Alexei Navalny was killed in the far north above the Arctic Circle, in the small town of Kharp, where the Ural Mountains are intersected by a railroad leading to the city of Labytnangi on the Ob River. This place of death, this scene of the crime, is not random. It puts a period to the argument with fate that Alexei Navalny led as a man and politician — even, one could say, to his argument with Russia and its history. The man who came up with The Beautiful Russia of the Future as image and slogan died in the horrible Russia of the past. Approximately fifty kilometers southeast of Kharp, beyond the Ob, is the city of Salekhard. The sadly famous Road 501, the Dead Road, leads east from there. It is one of the last projects born of Stalin’s megalomania, a railroad branch to the Enisei River that would traverse uninhabited places unsuitable for construction across the permafrost and the swamps of western Siberia. All that remains of that pharaonic project are a few hundred kilometers of embankments, dilapidated camp barracks, and steam engines rusting in the tundra. And corpses. Corpses in nameless ravines and pits, without a cross or a marker, unknown, buried without funerals, the dead whose killers and torturers remain unpunished. This is the region of the Gulag, the wasteland of the murdered and the murderers. In these places, geography helps the work of the jailers, and the climate serves as a means of torture. Here, in this ideal geographic nothingness, a space beyond history, beyond evidence, the Soviet state cast out people doomed to annihilation. This is the place where Russia’s historical sin is preserved in material, sometimes even imperishable, form — permafrost, after all. Here lie Russia’s guilt and responsibility. Alexei Navalny’s political credo, which changed over the years and is not easily summarized, did have one constant premise, one characteristic feature. He denied — or rather refused to consider — the power of the totalitarian past. He would not recognize the genealogy and the continuity of state violence, and most importantly, its long-term social consequences. Yes, he would come to the Solovetsky Stone — a monument to the victims of communist crimes in Lubyanka Square in Moscow, consisting of a large boulder brought a great distance from the very first Soviet penal camp — every year on October 30, the day commemorating the victims of political oppression, and lay a bouquet at the monument: the proper gesture. But his image of the “real” Russia was always that of a tabula rasa, an ideal community over which the past had no power — the strange notion of a society that experiences the oppression of an authoritarian regime but somehow automatically aspires to democracy and is in a certain sense innocent, historically undetermined, without, so to speak, a medical record. His “beautiful Russia of the future” was already here, it already existed in the present, in his own generation, it only needed to be unblocked, unveiled, unpacked, affirmed in reality. Yet it is unlikely that he could explain how it came to be, how it was born. He announced it with the disproportionate confidence of a fakir with a grateful audience that also wished to believe that you can turn over a new leaf without acknowl-edging historical guilt or admitting historical responsibility, without recognizing the stubborn presence of the past, without punishing the criminals and thereby severing the umbilical cord of violence. Navalny told a fairy tale about a miracle. In classical myth, crimes and sins give birth to monsters, chthonic creatures, the embodiment of fate. He offered a postmodern reverse myth, the story that monsters are capable — simply by the force of history’s progressive course, or because you want to believe it — of giving birth to beautiful, ideal children. In other words, this was a rather spectacular case of a denial of trauma. It was premised on a population without memory and without unhealed scars. But history cannot be fooled. Monsters, if not completely killed, give birth only to monsters. Chechen war raised and solidified his ratings, turning him into a national leader. That base and ruthless war turned the Russian Army into a punitive tool, because it not only fought with Chechen troops but it also “pacified” the population. It was a war with tens of thousands of victims; a criminal war from start to finish. It certainly was a crime that on the scales of justice — and in common sense — significantly outweighed any number of stolen billions and any amount of cheating at the polls. It is strange to judge a murderer for the theft of office supplies, or to accuse a serial killer of forging lottery tickets. The right to life is the highest value. Vladimir Putin — like Boris Yeltsin before him — took away that right from tens of thousands of Chechens. Before 2014, before the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine, this was Putin’s greatest crime. Without acknowledging the guilt and punishing the perpetrators in the two wars against Chechnya, which set Russia back on its old imperial and colonial path, and unleashed the spiral of state violence, and turned Chechnya into a “black hole,” a zone of lawlessness from where the lawless practices spread throughout Russia — without confronting all this, no bright and real “Russia of the future” would be possible. Without an answer to the cardinal question of the right to secede, without a recognition of the centuries of repressive policies toward ethnic minorities, the Russia of the future will always be the Russia of the past. Alexei Navalny was silent about the main crimes of the Putin regime and of Vladimir Putin personally. If you think about it, it seems inexplicable. Or, perhaps, explicable but not justifiable — but the explanation destroys the very concept of the beautiful Russia of the future that needs only to be released from Putin’s regime to emerge. Navalny was silent either because
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence