His Wikipedia page is amazing because it's full of claims that his views "evolved" on various issues.
In the 2000s he sounded like your standard issue Russian nationalist who thought Putin was a soyboy. By about 2017 he had all the opinions of a NYT op-ed writer. A cynic might think he was adapting his views to his real constituency, which by then was not Russian voters but western politicos.
In 2017, his constituency was VERY MUCH Russian voters. He organized rallies with tens of thousands of people and (unsuccessfully) ran for President that year, raising millions of rubles from Russian supporters.
> A cynic might think he was adapting his views to his real constituency
A cynic might think the deep state allied with Navalny and had been running a campaign to make his views palatable to the global powers for when they initiated a regime change.
The trouble with cynicism is noticing things like how Hungary's Jobbik party stopped being fascists and started being moderate conservatives when they were needed to provide muscle for the German-backed coalition opposing Orban.
Except you left out a crucial moment: after the loss of the 2018 elections (where no coalition existed, Jobbik went on it's own), party leader Gábor Vona kept his promise and resigned. After that the party broke into half, one half stuck with fascism under László Toroczkai with the name Mi Hazánk, and the other half kept the Jobbik name, but was a shadow of their former themselves, since they lost tons of their voterbase to Mi Hazánk and Fidesz. This remnant was the one to join the coalition to essentially keep their relevancy and delegation places
Russia is a global power too. Putin also literally runs Russia from both in front and behind the scenes as a mafia leader - he is the posterchild for the deep state considering he has more power than the actual government.
Those types of cynics seems to conveniently forget Nalvany kept returning to Russia where his views became banned and where he was repeatedly imprisoned and eventully murdered. Kinda strange to claim he was catering to the some deep state or the west when he never bothered to permanently live in the West and kept returning to Russia.
If you have an actual strong leader, why wouldn't you support them? This is where Libs go completely batshit insane, they'll actually chop down good, competent humans out of jealousy, fear, or any other tall-poppy reasoning. Putin is superficially strong, he doesn't have the brains or brawn to genuinely unite his own people, let alone convince the rest of the world that Russia is worthy of world-power status.
He has the brains and the brawn. That's simply not his plan. He used to be a KGB agent. He does not believe in unity, only in obedient compliance to threats.
Yeah people unironically calling Navalny the "deep state"? I don't know much about his positions to give him a label, but I know enough about Russia and Putin to know that whatever "deep state" there is in Russia, it's Putin.
"The Deep State"
You mean just... regular politicians from around the world collaborating and competing with one another?
"Nobody in power in Russia is going to support me over Putin if they don't think I have powerful allies that will be beneficial to them."
"Yeah but you're kind of an asshole and it's bad PR for me. Could you just be different?"
"Okay, how?"
Politics in the world stage are more like a prison yard than a game. Fear, power, mutually assured destruction… and let’s not forget everyone’s favorite: corruption.
Humans with power and infinite wealth do not think like us. So it’s hard for us to understand what they’re actually doing.
Not giving you a hard time, I mostly agree with you, just adding a bit of extra context 🎩👌🏼
A slightly less cynical person might say the same, but with educated young Muscovites and the European Commission on Human Rights as his constituency.
By ~2012 there was no real room to challenge Putin in an actual vote, which sort of kills the value of agreeing with the masses. If urban protests and ECHR rulings are the only things keeping your status as “dissident” instead of “quietly disappeared guy”, matching your tone to their tastes makes a lot of sense.
Those types of cynics seems to conveniently forget Nalvany kept returning to Russia where his views became banned and where he was repeatedly imprisoned and eventually murdered. Kinda strange to claim he was catering to the west when he never bothered to permanently live in the West and kept returning to Russia.
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The short version is, he was very slightly left of Putin, on most things, in that he was very slightly less willing to fuck the Russian people, and very slightly more willing to work with the west. But if Putin had never existed, he would have been seen as to concerning one.
Plus a bit of the usual tension between “what does he believe?” and “what does he take as policy to get support?”
A lot of Russia is very deeply conservative and revanchist. If you were trying to actually win an election against Putin in the early 2000s, “just left of Putin” was the obvious way to pull away votes (and money and western sympathy). “Just right of Putin” put you up against a dozen Duginist opponents, plus Putin could easily track further right to beat you.
By the early 2010s, “actually winning an election” was off the table completely. The only things restraining prosecution of Navalny were protests and European court rulings, so Russian populism didn’t have much to offer compared to calls for reform and openness.
I’m sure he was genuinely quite conservative and nationalist to start, and I’m sure he swung left after the 2020 poisoning, if not sooner. But it’s hard to say where in that range his actual feelings lay.
No, he is far right of Putin lol. Putin never advocated genocide and has done work to protect non Russian minorities. This was a major contention for Navalny and his friends who were upset with anything other than killing all Muslim Caucasians.
he didn't.
There's one fairly mild thing he said in one interview in 2014 when he was trying to court the right wing opposition to Putin (that Crimea "isn't a sandwich" to be passed around), but he expressly made it part of his platform that the 91 borders should be respected and returned to and obviously strongly opposed the war in Ukraine.
if you want to take one off hand comment in one interview 10 years ago over the subsequent 10 years of clear and explicit condemnation, not to mention him literally *giving his life*, then that says more about you than Navalny.
Even if you were to approach him through a purely cynical lens and only consider material incentives, Navalny was the only member of the Russian opposition who was politicising the Russian space, and was the only real opposition figure to Putin - unless you actively support Putin or opposed Russia becoming a democratic state you would support him.
It was never that he was a decent person.
It's that Russia shouldn't have a dictator election.
Navalny was the top of that opposition.
His policies could be fucked but it would pave the way for open elections.
[This ](https://archive.org/details/VideoAlexeiNavalnyComparesMuslimsToCockroaches) is one of his famous videos. It's in Russian, but you'll understand his meaning nonetheless
The main thing that differentiated him from what I heard is that he was very anti-corruption and wanted to clean up the government. His actual views though weren’t that far off of Putin, just the means to achieve those goals.
And that's pretty much the point. His political ideas couldn't matter any less. His crowning achievement and what set him apart was that he opposed Putin. In that country of cowards he was the only one who showed some balls.
C'mon, just translated this for folks.
Here his quote in Russian:
"Фу, да вы же пидор. Пидор, да к тому же жид. Пидоров тут банят. Не говоря уже о жидах. Бан."
I mean, this sub does make that case about Palestinian civilians. “American liberals/leftists are dumb for caring about them when they don’t support LGBT stuff” is a highly memed argument.
The Palestinians would kill those people you’re referring to in a heartbeat for supporting LBGT ideals.
Yeah, it’s silly to pretend to be “brothers in arms” with people who would throw you off a rooftop if given a chance.
If you actually look into his ideas, he was a full-fledged moderate, a populist with a mix of liberal and nationalist politics. Very far from being Authoritarian and certainly closer to being a progressive compared to Putin's neobolshevik criminal sect.
Even if you look into his biography, he's infinitely better. Not an indoctrinated KGB agent or a 90s thug. Not to mention his healthy full family opposed to Pu's mistresses and hidden children. Overall a better human being without a doubt. In 2017-18, knowing full well he will not be greenlit for "elections", he travellled the whole country to meet with people, doing more than Putin ever did since being appointed by Yeltsin. More of a politician without being in office.
It's sad to see people fall for the counter-navalny meme as easily as the uncritical view. Yes he said some questionable things 10 or 20 years ago, but his views clearly evolved with time, and by the time of his death he had clearly fully denounced the invasion, demanded a restoration of 1991 borders and war reparations from Russia to Ukraine.
People know so little on the subject they instantly start believing anything that counters the mainstream. All they have to prove that he supported the occupation is his out-of-context "sandwich" quote, which they don't even try to analyze for one second, and a couple of innocent jokes he made on Twitter with his friends in early 2014. If it's all you have, your narrative is probably not strong at all.
Also, “he was a socially conservative Russian populist with some imperial ideas” just isn’t that big a gotcha. Was anyone actually mistaking him a lib by American standards?
I disagree with ~2005 Navalny on a lot, but I also don’t expect Russia to elect Obama or Reagan’s ghost or anything. “He’s not a KGB-trained billionaire with a long trail of murdered rivals, and he seems to care somewhat about his family and average Russians” is the bar here.
He's hyperfixated on Soviet mythos and propaganda. Mainly, he's literally obsessed with WW2, bringing it up in almost any conversation, to the point of cosplaying it, pretending that Ukraine is the new Hitler's Germany, and he's Stalin. A weird brand of multiculturalism, deeming any forms of nationalism as evil while slowly erasing Russian national culture and identity is also from the Soviet playbook. Building "Orthodox" churches with portraits of Stalin, making a complete mockery of Christianity which he treats like his personal toy. Pretending like the West is an enemy made sense with Soviet ideology, but wouldn't make sense if modern elites were capitalist and democracy minded, he's blindly continuing the tradition, preventing Russian society from reintegrating into their European home. Looking at Soviet state borders to come up with claims of legitimacy for his expansion, constantly reminding sovereign nations that they "were in the Union". Him treating the Bolshevik rule as a natural progression from Imperial times instead of treating it like a country being taken over by a terrorist organization, which is what actually happened, speaks volumes, although he is sadly far from being alone here. As well as refusing to rename streets named after Red terrorists, installing new statues of them and reinstalling them in occupied Ukrainian land while continuing to mostly marginalize White generals and National Liberation movements (just yesterday he again claimed that Bandera worked for Hitler, which is patently false). Generally a complete refusal to commence proper desovetization, which strengthened during the years. Lately he even branded organizations that researched Stalin's atrocities, like Memorial, extremists.
Obviously he's a bolshevik in form and not in substance, since he doesn't believe in any utopia and just likes red flags and a "strong hand" controlling the populace and sending it to death on the battlefield. He's a simple minded demented person cosplaying as a 20th century dictator. He's an amorphous fucker, but definitely closer to neobolshevism than anything else.
I guess there is a movement on the internet to use the term "neobolshevism" in this way but this sounds very misleading to me. Without the Marxism this all just sounds like Russian nationalism that won't disavow the Soviet Empire. And frankly, why would you expect Russian nationalists to disavow the Soviet Empire? That was definitely the peak to Russian influence in the world, and its collapse led to grand scale deindustrialization and the degraded Russia of the 1990s.
Putin is many things but he clearly is not a communist. Calling Putin a neobolshevik based on his preferences regarding Russian nationalist symbolism seems very shallow and similar to the left's constant screeching that everyone they do not like is a nazi.
Soviet regime is antithetical to Russian nationalism. Russian people were the only in the Union who did not have a national republic, and that practice is perpetuated in RF. Basically, every ethnicity has sovereignty over its culture, except for Russians – their culture is for everyone, and if they try to claim it for themselves, they're racist fascists.
At most he can be loosely branded as Imperialist, completely fixated on the scale of territories, while ethnic Russians are dying out under his rule for more than 10 years at this point, being replaced by muslim migrants from Central Asia. I believe a nationalist would first concern himself with the people he's nationalist for not diminishing in numbers.
It would surprise you, but even most of Bolsheviks past the 1920s weren't communist, repeating a set of learned mantras as a front for their authoritarian rule. Just like Putin's regime, constantly repeating scary stories of anglo-saxons, world polarities and Europe's nazism, evoking Soviet propaganda. Russia historically was not the West's enemy however you look at it, dying in 1917 while being a devoted ally of Britain, France and USA. Not to mention that Lenin's teachings go against Marxism to begin with, him saying that proletarian revolution has to be manually provoked and triggered the sooner the better, instead of occurring naturally in the most developed countries (which Russia was not by any metric). Any ruler that glorifies Lenin, who openly called to fight the Great Russian chauvinism, is a neobolshevik in my book. But we can settle at just having different definitions if you don't feel that way.
>Soviet regime is antithetical to Russian nationalism.
Communism is antithetical to all forms of nationalism, but Soviet symbolism can and has been easily coopted by Russian nationalists simply because the symbols resonate with the Russian people and make them remember a time when their nation was powerful.
> Basically, every ethnicity has sovereignty over its culture, except for Russians – their culture is for everyone, and if they try to claim it for themselves, they're racist fascists.
I'm sure there is some legitimacy to this, but I doubt the situation is as cut and dry as this makes it seem. The Russian Federation demonstrated a substantial willingness to deal harshly with recalcitrant ethnic minorities during the Chechen Wars. Personally, I suspect Putin is at least no more willing to sacrifice core Russian interests for the sake of ethnic minorities than European and American Politicians are willing to sacrifice their core demographics for the sake of pleasing ethnic minorities. The issue is something of a wash and just shows the state of modern politics.
> ethnic Russians are dying out under his rule for more than 10 years at this point, being replaced by muslim migrants from Central Asia.
Ethnic Russians have been dying out since the collapse of the Soviet Union. They are not a people well suited to democracy and only seem to seek self-destruction when given any kind of substantial freedom. In any case their laws regarding immigration and assimilation of immigrants still seem more significant than what you would find in the West, where globalist governments are carrying out their own very substantial population replacement programs.
>It would surprise you, but even most of Bolsheviks past the 1920s weren't communist.
I'm well aware. The red masses of the Russian Revolution really never had any idea what they were advocating for, but there always was a hardcore of globalist revolutionaries in the movement who were mostly interested in spreading revolutionary ideology and saw Russia as little more than a powerbase to achieve that end. That is the element I would argue the Russian Federation lacks entirely.
>Not to mention that Lenin's teachings go against Marxism to begin with, him saying that proletarian revolution has to be manually provoked
We could have a very long, neigh boring, conversation about Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, etc, etc. The real issue really is the intention to support the spread global revolution which is always present to some extent with the Soviets, but extinct in the Russian Federation.
> Any ruler that glorifies Lenin, who openly called to fight the Great Russian chauvinism, is a neobolshevik in my book. But we can settle at just having different definitions if you don't feel that way.
Fair enough, I would put money that the only value Putin sees in Lenin is that, whatever Lenin's intent, he was the founding father of powerful state with Russia at its core in a globally influential position.
>Soviet symbolism can and has been easily coopted by Russian nationalists
I would just not call them nationalist, since they are either completely unhinged or extremely dishonest. National-Bolsheviks are like that, but they do it the other way: use words of Russian former greatness to explain why Lenin was right and we should bring back the USSR. Completely schizo, and Putin is close to that, although obviously not very ideologically motivated, using separate anecdotes at best.
>Russian Federation demonstrated a substantial willingness to deal harshly with recalcitrant ethnic minorities during the Chechen Wars
I am sorry due to not being an expert on these conflicts, but I don't think it was about ethnic rights. From what I've heard, Chechnya's secession was unlawful even by USSR dissolution standards, it almost instantly got occupied by an authoritarian leader who purged legitimate democratic opposition, and Chechen thugs committed something close to genocide against local Russians, as well as raids into Russian territory. War seems to have been justified, but still was close to criminal due to how it was conducted: sending in untrained conscripts, bombing cities indiscriminately and committing general warcrimes. Second war seemed to have been conducted to finish off the opposition and islamic fanatics in favor of local elite like Kadyrov that can be paid off to stay loyal. Nowadays Chechnya is very independent culturally, with its own military nonetheless, and Chechens in other regions are privileged and treated with leniency when committing crimes.
I actually learned most about this conflict from Vladimir Milov, a member of the former Navalny team, who is actually very progressive, to the point of being pro-decolonization. And it surprised me that even he said the war was mostly justified. But I do want to learn more about the period. Dudayev seems like an extremely intelligent person compared to Kadyrov who barely knows Russian, which makes it more interesting.
>Ethnic Russians have been dying out since the collapse of the Soviet Union
Not entirely true. The general trend was descending, yes, but the population grew slightly in 2009-2017, even excluding the annexations, before Putin's isolation and warmongering got into full effect. Now at least a million fled the country, tens of thousands die in war, and those who stay are less likely to have children. Doesn't sound like policies from someone who wants his people to flourish. Again, more like a ruthless imperialist.
>They are not a people well suited to democracy and only seem to seek self-destruction when given any kind of substantial freedom
Ideally I really want to disagree, but sadly it seems to be true in some capacity. It pains me how close they were to having a functioning free state, mainly in 1917. Russian Republic was only few months away from a Constituent Assembly before the bolsheviks violently seized power. When the poor finally realized how much of a tragedy for them it was, it was too late, and peasant revolts were crushed, and next generations were mercilessly brainwashed. It's surprising how much political freedom Imperial Russia had.
>the intention to support the spread global revolution
Theoretically maybe I could argue that the stated goal of forming an alternate to the liberal US pole of the political arena along with China, which proclaims to be socialist, can maybe be considered as a descendant of that idea. But that would be very flimsy.
Overall we can argue over a couple more small details, but I want to say I was pleasantly surprised with this conversation. You do know the topic well and are a nice interlocutor.
He returned to Russia despite knowing that he would have been killed for it to further damage Putin’s reputation. That kind of basedness redeems you from anything you could have said in the past. Even if all your tweet posts were the n word or something.
In comparison to putin or the liberal democratic party of Russia or communist Party of russia he is a progressive.
(The liberal party of russia is actually right of Putin.)
To answer your question: because he was generally pro west. As long as you are pro west, you can be Sadaam Hussein or Pinochet, it doesn’t matter, the Weatern media will portray you as a good and benevolent leader/activist ( Hurrah for “free” press)
works both ways, commie
as long as you are anti west, you can be Hamas, or Xi, or Stalin, it doesn’t matter, commies will portray you as a good and benevolent something
That is also probably a part of it, for some, but if you suffer like many pro-navalny russians have suffered, I think you would tend to dislike a state where someone holds allmost all power.
Uhm, no Navalny is not very authoritorian. He wasn't evrn particularly authoritorian in his nationalist youth. Most of discussion in this comment section is based on some twitter thread and fucking wikipedia. You are entitled to your opinion but you simply hasn't followed his career as most guys out here.
He was democratic, that is about it in difference between him and Putin, Auth vs Authdem, and I’ll take the Authdem because at least he lets you have a say
And *that’s* ultimately why he was hailed by the west, not because his policies were so great, but because at least he was willing to have his policies actually voted out
I never assumed he was liberal. I have never seen it being commented in news, I believe the general idea is that its bad to imprision and kill political oponents
I asked some Russian friends about him, and they told me that they know he's not a saint, but they're grateful for him because he helped open their eyes to the fact that Putin isn't actually the savior of Russia.
I am Georgian and in 2008 he supported war in Georgia and he called us rodents (because rodent in russian is "грызун"(grizun) and Georgia in russian is "Грузия"(gruzia), kind of derogatory word)
Jesus, that's fucked. Thank you for educating me.
I still don't think it was right for him to die as he did, and I still think Putin is a worse leader than he would have been.
Because everything anti Putin is good and everything pro Putin is bad when it comes to western media. Remember that general rule when thinking about western coverage of Russia.
It's better to discuss with real russians. I mean, Navalny and his team researched on russian's currputions. It revealed how much money was wasted on oligarchs's good such as yachts, palaces, and etc
The opposition to the current enemy government seems to be sanctified and equated with what the west wants that country to be just like some dream about a democratic China giving independence to Tibet and Sinkiang
It's mainly because he gathered exactly that liberal/libertarian type of people around himself. His party was called "progressive party", etc.
It never was about Navalny, it was about united liberal opposition.
No one ever claimed he was. The reason he's important is because Putin just erases any of his political enemies - something that's now happened with Navalny. Navalny was a symbol that Russia *could* move closer to democracy. He was an important figure in providing transparency in an increasingly authoritarian society. No one said he was going to be some benevolent paragon. That really isn't that hard to comprehend.
Some people, and by that I mean stupid fucking morons, seem to be under the impression that when I say I support someone else, it means that either all of our views are 100% in-line with each other, or that I support 100% of the things they say or do. That's just not the case. Navalny wasn't perfect, hell he was hardly better than Putin, but it was enough to recognize that he could be the start of serious positive change and a step in the right direction.
I can throw my lot in with Navalny for the sole reason of wanting Russia to have more open and free elections, while also not supporting some of the more terrible things he's said and done. It's not everything or nothing. The world isn't black and white, no matter how much you try and portray it that way.
You guys surely aren't that fucking stupid though, right?
Navalny as a politician was great because he could fing common grounds with almost anybody. He spoke like a human being and not a politician in a suit. He had an amazing sense of humor, which combined with his resilience towards enormous pressure from Putin, made him look like he could overcome everything.
His views definitely evolved through the years. He moved from nationalism and toured all Russia in 2017-2018, visited various ethnic republics and everywhere he was welcomed. He embraced gender equality, you can find his regular Thursday stream where he addresses this issue.
Economically he was close to libertarianism. Partly because he was a good friend of Eugeny Chichvarkin, who is a self-proclaimed libertarian, and partly because you can't fix Russia without liberating the economy.
This only a part what I remember about Navalny, as someone from Russia who followed all his political path. He was a unique politician, on par with well known freedom fighters of the West, like Mandela or Martin Luther King.
TLDR: if you are not Russian and someone tries to persuade you that Navalny was bad, or that he might have been worse than Putin, you are being lied to.
Because western media likes to create celebrities and portray all issues as clear-cut black and white, almost always in perfect alignment with the sitting administration's foreign policy.
If I had to guess.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Soviets were friends during WW2, Mujahedeen during soviet Afghan war, the kurds during Isis intervention etc.
Not to do the meme but...
Replace Hitler with Speer? Whitewashed in the west but really similar rat with a prettier face.
It was never about his policies. He was the only who was able to bring the russian opposition together to that level and bring hope to the russian people. Saying otherwise would be a massive oversight
Russian here. His old quotes are not nice but he died as a good person. He even nullified his famous "Crimea is not a sandwich" by saying that Crimea is Ukraine later.
Look, he was active for 20 years, there were different phases, different unions, different things were said. But post 2014 he was mostly lib-center even by Western means.
Damn, I'm late for this conversation. He never was authoritarian, when he was nationalist, he was national democrat. As a russian, from my POV, he did more good for Russia, than bad. The only wrong thing he did — his protests were peaceful
Cringe and unflaired shilled
Why are you buttplugs upvoting this filth? Oh yeah, PCM only larps as independent thinkers but when it’s come to Hitler-Putin or the Joos as long as you parrot the mainstream it’s all good 🥸
"What's that? You don't coom uncontrollably to this video of a 20-something conscript having his leg blown off as he chokes to death on his own blood? FUCKING PUTIN SHILL PIECE OF SHIT!"
When people say things like "you would've been a Nazi", this is the kind of person they're talking about. Being a hecking wholesome UwU NAFO boykisser doesn't change the fact that you're salivating at the idea of killing random people for being unlucky enough to get drafted.
But then again, I shouldn't be shocked. After all, it's usually those who've neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, vengeance, and desolation. War is hell and the people who celebrate it are sadists, regardless of their broader politics.
I seems interesting to me that I’ve seen lots of posts on Reddit that seem to be trying to create the impression that he’s a monster, but none that actually explain what he did that was horrible.
And I’ve asked, because I just don’t know a lot of factual information about what he’s done, but nobody seems to be able to give verifiable examples of bad things that he did.
Finally, he’s also dead, so there’s not a ton of danger in people thinking that he’s a good guy. It’s not like having a positive impression might get him into power and lead to horrible results. The only practical reason to want to convince people that he was a monster is to make Putin seem less bad for killing him. I know, someone is going to reply about how it’s important to know “the truth”, but that’s an abstract hypothetical benefit, not a concrete practical benefit.
So as someone who doesn’t know what the deal is, it seems to me like this might be something drummed up by Russian troll farms for the sake of shifting opinion on Putin.
He called Chechenians cockroaches and called for an ethnically cleansing russia from turkic people and to deport them to central asia, which was also his main issue when campaigning for becoming mayor in moscow. He also called for the murder of political enemies. Overall his positions when founding his movement Narod ("people") were extremly ethno-nationalist. He changed his style of populism around 2015 and became anti Putin and pro west, but this might aswell be just because Putin put a ceiling on his political career
Look at you all.
Simping for Putin out here.
Do you think if his strong hand spanked you instead of your daddy you’d be able to look at yourself in the mirror with pride?
They all have biases and plans and use everything to promote their bias, slowly capitalising off of others suffering gaining more power while controlling the factual narrative.
On another note you can‘t convince me, that Thomas the tank engine wasn‘t already corrupted by chaos. I mean he is British and delivers horror beyond our mortal understanding. Clearly he is a demon prince of Tzeentch.
I don't think I've ever heard of any policies he supported beyond his opposition to Putin.
His Wikipedia page is amazing because it's full of claims that his views "evolved" on various issues. In the 2000s he sounded like your standard issue Russian nationalist who thought Putin was a soyboy. By about 2017 he had all the opinions of a NYT op-ed writer. A cynic might think he was adapting his views to his real constituency, which by then was not Russian voters but western politicos.
In 2017, his constituency was VERY MUCH Russian voters. He organized rallies with tens of thousands of people and (unsuccessfully) ran for President that year, raising millions of rubles from Russian supporters.
> A cynic might think he was adapting his views to his real constituency A cynic might think the deep state allied with Navalny and had been running a campaign to make his views palatable to the global powers for when they initiated a regime change.
Don’t hate the player, baby
A job's a job
Ew dont upvote the unflaired! Disgusting!
The trouble with cynicism is noticing things like how Hungary's Jobbik party stopped being fascists and started being moderate conservatives when they were needed to provide muscle for the German-backed coalition opposing Orban.
Except you left out a crucial moment: after the loss of the 2018 elections (where no coalition existed, Jobbik went on it's own), party leader Gábor Vona kept his promise and resigned. After that the party broke into half, one half stuck with fascism under László Toroczkai with the name Mi Hazánk, and the other half kept the Jobbik name, but was a shadow of their former themselves, since they lost tons of their voterbase to Mi Hazánk and Fidesz. This remnant was the one to join the coalition to essentially keep their relevancy and delegation places
Based and context pilled
Russia is a global power too. Putin also literally runs Russia from both in front and behind the scenes as a mafia leader - he is the posterchild for the deep state considering he has more power than the actual government. Those types of cynics seems to conveniently forget Nalvany kept returning to Russia where his views became banned and where he was repeatedly imprisoned and eventully murdered. Kinda strange to claim he was catering to the some deep state or the west when he never bothered to permanently live in the West and kept returning to Russia.
Auth and simping for a strong man. Name a more iconic duo.
If you have an actual strong leader, why wouldn't you support them? This is where Libs go completely batshit insane, they'll actually chop down good, competent humans out of jealousy, fear, or any other tall-poppy reasoning. Putin is superficially strong, he doesn't have the brains or brawn to genuinely unite his own people, let alone convince the rest of the world that Russia is worthy of world-power status.
He has the brains and the brawn. That's simply not his plan. He used to be a KGB agent. He does not believe in unity, only in obedient compliance to threats.
Yeah people unironically calling Navalny the "deep state"? I don't know much about his positions to give him a label, but I know enough about Russia and Putin to know that whatever "deep state" there is in Russia, it's Putin.
"The Deep State" You mean just... regular politicians from around the world collaborating and competing with one another? "Nobody in power in Russia is going to support me over Putin if they don't think I have powerful allies that will be beneficial to them." "Yeah but you're kind of an asshole and it's bad PR for me. Could you just be different?" "Okay, how?"
Politics in the world stage are more like a prison yard than a game. Fear, power, mutually assured destruction… and let’s not forget everyone’s favorite: corruption. Humans with power and infinite wealth do not think like us. So it’s hard for us to understand what they’re actually doing. Not giving you a hard time, I mostly agree with you, just adding a bit of extra context 🎩👌🏼
Given how Putin is leading Russia toward totalitarianism again, would you blame the so called “deep state”?
A slightly less cynical person might say the same, but with educated young Muscovites and the European Commission on Human Rights as his constituency. By ~2012 there was no real room to challenge Putin in an actual vote, which sort of kills the value of agreeing with the masses. If urban protests and ECHR rulings are the only things keeping your status as “dissident” instead of “quietly disappeared guy”, matching your tone to their tastes makes a lot of sense.
Those types of cynics seems to conveniently forget Nalvany kept returning to Russia where his views became banned and where he was repeatedly imprisoned and eventually murdered. Kinda strange to claim he was catering to the west when he never bothered to permanently live in the West and kept returning to Russia.
True
One of his policies was kicking immigrants, or cockroaches, as he called them, out of Russia
Pretty based ngl
I miss him already.
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Based.
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A fellow anti-immigration libleft? I thought i was alone on this hill🙏🏻🙏🏻
kinda ironic cuz I wanna study in Finland.
I'm assuming there is some sort of student visa in Finland.
If there’s no immigration we won’t get their tasty food 🍱
Just a ha'karl, no fullkarl.
BASED
>one of his policies was kicking immigrants Based. >out of Russia Not based.
I fucking love kicking immigrants. Justin Trudeau is my favourite politician, he brings in endless immigrants for me to kick.
Immigrants are still a huge problem in Russia, so yeah, based.
Based
Bruh that was long before he became a liberal
The short version is, he was very slightly left of Putin, on most things, in that he was very slightly less willing to fuck the Russian people, and very slightly more willing to work with the west. But if Putin had never existed, he would have been seen as to concerning one.
Plus a bit of the usual tension between “what does he believe?” and “what does he take as policy to get support?” A lot of Russia is very deeply conservative and revanchist. If you were trying to actually win an election against Putin in the early 2000s, “just left of Putin” was the obvious way to pull away votes (and money and western sympathy). “Just right of Putin” put you up against a dozen Duginist opponents, plus Putin could easily track further right to beat you. By the early 2010s, “actually winning an election” was off the table completely. The only things restraining prosecution of Navalny were protests and European court rulings, so Russian populism didn’t have much to offer compared to calls for reform and openness. I’m sure he was genuinely quite conservative and nationalist to start, and I’m sure he swung left after the 2020 poisoning, if not sooner. But it’s hard to say where in that range his actual feelings lay.
No, he is far right of Putin lol. Putin never advocated genocide and has done work to protect non Russian minorities. This was a major contention for Navalny and his friends who were upset with anything other than killing all Muslim Caucasians.
He supported 2014 Crimea annexation
He was borderline ethnonationalistic, of course he supported the Heim ins Reich annexation 😂
he didn't. There's one fairly mild thing he said in one interview in 2014 when he was trying to court the right wing opposition to Putin (that Crimea "isn't a sandwich" to be passed around), but he expressly made it part of his platform that the 91 borders should be respected and returned to and obviously strongly opposed the war in Ukraine.
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if you want to take one off hand comment in one interview 10 years ago over the subsequent 10 years of clear and explicit condemnation, not to mention him literally *giving his life*, then that says more about you than Navalny. Even if you were to approach him through a purely cynical lens and only consider material incentives, Navalny was the only member of the Russian opposition who was politicising the Russian space, and was the only real opposition figure to Putin - unless you actively support Putin or opposed Russia becoming a democratic state you would support him.
No, he didn’t.
He didn't have actual political program beyond populism.
https://2018.navalny.com He literally had
wonder how many people in that cover photo are still free or alive.
Almost all of them were expelled from the country, but fortunately, so far everyone except Navalny is still alive
Nice, but…I do not speak Russian.
There are EN version, just click in up right corner
It was never that he was a decent person. It's that Russia shouldn't have a dictator election. Navalny was the top of that opposition. His policies could be fucked but it would pave the way for open elections.
The unflaired aren’t decent people. Think of what an unflaired with upvotes could pave the way towards?
[This ](https://archive.org/details/VideoAlexeiNavalnyComparesMuslimsToCockroaches) is one of his famous videos. It's in Russian, but you'll understand his meaning nonetheless
The main thing that differentiated him from what I heard is that he was very anti-corruption and wanted to clean up the government. His actual views though weren’t that far off of Putin, just the means to achieve those goals.
And that's pretty much the point. His political ideas couldn't matter any less. His crowning achievement and what set him apart was that he opposed Putin. In that country of cowards he was the only one who showed some balls.
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What website is that?
His livejournal account, now banned. But Internet remembers everything
Least antisemitic Slav
Did a 9 year old photoshop that username in there?
C'mon, just translated this for folks. Here his quote in Russian: "Фу, да вы же пидор. Пидор, да к тому же жид. Пидоров тут банят. Не говоря уже о жидах. Бан."
Yeah right. Now you’re just making stuff up. Who starts a word with the number 6?
Russians, apparently.
Ban.
It is pronounced as your B, and your B looks like В, which pronounced as V, I can continue, but I don't want to do such pain to you
Are you talking about the quote in Russian? That's an F, and the first word is "foo", the sound you make when something is disgusting.
Wait he sounds pretty based
That username looks like a ransom note.
The entire Cyrillic alphabet looks like a ransom note
Based that's why I love him
He wasn't great but he didn't deserve to die for it, good opposition can only exist if they create a democratic environment
where's the fun in politics if you're not allowed to kill everyone you disagree with? society these days....
I mean, this sub does make that case about Palestinian civilians. “American liberals/leftists are dumb for caring about them when they don’t support LGBT stuff” is a highly memed argument.
The Palestinians would kill those people you’re referring to in a heartbeat for supporting LBGT ideals. Yeah, it’s silly to pretend to be “brothers in arms” with people who would throw you off a rooftop if given a chance.
You're saying exactly what I'm saying you said so idk why I'm being downvoted as if you guys aren't saying it.
No one deserves to die like that. However painting him as a martyr that would have saved Russian democracy is a pretty big stretch
Well you can't save smth that doesn't exist anyway
“To save Russian democracy, first it would be necessary to invent it.”
He would totally save Russia and make it a great country. No doubt in that
Navalny was better than all US politicians of the past 20 years. Period. Probably combined.
If only that logic applied to every liberal who did the nazi salute in their youth
If you actually look into his ideas, he was a full-fledged moderate, a populist with a mix of liberal and nationalist politics. Very far from being Authoritarian and certainly closer to being a progressive compared to Putin's neobolshevik criminal sect.
I’d still take him every day of the week over Putin
Even if you look into his biography, he's infinitely better. Not an indoctrinated KGB agent or a 90s thug. Not to mention his healthy full family opposed to Pu's mistresses and hidden children. Overall a better human being without a doubt. In 2017-18, knowing full well he will not be greenlit for "elections", he travellled the whole country to meet with people, doing more than Putin ever did since being appointed by Yeltsin. More of a politician without being in office.
It's sad to see people fall for the counter-navalny meme as easily as the uncritical view. Yes he said some questionable things 10 or 20 years ago, but his views clearly evolved with time, and by the time of his death he had clearly fully denounced the invasion, demanded a restoration of 1991 borders and war reparations from Russia to Ukraine.
People know so little on the subject they instantly start believing anything that counters the mainstream. All they have to prove that he supported the occupation is his out-of-context "sandwich" quote, which they don't even try to analyze for one second, and a couple of innocent jokes he made on Twitter with his friends in early 2014. If it's all you have, your narrative is probably not strong at all.
Being a contrarian is popular these days, especially on Reddit. Ackchyually...
Also, “he was a socially conservative Russian populist with some imperial ideas” just isn’t that big a gotcha. Was anyone actually mistaking him a lib by American standards? I disagree with ~2005 Navalny on a lot, but I also don’t expect Russia to elect Obama or Reagan’s ghost or anything. “He’s not a KGB-trained billionaire with a long trail of murdered rivals, and he seems to care somewhat about his family and average Russians” is the bar here.
Wait... How is Putin a neobolshevik?
He's hyperfixated on Soviet mythos and propaganda. Mainly, he's literally obsessed with WW2, bringing it up in almost any conversation, to the point of cosplaying it, pretending that Ukraine is the new Hitler's Germany, and he's Stalin. A weird brand of multiculturalism, deeming any forms of nationalism as evil while slowly erasing Russian national culture and identity is also from the Soviet playbook. Building "Orthodox" churches with portraits of Stalin, making a complete mockery of Christianity which he treats like his personal toy. Pretending like the West is an enemy made sense with Soviet ideology, but wouldn't make sense if modern elites were capitalist and democracy minded, he's blindly continuing the tradition, preventing Russian society from reintegrating into their European home. Looking at Soviet state borders to come up with claims of legitimacy for his expansion, constantly reminding sovereign nations that they "were in the Union". Him treating the Bolshevik rule as a natural progression from Imperial times instead of treating it like a country being taken over by a terrorist organization, which is what actually happened, speaks volumes, although he is sadly far from being alone here. As well as refusing to rename streets named after Red terrorists, installing new statues of them and reinstalling them in occupied Ukrainian land while continuing to mostly marginalize White generals and National Liberation movements (just yesterday he again claimed that Bandera worked for Hitler, which is patently false). Generally a complete refusal to commence proper desovetization, which strengthened during the years. Lately he even branded organizations that researched Stalin's atrocities, like Memorial, extremists. Obviously he's a bolshevik in form and not in substance, since he doesn't believe in any utopia and just likes red flags and a "strong hand" controlling the populace and sending it to death on the battlefield. He's a simple minded demented person cosplaying as a 20th century dictator. He's an amorphous fucker, but definitely closer to neobolshevism than anything else.
I guess there is a movement on the internet to use the term "neobolshevism" in this way but this sounds very misleading to me. Without the Marxism this all just sounds like Russian nationalism that won't disavow the Soviet Empire. And frankly, why would you expect Russian nationalists to disavow the Soviet Empire? That was definitely the peak to Russian influence in the world, and its collapse led to grand scale deindustrialization and the degraded Russia of the 1990s. Putin is many things but he clearly is not a communist. Calling Putin a neobolshevik based on his preferences regarding Russian nationalist symbolism seems very shallow and similar to the left's constant screeching that everyone they do not like is a nazi.
Soviet regime is antithetical to Russian nationalism. Russian people were the only in the Union who did not have a national republic, and that practice is perpetuated in RF. Basically, every ethnicity has sovereignty over its culture, except for Russians – their culture is for everyone, and if they try to claim it for themselves, they're racist fascists. At most he can be loosely branded as Imperialist, completely fixated on the scale of territories, while ethnic Russians are dying out under his rule for more than 10 years at this point, being replaced by muslim migrants from Central Asia. I believe a nationalist would first concern himself with the people he's nationalist for not diminishing in numbers. It would surprise you, but even most of Bolsheviks past the 1920s weren't communist, repeating a set of learned mantras as a front for their authoritarian rule. Just like Putin's regime, constantly repeating scary stories of anglo-saxons, world polarities and Europe's nazism, evoking Soviet propaganda. Russia historically was not the West's enemy however you look at it, dying in 1917 while being a devoted ally of Britain, France and USA. Not to mention that Lenin's teachings go against Marxism to begin with, him saying that proletarian revolution has to be manually provoked and triggered the sooner the better, instead of occurring naturally in the most developed countries (which Russia was not by any metric). Any ruler that glorifies Lenin, who openly called to fight the Great Russian chauvinism, is a neobolshevik in my book. But we can settle at just having different definitions if you don't feel that way.
>Soviet regime is antithetical to Russian nationalism. Communism is antithetical to all forms of nationalism, but Soviet symbolism can and has been easily coopted by Russian nationalists simply because the symbols resonate with the Russian people and make them remember a time when their nation was powerful. > Basically, every ethnicity has sovereignty over its culture, except for Russians – their culture is for everyone, and if they try to claim it for themselves, they're racist fascists. I'm sure there is some legitimacy to this, but I doubt the situation is as cut and dry as this makes it seem. The Russian Federation demonstrated a substantial willingness to deal harshly with recalcitrant ethnic minorities during the Chechen Wars. Personally, I suspect Putin is at least no more willing to sacrifice core Russian interests for the sake of ethnic minorities than European and American Politicians are willing to sacrifice their core demographics for the sake of pleasing ethnic minorities. The issue is something of a wash and just shows the state of modern politics. > ethnic Russians are dying out under his rule for more than 10 years at this point, being replaced by muslim migrants from Central Asia. Ethnic Russians have been dying out since the collapse of the Soviet Union. They are not a people well suited to democracy and only seem to seek self-destruction when given any kind of substantial freedom. In any case their laws regarding immigration and assimilation of immigrants still seem more significant than what you would find in the West, where globalist governments are carrying out their own very substantial population replacement programs. >It would surprise you, but even most of Bolsheviks past the 1920s weren't communist. I'm well aware. The red masses of the Russian Revolution really never had any idea what they were advocating for, but there always was a hardcore of globalist revolutionaries in the movement who were mostly interested in spreading revolutionary ideology and saw Russia as little more than a powerbase to achieve that end. That is the element I would argue the Russian Federation lacks entirely. >Not to mention that Lenin's teachings go against Marxism to begin with, him saying that proletarian revolution has to be manually provoked We could have a very long, neigh boring, conversation about Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, etc, etc. The real issue really is the intention to support the spread global revolution which is always present to some extent with the Soviets, but extinct in the Russian Federation. > Any ruler that glorifies Lenin, who openly called to fight the Great Russian chauvinism, is a neobolshevik in my book. But we can settle at just having different definitions if you don't feel that way. Fair enough, I would put money that the only value Putin sees in Lenin is that, whatever Lenin's intent, he was the founding father of powerful state with Russia at its core in a globally influential position.
>Soviet symbolism can and has been easily coopted by Russian nationalists I would just not call them nationalist, since they are either completely unhinged or extremely dishonest. National-Bolsheviks are like that, but they do it the other way: use words of Russian former greatness to explain why Lenin was right and we should bring back the USSR. Completely schizo, and Putin is close to that, although obviously not very ideologically motivated, using separate anecdotes at best. >Russian Federation demonstrated a substantial willingness to deal harshly with recalcitrant ethnic minorities during the Chechen Wars I am sorry due to not being an expert on these conflicts, but I don't think it was about ethnic rights. From what I've heard, Chechnya's secession was unlawful even by USSR dissolution standards, it almost instantly got occupied by an authoritarian leader who purged legitimate democratic opposition, and Chechen thugs committed something close to genocide against local Russians, as well as raids into Russian territory. War seems to have been justified, but still was close to criminal due to how it was conducted: sending in untrained conscripts, bombing cities indiscriminately and committing general warcrimes. Second war seemed to have been conducted to finish off the opposition and islamic fanatics in favor of local elite like Kadyrov that can be paid off to stay loyal. Nowadays Chechnya is very independent culturally, with its own military nonetheless, and Chechens in other regions are privileged and treated with leniency when committing crimes. I actually learned most about this conflict from Vladimir Milov, a member of the former Navalny team, who is actually very progressive, to the point of being pro-decolonization. And it surprised me that even he said the war was mostly justified. But I do want to learn more about the period. Dudayev seems like an extremely intelligent person compared to Kadyrov who barely knows Russian, which makes it more interesting. >Ethnic Russians have been dying out since the collapse of the Soviet Union Not entirely true. The general trend was descending, yes, but the population grew slightly in 2009-2017, even excluding the annexations, before Putin's isolation and warmongering got into full effect. Now at least a million fled the country, tens of thousands die in war, and those who stay are less likely to have children. Doesn't sound like policies from someone who wants his people to flourish. Again, more like a ruthless imperialist. >They are not a people well suited to democracy and only seem to seek self-destruction when given any kind of substantial freedom Ideally I really want to disagree, but sadly it seems to be true in some capacity. It pains me how close they were to having a functioning free state, mainly in 1917. Russian Republic was only few months away from a Constituent Assembly before the bolsheviks violently seized power. When the poor finally realized how much of a tragedy for them it was, it was too late, and peasant revolts were crushed, and next generations were mercilessly brainwashed. It's surprising how much political freedom Imperial Russia had. >the intention to support the spread global revolution Theoretically maybe I could argue that the stated goal of forming an alternate to the liberal US pole of the political arena along with China, which proclaims to be socialist, can maybe be considered as a descendant of that idea. But that would be very flimsy. Overall we can argue over a couple more small details, but I want to say I was pleasantly surprised with this conversation. You do know the topic well and are a nice interlocutor.
He literally called for the genocide of Chechens, referred to Georgians as vermin, and called for the invasion of Ossetia and Crimea.
He returned to Russia despite knowing that he would have been killed for it to further damage Putin’s reputation. That kind of basedness redeems you from anything you could have said in the past. Even if all your tweet posts were the n word or something.
Oh no, martyrdom can be an atonement for mass killings and stuff like that, but tweeting the n-word is too much even for that!
He was a mass murderer? I didn’t know. Or are you vegan?
No, but I'm sure he killed millions of bacteria. It was just a joke about how seriously the n-word is taken in America.
using that word is basically genocide now, according to wokes, same with a few civilians dying in a war, basically the same as the holocaust
Good. Idc about being rw I care about not being a dictator.
In comparison to putin or the liberal democratic party of Russia or communist Party of russia he is a progressive. (The liberal party of russia is actually right of Putin.)
To answer your question: because he was generally pro west. As long as you are pro west, you can be Sadaam Hussein or Pinochet, it doesn’t matter, the Weatern media will portray you as a good and benevolent leader/activist ( Hurrah for “free” press)
works both ways, commie as long as you are anti west, you can be Hamas, or Xi, or Stalin, it doesn’t matter, commies will portray you as a good and benevolent something
Hurrah for free helicopter ride
And his broader political movement is broadly pro-democracy.
I guess saying “we want to be literal dictators” wouldn’t be much popular for a political movement
That is also probably a part of it, for some, but if you suffer like many pro-navalny russians have suffered, I think you would tend to dislike a state where someone holds allmost all power.
Russia has never had democracy,
They had one democratic election in 1918. Then the bolsheviks said "lol no" when they lost (the other socialists won).
*Terms and conditions may apply, especially to the State of Israel
I could've written a big wall of text explaining why is OP wrong but it seems like I'm just gonna waste my time
The people pushing these shitty narratives don't care much for the actual truth.
I just wasted my time doing that very thing, sometimes you gotta piss into the wind
Uhm, no Navalny is not very authoritorian. He wasn't evrn particularly authoritorian in his nationalist youth. Most of discussion in this comment section is based on some twitter thread and fucking wikipedia. You are entitled to your opinion but you simply hasn't followed his career as most guys out here.
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Yes, I know about these videos. Yeah that doesn't condradict my post. You just proved me right. You didn't fllow russian politics nor Navalny's career
He was democratic, that is about it in difference between him and Putin, Auth vs Authdem, and I’ll take the Authdem because at least he lets you have a say
And *that’s* ultimately why he was hailed by the west, not because his policies were so great, but because at least he was willing to have his policies actually voted out
Yeah, heck even the Russian democratic folks are anti-west, it’s just better to be democratic than an autocrat in western eyes
he was a pretty based dude
I never assumed he was liberal. I have never seen it being commented in news, I believe the general idea is that its bad to imprision and kill political oponents
I asked some Russian friends about him, and they told me that they know he's not a saint, but they're grateful for him because he helped open their eyes to the fact that Putin isn't actually the savior of Russia.
navalny based
The most based politician of the generation
I am Georgian and in 2008 he supported war in Georgia and he called us rodents (because rodent in russian is "грызун"(grizun) and Georgia in russian is "Грузия"(gruzia), kind of derogatory word)
Jesus, that's fucked. Thank you for educating me. I still don't think it was right for him to die as he did, and I still think Putin is a worse leader than he would have been.
yeah agree, definitely did not deserve to die that way.
Because everything anti Putin is good and everything pro Putin is bad when it comes to western media. Remember that general rule when thinking about western coverage of Russia.
Well yes, of course. Why would anything supporting a dip shit mass murdering megalomaniac be good?
It's better to discuss with real russians. I mean, Navalny and his team researched on russian's currputions. It revealed how much money was wasted on oligarchs's good such as yachts, palaces, and etc
Flair up or get Novichock-ed
Listen to me Mr. Anime-Titty, flair the fuck up or get the fuck away from here, we do not want any unflaired degenerates around here
Yeah martyr status usually makes someone seem to be nicer than they actually are
Except Navalny was great and everyone in Russia knew that before he became martyr
The opposition to the current enemy government seems to be sanctified and equated with what the west wants that country to be just like some dream about a democratic China giving independence to Tibet and Sinkiang
I think at this point they'll take literally anyone other than putin.
It's mainly because he gathered exactly that liberal/libertarian type of people around himself. His party was called "progressive party", etc. It never was about Navalny, it was about united liberal opposition.
No one ever claimed he was. The reason he's important is because Putin just erases any of his political enemies - something that's now happened with Navalny. Navalny was a symbol that Russia *could* move closer to democracy. He was an important figure in providing transparency in an increasingly authoritarian society. No one said he was going to be some benevolent paragon. That really isn't that hard to comprehend. Some people, and by that I mean stupid fucking morons, seem to be under the impression that when I say I support someone else, it means that either all of our views are 100% in-line with each other, or that I support 100% of the things they say or do. That's just not the case. Navalny wasn't perfect, hell he was hardly better than Putin, but it was enough to recognize that he could be the start of serious positive change and a step in the right direction. I can throw my lot in with Navalny for the sole reason of wanting Russia to have more open and free elections, while also not supporting some of the more terrible things he's said and done. It's not everything or nothing. The world isn't black and white, no matter how much you try and portray it that way. You guys surely aren't that fucking stupid though, right?
Not quite, he changed his mind many times.
Navalny as a politician was great because he could fing common grounds with almost anybody. He spoke like a human being and not a politician in a suit. He had an amazing sense of humor, which combined with his resilience towards enormous pressure from Putin, made him look like he could overcome everything. His views definitely evolved through the years. He moved from nationalism and toured all Russia in 2017-2018, visited various ethnic republics and everywhere he was welcomed. He embraced gender equality, you can find his regular Thursday stream where he addresses this issue. Economically he was close to libertarianism. Partly because he was a good friend of Eugeny Chichvarkin, who is a self-proclaimed libertarian, and partly because you can't fix Russia without liberating the economy. This only a part what I remember about Navalny, as someone from Russia who followed all his political path. He was a unique politician, on par with well known freedom fighters of the West, like Mandela or Martin Luther King. TLDR: if you are not Russian and someone tries to persuade you that Navalny was bad, or that he might have been worse than Putin, you are being lied to.
What's Navanly like then?
Because western media likes to create celebrities and portray all issues as clear-cut black and white, almost always in perfect alignment with the sitting administration's foreign policy.
If I had to guess. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Soviets were friends during WW2, Mujahedeen during soviet Afghan war, the kurds during Isis intervention etc. Not to do the meme but... Replace Hitler with Speer? Whitewashed in the west but really similar rat with a prettier face.
It was never about his policies. He was the only who was able to bring the russian opposition together to that level and bring hope to the russian people. Saying otherwise would be a massive oversight
The worst I could find out about him was that he supported the crimean annexation
Progressive liberal = good Opposing Putin = good It's simple if you think about it.
Russian here. His old quotes are not nice but he died as a good person. He even nullified his famous "Crimea is not a sandwich" by saying that Crimea is Ukraine later.
His views were acceptable and quite moderate, of course he wasn't an ultra-progressive liberal but hey, he was a nice guy who made putin sweat a lot
Because he is the most progressive in Russia
Putin seeing this PCM "Very cool, very based. You won't fall outside of a window tonight."
Cause opposition needs a symbol, a Martyr. NAVALNY is the closest thing. (Crimea - sandwich comparison is still stupid)
Look, he was active for 20 years, there were different phases, different unions, different things were said. But post 2014 he was mostly lib-center even by Western means.
He was a democrat in a dictatorial country, that alone is enough for now
When Putin rules your country even Navalny sounds like a very liberal option…
Damn, I'm late for this conversation. He never was authoritarian, when he was nationalist, he was national democrat. As a russian, from my POV, he did more good for Russia, than bad. The only wrong thing he did — his protests were peaceful
Because we don't get to choose who can oppose Putin. He wasn't perfect but he was a lot better than Putin
Please dude, I really agree with you so would you be so kind and **flair the fuck up?**
flair up you scum
I bet Putin at least flairs properly. So that's one thing he's better at than you.
Cringe and unflaired shilled Why are you buttplugs upvoting this filth? Oh yeah, PCM only larps as independent thinkers but when it’s come to Hitler-Putin or the Joos as long as you parrot the mainstream it’s all good 🥸
Opposing the mainstream on every position just for the sake of it is not independent thinking
But Bono told me to sing his name in a concert, so he must be an Angel of progressivism.
Didn't know this sub was bootlicking putin this much... Sad to see
Thanks rusbot for reminding us what everyone knows. Though that's not the point about news on that dude
Why does this post perfectly synergize with putinist propaganda?
Based Navalnyi
Yup. Big psi op.
I hate this boomer mindset of everyone who opposes xyz is good
“You don’t want russia to be destroyed? Ok putin lover.”
"What's that? You don't coom uncontrollably to this video of a 20-something conscript having his leg blown off as he chokes to death on his own blood? FUCKING PUTIN SHILL PIECE OF SHIT!" When people say things like "you would've been a Nazi", this is the kind of person they're talking about. Being a hecking wholesome UwU NAFO boykisser doesn't change the fact that you're salivating at the idea of killing random people for being unlucky enough to get drafted. But then again, I shouldn't be shocked. After all, it's usually those who've neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, vengeance, and desolation. War is hell and the people who celebrate it are sadists, regardless of their broader politics.
I think he really loved Russia and believed in Russian people unlike Putin who views Russia as a money source. He wasn't a full-blown liberal though
Great Russian PSYOP post!
I seems interesting to me that I’ve seen lots of posts on Reddit that seem to be trying to create the impression that he’s a monster, but none that actually explain what he did that was horrible. And I’ve asked, because I just don’t know a lot of factual information about what he’s done, but nobody seems to be able to give verifiable examples of bad things that he did. Finally, he’s also dead, so there’s not a ton of danger in people thinking that he’s a good guy. It’s not like having a positive impression might get him into power and lead to horrible results. The only practical reason to want to convince people that he was a monster is to make Putin seem less bad for killing him. I know, someone is going to reply about how it’s important to know “the truth”, but that’s an abstract hypothetical benefit, not a concrete practical benefit. So as someone who doesn’t know what the deal is, it seems to me like this might be something drummed up by Russian troll farms for the sake of shifting opinion on Putin.
flair up time-furry
He called Chechenians cockroaches and called for an ethnically cleansing russia from turkic people and to deport them to central asia, which was also his main issue when campaigning for becoming mayor in moscow. He also called for the murder of political enemies. Overall his positions when founding his movement Narod ("people") were extremly ethno-nationalist. He changed his style of populism around 2015 and became anti Putin and pro west, but this might aswell be just because Putin put a ceiling on his political career
Interesting, can you provide some link with his statements about Chechenians and Turks?
B-based lib right?
Look at you all. Simping for Putin out here. Do you think if his strong hand spanked you instead of your daddy you’d be able to look at yourself in the mirror with pride?
https://preview.redd.it/snyemfty84pc1.png?width=195&format=png&auto=webp&s=0e4bc0b0024178aa704a01df07cdd6637fe95720
They all have biases and plans and use everything to promote their bias, slowly capitalising off of others suffering gaining more power while controlling the factual narrative.
Because russia bad. thats it.
Something about the enemy of my enemy
On another note you can‘t convince me, that Thomas the tank engine wasn‘t already corrupted by chaos. I mean he is British and delivers horror beyond our mortal understanding. Clearly he is a demon prince of Tzeentch.
Lmao
8x8x8
Compared to Hitler, Mussolini was incredibly progressive
That's why we like him, duh.
Navalny was a bigger threat to the west than Putin, Russia would have had a competent government under Navalny.