Julia Ioffe Instagram – On Friday, Alexey Navalny was buried, and despite the risk, tens of thousands of people came out to bid him farewell.
“It was hard not to see last weekend as a kind of inversion of Bolotnaya, and of that entire winter when Alexey first emerged as the most credible leader of the anti-Putin movement,” Julia Ioffe writes. “But back then, the air was filled with a sense that better days were ahead, if not just around the corner. Russia seemed on the brink of finally, finally fulfilling its potential.”
“What we saw this weekend was the end of that hopeful arc. First, the protest movement had been killed, and now so too had its leader. And though over 10,000 people in Moscow came out to bid Alexey farewell, what did it change, really? Putin would still be re-elected overwhelmingly for another six-year term, Russian missiles would keep killing Ukrainian children for no discernible reason, and dissent would land hundreds and thousands more Russians behind bars. If we thought the repression of Russian society was bad 15 years ago, it has become Stalinesque now.”
Read Julia Ioffe’s full essay at the link in bio.
Photo: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images
#Navalny #AlexeyNavalny #Russia #Moscow #Putin | Posted on 06/Mar/2024 23:21:41
