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Notes -
Navalny is dead.
IMHO it is stupid to seriously discuss the circumstances of his death, especially after Litvinenko, Nemtsov and Navalny himself in 2020. He was killed and many new details that are brought in every hour only prove this more. Prison conditions as a reason are not an excuse, especially when we can see yesterday's Alexei, looking unhealthy, but not at all near death. Prigozhin's fate only further confirms the presumption of guilt.
His death is the right choice for the regime. Navalny posed a much greater threat to them in prison than abroad, and no possible reaction is scary enough to keep him alive. The authorities hope that in the current conditions there will not be a new leader in the opposition who will be able to unite the disparate dissident branches. This is quite likely, especially considering that the deceased did not have a successor (official or informal).
The opposition has lost its head, and the FBK have lost the remnants of their legitimacy. This tragedy for many will be a time of opportunity for others. Surely the next leader is already here, although I hope we wouldn't need to wait too long. In his posthumous address that he recorded for the 2022 film, Alexey asks Russians not to give up and I am sure that no one is going to do this. As a Russian I can say that as long as Russia exists, there will always be people willing to risk their lives for freedom and truth.
Not a Russian, but the history of Russia seems to be that all such people lose their lives in vain.
Actually compared to Eastern and Central European neighbors Russian Empire wasn't particularly bad, and there were a number of improvements, in no small part thanks to the some in the past that were similar to Navalny. Of course after First World War and revolutions everything went to shit for the next century.
Uh, I don’t know that that’s true. Austria and Germany were both meaningfully freer(although less free than the Anglosphere) in the run up to the Great War; Austria had to make real concessions in the ‘48 revolutions and Bismarck eventually backed down on his kulturkampf program without executing or imprisoning very many people. The ottomans might have been as bad as tsarist Russia, but they’re a non-central example; Russia has much more in common with its Eastern European neighbors than with Turkey.
At the start of the 20th century, if you were forced to pick a country that you think would carry out a Holocaust-level atrocity in the next fifty years, everyone would have picked Russia. (Not necessarily with Jews as the target, they were just the most obvious target). No other state in Christian Europe was nearly so repressive.
And they were right! Maybe not by the path anticipated but it did happen!
You mean that German SS entered territory of former Russian empire and killed Jews there?
I think he’s referring to the holodomor, which was indeed on the same scale as the Holocaust.
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