This is bravery.
***I’m hoping these sources are all legitimate. Hard to tell, so if you find one that is inaccurate, let me know.***
the courage required to show up for navalny’s funeral is worth our appreciation
— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) March 1, 2024
Muscovites are applauding and throwing flowers at the hearse as it drives to the cemetery. https://t.co/WaYBffnJJL
— Nataliya Vasilyeva (@Nat_Vasilyeva) March 1, 2024
People gathered near the Borisov Cemetery demand to be allowed into the cemetery to say goodbye to Alexei Navalny.#Russia #Moscow #Navalny #NavalnyFuneral pic.twitter.com/GZSiETlaYr
— Ulfh3dnar (@Ulfh3dnar_) March 1, 2024
Photo credit: Moscow Times
More photos and updates from the Moscow Times here
So the least we can do is go out and convince folks to vote for democracy.
Open thread
trollhattan
What boggles me is knowing Vlad pondered deploying enough police and soldiers to sweep in and arrest everybody. There will be arrests, just not on a giant scale.
What’s next for the opposition?
cain
@trollhattan: If he tries – I think he would be in some serious trouble trying to manage the backlash.
Steve in the ATL
On a related note, the Flying Burrito Brothers did a fantastic cover of Gram Parsons
zhena gogolia
Thank you for this.
Old School
TaMara
I thought I included this one, but I missed it. They knocked down the barriers to follow the hearse.
zhena gogolia
Meduza has great pictures. My favorite is someone with a sign that says, “Putin killed him but didn’t break him.”
Mike in NC
We went on a great cruise of the Baltic Sea in 2014. Everywhere we went people were terrified of what Putin would do next. True especially in Sweden and Finland, and now they’ve joined NATO (one of Trump’s favorite targets). We were in St Petersburg for a few days and nobody felt at ease to discuss politics.
Brachiator
People have to decide for themselves that democracy is worth saving.
We can try to point out the path with vigorous “get out the vote efforts,” but the people have to choose to walk that path.
ETA. The funeral photos are amazing and inspiring.
JoyceH
That’s how it needs to be done. Get out in numbers too large to arrest. Heck, the Soviet Union was brought down by the unarmed citizens of Moscow.
zhena gogolia
@JoyceH: Unfortunately, thanks to facial-recognition technology, they can arrest people later.
Of course they can’t arrest everybody, but the threat of random arrest is pretty daunting.
Tony G
Hmm. Yes, these people are very brave, considering the brutality of the Putin regime. My half-baked understanding of history is that sometimes a regime like Putin’s reaches a point at which ordinary people are so fed up that even the brutality doesn’t deter them from protesting anymore. At that point, further brutality just increases the opposition — and attempts to mollify the people are (correctly) perceived as weakness. Maybe this is the beginning of the end for Putin? I hope so. I wonder what those who are objectively-pro-Putin on the American “left” (I put Code Pink in that category) will have to say about this turn of events? Nothing, I suspect.
geg6
My admiration for these brave souls is off the charts. They give me hope.
Bupalos
@Tony G: The line many horseshoe leftists seem to be following is just to whattabout while pointing to Navalny’s flaws from the perspective of Western liberal democracy and perfect justice. And he isn’t flawless. But I think the Biden line is apt: don’t compare him to the almighty, compare him to the opposition.
Navalny was an absolute champion, the risks he took and bravery he showed are an absolute gift to Russia, Ukraine, and the West. May that gift blossom one day.
Ruckus
@zhena gogolia:
I would imagine that at some point the masses will have had enough and the only thing that will stop them is murder. I see that point not far away. Whatever it takes for enough people to have had enough, at some point they will have reached that point. That’s how it works in any dictatorship. And it looks to me that the point is now very near. Will many of the police join them? Because that’s how we’ll know when communism or whatever this is now – putinism, is done. The bonds that stop the masses get thinner and thinner as time goes on, the dictator’s hold gets less and less. The fear is lessened by the very thing that bound them and the power grows by the numbers of the now fearless. And once it starts….
MazeDancer
Such courage. And just because Putin isn’t cracking down now, does not mean his thugs won’t be combing through every video and coming for the folks later.
In further good news, like everyone here, thrilled that the DOJ has ruled trials are not part of the whole “must avoid election zone” malarky.
Trump being tried all Fall is good.
Tony G
@Bupalos: That’s right. I’ve known “leftists” like that in my younger days (back in the seventies and eighties before the Soviet Union collapsed). Back then, the same type of criticism was being directed at Solzhenitsyn. My simple analysis, then and now: These people are assholes — and many (not all) of them are entitled jerks from affluent families. Whether they’re worse or better than the MAGA assholes can be debated.
TaMara
@MazeDancer: Made my day.
It’s lunchtime here, which means I need to take a break and walk the dogs in the unseasonable 70-degree weather (I’ll take it, we are almost at normal snow/rain totals – and I’m assuming the weather gods will “bless” us with a spring blizzard this year).
West of the Rockies
I hope this is causing the goblin Putin excruciating anger and psychic misery.
Nalvany was loved. You, Putin, are despised. The world will squeal with glee when you croak.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Putin’s enforcers have to be getting thinner on the ground. Some of those people had to end up in the Army.
Anoniminous
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Probably not. There’s plenty of Russian cannon fodder. Secret police and internal security forces are too valuable to and for the regime to waste.
glc
@trollhattan: What’s next would be much more of the same.
Putin is actually quite good at repression even though he lacks broad management skills. He has made some space in the prisons with his special military operation recruitment policy and will probably use it effectively.
Random link, but fresh.
What will really test him is a resounding defeat in Ukraine.
zhena gogolia
@glc: Yes, if only our Republicans had any interest in defeating him.
Anoniminous
The more I learn about Taylor Swift the more I think she’s pretty chill.
Matt McIrvin
@Tony G: Solzhenitsyn would probably be cheering Putin’s invasion today and probably be MAGA too. But it was a different time, different context.
dr. luba
@Bupalos:
He wasn’t much of a gift to Ukraine….until, perhaps, his thinking changed quite recently. But he was a russian chauvinist, white supremacist, and a “Krym Nash!” type for most of his life.
Not sure if his followers were aware of or care about this shift in thinking.
Bupalos
@Anoniminous: i think you’re probably right about there not being much direct diversion out of the police in the population centers. There certainly are going to be less direct effects from the labor pressure created by the war.
For anyone interested, Mark Galleotti did an entire podcast episode on the state of the police in Russia. There are several interesting takeaways from that, one of them being that official figures are wildly overstated, with the regime broadly overcounting “police” by including support personel like cafeteria workers or IT contractors. Galeotti believed the force was stretched thin in ways.
TBone
Here’s to the survival of democracy 🎶 I’m celebrating today ☺️
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3VFOEa8K-6Q
Bupalos
@dr. luba: This is largely emblematic of what I’m talking about. Political transformation in Russia is Ukraine’s only hope for peace and stability. In order for that to come about, politics has to be something that can and does happen in Russia. Navalny was the only significant figure driving politicization within Russia. In order to do that he had to do Russian politics, and do it within specific boundaries. It’s beyond self-defeating to shoot his very real contibution down with this kind of imaginary moralistic accounting.
Yes his bravery and his politicization of the Russian civic space is an absoute gift to Ukraine. Not one I’d expect Ukrainians to be able to appreciate, and not one that was delivered with them particularly in mind. And not one that has come to fruition. But bigger than any gift they’ve received from any figure in the West, IMO.
TBone
I don’t know if any are duplicates but here’s some more!
https://digbysblog.net/2024/03/01/this-is-inspiring/
dr. luba
@Bupalos: I was speaking as to how Ukrainians I know feel about Navalny and russia. We have been in a struggle with russia since 1654; russia has not changed an imperialistic whit since, and I have little hope it ever will. It appears to be their nature.
They had a chance to choose a different path after the break-up of the USSR. They didn’t. They spent a few decades mourning their loss, and have been trying to recreate their empire since.
They’ve had leaders (e.g. Nemtsov) come along to show them a different path; but they do not follow, and the leaders get destroyed.
Will Navalny’s death prove different? Will the people rise up to avenge his death? It would be nice. But those in Ukraine, the Baltics, Poland and even Finland and Sweden are not holding their breaths. They have taken their examples from the west; russia continues to follow the path it has since the Golden Horde.
Amy!
Can anyone tell what the crowds are chanting? I can hear “Навальный погиб ” at the start, and I think the last word is “стране”, so it’s maybe some variant of “Navalny perished [for his?] country”, but it could be something else, and my ears are too rusty from disuse to work it out.
Carol
I heard yesterday that authorities were no allowing Navalny’s body to travel in a hearse. It looks like the good people of Moscow found a way around that with an suv. Good for them.
Bupalos
@dr. luba: I have Rusyn roots and am involved in the eastern european cultural scene in NE Ohio, I agree that many Ukrainians hold this kind of misapprehension.
I also have degrees in history and political theory and this:
appears to me as mystical biggoted nonsense. Was it in the Brittish “nature” to conduct imperial slaughter? Are the Germans really nazi’s deep down? People are people. Their “nature” is to change with conditions. We can help that happen.
Tony G
@Matt McIrvin: That is probably true! His works that I read, many decades ago — “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and “The Gulag Archipelago” were, I thought, very impressive, but I remember reading a few years later that he was a right-wing Russian nationalist. However, my point was that certain doctrinaire Marxists that I knew back in the day supported the Soviet Union (and therefore opposed Solzhenitsyn) because the USSR was the enemy of their real enemy — The United States. I hung out with some weird people in those days. Maybe I was weird too!
Tony G
@Bupalos: Every country in Europe (and, of course, the good old U.S.A. has plenty of of blood on its hands at various points in history. That’s because all of these countries are inhabited by those weird Homo sapiens apes.
Citizen Alan
@dr. luba:
I disagree. I think after the fall of the USSR, it was the West that had a choice to make. Should we do everything we could to encourage Democracy in the former Soviet states at the risk of them remaining Socialist countries? Or should we encourage Capitalism there at the risk of them remaining Autocratic countries? We chose the latter route and, predictably, ended up with oligarchs running Eastern European kleptocracies with enough financial resources and connections with our homegrown would-be oligarchs to begin destabilizing Western Democracy
Mike in Pasadena
@Carol: Speaking of Navalny’s body: any information about an autopsy? Cause of death? Poison? Beaten to death? I’ve searched, but not a hint of an answer. Perhaps his parents weren’t allowed to obtain an autopsy.
Mike in Pasadena
@Citizen Alan: Truth, in a nutshell.
way2blue
That. That is the most uplifting reaction I’ve seen from everyday Russians in recent memory. Responding to Navalny’s courage with their own. I wonder if they realize coming out into the open en masse makes it difficult for the security services to silence them all. Ave atque vale.
Melancholy Jaques
Two ways. Gradually then suddenly.
Tony G
I found this on one of the other fine blogs that I frequent … https://digbysblog.net/2024/03/01/this-is-inspiring/
Now the crowd in Moscow is apparently chanting “Putin is a murderer”. Putin now has his ass in a sling, to use the standard technical term.
At this point, if he orders the police and the army to fire on the crowd, then he risks the possibility that some of the cops and soldiers will fire their weapons at their officers. (Some of the grunts in Vietnam did that, with a lot less provocation.). The protestors, for the most part, are ethnic Russians — not members of religious or ethnic minorities that are hated by the Russians.
When there were mass protests like this in Tiananmen Square 35 years ago, the Chinese Army obeyed the order to massacre the protestors. Would the Russian Army (fresh from their hellish slog in Ukraine) do the same? Would Putin be willing to risk that? And would doing that suppress the opposition or pour gasoline on the fire?
On the other hand, if Putin does nothing, in response to masses of people calling him a murderer, then he shows “weakness” that will encourage more protests.
It’s quite a puzzle. Maybe Putin will be retiring and moving to North Korea soon.
wjca
Whether they (the ones from the 70s and 80s) currently are MAGA assholes . . . I’d bet on a lot of overlap.
Ruckus
@Tony G:
Putin isn’t moving until he’s dead. And I doubt he retires before then either. His life is whatever he wants it to be, and very, very few people in his country get anywhere near that option. He lives a high life, he’s got plenty of interference run for him and that concept of supreme judge and jury with likely very, very few possibilities that anyone will ever get close enough to him to do him any harm, no matter how much they want to. He keeps a guarded group of very wealthy sycophants to protect how close anyone gets in a business way and an entire army and police force to protect how close anyone else gets, and from pics I’ve seen that isn’t very close in any event. He knows he’s a dictator and he makes sure everyone else knows it as well.
Tony G
@way2blue: Anecdotes are not data, but … I do some volunteer ESL tutoring in my spare time. A few years ago I was doing so with a guy who was a recent immigrant from Russia (from the city of Omsk in western Siberia). Very nice guy, very intelligent and well read. I learned a lot about Russian history, geography, etc. as he was practicing his English explaining these things to me. (For example, in ww2 dozens of factories for tanks, aircraft, etc. were moved east to Omsk.) The guy never mentioned Putin (nor did I ever mention Trump). Right after the beginning of Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine two years ago, the guy politely terminated the tutoring sessions. Maybe it was a coincidence, who knows? I’ve wondered since then whether the guy was avoiding potential. uncomfortable conversations with an American. I imagine that in a country like Russia, ordinary people get by through self-censorship. Maybe the sight of people getting away with calling the “leader” a murderer will change that habit. Or maybe the protestors will be slaughtered, Tiananmen Square style.
Tony G
@wjca: That’s true! There were a lot of “leftist” assholes who “changed” and become right-wing assholes!
Tony G
@Ruckus: Sad, but probably true. It took the destruction of Germany for Hitler to decide to blow his brains out.
glc
@Bupalos:
I certainly hope that is not the case.
dr. luba
@Citizen Alan: And yet different Soviet “republics” made different choices. Ukraine, which through most of its history was European has chosen, in fits and starts, to become a western democracy. Ditto the Baltics. Belarus has tried.
Russia has not.
AWJ
@dr. luba: Russia did have widespread protests when the 2011 elections were flagrantly rigged even by Russian standards. Putin crushed those protests with a wave of repression, and the experience was a turning point for him—it was in the 2010s that he became obsessed with the menace of “color revolutions” and reinvented himself as a 21st century Tsar Nicholas, champion of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and No-Homo.
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
@AWJ: That did not do Nicholas II a lot of good in the long run.
Will VVP die peacefully in his sleep, or from food or lead poisoning, is a fair question.
AWJ
@Boris Rasputin (the evil twin): I meant Nicholas I, actually. The one who was known as the “Gendarme of Europe” for all the hard work he did promoting absolute monarchy and suppressing liberalism not just at home in Russia, but all over the continent. Compare Nicholas I’s intervention in Hungary in 1849 to Putin’s intervention in Syria in 2015.