Anti-Putin does not mean anti-imperial. Why the romanticisation of Russian dissidents is misleading

In the German debate on the Russian anti-Putin camp, the problematic aspects of this milieu are often ignored. The Russian perspective continues to be prioritized other those of the colonized.

Three of the most prominent Russian opposition figures in the West—Yuliya Navalnaya, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and Ilya Yashin—have called for an “Anti-War March” this Sunday in Berlin. Their appeal to other Russians to join the march is yet another example of how the Russian opposition, often met with adulation in the West, attempts to absolve Russian society—“ordinary Russians”—of any responsibility for Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine. This is an absurd claim, given the daily atrocities committed by Russians in Ukraine and the fact that at least substantial parts of Russian society either support the war waged in their name or are indifferent to it.

Navalnaya and her fellow campaigners not only deny this reality but also show more solidarity with their imagined “wonderful Russia of the future” than with Ukraine, which is currently under attack. In their appeal, they demand that Putin withdraw Russian troops from Ukraine (good luck with that) but do not call for more weapons to be sent to Ukraine. In fact, all three have been, at best, ambiguous on the issue of arms deliveries to Ukraine.

Lastly, their choice of Berlin as the location for their march is curious. Why Berlin? Because the city is associated with the Soviet defeat of fascism, which Russia continues to claim as an exclusively Russian victory? Or perhaps because Germans still feel guilt for the crimes committed by their ancestors in the Soviet Union during the Second World War and too often project this guilt more onto Russia than onto Ukraine or Belarus? Or is it because of Germany’s traditional “Russia Complex,” which can also be seen in the uncritical admiration of prominent opposition figures? Do Navalnaya, Kara-Murza and Yashin perhaps see this as a potential asset for their claim of discursive legitimacy in the Western debate about Russia and Ukraine?

In this essay, I argue that it is high time for a critical assessment of the self-proclaimed leaders of the Russian opposition in the West.

Russian Anti-War demonstration on March 26, 2022, Wikimedia

This autumn, the memoirs of Kremlin opponent Alexei Navalny were published in Germany. The tireless fighter against the corruption of the Putin regime was murdered in a Russian penal camp in February 2024. In the reviews of his memoirs (apart from a few exceptions such as those by Nikolai Klimeniouk in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and Ulrich Schmid in the Neue Züricher Zeitung), a pattern is repeated that could already be observed in numerous obituaries in German newspapers after his death: the stylisation of Navalny as a hero, a fighter for democracy and freedom, while at the same time his well-documented racism, nationalism and imperialism are played down or even completely ignored. The media discourse in Germany about Navalny and also about his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who wants to continue his legacy, is exemplary of the uncritical romanticisation of the Russian anti-Putin camp in the West.

At the same time, there is an imbalance between the interest in (supposed) beacons of hope from Russia and those Ukrainians who are currently fighting for the survival of Ukraine and its democracy. For example, around the same time as the publication of Navalny's memoirs, it was announced on 18 October that the human rights activist and soldier Maksym Butkevych had been released after almost two years of Russian imprisonment. The tageszeitung was the only major German newspaper which considered this newsworthy. This is just one example of many that ‘good Russians’ (an ironic description by critics of problematic figures from the Russian anti-Putin camp) enjoy a higher media presence in the Western media than Ukrainians fighting for their freedom, even during Russia's war of aggression. The romantic idealisation of Russia, which the historian Gerd Koenen aptly described as a ‘Russia complex’ in one of his books, is still not a thing of the past despite Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. On an analytical level, this is unsatisfactory and it is problematic from a political perspective. It was not least the complete misjudgement of Russia's current state that at least facilitated the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

It is noteworthy that the romanticisation of Navalny can also be observed in professional circles. For example, Kerstin Holm, the long-standing cultural correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Moscow, sees in Navalny a ‘personality of tremendous curiosity, learning ability and creativity’, who ‘early on sought out exchanges with people outside his bubble (such as nationalists, for which many democrats criticised him)’. The latter is simply wrong. Navalny did not seek out dialogue with nationalists; he was a nationalist himself and never made a secret of it. Even if he was not part of the organised extreme right-wing militant scene, Navalny attracted attention with extremist racist statements, especially in the early phase of his political biography. One example is a video published by the Russian National Liberation Movement in 2007, in which Navalny, a self-declared ‘certified nationalist’, refers to non-white people, who are labelled as ‘alien’ and Muslim in the video, as ‘flies and cockroaches’ and then shoots one of them in a game. In the Ostcast of the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT, Eastern Europe experts Alice Bota and Michael Thumann played down the video, which uses a fascist-like (image) language, as ‘half-joking’ or a ‘gag’ and emphasised that such statements were limited to this phase in Navalny's life. It is undoubtedly true that a development can be seen in Navalny's biography, in the sense that he made the fight against corruption in Russia his main theme. But he continued to see himself as a nationalist. He merely toned down his tone over time, but anti-migrant demands and xenophobic rhetoric remained part of his political programme, both as a candidate for the Moscow mayoral elections in 2013 and in his (unsuccessful) attempt to be nominated as a presidential candidate in 2018. He never distanced himself in the slightest even from his most inhumane statements. This was a deliberate decision by a man who saw himself as the antithesis of Vladimir Putin and wanted to become Russia's president. As historian Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon put it in her obituary of Navalny, ‘Navalny's Future Russia Did Not Include Everyone.’

The marginalisation of this aspect of Navalny and his political programme may be related to the fact that Navalny's focus on corruption succeeded in attracting younger people to protest against the Putin regime. The great recognition that Navalny enjoys in the West is also rooted in this. After all, so the argument goes, someone managed to organize a little resistance to Putin on the streets. But what is overlooked is that the narrow focus on the issue of corruption was also the great political failure of Navalny. In Chechnya, Syria and Ukraine, it can be seen that it is not corruption that makes Russia so dangerous and destructive, but violence and colonialism coupled with extreme nationalism.

The colonial mindset of the Russian anti-Putin camp

Navalny is by no means the only representative of the Russian anti-Putin camp to be uncritically elevated in German media discourse to a symbol of a different, better Russia. The same applies, for example, to the former Russian politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was arrested and imprisoned in Moscow in April 2022 for opposing Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Although he is a long way from the extreme racism of someone like Alexei Navalny, his attitude also reveals a widespread attitude in the Russian anti-Putin milieu: an unwillingness to hold Russian society accountable for Russia's development. Shortly after Kara-Murza was released from prison in August 2024 as part of a prisoner exchange, he stated that in the future he would focus his efforts on ending the comprehensive sanctions against Russia. After all, only Putin and his clique are responsible for this war and consequently only they should be affected by sanctions. In doing so, he effectively declared the suffering and deaths in Ukraine and its victory to be a secondary matter: after all, the point of Western sanctions is to weaken the Russian war economy and thus make a defeat of Moscow more likely. Kara-Murza made a sharp distinction between Putin and Russia and spoke – as had Navalny and his wife Yulia Navalnaya before him – absolving Russian society of any responsibility for this war, even going so far as to claim that the majority of Russians were against the war.

Putin opponents Ilya Yashin and Andrey Pivovarov, who were also released as part of the prisoner exchange, made similar statements. Even after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Navalny, still in prison, continued to deny that Russia is an imperialist country. Navalny's line of argument was remarkable. He asked the (rhetorical) question whether all Russians had an ‘imperial consciousness’. It goes without saying that the answer to this can only be negative: It would be impossible to say that all citizens of any country, without exception, have the same attitude on any issue. Navalny's second argument was even more telling: if Russia is imperial, then Belarus must also be imperial, since the attack on Ukraine also originated from Belarusian soil. The absurdity of this claim is obvious, since Belarus's degradation to a vassal state is a consequence of Moscow's imperialist policy.

It was thus perhaps only logical that Navalny’s team refrained from collecting money for Ukraine and continued to focus on the corruption of Putin and his entourage and the production of YouTube videos on this topic. Recently, his widow, who has also been stylised by the media as a heroine, said that the question of whether Ukraine should receive weapons for its defence was difficult, since these weapons could ultimately be used against Russians. This is the core of the failure of many prominent Russian opposition figures in the West: they imagine an innocent Russian society that only needs to be freed from Putin, and the democratic and free Russia of the future will begin. This dream of a ‘wonderful Russia of the future’ and the (supposed) Russian victims of the present are the primary recipients of their solidarity, and not Ukraine, which is fighting for its very survival. But where is this better Russia supposed to come from, when the majority of those who present themselves as representatives of this Russia not only have no political influence in their home country, but also show no willingness to criticise their society? If they are incapable of even calling by name the colonial violence that characterises Russian politics and society, past and present?

The Russian oppositionist as martyr

It is striking that such critical analysis of the Russian opposition in Germany often triggers emotional defensive reflexes. The traditional prioritisation of Russian perspectives is one reason for this. Another is related to the form of resistance of prominent Russian opposition figures. This form is personified by Navalny, Kara-Murza, and Yashin: all were willing to go to prison for their convictions and to pay for standing up for them with their lives. One can draw the moral conclusion from this that criticising such people is fundamentally inappropriate in light of their personal willingness to make such sacrifices. However, from an analytical point of view, this would be the end of any critical examination of agency in dictatorships, at least for all those working in democracies. Awe-inspired silence and quiet admiration would replace analysis. But this would also be the wrong approach from a political point of view. We would not be doing Russian opposition members any favours by branding any criticism of their fate as out of place. Only through tough discussions is there a chance that something will change in this milieu.

How should the forms of resistance that Navalny, Kara-Murza and Yashin against Putin's regime be interpreted in the Russian cultural-historical context? Because in these cases it was indeed a choice: Navalny could have stayed in Germany after the poisoning attempt on his life, and Kara-Murza, who also has British citizenship, could have left Russia. The fact that both Kara-Murza and Navalny accepted the – expected – camp detention in Russia and thus their own death also has to do with a traditional Russian, strongly religiously charged, model of the regime opponent, who in his resistance to power takes on the ordeal of the martyr for the people and draws his moral authority from this act of sacrifice. Nikolai Klimeniouk has pointed to a second tradition, originating from the days of the Soviet dictatorship, that may explain this decision: the idea that, as an opponent of the regime, you can only remain credible as a political actor within Russia, even if this means waiting for death or rescue from abroad as a prisoner.

In the case of Kara-Murza and Yashin in particular, the path of sacrifice had something passive and fatalistic about it. After all, after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, there would have been more active and effective forms of resistance: joining the Ukrainian army, for example (which some Russians, far less well known in the West, did) or using their international contacts to lobby for military support for Ukraine. However, that would have meant breaking with the Russian cult of martyrdom and, perhaps more importantly, recognising that the most effective opposition to Putin and his regime is not in Russia, but in Ukraine – a country, of all places, that many Russians have traditionally treated with colonial arrogance.

The quasi-religious cult that has developed around Navalny since his death, in which he appears as a revenant of Jesus Christ, belongs in the context of the older martyr cult. This martyr cult of individuals, in turn, has a passive element in which the cult of mourning replaces a comprehensive and honest criticism of present-day Russian society. But without a critical reckoning with Russian society this better Russia of the future will simply not come into being. At present, those Russians who both acknowledge the responsibility of Russian society and warn against a Navalny cult – the writer Sergei Lebedev is one example – are largely marginalised in the Russian discourse of the anti-Putin camp and are also far less in demand as interview partners in the West.

The erasure of the experiences of the colonised

As understandable as the longing for a Russia that is different from the one currently committing genocide in Ukraine may be on an emotional level, this desire is problematic. Firstly, it is high time that the West abandoned its romantic ideas about Russia. The surprised reaction of many in the West to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is a stark reminder that listening to the wrong people on can have fatal political consequences. Secondly, the persistence of cultural hierarchies regarding the people and countries of Eastern Europe, in which Russia often still occupies the top spot, shows that we are still far from a decolonisation of the Western view of Eastern and Central Eastern Europe. For those people in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the Baltic countries and other countries and regions who have experienced Russian colonialism, the uncritical glorification of many representatives of the anti-Putin camp in the West, the ignoring of their colonial mindsets and their defence of Russia also contains a fundamental message: Russian perspectives are still more important to us than yours.

In the countries and regions historically and currently affected by Russian colonialism, the romanticization of Navalny and other prominent Russian opponents of Putin cannot be found. On the contrary, the Western adulation of individuals like Navalny is met with dismay.

We should take the appeals from Russia's colonised countries, such as Ukraine, to disengage from an uncritical romanticisation of the Russian anti-Putin camp seriously. Perhaps many Germans find it difficult to do so because the perpetrator perspective is so familiar to them due to their own past. Ultimately, the self-centredness of Russian opposition figures, the tendency to see Putin and his clique as the only ones responsible and to conceptualise Russian society as a victim rather than as an accomplice, is strongly reminiscent of West German discourses after 1945. Decolonising one's own thinking can undoubtedly be a painful process that often directly affects one's own life – be it in academia, politics or journalism. Have you overlooked things, had illusions, were the heroes of your own life perhaps not beyond reproach as you assumed? But the romanticisation of Russia, the self-deception about the path the country is taking, the colonial arrogance towards Ukraine, were decisive for the disastrous Eastern policy of the German governments of the last decades and their comparatively high social acceptance. The people of Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and now Ukraine have paid the price for this. We should not repeat this mistake.

This is a revised version of an essay that was first published in Geschichte der Gegenwart: https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/anti-putin-does-not-mean-anti-imperial-why-the-romanticisation-of-russian-dissidents-is-misleading/