What Italy can do to honor Navalny
The speech by Marco Mayer, professor of Intelligence and National Security at Lumsa
Whatever the cause, the death of Alexey Navalny — locked up in solitary confinement (for a 19-year sentence) in the “Polar Wolf” penal colony above the Arctic Circle — removes any remaining doubt about the fact that the presidential elections of the Russian Federation on next March 17, 2024 they will be a tragic farce.
Despite the Putin regime having implemented repressive measures, ten years ago Navalny managed to run (coming second with 27.4% of Moscow voters) in the municipal elections of 8 September 2013 for the Mayor of Moscow.
Political and civil liberties were already limited, but since then the process of authoritarian involution has undergone a progressive acceleration of which Italian public opinion has not been adequately informed by the media, perhaps still nostalgic for the myth of Pratica di Mare.
To sweeten the pill in the newspapers we continue to talk generically about autocracy; the truth is that in the last decade the Russian Federation has fallen into a ferocious dictatorship based on harsh internal repression and international aggression that recalls the invasions of Soviet tanks in Budapest (1956), Prague (1968) and Kabul ( 1979).
To give an idea of the levels of political involution, it is enough to remember that a few months ago, on 18 August 2023 – with the sacred blessing of a prelate – a statue of Stalin was inaugurated with great media fanfare in the city of Velikji Luke, sparking controversy even in the inside the Russian Orthodox Church whose orientation is notoriously pro-Putin. Evidently someone must have remembered that in thirty years of Stalin's regime, tens of thousands of Christian priests were killed and an even greater number of churches destroyed.
What to do?
The death of Alexey Navalny tragically marks a watershed and Italian politics – possibly united – must react.
I am very clear about the thousand differences in the historical contexts (and the responsibilities which in the Navalny case are all to be ascertained) but when I heard the news of Navalny's death due to a conditioned reflex I thought of Giacomo Matteotti and the history of the following twenty years.
We need striking gestures of protest that highlight to the eyes of the world the liberticidal brutality of the Kremlin which, moreover, does not even allow the mothers of Russian soldiers killed in combat in Ukraine to demonstrate in the streets of Moscow.
The first thing, taking inspiration from what our nation has done for Elena Bronner, wife of Andrei Sakharov , is to invite his mother Iumilla and his wife Iulia to Italy and delve deeper with them as they are almost the best choices to honor the memory of Alexey Navalny and to support its great battles for freedom with greater energy.
But alongside human solidarity, a more political decision is also needed to make the upper levels of the Kremlin understand that Italy is not to be trifled with when it comes to freedom. On this front, the revocation of Alexey Miller's honor as Grand Officer of the Italian Republic is very significant (also due to his dense network of relationships in Italy) and certainly a hypothesis worth exploring.
Beyond the person, Gazprom is one of the major pillars on which Vladimir Putin's regime rests.
Frankly, I don't think that the president and CEO of Gazprom still deserves the prestigious Italian honor that he received in 2010 from Ambassador Vittorio Claudio Surdo, at the time the owner of the Italian Embassy in Moscow.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/navalny-italia/ on Sat, 17 Feb 2024 07:32:38 +0000.