would find politics more fascinating than fashion and leather pants and especially 'eye-catching footwear'.

Ms. Smith writes:  'Isn't it demeaning, not to say sexist, to focus on how she dresses?'

In summing up Ms. Smith writes:  'This is all the more disappointing at a moment when the Conservative Party has overturned the traditional order of British politics by fielding a competent, personable woman against a male opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who looks and sounds like a throwback to the 1970s.'

Are the media to blame for focusing on what they believe the public like?  Or are the British public to blame for preferring fashion and the sexy style of Mrs. May to the dreariness of Mr Corbyn and John McDonnell?

* Overnight Mr. McCluskey underwent a change of mind on this matter, and on the BBC this morning he said that 'following the launch of Labour's manifesto, which he said had been warmly welcomed by his union's members'.  This only suggests a kind of collective catastrophic psychological condition in which Labour supporters, like McCluskey, don't know whether they are coming or going.