Eulogy to Alexei Navalny

Echo essay published in The Washington Post by Michael McFaul*.

Vladimir Putin killed my friend Alexei Navalny this week. There will be a time and place to discuss the politics and how the free world should respond. For now, I want to share a few memories.

Associated Press:  The sudden death of Navalny, 47, was a crushing blow to many Russians, who had pinned their hopes for the future on President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe. Navalny remained vocal in his unrelenting criticism of the Kremlin even after surviving a nerve agent poisoning and receiving multiple prison terms.

The Alexei Navalny I knew was super smart. For me, the sign of a true intellectual is the courage to change your mind. We disagreed about some things he had said in the past, particularly about the Caucasus and Crimea. He listened, and it felt to me he was rethinking some of his earlier statements. But he also pushed back, challenging my commitment to “neoliberalism” in the 1990s. Russia would be better off, he argued, had the West supported social democratic ideas back then. He was right. I changed my mind, too. That’s called learning. He was exceptional at that.

The Alexei I knew was extremely charming. I remember our first meeting at the White House in 2009, when I worked at the National Security Council. 

My boss at the time, Barack Obama, was known for his charisma. Navalny had Obama-caliber presence. I understood that day why Putin feared him. In a free and fair election, Navalny would have destroyed Putin. Remember that the next time you read a poll in the media about Putin’s popularity.

The Alexei I knew was incredibly funny. When I served as the U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012-2014, we never had a formal meeting, just one chance encounter at an anniversary dinner for the Moscow Times. Navalny understood that any public meetings with me would just fuel conspiracy stories constantly propagated on Putin’s media channels — that the United States was funding his operation. So, instead, we interacted on Twitter, always in a humorous, playful way.

When I once called Russia a “wild country” after a group of paid Putin agitators accosted me on the street, it felt like the whole world, including many in the United States, berated me for my “undiplomatic” outburst. 

Not Alexei. He asked on Twitter why I did not just belt them, since I had diplomatic immunity. In another tweet, lampooning Putin’s conspiracy-mongering, Navalny instructed me to meet him at some metro station in the “last wagon” (a common way to meet people during the Soviet days) to do our “secret” business.

The Alexei I knew — and that the world knew — was incredibly brave and firmly committed to his values: fighting Putin’s corruption and trying to liberate his country from totalitarian dictatorship. As a scholar of democratization and a sometimes activist for democracy, I have studied or had the privilege of meeting some of the most courageous freedom fighters in the world. Navalny was one of them — the Mandela of Putin’s Russia. Nelson Mandela survived his three decades of captivity. Navalny tragically did not.

The Alexei I knew was a fierce family man. He was so proud of his daughter, Dasha, when she got into Stanford, where I teach. He and his wife, Yuliya, were just like all the other excited Stanford parents when they dropped Dasha off on campus her first year. And they have watched her grow into a strong, principled, charismatic leader, just like her dad and mom. Of course, Alexei had to watch from afar.

In fact, well before he decided to go back to Russia, it seemed to me his deepest anxiety was not about enduring torture in Putin’s gulag or even facing death, but about being an absentee father and husband. By doing what he thought was right for his country, he knew that he was asking his family to sacrifice a lot, too. And today, that sacrifice has grown so much larger.

Navalny dreamed of a free Russia. Barbaric dictators such as Putin can kill men, but they cannot kill ideas. I do not know when, but I am confident that Navalny’s ideas of freedom will outlive Putin’s ideas of tyranny.

*Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, is director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Hoover fellow at Stanford University and a contributing columnist to The Post. He is the author of "From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia.

Protests:  More than 200 arrests were made in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, the group said. By Sunday evening, court officials in St. Petersburg reported rulings ordering 154 of those detained to serve from one to 14 days in jail.

Even Moscow called out Tucker-Schmucker-Sucker Carlson about creating fake news

"When Tucker Carlson announced his interview with Vladimir Putin claiming that “no Western journalist had bothered” to interview the Russian president, he was immediately corrected by not only other journalists but the Kremlin itself." Moscow Times! ❗ 😂

Putin Says He Was Not Impressed by Tucker Carlson

Echo report published in the Daily Beast by Julia Davis

Tucker Carlson (i.e. "Tucker-Schmucker-Sucker) did all that he could to impress the Russian authoritarian (evil) Vladimir Putin: he asserted that Russia is not an expansionist power, claimed that Moscow is better than any American city, posed in a Buryat costume, and lobbied against continued U.S. aid to Ukraine.

Nevertheless, Putin was not impressed. 😖😞😑😜 He told interviewer Pavel Zarubin this week, “Sincerely speaking, I didn’t fully enjoy this interview.”

“Frankly, I thought he would behave aggressively and ask tough questions. I wasn’t just prepared for this, I wanted it!” Putin insisted.

Russia's dictator president complained that Carlson’s failure to ask pointed questions “didn’t give him an opportunity to do what he was prepared to do” and therefore, this interview didn’t turn out to be as engaging or substantive as it could have been.

When Zarubin queried the Russian president as to what he thought about negative reactions of Western leaders, Putin evasively replied that it’s a good thing they’re watching and listening. He added, “If today, due to their own reasons, we are unable to conduct direct dialogue, then we should be grateful to Mr. Carlson for the fact that we can do this through him as an intermediary.”

For years leading up to Tucker-Schmucker-Sucker Carlson’s interview with Putin, he was a darling of the Russian state media. Top Russian propagandists gushed about him, featured translated clips of his Fox Fake News segments and even described Carlson as “the only American they wouldn’t want to kill.”

Head of Russia Today (rt) Margarita Simonyan recounted that Carlson repeatedly contacted her since 2021, pleading for an interview with Putin—and his attempts intensified after Russia invaded Ukraine. 

Simonyan said that she went “from office to office, begging for what we [RT] believe is important for the country.” State media’s talking heads predicted that the interview would blow up the U.S. elections and stun gullible Americans.

Instead, the sit-down was more of a (boring🥱) monologue than a conversation, with Putin droning on about ancient and modern history, deliberately twisted to justify Russia’s revanchist aspirations with respect to (falsely) recovering Ukraine. The outcome was clearly underwhelming. Carlson’s softball endeavor was not only ridiculed in the West, but also rejected by Russian audiences.
Russian propagandists anticipated questions about Satanism, LGBT issues and American biolabs. The closest they got was when Carlson asked Putin, “So do you see the supernatural at work as you look out across what's happening in the world now? 

Do you see God at work? Do you ever think to yourself, these are forces that are not human?” Putin failed to take advantage of the leading question and delivered a very Soviet-minded response: “No, to be honest. I don’t think so.”  

(Maine Writer must expreess an opinion here......Tucker-Schmucker-Sucker Carlson's wasted question about supernatural forces is over the top stupidity.  Vladimir Putin is a tyrannical dictator, but much too smart to lower himself to respond to this idiotic and ludicrous leading question.)

Despite her initial frustration about wasted propaganda opportunities, Simonyan quickly bounced back and was soon praising the interview on Vladimir Solovyov’s show, Sunday Evening With Vladimir Solovyov. With fervor rivaling the infamous North Korean “woman in pink,” Simonyan declared, “This was the most successful, the most significant and a truly historic media event in journalism in the history of humanity!”

To spice things up, Simonyan claimed that herself and her husband Tigran Keosayan were so moved that they wept while watching the interview.

Now that Putin has revealed his disappointment with the outcome of her pet endeavor, Simonyan may be crying for other reasons—or quickly changing her rhetoric to match that of “the Soviet Boss.”

Putin keeps dead military troops secret - how can Russian people put up with this autocracy?

Autocracy-  government system in which a supreme power is concentrated in the hands of one person, whose decisions are subject to neither external legal restraints nor regularized mechanisms of popular control. Nevertheless, even the autocrat Vladimir Putin in Russia is subject to a coup d'état or insurrection. 

In fact, Putin is setting up an insurrection opportunity by refusing to let his government acknowledge military deaths. This oppression can't be tolerated.  Regardless of what kind of benefits the military might feel entitled to, the regard for the dead is of the highest value.  
Although war can often leave behind many unknowns, the fact is, to oppress the names of the military dead is irresponsible. 

Ivan Nechepurenko reported in The Moscow Times and printed in the June 12, 2015 The Week.

You can now be jailed for reporting on Russian death in Ukraine, said Ivan nechepurenko.  

President Vladimir Putin has signed a law that classifies all military casualties as state secrets - in times of both war and peace. Even the families of dead or injured troops will now be barred from talking about what happened to their loved ones. In fact, the decree formalizes what has been an effective Russian policy since the beginning of the Ukraine conflict. 

The Kremlin has consistently denied that Russian soldiers are fighting alongside pro-Russian rebels, and it - or someone - has punished those who say otherwise. When the Pskovskaya Gubernaia reported on secret funerals for paratroopers killed in Ukraine, one of its journalists, "was severely beaten by three unidentified men."  Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was working on a report about the deployment of Russian troops to Ukraine when he was murdered in Moscow in February.  

Legal and military experts told us that the decree is in itself "further confirmation of Russia's direct involvement in the Ukraine conflict." But that vague confirmation is all we can now hope for.

"The main consequence of this law," says Alexander Peredruk of the Soldiers' Mothers Committee, "is that it will basically be impossible to obtain information."

Indeed, this blog is calling for President Putin to leave his autocratic government and turn his leadership over to a someone who the world can trust. 

Unfortunately, perhaps Putin is rightly terrified about letting go of his autocracy because, in so doing, his name will soon be conveniently forgotten.

Crimea - so what has Russia done for you "lately"?

".....extraterritoriality — meaning exempted from local law — and it negates all past efforts to stop Chechnya from being an extraterritorial region...." ( In other words....seems like Russia has created a Crimea where law is a territorial limbo zone.)

Ukraine a year later without Crimea is a grim anniversary. 

Russia stole the Crimea from the Ukraine, but the separation hasn't exactly been an idyllic transformation.

Nevertheless, even if the Crimean people may have some "buyers regret" about the aggressive move toward a unification with Russia, the fact remains that rejoining the Ukraine may not be the country's primary choice.

Moscow Times op ed says Crimea annexation, or whatever the takeover is called, isn't going so great.

Why Russia Won Nothing in Chechnya
By Ivan Sukhov  Mar. 18 2015 17:52

Events connected with the investigation into the murder of (Putin opposition leaers) Boris Nemtsov have forced Russian society to face an issue it has long put off: the situation in Chechnya. 

The federal center has resorted to the large-scale use of force twice over the last quarter-century in order to suppress the separatist movement there. It claims to have succeeded in that struggle, but has it really?

In the late fall of 2014, Moscow police, with support from the special forces, attempted to detain someone in the capital who was suspected of conducting fraudulent cash transactions. However, the special forces were unable to even enter the hotel where the suspect was staying. The man's armed guards fought off the officers, almost resorting to hand-to-hand combat. As a result, the suspect fled and the police operation was cancelled.

The investigator from the Moscow criminal investigation department who planned the sting operation lost his job, although he was one of the "golden group" of Moscow police. It turned out that the man they had wanted to detain was Ramzan Tsitsulayev, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov's special enjoy to Ukraine. Tsitsulayev lives openly in Chechnya, but Moscow investigators lack the resources to bring him to justice.

In February 2015, a group of Dagestani residents were charged with planning the murder of Saigidpasha Umakhanov, the mayor of the Dagestani town of Khasavyurt. Dagestani investigators had done a great deal of work, even managing to infiltrate the group that received instructions for the assassination.

Some of the results of that investigation were published. That information revealed that one of Kadyrov's advisors, the separatist Shaa Turlayev, was the mastermind behind the planned murder. 

Everything about him is known — his name, job, even his home and work telephone numbers. Dagestani investigators know that Turlayev is connected with the group planning to assassinate the mayor. The only problem is, they cannot bring him to justice because he's in Chechnya.

This is what's called extraterritoriality — meaning exempted from local law — and it negates all past efforts to stop Chechnya from being an extraterritorial region.

The problem that Moscow investigators face in the Tsitsulayev case and that Dagestani investigators face in the Turlayev case is no different than the difficulties that Russian prosecutors encountered when trying to obtain timely information in the search for those who had kidnapped and killed four foreign engineers whose heads were found beside a Chechen road in October 1998.

The only difference is that in 1998, Chechnya was de facto independent, whereas now, at least ostensibly, it is not. In fact, Moscow practically holds up Chechnya as an example for other Russian regions to emulate.

Of course, it is wrong to conclude that everything in Chechnya has been going badly in recent years based on the failure of a few investigations. After all, the Chechen war ended long ago and Grozny has been rebuilt and outshines every other city in the North Caucasus.

What's more, Chechnya is perhaps the only place in Russia that not only scrupulously accounts for every ruble it receives from the federal budget, but where residents can even show you every building, road and bridge that that money has purchased. Taken together, that cannot but create a very positive impression.

But, who resides within those new buildings and drives over those new roads and bridges? The problem is not that part of Chechnya's current establishment consists of former separatists. That is nothing to be ashamed of — in fact, it shows that Russia not only found a positive solution to the conflict, but also has something positive to offer, if former die-hard freedom fighters have given up their struggle.

The problem is that those former rebels have never adopted Russian laws. Chechnya is a unique experiment, although the locals are usually reluctant to discuss the subject with outsiders. 

Of course, every Russian region has its share of legal abuses, but Chechnya has become a practically lawless society.

The stabilization of Chechnya is touted as one of, if not the main domestic victory of Putin's rule. Indeed, events in Chechnya played a significant role in Vladimir Putin's rise to power. 

And whereas prior to Putin, Chechnya was a Somalia-like failed state in the patchwork fabric of Russia's North Caucasus, and still lay in ruins during the early years of Putin's rule, by about the end of his second presidential term the situation in Chechnya took a turn for the better.

Apparently, the point is not whether automobile showrooms and jewelry stores now stand on the site of former ruins, but that, for example, Russian officialdom completely ignored the 15th anniversary of the heroic death of the 6th company of the Pskov Airborne Division.

In the spring of 2000, those men encountered a huge gang of insurgents on a wooded hill above the Chechen village of Ulus-Kert. Almost every soldier in the company was killed, but the survivors did not flinch or give up.

Only the surviving paratroopers, the relatives of the slain and Russian nationalists commemorated that battle, even while the Russian media suggested several times recently that a Chechen who shoots someone whom he feels has insulted Islam can be considered a patriot.

There are no grounds for asserting that some of the insurgents who killed the Pskov paratroopers at Ulus-Kert now hold official positions in Grozny, but more than a few Russian siloviki and law enforcement officers working with Chechnya are veterans of the war there.

And whenever they confront a cynical silence in response to their latest request for assistance with an arrest, for example, they must ask themselves: Was it really worth it to fight two wars to restore constitutional order here if it was never actually restored? Are the people holding power in Chechnya the same who rained heavy fire down on Russian positions in Grozny in 1996 and 2000? If so, then what victory was achieved there?

But this "victory" in Chechnya became the foundation not only for Putin's first election campaign, but for the renaissance of imperial ideology, militarization and the readiness to achieve future victories.

The entire current political system in Russia is based on the assumption that in Chechnya, after long years of struggle, numerous erred decisions and countless victims, victory is finally secure. Too much stands on that idea, on that foundation, to simply admit now that it is untrue.

And yet that is exactly the conclusion that the investigation into the murder of Boris Nemtsov will demonstrate if the authorities conduct it honestly, impartially and without fear of recrimination.

That is the type of investigation desired by tens, if not hundreds of thousands of military personnel, police, prosecutors, FSB agents and military intelligence officers who fought and now work in Chechnya for the restoration of constitutional order, and not for the creation of an odious and expensive regime that is quasi-colonial in every sense of the word.

They understand how things actually stand, and are deeply and personally offended by it. But their complaint will never be heard by a society that believes it achieved victory in Chechnya.

In a sense, it is not Chechnya that has adopted Russia's constitutional order, but Russia that has assimilated much of what has become customary in Chechnya over the last 10 years.

Ivan Sukhov is a journalist who has covered conflicts in Russia and the CIS for the past 15 years.

It seems to me, the Crimea will soon be set adrift on its own, without a viable government.  It's possible the Ukraine will never reclaim this former region, but Russia won't have unmitigated access to the region, either. This is a terrible situation for the people in the Crimea. Nevertheless, they voted for the separation from the Ukraine.  What were they thinking?

Obviously, an example of "be careful what you wish for".  

They must ask, "So, what has Russia done for us, lately?"

Russian economy shrinks for first time since 2009: Economic sanctions at work

The Moscow Times is telling the world what's going on inside Russia, but major American news networks like NBC would rather report "Making a Difference" stories. US news media must eventually give President Obama credit for his international patience and suppot for economic sanctions to oppose Russian President Putin's illegal invasion of the Ukraine.

It's difficult to understand how President Putin can withstand this kind of economic downturn, but our American news isn't reporting the ruble's collapse.

"This is linked to sanctions first of all, oil and the panic we saw on the market in December. The damage to the banking system and consumer sentiment will take a long time to repair," Polevoy said.
(chief economist for Russia and the CIS at ING Bank in Moscow)

The (economic) sanctions have severely reduced the ability of Russian companies to borrow abroad, triggering the worst currency crisis since Russia defaulted on its debt in 1998.

 

Russia's economy shrank sharply in November and the ruble resumed its slide on Monday as Western sanctions and a slump in oil prices combined to inflict the first contraction in GDP since the global financial crisis.

The Economic Development Ministry said gross domestic product shrank 0.5 percent last month, the first drop since October 2009. With oil exports forming the backbone of the economy, analysts said the contraction is likely to worsen.

The slide on the oil market accelerated this month after the exporters' group OPEC refused to cut output, and prices are down almost 50 percent from a peak in June. On top of this, the sanctions imposed over Moscow's role in the Ukraine crisis have deterred foreign investment and led to over $100 billion flooding out of the Russian economy this year.

"With the current oil price we expect things to get worse. There is no cause for optimism," said Dmitry Polevoy, chief economist for Russia and the CIS at ING Bank in Moscow.

"This is linked to sanctions first of all, oil and the panic we saw on the market in December. The damage to the banking system and consumer sentiment will take a long time to repair," Polevoy said.

The sanctions have severely reduced the ability of Russian companies to borrow abroad, triggering the worst currency crisis since Russia defaulted on its debt in 1998.

The ruble, which had strengthened on Friday, slumped over 6 percent against the dollar in early trade on Monday in thin trade, although it later regained some of the losses.

Overall the ruble's weakness will inevitably lead to higher inflation next year by pushing up the cost of imports, threatening President Vladimir Putin's reputation for ensuring Russia's prosperity.

Government ministries forecast the slump in oil prices will lead to a 4 percent contraction of the economy next year and that inflation could exceed 10 percent.

Falling Ruble

The ruble had lost more than half of its value at one stage in December, although it has recovered since then after the government introduced informal capital controls and raised interest rates steeply.

The government issued orders to large state-controlled oil and gas exporters Gazprom and Rosneft to sell some of their dollar revenues to shore up the ruble.

Russians have kept a wary eye on the exchange rate since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hyper-inflation wiped out their savings over several years in the early 1990s and the ruble collapsed again in 1998.

At 2:27 p.m. in Moscow the ruble was trading at 56.40, much weaker than the 30-35 seen in the first half of the year but well up from a low of 80 per dollar in mid-December, its lowest point since the financial collapse of 1998.

The falling ruble has prompted huge buying of foreign currency in Russia and heavy withdrawals of bank deposits, heaping pressure on a vulnerable banking sector whose access to Western capital markets is restricted by the sanctions.

On Friday, Russian authorities also significantly scaled up rescue funds for Trust Bank, saying they would provide up to $2.4 billion in loans to bail out the mid-sized lender, the first bank to fall victim to the crisis.

 

It's a dangerous situation for ordinary Russians trying to survive the winter.  For President Putin, it's an ominous problem but one he has control over. Just pull back out of Eastern Ukraine and the economic problems will be alleviated. It's not rocket science.  

 

But, for President Putin to order a withdrawal means he must deflate his ego or the Russian nation will pin prick it for him.

American voters are not getting news about Russian ruble free fall

Americans who listen to Brian Williams on NBC reporting on his Making a Difference Report and Fox News just making stuff up, should give the Moscow Times a try. Theirs is real news, reporting on the free fall of the Russian ruble. Listen up American voters! A Russian ruble is now hovering at less than $0.25 on the dollar.

Could this news just be too close to the truth for the American network anchors to deal with?  

I submit, President Putin can't pay his military to maintain an assault on the Ukraine, keep a stabilizing presence in the Crimea and prop up evil President Assad in Syria with a ruble that's rotting.

Perhaps President Obama's lead on imposing economic sanctions against Russia is taking a toll on that nation's economy.  Ya think?

Our American news media should tell viewers the truth. Obama deserves credit. Rather than bomb Russia to smithereens over its unlawful invasion of the Ukraine, takeover of the Crimea, support for the evil Assad regime in Syria and the horrendous attack on an innocent Malaysian airliner, blowing it out of the sky, killing everyone on board....instead, President Obama's cautious approach tightened economic sanctions against Russia.  Now, the ruble is worth slightly less or only 1 cent more than 2 bits $US.

The Moscow Times reports on the ruble's free fall:

"Modest gains for Russia's beleaguered currency were rapidly reversed Monday as the ruble dropped to new record lows amid speculation that the Central Bank might abandon its policy of spending foreign reserves to slow the currency's decline."

Russia Eyes Shrinking Cash Reserves as Fight for Ruble Escalates by Harold Amos

The ruble sank to record lows against both the euro and the dollar Tuesday amid growing concerns over the Central Bank's policy of drawing down its foreign reserves to defend the country's beleaguered currency.

The Russian currency fell to 40.9 against the dollar in early evening trading, its lowest level since a traumatic 1998 restructuring, and dropped to 51.7 against the euro, a second historic low in two consecutive days. (note- today ruble = $0.24 cents)

https://www.google.com/search?q=ruble+to+dollar&rlz=1C1WLXA_enUS514US516&oq=ruble+to+dollar&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.3323j0j8&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=0&ie=UTF-8

Ruble slides to all-time low against dollar and euro

MarketWatch‎ - 3 hours ago

LONDON (MarketWatch) -- The ruble continued to slide on Tuesday, hitting another record ...

Ruble Drops as Volatility Surges to 2-Year High on Oil, Ukraine

Bloomberg‎ - 1 day ago

Ruble Weakens to Record on Concern Russia to Expedite Free Float

Bloomberg‎ - 5 hours ago

Consistently butting at the upper end of the regulator-set trading corridor, the ruble's trajectory has caused the Central Bank to sell over $6 billion on currency markets since Oct. 6. While interventions have slowed the ruble's tumble, they have also generated questions about monetary policy.

In a bid to decelerate the ruble's devaluation, the Central Bank has burned through $54.9 billion worth of foreign currency since the start of the year, leaving its reserves at a four-year low.

Dear Republicans, especially those who are in rapture by Fox News rhetoric, it's time to wake up and deal with the truth.  President Obama has led America out of a near depression; and now his lead on economic sanctions towards Russia appear to be working.

Moreover, Democrats need to be running toward these achievements and taking credit for supporting them.