Why did he return to Russia?
We’ve all wondered about it at least once, since Alexei Navalny was detained at Sheremetyevo Airport on January 18, 2021. It was his last day of freedom.
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From the moment it became known that Navalny died in a penal colony following a long and excruciating torture to which he was subjected on Putin’s orders, millions of people around the world have been asking themselves this question once again.
This is a stupid question. This is an attempt to find a rational explanation for the irrational: heroism. If heroes were to ask themselves the same questions every time that we, mere mortals, ask, then they would never accomplish their feats.
The essence of true heroism is doing what you believe in without weighing the risks, even if balanced on those scales are what you hold most dear – freedom and life.
Putin’s place in history
Alexei Navalny is the bravest person I’ve ever met in my life. He is a hero whose spirit was neither broken by a poisoning attempt nor by the torture of agonizing prison conditions. A hero who has given his life for freedom is of the highest significance to people who have a sense of dignity, and something meaningless and abstract for those who lack it.
Navalny returned to Russia because he could not help but return. He knew that he would be arrested and understood how it might end for him. With his gesture, with his contempt for the fear of death in the name of freedom, he entered eternity and took his rightful place among people such as Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi.
His murderer, Vladimir Putin, will also eternally remain in people’s memory. He will take his place among the most despicable representatives of humanity, somewhere between Hitler and Gaddafi.
Navalny’s name will haunt him
The Russian dictator did not pronounce Navalny’s name for the same reason he avoids any debate and honest elections – he is a political coward, terrified of competition. Now Navalny’s name will haunt him for the rest of his life and even after his death: in the history of humankind, he will forever remain the cowardly poisoner of his main political opponent.
Streets and squares in the major capitals of the world will be named after Navalny. Legends and films will be made of his exploits. Millions will be inspired by him. Heroes do not die; their legacies live on eternally.
As for his murderer – the same fate awaits him as it did his predecessors, who died from a shovel handle in the back door or in a lonely bunker in a puddle of their own urine.
This ignorant lover of history has not learned its main lesson: dictators end in the same way. If the people preserve his grave, then it will be decorated not with flowers, but with a mountain of dirty underwear – as a symbol of contempt for one of the vilest leaders not only in the history of Russia, but in all of human history.
