Book review: Warnings on Putin ignored at our peril

Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny chose to return to Russia in the knowledge that the only doubt around his repatriation was how long it might be before Putin silenced him. File picture: Pavel Golovkin/AP

• Murder In The Gulag: The Life and Death of Alexei Navalny 
• John Sweeney 
• Headline Press, €25.00 

At the end of this challenging book journalist John Sweeney offers a list of 21 names. His ‘Shortlist of Putin Critics, Adversaries Killed, When, Why and How’ includes some famous names murdered by the agents of a one-time, peripheral security functionary turned paranoid despot and probably one of the world’s richest men. 

Three were killed because they wondered if Putin might be a paedophile like one of his predecessors, Stalin’s secret policeman Lavrentiy Beria. 

Another, Evgeny Prigozhin, died in a “fireball” after he challenged his benefactor. It’s almost 20 years since journalist Anna Politkovskaya was poisoned and shot because she investigated war crimes.

The execution of journalists is almost an everyday event in Putin’s Russia: seven editorial staff of  Novaya Gazeta have been murdered since Putin assumed power. 

By publishing a list like this Sweeney knew it would be very quickly out of date, and so it transpired. On July 28, barely months after this “J’Accuse” was signed off, pianist and anti-war activist Pavel Kushnir, 39, died while in pre-trial detention in Birobidzhan in Russia’s far east.

Kushnir died on “hunger strike”, one of those euphemisms that mark so many deaths in Russia.

At that moment human rights group Memorial said that 333 people were incarcerated by Putin as political prisoners. 

Yet despite this normalised brutality, despite this record of murder as public practice, the most charismatic of Putin’s recent opponents, Alexei Navalny, chose to return to Russia in the knowledge that the only doubt around his repatriation was how long it might be before Putin silenced him. 

This expectation was sharpened by the fact that Putin had already tried to murder Navalny by smearing the nerve agent novichok on his underwear. 

Was Navalny’s response, his selfless return to the lion’s den, reckless or noble? Probably both. 

Only time can tell if his memory helps to sustain those who hope to recover Russia and its almost infinite natural resources. He died after ever-more intense abuse in prison on February 16.

However, the void at the head of domestic opposition to Putin’s repressive kleptocracy seems to exact a very high price, as any successor faces predictable oblivion. Would you be brave enough?

Navalny, as his closest supporters and Sweeney acknowledge, was not a perfect leader, especially as he flirted with Russia’s nasty fascist nationalists in a considered effort to build anti-Putin momentum. 

He made other misjudgements but never wavered in his core belief: that good would prevail. 

He believed Putin’s regime would end and that Russia might become a democracy and that the permanent repression in that blighted country might end.

If that good is to be made real, Russians will need support and, as Anne Applebaum also argues in Autocracy, Inc, Sweeney warns the West must close the lucrative money-laundering facilities that reward the corruption so forceful in Russia.

It might be naive to imagine that Irish institutions, or at least some institutions with Irish addresses, are not knowing players in this high-earning assault on democracy.

This book is also a get-real warning to those who think support for Ukraine is optional and a warning about the dire consequences of a second Trump presidency. 

The history of the last 110 years shows by not being prepared to defy and confront the worst of humanity we invite one ogre after another to try to change our world.

There is a growing realisation that the West has, yet again, been naively neglectful and that we must do much, much more to secure our world and our children’s world too. Sweeney’s Murder in the Gulag is a very timely and valuable contribution to that debate and process.

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