Alexei Navalny didn’t die in prison. He was murdered there.

This isn’t precisely espionage related, and what I’m about to say is my opinion, or you might say, how I would write it in a story or novel.

And much like I never speak or fully write the name of the twice-impeached, multiple times indicted former president, I also won’t say the name of a certain eastern European dictator.

Alexei Navalny was likely murdered last week in a prison north of the Arctic Circle. I personally believe the dictator wanted him dead a long time ago. There’s a history, of course, of murdered opposition leaders, reporters, perceived enemies and out-of-favor politicians, defectors, generals, and more. The methods have been varied: poison (nuclear and conventional), “gang” violence, drive-by shootings, mysterious falls from fifth-floor windows, the infamous ailment from the soviet era – heart attack, aircraft coming apart in midair. I’m sure there are more.

Navalny, however, had a large popular following, and a death soon after his return to Russia from medical treatment (for having been poisoned) in Germany would have been too convenient, too suspicious. One has to distance oneself from the people you want dead. Maybe the dictator took a page from Slobodan Milosevic’s playbook.

However the means or the motivation, it happened. Alexei Navalny is dead.

Who is Alexei Navalny?

To me, he is a Russian patriot, a man who envisioned Russia as a democracy. No one-man rule for him. He was an optimist in the face of the ultimate pessimism. That, as Nathan Hodge put it on CNN, was an “existential threat” to the one man ruling Russia. Yes, in the face of such optimism, totalitarianism can’t exist.

In short, Navalny had to go.

However, Navalny had managed to inspire countless Russians to take to the streets in record numbers and voice loudly and openly their opposition to the oligarchs, the all-encompassing corruption, to the dictator himself. Even in the face of brutal police and security services’ reaction to their protests, they returned, day after day. Protests spread from Moscow to many other Russian cities. The offices of not only Navalny but of his supporters among an amorphous opposition were raided, protesters were jailed or exiled. Navalny, under constant surveillance by Russia’s security and intelligence services, was eventually poisoned by Novichok but survived. Indeed, he was allowed to leave Russia to be treated in Germany, and he survived.

He could have stayed there, in Germany, in, as Hodge puts it “comfortable exile.”

But Navalny was an optimist, remember. He could see a better Russia, and against all advice, he returned to his homeland.

And was promptly arrested.

In a trial reminiscent of those for Stalin’s purges, Russian prosecutors came up with new charges almost daily, but at each court appearance Navalny continued to speak out for that alternate Russia he saw in his mind. In court, he called the dictator a “naked king” and spoke of the “crown slipping from his head” as more and more people spoke out against him. This, I think, is his best quote:

“Your naked king wants to rule until the end, he doesn’t care about the country, he is clung to power and wants to rule indefinitely.”

Hmm, that sounds familiar, doesn’t it, considering the current election cycle here in the U.S.

The Russian Penal System

Now, there is no doubt Russian prisons of any ilk are horrific, brutal places. Many years ago, I watched a documentary on the Russian penal system, and it’s nightmarish. Food you wouldn’t feed pigs. Constant, brutish interrogations. The smallest of infractions punished with reduced rations and solitary confinement. Hard, back-breaking labor. There is a reason the tsars and the communists put their gulags and prisons in Siberia. It’s a harsh land with harsh conditions, especially in the winter.

Navalny endured all the Russian prison system tossed at him and never lost his optimism, his vision for Russia. He remained composed and even exhibited he could still enjoy making a joke—about the music blasted throughout his last prison, designated IK-3 and situated north of the boundary of the Arctic Circle in the Yamal Nenets region.

On Valentine’s Day, Navalny posted an older picture of him and his wife Yuliya on Russian social media. He spoke of the distance between them and concluded with “but I feel that you are near every second, and I love you more and more.”

Two days later, according to “official” Russian government statements, he collapsed while walking outside with his guards. Prison medical personnel allegedly tried to revive him but couldn’t. He was 47 years old. No cause of death has been provided. Indeed, at the time of drafting this post, the location of his body is unknown.

Now, if this were my story to write, I would certainly have had the prison warden receive a phone call from the dictator with vaguely worded but completely understandable instructions for the “handling” of this prisoner. However, that’s dramatic license. Very Stalinesque, however, which is somewhat appropriate, given the dictator’s admiration for the mad Georgian.

Expected but Still a Shock

The dictator, like any of them through history, has people around him who can, shall we say, anticipate the dictator’s desires concerning any enemies real or perceived. Like the knights around Henry II, who heard the king’s complaints about a troublesome priest and promptly murdered Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas a Becket in his cathedral. Surround yourself with enough sycophants, and you never have to give a direct order.

Granted, most of Navalny’s supporters in Russia and in the west, suspected what the ultimate outcome would be when Navalny was sentenced to up to 30 years in prison for trumped-up charges. That amount of time in and of itself is almost a death sentence in a Russian prison. Navalny himself probably understood it, too, but that never suppressed his vision of a better Russia. Dictators don’t understand this: the human mind and its imagination cannot be suppressed.

Still, it was a shock. Indeed, it took me this long to be able to write of it. Even now, it’s difficult to believe even though I suspected what would happen.

Next month, Russia will have an election, and the dictator will win his fifth term because any opposition that might have unseated him is either disqualified from the ballot, exiled, or dead.

This is something we here in the United States, with politicians and some self-declared journalists falling over themselves to kiss the dictator’s arse and do his bidding, need to learn from. This is a dim and dismal future that we here must repulse not welcome.

There are memes going around social media along the lines of “my father or grandfather fought fascism, etc., etc. And all we have to do is vote in November.”

So, here’s my version:

When he was 17, my father left the family farm, crossed an ocean to fight fascism, waded a river with a bazooka held over his head and disabled a Nazi tank that had been killing his fellow soldiers, fought in the Battle of the Bulge in one of the coldest winters in decades in Europe, collected enough bits of shrapnel in his arms and chest that they’d still pop out of his flesh on occasion, and liberated Nazi concentration camps. All we have to do is vote in November.

That’s the same vision, the same optimism that Navalny had.

I wish the Russians had the same opportunity as we do here to have their votes mean something. Rest in power, Alexei Navalny.