10/24/20
TOMSK, Russia -- When Aleksei Navalny arrived in this Siberian city in August, the opposition leader gathered supporters at his local headquarters to applaud their efforts in an ongoing regional election campaign and give a motivating speech tinged with his usual mix of sarcasm and dark humor. But Andrei Fateyev, who was among those in attendance, says Navalny became serious when a supporter posed a question he's been asked repeatedly during his decade of activism against President Vladimir Putin's rule and corruption among Russia's elite: Why haven't they killed you yet? "He said he understood the authorities were weighing the risks of various methods," Fateyev recalled this week in the Navalny team's modest office near the Tomsk city center, "but they probably figure it'd be worse to kill him than let him continue his work." The assumption seemed to shatter when, en route back to Moscow on August 20, Navalny fell violently ill. The plane made an emergency landing in the city of Omsk, where he was placed in a coma and kept in a local hospital until he was flown for treatment to Berlin following desperate pleas from his relatives and aides. German officials would subsequently confirm he had been poisoned with Novichok, a class of Soviet-developed nerve agents, prompting a diplomatic scandal and repeated denials of involvement from the Kremlin.
But for Fateyev and other Navalny supporters in Tomsk, it served to galvanize their resolve to break the Kremlin's hold on power in Russia. "It was like a red flag to a bull. It motivated us," said Fateyev, 32. "When you confront lawlessness and injustice, it really riles you up." Along with 28-year-old Ksenia Fadeyeva, who leads Navalny's operations in Tomsk, Fateyev ran for election to the city council and won. "People started recognizing us on the streets," Fadeyeva said. "And some would curse United Russia as they walked past." Fateyev said that the number of people signed up to Navalny's political campaign in Tomsk soon doubled. Fadeyeva is not waiting to make her mark, or mincing her words. In her first speech as a city councilwoman on October 5, she issued a scathing indictment of Russia's political system under Putin's rule and the conditions in which opposition activists operate -- the kind of blistering tirade that few deputies of the legislative body had probably ever witnessed. Real wages had fallen for six years straight, she went on, and the retirement age raised as part of highly unpopular reforms passed in 2018. She then turned to members of the Kremlin-backed party who had managed to secure seats on the council, their combined number representing a shadow of the influence they once wielded. "Respected deputies from United Russia. Now you are the opposition. You are the minority."
So then, Americans are stupid because they don't believe your swill Mr. Stalin?