Editor’s note: Peter Bergen is a national security analyst at CNN, vice president of New America, professor of practice at Arizona State University, and host of the Audible podcast “In the Room.” apple and spotify.he is the author of The price of chaos: the Trump administration and the world” The views expressed in this commentary are his own.read more opinion On CNN.
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The exact details of the death of imprisoned Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, reported by the Russian Prison Service on Friday, are still unknown, and we may never find out the exact truth. But as U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said in her speech at the Munich Security Conference, “No matter what they talk about, let me be clear: Russia is responsible.”
Indeed, Russian President Vladimir Putin practices improbable rather than plausible deniability regarding the deaths of his most prominent critics and rivals. Does anyone seriously think that there was a plane crash involving the leader of the Wagner Group near Moscow last year? Was Evgeny Prigozhin’s uprising an accident? (The Kremlin has repeatedly denied involvement.)
What we do know is that President Putin’s life project is to effectively rebuild the KGB state, win the Ukraine war, and make Russia great again. These projects are now intertwined with each other. Russia has seen a dramatic increase in repression since President Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost exactly two years ago.
Human Rights Watch points to “increased war censorship, the imprisonment of vocal critics, and the repression of human rights activism.”
And what better way to signal that Russia’s opposition is effectively dead than by silencing its most prominent leader, Mr. Navalny? He was as well-known a dissident in the West as Soviet-era physicist Andrei Sakharov and writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
How did Russia under Putin get here? One of the most important events in Putin’s life was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. At the time of the fall of the Wall, President Putin was a KGB official in Dresden, then East Germany. The Soviet Union collapsed two years later.
The fall of the wall and the implosion of the Soviet state came after Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev had spent years liberalizing the Soviet Union with a policy of “glasnost” or “openness.” Gorbachev had also withdrawn Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1989 after nearly a decade of bloody war there, believing the conflict to be a quagmire that the Soviets needed to pull themselves out of.
Putin learned two big lessons from the Gorbachev regime: The most dangerous moment for an incompetent dictatorship is when it begins to liberalize (in the words of French historian and politician Alexis de Tocqueville). It’s time. And the most dangerous thing Russia’s leaders can do is lose the war, as the Romanovs did in World War I, which sparked the Russian Revolution of 1917. Gorbachev’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989 signaled the threat of the feared Soviet military to Eastern Europe. Like a papier-mâché tiger, within nine months the Berlin Wall had come down.
President Putin has emphasized that he will not attend Gorbachev’s funeral in 2022, indicating his disapproval of Gorbachev’s record and worldview.
In contrast to Gorbachev, Stalin ruled with an iron fist and played a key role in the Allied victory in World War II. After more than 20 years of rule, the Soviet dictator died in 1953.
As Tucker Carlson’s bizarre recent interview showed, President Putin, a student of Russian history in his own right, appears to be planning to rule more Stalin’s way than Gorbachev’s.
After all, Putin has essentially amended Russia’s constitution, allowing him to continue pursuing election as the country’s leader until 2036.
In fact, President Putin is running for president in March’s presidential election. Last month, anti-war Boris Nadezhdin also began running for president. But as interest in his campaign grew, Putin’s government called it quits just over a week ago. President Putin will now run for office almost unopposed.
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How will the news of Navalny’s death be received in Russia? Most Russians get their news from Russian TV (now effectively Kremlin TV). Perhaps Russian television will remain silent about Navalny’s death, choosing instead to promote the great leader Putin. Putin is certain to win next month’s election, but he is satisfied that his most effective opponent is gone.
However, there is no need for the international community to remain silent. Navalny should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to show the people what this means. world. This would require the Nobel Committee to change its rules not to award prizes posthumously.
Still, just as Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, this work will send a powerful message to Russians and the world.