Hi All,

As you no doubt already know, Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was declared dead by prison authorities yesterday. As of this morning, his team has confirmed they have received a death notice, but say they have not yet been allowed to see the body.

Cue the conspiracy theories. Already many, including my students, are convinced he was murdered at the behest of the Russian government or Putin personally. Which is possible. It’s also entirely possible that what the prison authorities are saying is exactly what happened: He suddenly collapsed and died from an embolism, with no additional help from poison, beatings, etc. He had apparently been growing increasingly frail, and Arctic penal colonies are notoriously bad for health, especially on top of the near-fatal poisoning in 2021. Perhaps one day we will know exactly what happened, but at the moment it’s mainly wild speculation.

Rather than speculating on Navalny’s precise cause of death, I thought I’d speculate on something very different. What, I’ve been asking myself ever since I saw the headlines yesterday morning, was it all for? What, exactly, did Navalny accomplish with all this?

Navalny had many gifts. He was handsome, charismatic, witty, intelligent, an excellent writer, and possessed more than enough courage for his convictions. But ultimately, what will his legacy be? Has he achieved what he set out to achieve; namely, the overthrow of Putin and the reform of the Russian government? 

A sober examination of the facts suggests that he achieved none of those aims, and may in fact have made matters worse by his head-on challenge to the system (more on that later). Meanwhile, he endangered his family, caused his brother to be sent to prison, and finally died without, as far as I know, leaving behind any significant body of work that will live beyond his current notoriety. Perhaps we will one day discover the manuscript to his great work of art or philosophical treatise, but one doubts it. One suspects that he was too busy trying to batter down the entire Russian government with his bare head to produce anything substantive.

As far as I can tell, Navalny got caught up in a fatal flaw we humans (especially of the male variety) are extremely prone to: a dominance struggle. I’ve been studying the psychology and neuroscience of violence as part of my research, and one of the most dangerous and destructive traps people and nations can fall into is a dominance struggle in which both sides are convinced they can and must win. Normally one side is deluded, but their certainty that victory is just around the corner causes them to go on fighting long after they should make a tactical withdrawal and rethink their strategy. Their aggression, meanwhile, triggers more aggression from the other side, leading to an escalation of violence and repression and/or a war of attrition (literal or figurative) in which everyone ultimately loses.

Of course, persistence is essential to achieving anything worthwhile. The trick is knowing the difference between persistence and pigheaded stubbornness that will destroy you and everything you’re striving for. Many of us, alas, have a very hard time drawing that line, and it seems that Navalny did as well. 

When he returned to Russia after recovering from the attempted poisoning in 2021, many people wondered why. He knew he would be probably be arrested on the spot, and indeed he was. (If you’re now fulminating against the barbarism of the Russian government and Russian society, consider the fates of similar characters in the West, such as Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden. While they are all currently still alive, they have all faced lengthy prison sentences and, in Snowden’s case, the possibility of the death penalty). 

I’ve also been thinking about why Navalny returned. When he did it, I assumed it was because he was demonstrating the courage of his convictions and his commitment to Russia, and I have no doubt that was part of it. He could have remained in the West, but he’d probably have had to earn his bread by writing op-eds for Western publications explaining why Russia was evil and needed to be destroyed. Maybe he couldn’t stomach that. Maybe he also couldn’t stomach the thought of becoming just another cranky Russian emigre. Maybe he was addicted to the fame and adulation he was receiving, and was deluded enough to believe he could parlay it into actual power.

We’ll probably never know that either. What we can know is that these head-on dominance struggles rarely achieve what we want them to achieve. The most likely outcome from them is that everybody loses. To actually achieve real change, we often need to implement the wisdom of the serpent and the innocence of the dove (MT 10:16), rather than the bullheadedness of the, well, bull.

As it happens, we have another famous Russian, one who unquestionably left behind a substantive legacy, for thoughts on how one might do that. Lev Tolstoy’s concept of nonresistence to evil, developed most thoroughly in his treatise The Kingdom of God is Within You, which I am currently reading, gives us pointers on how we might go about creating good rather than succumbing to evil. It focuses mainly on not falling into a vengeance spiral (something to which we humans are also extremely prone), but I think it could also apply to these dominance struggles that are so deadly. We talk about fighting fire with fire, but too much of that can burn the whole world down (don’t be surprised if you see that line appear again elsewhere, because I’m definitely keeping it). 

These are all thoughts I’ve been contemplating as I work on Terminal Degree and consider how best to bring Rowena and Dima’s story to a (temporary) close. Dima is loosely based on a number of real-life prototypes, including Alexei Navalny. In fiction, though, we have the opportunity to run simulations and redo things that have gone wrong in real life. Perhaps the fictional Dima will learn from the real-life Alexei how to have less of the bull and more of the dove in his heart. At the moment, though, I can only conclude by wishing вечная память (eternal memory, an orthodox blessing) for Alexei Navalny. May he be at peace.

Sid Stark