While many people we never hear of die heroic deaths at the hands of criminal regimes throughout the world, there are a few martyrs whose stories must be preserved. Some of these deaths are associated with particularly prominent criminal regimes. For example, no one should ever report on Saudi Arabia and its ruler without mentioning the fact that his regime murdered the journalist Jamaal Khashoggi. By the same token, no one should report on Russia and its totalitarian dictator without identifying them with the killing of Alexei Navalny.

After recovering from being poisoned with a nerve agent in 2020 by Kremlin operatives, Navalny returned to spend the last two years of his life in prison. He died last February 16 of this past year in a Arctic Circle gulag. As the United States descends into the Russian-sponsored abyss of our own corrupt plutocracy, the life and legacy of Navalny should provide a constant beacon for us.

Fortunately, the legacy of Navalny is preserved in his lively autobiography, Patriot: A Memoir, much of which was written while he was in prison. This book inspires hope and provokes ideas for how to encourage democracy in a society where the institutions of civil society have fallen under the control of an aspiring dictator. While the Russian system is surely more corrupted than our own, no one should believe for a moment that four more years of Trump will do anything other than to more fundamentally corrupt the civil institutions upon which our republic has operated. We are becoming more like Russia.

If someone had forewarned us that three decades after the end of the Cold War the leaders of the two former global superpowers would be the horrific Putin and the absurd Trump, thinking people would have asked for a “do-over.” Something has gone terribly wrong, and we need to understand how the world got off track so badly. The lofty promise that free markets and stable democracies are inherently correlated has proven false. Instead, we live in a world of global plutocracy and increasingly dictatorial regimes.

Part of the enigma is that the current Russian system today is not significantly different from the totalitarian regime that predominated in the Cold War era. Democracy in our country, however, is clearly in crisis. One of the standard articles of faith in the United States thus needs to be dismissed: The United States did not win the Cold War. If anything, the old commissar system of the Soviet regime continues to operate in today’s Russia, while our two-party constitutional republic has lapsed into one where one of the two monopoly political Parties is nothing other than a cult of personality around a Russian stooge. While the publicly released portions of the Mueller report thoroughly documented Russian interference in the 2016 election, it obviously could not investigate as thoroughly what was happening from the Kremlin’s side.

It’s not unreasonable to consider that the Trump presidency had been planned inside the deepest bowels of Soviet and Russian intelligence over many decades. These Soviet/Russian agents operated on the sound premise that the American public is so stupid and our institutions so corruptible that a palpable fool like Donald Trump could be groomed to rise to the highest office in the land. Using the infinite greed of our media moguls, Russian operatives and their aligned networks developed over generations in the Soviet system used propaganda techniques to convince the American public that institutions promoting fairness, equality and scientific reason were products of a liberal deep state looking to rob the nation of all that is holy and pure.

Donald Trump is the Manchurian candidate. And his rise to power depended on a public that couldn’t locate Manchuria on a map if you paid them, or read at the fifth-grade level. Our constitutional system, however, was supposed to have built-in safeguards against the power of ignorant masses attracted to whatever appeal a Trumpish character might claim. Clearly, those safeguards have failed.

It is with some degree of schadenfreude that one watches as the once staid voices of Senate Republicans and members of the Supreme Court operate in a political order defined by Trump. They have orange excrement smeared all over their faces and now have the audacity to complain when no one takes them seriously. Mitch McConnell should know that Trump will define his entire legacy. The same is true for Chief Justice John Roberts. They both had their chances to stop this and chose not to. Now, they can’t get the stench out. McConnell and Roberts, however, have never been anything other than servitors of the plutocrats. In examining the failure of our civic institutions, however, it is the media that should concern us most.

The 2010 Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case provided for the unfettered influence of money in our election that paved the way for the defining role of Elon Musk in the 2024 elections. Prior to the election, Musk purchased control of the dominant social media platform, Twitter, and proceeded to use it as a forum to promote the hatred, fear, and ignorance that defined the Trump campaign. Additionally, Musk contributed $250,000,000 of his own wealth to promote Trump throughout the land. In Placentia, that included hiring an attractive and diverse group of young people driving nice cars to come knock on our doors. This is what happens when corporations become people and money becomes speech. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word is now for sale.” It was not, however, Musk alone — though his ego might want you to believe that.

While there are many examples of self-serving cowardice and compromise of principle for personal gain, a special role in destroying what remains of our constitutional republic goes to Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong. To further elevate their public profiles and stroke their egos, they both bought foundational national newspapers. Bezos bought the once great Washington Post, Soon-Shiong the Los Angeles Times. Both violated core First Amendment principle when they demanded that their editorial boards remove endorsements for Vice-President Kamala Harris. Bezos denigrated the legacy of Khashoggi by tacitly endorsing a candidate beholden to the murderous Saudi regime that killed a journalist who worked for the Post. Soon-Shiong not only violated the First Amendment of the Constitution, but he also betrayed the Hippocratic Oath by tacitly endorsing a candidate responsible for at least 400,000 unnecessary deaths attributable to failure to uphold science-based pandemic protocols.

Soon-Shiong, much like his fellow South African-born compatriot Musk, bilked some very bilkable systems. For Soon-Shiong it was health care. For Musk, it was EVs, aerospace, and defense. It is a mistake, however, to attribute too much credit to the specific role of Musk in paving the way for Trump’s return to the White House.

We live, after all, in a plutocracy, not an oligarchy. The difference is that the term oligarchy pertains to “a few” excessively wealthy people whose influence on politics and economics is extraordinary; while plutocracy relates to a system wherein many wealthy individuals exert power directly and indirectly on a scheme they construct to benefit themselves. There are many power brokers in the United States whose influence compares to that of Musk and Bezos and Soon-Shiong. Many of them avoid the limelight because the limelight often entails a level of public scrutiny they would prefer to dodge. The limelight can get you shot on the streets of New York. (OK, Brian Peterson was merely a multimillionaire whose wealth depended upon serving the interests of the plutocrats. True plutocrats would have used helipads and never have allowed themselves direct contact with hoi polloi.

Money is power and as money flows across borders with few impediments, it creates opportunities for foreign influence in our economic and political lives. There are almost 2800 billionaires in the world. About 800 of them live in the United States, 500 in China, 200 in India, and a 130 or so in Germany and Russia, each. Many of them use the power of their wealth to ensure that the US continues to deny climate science and spend inordinate amounts of money on health care. They also work to place prisons, schools, and social security into the hands of private interests. For these people, wealth is their identity. They have no country or ideals apart from themselves and their wealth.

The dirty little secret of this club of 2800 billionaires is that they are a well-integrated network that will continue to collude with each other and will rarely confront each other. This dirty little secret came to light recently in the absurd confrontation between the tech bros (Musk et al.) and the MAGA knuckleheads. Many of the 2800 billionaires sit atop a mountain of wealth generated by decades of international investment in STEM education. Musk, for example, would have you believe that his entrepreneurial genius has been essential in developing the EV industry in the United States and that the future of space exploration depends on his unsurpassed intelligence. (His boundless arrogance reminds us of two of the great murder mysteries in recent US History: Who really killed JFK, and who killed Roger Rabbit?). These 2800 billionaires are the ultimate globalists who will never allow the MAGA dupes to interfere with their access to the global markets from which they derive their wealth.

The billionaire club is fully in control of the algorithms that shape our discourse. The documents released by the heroic Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, show convincingly that the sites generating the most algorithmic momentum are those that promote fear and anger. Many of these so-called “troll farms” operate from countries formerly located behind the Iron Curtain. These troll farms provide links to fake news sites and pseudo-scientific publications that themselves benefit financially by promoting hysteria. The daily attacks on healthcare professionals, election officials, and school boards derive from the emotion generated by these sites. A 2019 internal Facebook document leaked to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed that 15,000 troll farms reach 140 million Americans every month. These foreign troll farms reach 75 million Christians monthly! They also target African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and women. The paradox is that these Tech Bros depend on an ignorant mass base to promote interests that depend on the highest levels of scientific knowledge. And this was before Musk made his investment in Twitter.

The Tech Bros have already won the confrontation with the MAGA base on the issue of H-1B visas, so they will need to find a way to satisfy the ravings of the multitudes to sustain the support of their mass base. Expect a lot of horror stories from the border to satisfy the blood lust of a political movement rooted in hatred. In the second Trump term, however, expect a much more direct assault on what remains of liberals and their institutions. When Trump’s domestic program inevitably fails, as it did in his first term, his advisors will encourage a crackdown on key individuals in the Democratic Party or the opposition more generally. They will inevitably use terms like “Marxism,” “socialism,” “communism,” and “fascism” in the indistinguishable way that comes from people who have no clue what anyone of these terms really mean. In other words, over the next four years we will have political prisoners. Take President Trump very seriously when he and his appointees discuss sending political opponents to prison. Welcome, America, to the world in which Alexei Navalny lived and died!

Russia and its dictator benefitted enormously from the victory of Trump, making it more difficult to imagine someone stepping into the vital role Navalny played any time soon. Understandably, the reaction of Russian media to Trump’s return to the White House in 2024 has been much more mocking than in 2016. In 2016, when members of the Russian Duma popped champagne bottles after Trump’s unexpected victory, the media tone trended toward the merely smug. In 2024, however, the response of Russian TV is openly derisive. State TV posting of nude photos of Melania ridicules both the newly elected president as well as the nation that elected him. Russians have been told for generations that their system was superior by every measure. The election of Trump has verified to Russia and much of the rest of the world that the United States is no longer a nation representing ideals that anyone else should ever aspire to. Political prisoners in Russia can no longer count on any support from the US government in upholding civil rights in that country because Russia, and its ridiculous puppet in Budapest, are the operating models of leadership in the new plutocracy.

Russia has joined with dictatorships around the world to cheer the imminent end of the American Century as represented in its core political principals and central role in global economic affairs. Russians laugh as Trump recklessly raises the possibility of US territorial expansion in Central America, Canada, and Greenland. There is a real possibility that the defining role of the US dollar in global economics will decline as Trump dismantles the monetary framework built on the foundation of the Bretton Woods agreements at the end of World War II. The Russians relish at the possibility that Trump will appoint leading Kremlin apologists to key posts in the new administration. Russians gloat over the intrinsic violence in the US, encouraging it by overtly supporting the National Rifle Association.

Russian agents have successfully promoted division and gun violence in the US, knowing that an essential feature of fascism is bloodlust. They hope the US lapses into a civil war that will further speed the demise of our nation. Russians revel over the nomination of a rapist and pedophile to be the Attorney General and an utterly unqualified sot to be Secretary of Defense. They anticipate the day when Trump names Alex Jones Press Secretary, or at least awards him the Presidential Medal of Honor. Meanwhile, our allies in Europe and Latin America will begin to drift toward closer relations with China, India, and Russia. The American Century is coming to an end. Who really won the Cold War?

God have mercy on the Ukrainians. God have mercy on us. May God give us the strength to face the days ahead. Thank God for the legacy Navalny left us. May his life help illuminate the way out of this cold darkness.

Back to our “Man of the Year.”

While in his memoir Navalny makes the claim that he just “happened” to be the person at the top of a pyramid of phenomenally gifted volunteers, it is important that we appreciate the unique skills and abilities he embodied. Powerful leadership entails an array of personal characteristics that are difficult to find in one person. Navalny had many.

He was authentic. The love between him and his wife, Yulia, even though not a principal theme in the book, nevertheless permeates it. That love extends to the rest of his family. His joy for life and his great appreciation for fellow Russians also illuminates every chapter.

The American public is generally ignorant of Russian history. We baby boomers grew up in a time when Russians represented the evils of the Soviet system, under the control of a sinister leadership who used the power of brainwashing that a totalitarian society could impose on people. In our popular culture, Russians became stereotypical goons in the films and advertisements of the 1970s and 1980s.

Our textbooks taught the decisive importance of US entry into the two world wars and the crucial role that the invasion of the Normandy beaches played in defeating the Nazis. Americans generally do not know or appreciate that the Soviet Union lost 24 MILLION people in World War Two, mostly civilian, while the United States lost 418,000, almost all military. To this day, World War II defines Russia in ways that it is almost impossible for us to imagine. Three generations after the end of World War II, this shared experience is the essence of Russian unity, even though the 24 million number above represents far more than just Russians.

When Navalny declares that he loves the Russian people while hating the government that represents them, he documents his disdain for that government by showing how Putin has diverted the wealth of Russia into his own hands and the hands of those who serve him. Born in the Soviet Union in 1976 to a Russian mother and a Ukrainian father who was part of the Soviet military, Navalny thus had access to an excellent education. From childhood, he was a voracious reader in various languages and his facility with words is one of the great joys of reading his memoir.

His education led him to law school at a time when Russia was quickly transitioning into the kleptocracy it has become today. His ability to work within the framework of the Russian legal system allowed him to engage it on its own terms. At the turn of the millennium, the Russian system still had some pretense of being a society operating under the rule of law. Navalny knew well how to operate within such a system.

At about the time when Putin was consolidating his takeover of the country, Navalny and his network of friends and advisers began to document the corruption transpiring in Russia as public assets fell into the hands of Russia’s emerging oligarchs. Navalny and his colleagues did so by using their limited resources to invest in publicly traded companies. Even as modest shareholders, they had the right to financial statements that revealed the corrupt networks of companies and individuals diverting the public good into the hands of the kleptocrats. Ultimately, Navalny and his network established the link between the Russian oligarchs and the state officials whose personal wealth far exceeded anything that could reasonably be associated with their salaries. Such accounts appealed to that portion of the public with the time, interest, and resources to wade through the well-documented details. These reports did not, however, attract the mass appeal needed to begin to challenge the political power of Putin in a system in which elections, albeit degraded, nevertheless still mattered. To be a leader of all the people, one had to engage social media.

Navalny had always been a person capable of speaking and writing clearly and persuasively; but the politics of the 21st century requires the concise and visual messaging associated with social media. Volunteers adept with social media technology and production complemented the team of lawyers, accountants, and political consultants that had previously driven Navalny’s political career. His team used drones to visually document the lavish estates of Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev and Putin.

Drone footage outside of Russia revealed Russian state officials on the spectacular yachts of Russian oligarchs to a public which still spends lots of time on busses, subways, and waiting in lines. These social media posts attracted millions of Russian followers and elevated Navalny to the leading position in the movement opposed to Putin’s dictatorship. Navalny’s YouTube channel has 6.5 million subscribers and 1.6 billion views.

In a system rapidly falling back into the Orwellian patterns that had emerged in the Soviet era, Navalny and his team chose to adopt an electoral strategy to limit Putin’s consolidation of power that entailed political engagement with some unsavory candidates. The strategy endeavored to limit the number of parliament seats controlled by Putin’s party, United Russia. To do this, Navalny’s Russia of the Future Party would back any candidate anywhere who had a chance of prevailing over Putin’s United Russia. Communists, fascists, anarchists, extreme nationalists might receive the tacit or direct support of Navalny’s party. This strategy obviously created some controversy, probably more outside of Russia than inside.

The strategy provides the context for understanding one of the early betrayals of free speech by Silicon Valley corporations. In 2021, at a time when the Kremlin had already imprisoned Navalny after he had returned to Russia in the wake of the Novichok poisoning, Google and Apple submitted to pressure by Putin to remove a voting app created by Navalny’s party that assisted Russians in their voting choices.

The decision by Google and Apple is a complicated instance of tech companies subordinating the public interest to profits. Granted, the Kremlin had also threatened the livelihoods if not the lives of Google and Apple employees in Russia as part of Putin’s coercion. Still, the Kremlin walked away with a massive propaganda victory because they were able to claim that Google and Apple had admittedly allowed the channeling of foreign influence into Russia’s national affairs. The foreign tech giants had implicitly confessed their sin. The Kremlin’s argument was bogus, of course. In a sign of the times, it was an argument that was raised but never successfully used to coerce companies in the Cold War era. While one might argue that the big tech companies did this to protect employees rather than preserve revenue streams, it represented an essential capitulation to dictatorship that, by the way, preserved the revenue streams at the cost of free speech and democracy.

Navalny did not examine the betrayal of Google and Apple in this instance, nor did he scrutinize the relationship between Trump and the Russian oligarchs. Part of this may relate to the fact that Patriot is a personal memoir and not a political discourse. Its goal is to give us a sense for the person and the dynamics of his vision for democracy and justice in Russia. Still, there is a brief reference to the relationship between Oleg Deripaska and Paul Manafort, who as Trump’s campaign manager in the 2016 election funneled internal campaign information to the Russian government. Manafort owed Deripaska a lot of money and, tellingly, did not take a salary for his work as Trump’s campaign manager. The expansive financial and personal ties between Trump and the Russians have been well-documented.

Mainstream media, however, does not appear to want to belabor this point to the extent that they should. Both of Donald Trump’s sons have repeatedly stated that Russians and Russian banks are keys to their family’s fortunes. They have both denied ever making such statements. They are Trumps to the core.

The final third of Navalny’s memoir is primarily a brilliantly tedious record of the prison diary he kept while spending the last three years of his life in prison. The reason why inhuman regimes put political opponents in jail is to break the spirit of the leaders and their followers. The power of the corrupt rests not only in their ability to control the bodies of their adversaries, but their minds and souls as well.

Navalny’s memoir testifies to his seemingly unbreakable spirit. Faith in the righteousness of his cause, knowledge of the love of his family, consciousness of the support of hundreds of millions of followers, and the ability to find joy in the smallest of life’s pleasures sustained him through his time in prison. It is impossible to read his diary and ever again eat a tomato, cucumber, and red onion salad without thinking of him. Meals in prison can be causes of celebration for those looking to find reasons to endure.

The days ahead will be dark for many of us. On New Years Day I rediscovered Natalie Merchant’s song Motherland. I kept listening to it throughout the day. A couple of stanzas keep running through my head ever since.

Oh, my five-and-dime queen
Tell me what have you seen?
The lust and the avarice
The bottomless, the cavernous greed
Is that what you see?
. . .
Now come on, shotgun bride
What makes me envy your life?
Faceless, nameless, innocent, blameless, and free
What’s that like to be?

The song, moreover, instructs us to “keep your heart off your sleeve” as we leave “this wasteland, this terrible place.” Here is the paradox: we must leave a terrible place yet remain connected to the motherland. We must keep our hearts off our sleeves, yet not lose our hearts altogether. Navalny’s testament is a guide for navigating this paradox.

We all carry the burden of and responsibility for Navalny’s death just as we all carry the burden of and responsibility for the Palestinian genocide in Gaza. It can be overwhelming and drive us into despair or, worse, an illusory attitude of privileged disregard for the plight of others. A democratic Russia could have set the foundation for a more just and peaceful globe. We are further from a democratic Russia today than we have ever been. The Soviet system was at least capable of producing the remarkable Mikhail Gorbachev. It is difficult to see a similar leader emerging from Putin’s dystopia. What is worse, the United States is on its way to destroy the very constitutional foundation of its republic. Whatever role we had as a global leader has been squandered.

May the memory of Navalny kindle all our hearts and illuminate our minds as we look to restore a vision for democracy throughout the world. Perhaps we should make February 16, the anniversary of his death, Navalny day. I will definitely eat a tomato, cucumber, and red onion salad in his memory on that day. On his birthday, June 4, I may add some pickled herring to it. The Deluxe Navalny!

We Are All Navalny Now.

If we have the guts.