Today, It’s Navalny, Tomorrow It Could Be Anyone in Russia
The lifelessness of Navalny’s face speaks for all of the country, but most are too cowardly to understand
When I first saw the body lying in the open casket, I thought of Vladimir Lenin, the founding revolutionary of the Soviet Union. Deep beneath the earth on Red Square, the brick and granite of the mausoleum are set off perfectly by the polished black marble. When you enter, you slowly cascade downwards to the waxy body. As eerie and somber as it is inside, it could also be the setting for a 1970s-Swedish porn.
Something else made me think of Lenin. As part of his program for readying Russia for the Communist revolution, violence was used liberally. Mass killings of anyone suspected of not being ready to accept the extremist views of Lenin’s Bolsheviks regarding ownership of private property were carried out regularly. Millions of pro-Czarist Russians were wiped out almost without a trace. In August of 1921, the famous Russian poet Nikolay Gumilyov was executed by the Bolsheviks. His friends and followers, however, didn’t dare mourn his death in public as they feared being executed.
As much as Vladimir Putin tried to deny the followers of Navalny, Putin was trying to follow the example set by Lenin and then used by Soviet…
