With Navalny’s Death, Putin is Feeling More Confident than Ever
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 28 February 2024
⏱️ 42 minutes
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Summary
After a decade of provoking Russian President Vladimir Putin through organized protest, anti-corruption investigations, and taunting social-media posts, the opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in a Russian prison, from what the Kremlin claims was a pulmonary embolism. The New Yorker staff writer Masha Gessen, who knew Navalny, calls his death “a shock, but not a surprise,” and says that, had Navalny been killed a decade ago, the incident might have led to even more widespread outrage. But Russian citizens and the world have since grown accustomed to Putin’s iron grip on power. With Putin gaining momentum in his war on Ukraine and Western sanctions seeming to be unable to stop him, Navalny’s death does not appear to signal Putin’s weakness; rather, it suggests that the Russian President feels as emboldened as ever. Despite this, Gessen sees a future for Russia’s political opposition movement. “They’re not going to organize to bring down the regime,” Gessen tells Tyler Foggatt. “That’s not the project. The project is to have a politics in place for when the regime collapses under its own weight. And I think it’s not impossible that they could do it.”
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| 0:47.0 | So killing Navalny is largely a way of communicating with the West. |
| 0:53.8 | And the message can be summed up as, |
| 0:57.0 | what are you going to do to me? |
| 1:03.0 | That's my colleague, Masha Gessen. There's a temptation among some Western leaders to claim that |
| 1:08.0 | the death of Russian opposition leader,ei Navalny is a sign of |
| 1:11.3 | vulnerability on the part of President Vladimir Putin. But as Masha explains, all signs point to Putin |
| 1:17.4 | being incredibly confident about his future. I ask Masha to come on the show to talk about this |
| 1:22.1 | critical period in Russia and what Navalny's death means for the future of the opposition movement |
| 1:26.3 | there. You're listening to the political scene. |
| 1:29.1 | I'm Tyler Faggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. |
| 1:38.0 | Masha, I want to start by bringing us back to July 18, 2013, |
| 1:42.5 | when something quite unusual happened in Russia. |
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