A work by the street artist Harry Greb, depicts Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is finally embracing the dissident label. | EIDON/Camera Press/ReduxDavid M. Herszenhorn is the Russia, Ukraine and East Europe editor at The Washington Post, overseeing coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“Those eight people in 1968, they were very brave. We admire them,” Volkov said. “But it was very clear for everyone that they were actually a minority among enormous, vast, silent majority.”, of those dissidents, like Sakharov and Bonner, and Marchenko and Gorbanevskaya and the rest, they were disconnected from the people,” Volkov continued. “So, they played a very important historical role. We admire them a lot. But there was a dramatic difference between them and our movement.
Covering Navalny for more than a dozen years, I have been fascinated by his resilience and his cutting humor. The Kremlin’s campaign to paint him as some kind of fifth columnist or Western agent often seemed comic, until state assassins tried to kill him. Navalny’s steadfast commitment to Russia, including his embrace of Russian nationalism over the years, has generally brought him and his family nothing but grief.
Navalny’s family history, childhood upbringing in Butyn and other military towns just outside of Moscow, his education, love life and early career are so utterly normal — initially so Soviet, then so Russian, and all along, so Slavic — as to make it ridiculous, if not impossible, to try to paint him with “otherness.” Here is a guy who spent a half year on a fellowship at Yale University and later said he realized he could not live in America because he missed black bread.
To call him Russian, however, is not entirely precise, at least not in the Russian way of thinking about ethnicity. Navalny’s mother is Russian. His father was born in Zalissia, Ukraine, a town that is now in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The town was abandoned after the nuclear disaster in 1986, and all its residents, including Navalny’s grandparents, uncles and other relatives, were eventually forced to evacuate and relocate.
Maria Gaidar, the daughter of the late former acting prime minister of Russia, knew Navalny from when he first started working for the progressive-liberal Yabloko party, in the early to mid 2000s. She later worked with him to organize a series of political debates that briefly became a sensation in Moscow — until pro-Kremlin hecklers forced them to end the events.
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