Heroes

 I was troubled, but also very moved, by the death of Alexei Navalny, the personality at the core of the resistance movement in Russia struggling to oppose the dictatorial and oppressive policies of the Putin regime. What exactly happened is not at all clear. At the time of his death, Navalny was imprisoned in a penal colony in Western Siberia in a place called Yamalo-Nenets near the Arctic Circle. According to the warden, he was taking a walk just two weeks ago after telling some guards that he didn’t feel at all well. And then he collapsed. The prison authorities claim to have done all they could to resuscitate him, but were, they said, regretfully unsuccessful, as result of which regretted unsuccess he was dead by mid-afternoon. His body was then held for well over a week and then finally released to his family for burial. And so ended the life of one of the world’s true heroes, a man who not only put his life on the line to stand up for his beliefs, but who personally embodied the struggle for human rights in today’s Russia. Yehi zikhro varukh. May his memory be a blessing for his co-citizens in Russia and for us all.

There’s a lot to say about Navalny, but the detail—one among many—that is particularly resonant with me has to do with his return to Russia in 2021, an act that was as noble as it was death-defying. By 2021, of course, Navalny had a long history of being a thorn—and an especially sharp one at that—in the side of Vladimir Putin. He had led countless demonstrations against the Putin government. He repeatedly accused, certainly correctly, Putin of engineering his own victories whenever he stood for re-election as Russia’s president. And he openly opposed the war against Ukraine.

Navalny tried several times to gain a foothold in the bureaucracy he so mistrusted. He ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013. And then he ran for president of Russia in 2018, a move that was in and of itself daring given that he had previously been found guilty of embezzlement, which detail would normally have disqualified him from running for elected office despite the fact that there appears to be no reason to think that the verdict was just or reasonable. But the real reason Navalny was such a problem for Putin was that he appeared to be unfazed by the forces of government, including the Russian judiciary, that were openly and brazenly arrayed against him. And so the government eventually took matters to a new level.

In 2020, on a flight to Moscow, Navalny took ill and ended up on a ventilator in the Siberian city of Omsk, where his airplane had been obliged to make an emergency landing. It didn’t take doctors long to realize that he had been poisoned. (It later came out that his clothing, including his underwear, had somehow been suffused with the Novichok nerve agent, a poison known to have been used by Russia in the past to murder dissidents abroad.) Eventually, the German government, acting unilaterally, sent an airplane to Omsk to bring Navalny to Germany. Amazingly, this actually worked. And it was in Berlin that doctors at the famous Charité Hospital determined with certainty that Navalny had been the victim of an unsuccessful attempt on his life and that he had definitely been poisoned. Remarkably, his life was saved and he recovered. And then, in January of 2021, he returned to Russia.

Because Navalny had been convicted in a 2014 trial that was almost certainly politically motivated and unjust, he had theoretically been forbidden to leave Russia even for medical treatment. And so was he arrested at the Moscow airport upon his return to Russia and imprisoned to await a judge’s decision about his future. And it was just a month after that, in February of 2021, that a Moscow judge decreed that his suspended sentence, minus time served, would be replaced with an unsuspended one and that Navalny would have to serve two and a half years in a Russian prison. He was sent to one prison, then to another. Eventually, the government determined that it did not want to face a freed Navalny in less than three years and so began new proceedings against him again, this time charging him with fraud and contempt of court. In March of 2022, just two years ago, he was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to nine years in a maximum security prison. And then, because even nine years was apparently not long enough, Navalny was put on trial again last summer and sentenced to an addition nineteen years on extremism charges. And so he ended up in the Arctic Circle prison in which he died two weeks ago at the age of forty-seven.

Navalny’s is a long, complicated story. But the one detail that stands out to me, the single part of the story that is the most resonant with me—and with my lifelong interest in the concept of heroism—has to do with Navalny’s decision in January 2021 to leave safety in Berlin and return to Russia. He had every reason to expect that he would be arrested upon return. He had no reason to suppose that any future trials to which he would be subjected would be just. He surely knew not to expect clemency or mercy from Vladimir Putin, the man behind all the juridical procedures overtly and unabashedly designed to silence him. And yet he chose to return—not specifically, I’m sure, because he wanted to die or because he wanted to participate in yet another crooked trial, but because he saw himself as a moral human being who had been granted the opportunity to inspire his co-citizens to demand justice and freedom for themselves and for their nation.

 I’ve written in this space, although not too recently, about my boundless admiration for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was safe and sound in New York when the Second World War broke out, but who made the noble (and eventually fatal) decision to return to Germany and there to try to inspire people to resist Nazism and to turn away from the path of ruinous and fascist barbarism down which the Nazi government was intent on leading the nation. (To revisit my comments about Bonhoeffer from 2011, click here.) Here was, in my eyes, a true hero: a man fully committed to his own ideals who made the conscious decision to leave the safe haven he had already found and to travel to a land that would probably, and which eventually did, kill him. To me, that decision to risk everything to attempt, even quixotically, to do good in the world represents the essence of heroism. It came to naught, of course. He did a lot of good for a lot of people, but, in the end, he paid the big price. On April 8, 1945, just a month before the end of the war, Bonhoeffer was tried on the single charge of treason in a court set up in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. There were no witnesses. No evidence against him was brought forward, nor was a transcript of the proceedings made. He was found guilty, apparently on Hitler’s personal order, and executed the next day in a way that was specifically intended to maximize his personal degradation and agony. (Eric Till’s 2000 movie, Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace, is a worthy attempt to tell Bonhoeffer’s story even if the director couldn’t quite bring himself to depict the barbarism of Bonhoeffer’s final moments in any detail, let alone explicitly. For a more detailed account of his life, I recommend Eric Metaxas’s 2020 biography, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Prophet, Martyr, Spy, which I read a few years ago and enjoyed immensely.)

So, two men who lived scores of years apart, who spoke different languages, who came from different countries. One, a political man fully engaged by the political process. The other, a man of God fully in the thrall of his own calling to preach God’s word in the world and to inspire others to seek justice and to act righteously. But both heroes in my mind—both fully safe in a place their tormentors could not reach them and yet both of whom made the decision to return to their separate homelands to seek out in those places the destiny to which each felt called. Would I have left New York in 1939 or Berlin in 2021 to risk my own life to follow the destiny I perceived to be my own? I’d like to think I would have. Who wouldn’t? But we don’t all have it in us to act that boldly, to risk everything to be ourselves fully and in the most noble way possible. To be a man in full—or a woman in full—is never quite as easy in real life as it sounds as though it should be on paper. And that is why I admire those two men, Bonhoeffer in his day and Navalny in ours—and their willingness not merely to talk the talk, but truly—and at their own mortal peril—to walk the walk. May they both rest in peace!