40. Navalny - a kind of saint

What does it take?

What does real commitment and real investment in a belief, an idea or an ideal take? 

Well, it takes everything. It takes a lifetime to hone and grow and crystallize the idea, it takes a tragic death to realize that which doesn’t exist anymore. 

I finished the book “Patriot” by Alexei Navalny a while ago. Somehow, I did not feel like I was ready to write about it immediately. I needed to let it simmer, work inside of me. The story, which it is still unfolding in real life, has a deep impact on me. 

Sometimes, during the day, I find myself thinking about his life, what he chose, why and the price he was ready to pay for his beliefs. 

He was lucid, and he was ready to die for his conviction. How does this work? 

I asked myself if that way of being really the wise way. I mean, he is dead. If you did not know, well now you do.

 He died in a cold, polar, Russian prison, under mysterious circumstances. But in Russia, the circumstances are probably never natural. They don’t fall into place as given by nature, they are constructed, made up, invented, made to fit a certain view. 

If try to put myself in the shoes of someone living in Russia, someone as alive, intelligent and open as Alexei Navalny - I can understand how claustrophobic he must have felt. 

I am having mixed feelings, even doubts, when it comes to his apparent dismissal and nonchalant, humorous attitude towards his own mortality. Did he want to die? Was he so recless, so outspoken, so loud, so merciless when speaking the truth that he did not care about the consequences? Wasn’t his intention to influence, to change the circumstances ? Was it to die for these beliefs?  Why?

As you can see, the book brought up a lot of questions. 

I am trying to find the answers by listening to this wife, who lucky is still alive, living outside Russia just like their two children. She is continuing her husband’s fight. Even Alexei was mentioning this in the book, his wife might be even more fierce, more convinced of the need to fight. 

Of course, I am bewildered by the apparent easiness with which he accepted his death, he walked right into it when the decided to return to Russia, after the poisoning attack. 

As an attempt to understand this, I watched several interviews and documentaries about him. His channel on YouTube, the breeze of truth in the Russian media, is still active. I have not yet watched all the investigations, but I could see that they have millions of views. 

Just like me, the question on everybody's mind, was : Why did they come back to Russia?

If he wanted to keep living and keep fighting for the possibility of change in Russia, why did he let himself be killed? 

Was it out of desperation? Did he want to become a martyr? I doubt it. He seems so down to earth, so normal and yet so strong and fearless. Is this a new type of Jesus that we failed to keep alive? Or, maybe a Jesus, by definition, has to die for his beliefs? 

Was the return to Russia, after the poisoning and all that work to recover the basic human abilities, a mistake? Was it childish to think that by walking straight into the lions' den, he would be left alive? Why didn't he choose to preserve his life, the very force that was allowing him to share his truth and to show the people the depth of deceit they were living in? 

Wouldn’t that have had a longer, lasting effect on people? 

The ripple effect of such a tragic death (murder) takes years to dissipate. The memory of such a personality will exist for a while, but I am afraid that at the rate that we are losing mental capacity and real human values nowadays, I’m afraid his death will be lost in the noise soon enough. 

The fact that we live in a world where people concomitantly are being killed, next to them other people are losing their judgement and human qualities to forces put in motion by a power that is unknown, but it’s everywhere, is disorienting. 

Maybe Alexei Navalny found his peace in prison.

He made peace with this death long before that, yes.

What I mean is that, maybe, he found the capacity to accept things in a more profound way. To accept the eternal conflict among good and bad and to become someone who is looking at it, not getting entangled in it. 

All those months in solitude, in dire conditions, the dark and the cold, the restrictions of all kinds, the back pain, maybe they brought him to a level of consciousness that was no longer valid for this forsaken world. 

Maybe he was promoted to another level. 

Oh, how I wish to know.