The news this morning–the death in prison, which is almost certainly murder, of Alexei Navalny. It is hard to think that good things will ever come from Russia. I remember reading Rosemary Sullivan’s biography of Stalin’s daughter and being struck by her account of Stalin’s final days. He had either transported the country’s best doctors to gulags, or had them murdered, or both, and the remaining doctors were afraid to touch him as he gasped and frothed. Imagine a country operating in such a climate of fear. Last weekend I read this excellent piece at the Guardian site about the photographer Barry Lewis and his images, taken in 1991 in a small window of glasnost, of remnants of the gulags. One photograph will haunt me for the rest of my life: Asir Sandler, a former political prisoner, with a string punctuated with tiny knot. A memory string. He had not been allowed anything to write with so he devised a method of keeping a record. So much can be taken from a person but memory persists.
The ordering of public memory has always preoccupied autocrats. Few nations have plural versions of history and even relatively free countries promote something like an “approved’ account of their recent evolution. But private memory is harder to get at. Dictators burn books and they close journals that are nostalgic in “the wrong way”. But they scrabble in vain to find the key to that small sealed room, the place in which individuals remember what happened to them and what their mothers whispered to them when nobody else was about.
I don’t know what we should do. Or can do. Or might try to do. In western democracies, little by little, some of the freedoms and rights we have taken for granted are being eroded. Reproductive rights. Freedom to read. Threats to journalists. Stacking the judicial system with judges sympathetic to the ones with power. The erosions are slow, like water on stone, so that we hardly notice at first. We see it in the large country to the south of us but it’s happening here too. I think of the journalist Brandi Morin who was covering a police raid on a homeless encampment in Edmonton and who identified herself to police as a journalist but who was arrested for obstructing a police officer. (Her court appearance is scheduled for today.) I think of the leader of the Conservative Party here promising to cut funding to our national broadcaster if elected. (Already Canada is ranked 15th out of 180 countries on Reporters Without Border’s 2023 World Press Freedom Index, not exactly stellar.)
Videos out of Moscow this morning show people lined up to place flowers on a memorial for Alexei Navalny. In silence. This is the only thing they are permitted to do. I wonder how many in that country wish for something else, another form of government, a lifting of the heavy and oppressive hand of the current leader. And I wonder how long they will continue to line up in silence. I hope they are storing every detail of the evil happening around them, knotted on strings of private and public memory. I hope their leadership crumbles like old rotten wood and they make fires for freedom, enough of them to warm the whole country. And I hope they turn their minds to the cities and citizens of Ukraine, not in silence, but in sorrow, in humility and profound regret for what is being done in their names as citizens of Russia.
Addendum: after I wrote this, I read this excellent piece:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/russia-has-died-with-navalny/
...Theresa Kishkan 