From The Australian. I'm Claire Harvey. We're hoping you're having a great holiday break and today we're bringing you one of our favorite episodes from the year. This episode originally aired on February twenty, shortly after the death of Russian dissident and YouTube superstar Alexei Navalni. The Front will return with all new episodes on Monday, January thirteenth. Just hit follow or subscribe to make sure you don't miss an episode.
The sun will set just after four thirty pm today on the treeless Arctic tundra of Siberia's Yamalo Nanette's region, and the temperature will plunge from minus eight degrees celsius to minus twelve. It'll be dark for sixteen hours before the sun limps over the horizon again. Today's forecast is for a howling wind to blast snow showers across the frozen plains. This is where the world's most famous political prisoner, Alexi Navali, has died in a Russian prison camp called
Ik three. Polar Wolf. Nav One was forty seven. His body was ravaged by the effects of a nerve agent poisoning from a few years ago. He'd been asking to see a dentist for nearly two years. He had serious pain in his back and struggle to walk. He was serving a twenty eight year sentence on what were widely regarded in the West as trumped up charges of fraud and extremism. Just a day before his death, Navale seemed in good spirits at a court appearance via videolink from
the Polar Wolf Camp. Prison camps, just like Polar Wolf, were the inspiration for two of the twentieth century's most evocative pieces of literature, books by Alexander Salzhanitsen, The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
He didn't want the morning to come, but the morning came, as it always does.
This is the nineteen seventies adaptation of Denisovich, written after Soljihnitsen's own years in prison after being convicted for criticizing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
Rumor had it that it was the Chinese who had given the authorities the idea of serving boiled grass instead of porridge. A bowl full of it weighed more than half a pound, but when you've eaten it, you are still hungry. The good thing about it was the detail had no taste hot or cold.
Now, sad to say, prison camps have a long history in Russian culture, but it developed really to an industrial scale under communism.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian's Foreign.
Editor, and life in these camps is cruel, harsh and primitive. You don't get enough food, you don't get enough heating, especially the ones in the Arctic, and you're liable to be killed at any time by the guards. Now, Alexi Nevelni was unbelievably brave to go back there, and everyone predicted he would be killed in one of the camps, and that is what has happened.
Late on Friday night, Australian Time, the news broke that Navalni was dead. Anthony Albanezi immediately blamed Vladimir Putin, as did other world leaders. Australia's ambassador to Moscow took the highly unusual step of laying flowers at a makeshift memorial, even as police were dragging away ordinary Russians in their hundreds who tried to pay similar tributes. Alexi Navanni was born in nineteen seventy six to a Russian mother and
Ukrainian father. He became a lawyer and entered regional politics in the early two thousands as a Russian nationalist, but quickly the authorities began to see him as a threat. A series of protests, arrests, and prison time began. This turned Navalne into a campaigner for democratic reforms and against what he said was rampant corruption from the Kremlin down, with a wildly popular series of social media videos in
which he bluntly accused Russia's power elite of criminality. He attempted to run for president in twenty eighteen, and that's where he came directly into conflict with Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Putin these days presents himself as a sort of a Russian Orthodox Christian defender of the West, but he was a KGUV colonel, and he really has wedded all the methods of communist repreat with over the top Russian nationalism and a patterner of completely fraudulent Russian Orthodox religious declarations as well.
In twenty twenty, Navale was poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent, an act he and his supporters directly attributed to Putin. Upon his return from treatment, in a German hospital. Navale released a documentary with drone footage of a glittering golden palace in southern Russia. Naviolei said the president had used money embezzled from ordinary Russians to build what he called Putin's Palace. Here's Navale in the video, speaking through a translator.
I really want to understand how an ordinary Soviet officer turned into a mudman who's obsessed with money and luxury and literally ready to destroy the country and kill for the sake of his chests of gold.
Here's Alexi Navoali speaking to the US sixty minutes on CBS.
You know you used to be known as the man or had no fear, But what about your family? Do you ever think that you were putting them in danger? That is the toughest part. Yes, I don't feel any fear. But children, what is kind of really horrible thought. If they will try to use this navichok somewhere around my apartment where my children is coming, like you know, this door or something, but everyone can touch it. But anyway, we should fight these people because they will never stop.
They will poison someone else, they will poison more people.
In two thousand and six, former KGB agent and Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in London, where he'd been informing on Russian organized crime. He died in a British hospital, blaming Vladimir Putin.
Alexander Livinenko's death from a cute radiation sickness was slow and agonizing, but unlike most murder victims, he was able to give extensive interviews to British detectives before he died.
In twenty eighteen, Russian double agent Sergei Scruppau and his daughter Julia were the targets of a botched assassination attempt, also in Britain. Navalni's death feels different.
Now, Alexi Navelni. We ought to pay tribute to him. He must be the bravest man on the planet. He was the leader of the Russian opposition and he very much echoes the old dissidents in the Soviet Union. The poisoning was meant to kill him. He was nearly dead, but he recovered. But then when he was fit and well again, he went back to Russia to lead the opposition. Now, the Russian government put him in jail straight away, but
I think they are a bit embarrassed about killing him immediately. However, his courriage is quite magnificent, and whenever he's appeared at court hearings and so on, he has retained his defiance
of Putin and the authoritarian Russian system. He's occasionally smuggled out through his lawyers or relatives, statements to the Russian people, urging them on to keep going in their resistance, and most recently he smiled and gave positive gestures at his latest court appearance, and then he was killed the next day.
The official story out of Russia was first that Navolni died of a blood clot and then the story changed to sudden death syndrome. His heart just stopped. His mother rushed to the camp but was unable to find his body in a local morgue. There are reports his body was covered in bruises that couldn't have been sustained through the hard manual labor Navalne endured at the camp. Next month, Russians will vote in a presidential election that Putin will
almost certainly win exactly the way he planned it. So is Navalne's death a well timed message to any would be opponents.
I mean, in a sense, nothing is a coincidence in Russia. On the other hand, you can overinterpret these things. There's a famous story of the State Department when the North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung died and the CIA directors question to the State Department boss was, now, why do you think he did that? It may have had more to do with the timing of what's going on in Ukraine.
But on the other hand, it's not an unreasonable speculation that he's sending out a message before the presidential election. He's saying to Russian citizens, don't you dare think that you can use the sham election that I'm about to hold as a pretext for engaging in any anti state protest. They want the power that they wield to cause people to be scared, above all their own citizens, but also
international actors. The final reflection I'd offer Claire is that the terrible tragedy of this is that Russia is really one of the world's greatest and most magnificent civilizations, and there is a deeply sophisticated culture and a people who would be European and free, who are being constrained by the savage authoritarian power of Vladimir Putin, who is really a kind of a communist emperor, but he also has learnt the lessons of communist techniques of repression, and eventually
he'll grow old and feeble and they'll be replaced. But there's no sign that the ruling system is under any serious real challenge within Russia.
Coming up. If Vladimir Putin is wiping out his enemies one by one, does that mean he's feeling weak or feeling invincible? While have you, we'd love you to join our subscribers at the Australian dot com dot au, where we have the nation's best news, analysis and commentary. Twenty four to seven. We'll be back with Greeg Sheridan after this break. In August, one of Vladimir Putin's former lieutenants
was killed in a plane crashed north of Moscow. Yevgeny Progosian had launched a rebellion against Russia's military leadership exactly two months earlier, and the leader of Russia's Mercenary Group, A. Wagner, has insisted it was not a coup but rather a protest. Some analysts suggested Putin was weakening and had Progosion killed to warn other potential rebels conciously. There's similar commentary now after the death of Navali. Maybe this shows Vladimir Putin is feeling threatened.
I'm not really convinced by that analysis. I think he was embarrassed by the Pregosion rebellion, and very early on a lot of analysts, including me, said, well, look, either Progosion or Putin must die out of this. There's just no other logical outcome. You're not going to be allowed to stage that kind of rebellion and stay alive unless you win. Progosion would be killed. And then that's exactly
what happened. And sadly, if Putin does fall, he's more likely to fall to a Progosion type figure than to Anvalni type figure, because control of the armed forces would be probably the decisive thing. But dictators in a sense are always brittle, even at their most powerful. So a dictator doesn't serenely rule for twenty or thirty years. He is always sleepless. He is always sleeping with one eye
open and a revolver under his pillow. So the fact that he thinks Navalni was a threat to him is a magnificent tribute to Nevalnie's moral courage and standing and heroism.
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