Charismatic and intelligent. But too keenly aware of himself as both these things. Angry, frustrated – for good reason. Perhaps reckless, lacking strategic thinking. Narrow-minded and naïve. Who could better represent an entire group? The bright and irrepressible liberal middle-class.

Yes, more than all the other things, Navalny was a talisman – he had magical powers over his people, but was hardly stimulating to others. To some he represented hope for a different Russia. He represented incarnate individual responsibility, competition (‘fair’ elections are ‘competitive’ ones), self-actualization. A personal antidote to apathy. He was in earnest, fired up – something to aspire to. An anachronism ( ‘out of time’) in a system designed to disempower and demotivate, close ranks and watch your back… in the end he transcended his actual views to become a symbol of Russia’s inability to find a way out of personalist politics.

Martyrdom was a choice. People won’t say it – but he would have been better off saving himself. His was a stance both more principled than many others, but which also reveals the personalized nature of his appeal and his politics – he was ‘anti-Putin’ and positioned himself that way on purpose. And clearly Putin felt personally challenged on some level – hence his refusal to even name him.

But the anti-Putin contains many ingredients of Putin himself – as numerous people point out (privately, of course) even now. The style over substance. The cultivated charisma which stems from a rather overweening masculine pitch to authority (very, very few feminists are given any airtime to express their deep-seated discomfort with his language). The temporary and fickle try-out of different ideas and slogans. The super-narrow political imagination – one might even say ‘anti-political’ imagination (anti-corruption is not politics).  

After building his career as a blogger and activist, in 2013 Navalny stood for mayor in Moscow (he could have won in a fair fight). Less internet savvy Russians were barely aware of him at this point, beyond a name. A measure of how the ratcheting up of repression makes time elastic in Russia is that it feels as though 2013-2020 (to his poisoning) was a short period, but that an absolute age elapsed between his return to Russia in Jan 2021 and his death nearly exactly 3 years later.

People in the West paid oversized attention to Navalny because they believed he captured a kind of Russian ‘zeitgeist’ in the 2010s. But the true zeitgeist was a general misrecognition on the part of that liberal middle-class: they were just as invested in maintaining the unequal system of crony networked capitalism as the elite. Navalny campaigned against electoral and political corruption and his fatal success was investigating the personal self-enrichment beyond measure of the leaders. But his most ardent supporters were also among the main beneficiaries of the system.

It is a misunderstanding to think that his (anyone’s) ‘liberal opposition’ excluded nationalism, chauvinism even. A model of individualism in a hostile environment, a self-made man who believe in the invisible justice of the market makes one myopic and prone to blame others for their misfortune. Here in Russia, liberalism is about protection from the rapacious state and personal responsibility for one’s actions. But being for ‘fair competition’ can also code as protecting ‘ethnic’  Russians from ‘immigrants’.

Navalny was pointedly hostile to people who have every right to live and work anywhere they like in Russia – Russian citizens in fact, who happen to be Muslim and racialized as such. It’s mistaken to see him as ‘cannily’ channelling nationalist sentiment in an acceptable way to urban Russians. Instead, we should read this as an essential script of liberal failure; in a country with millions of Muslims and rich diversity – and where inequality and ethnicity go hand-in-hand – playing the race card shows political immaturity at best and was ominous.

Thirdly, he was lauded for his supposed turn to ‘social issues’ (sic) in 2018 as if this was a smart pivot. In fact, it was years too late, and because it was too late it failed to resonate. The ‘social sphere’ for Navalny was hardly visible except in a negative sense – that corruption makes the state and the individual poor. He represented everything that is naïve about liberals in Russia – ‘if only we could just get on with being a normal country like the USA, everything else will fall into place’. In a sense, he traces an ideological line back to the Komsomol boys who privatized opportunity in the late Soviet Union and deluded themselves they were building a market where all would prosper.

His honest and principled disgust with corruption never led to diagnosis of root causes. Corruption was a byproduct of total social transformation that the elite and a large part of the Soviet nomenklatura had actively chosen and supported since 1990. Corruption exacerbated inequality, but the original sin of economic looting and wholesale destruction required more radical politics to mend. Way back in 2009-11, I did many political interviews with ordinary voters. They really disliked Navalny because of his naivety and smugness (seeing the problem as merely replacing ‘crooks and thieves’ with ‘honest’ representatives). His achievement in mobilizing the middle class to actually try to do politics was laudable but also doomed to failure. It should be seen in the light of similarly well-meaning people in democratic societies who think they can break cartel politics from the inside, through the ballot box or a more appealing offering in electoral politics.

Navalny as a political phenomenon is a warning. Like any charismatic project it shows that without a movement that can connect different kinds of people and show them that they have common material interests, clever slogans, social media, and urban youth organizing isn’t enough. The media write ups (just like the exaggeratedly glowing scholarly accounts) showed what an exceptional individual he was and how an individual can become symbolic of change for many people… but exceptional people do not really change history – despite what a popularized view of “great men” pretends to show. Churchills, Stalins, Trumps are ultimately just part of the structures of feeling that dictate their eras. Navalny was, despite everything, an anachronism not so different to Putin: out of step with what most Russian people want.

*title partly stolen from the genuinely great A.A.