Tyrants and dictators are accustomed to criticism, to being condemned and reviled. The cries of their victims are nothing to them. The curses and tears of families and friends whose loved ones have been taken, jailed, tortured, killed are accepted as a kind of sick, validating tribute to their power, cruelty and inhumanity.
What your average thuggish tyrant simply cannot stand is ridicule. And Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia and indicted, mass-murdering war criminal, is no exception to this unfunny rule. Putin takes himself very seriously indeed. He appears totally lacking in any sense of humour. Self-deprecation is as foreign to him as mercy is to a wolf. Yet he’s essentially absurd – a little man in too big a job.
Was mockery the reason Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most vocal and best-known critic, was finally killed? Goodness knows how many times, over many years, this brave campaigner for freedom, democracy, probity and justice has provoked and taunted the corrupt butcher of the Kremlin. In one well-documented incident in 2020, Putin’s agents are suspected of trying and failing to kill him using the nerve agent novichok. Somehow he survived.
That was Navalny’s great talent: survival. He was continually threatened, arrested, beaten and abused, his family and friends intimidated, his supporters harassed and worse. But he did not give up. He kept going when many others would have chosen silence, exile, safety. After his poisoning, he was treated in Germany but then, amazingly, chose to return to Russia to continue the fight.
Naturally, Putin had him arrested again – picked up on arrival at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. He had been held behind bars since, mostly recently in the Arctic Circle penal gulag known as Polar Wolf. He was moved there in December in order to continue serving a 19-year sentence under “special regime” conditions. Fears were expressed then for his health and safety. Conditions at the colony, which is surrounded by freezing tundra, are exceptionally brutal.
But weather is not what killed him. Navalny was nothing if not tough. He proved that again and again. An official investigation is under way into the cause of his death, the Russian authorities say. But their lies are notorious, their bottomless contempt for facts and truth epic. Any inquest into its own conduct by Putin’s regime is as probing and illuminating as a Tucker Carlson interview. In other words, it’s a sham.
Navalny may have been poisoned again. His reported sudden loss of consciousness after exercising in the open air suggests something of that sort may have happened. He may have been abused. He may have been physically attacked. His mother said that when she saw him on Monday, he was “alive, healthy and happy”. A death brought about by natural causes seems wildly improbable.
Yet whatever method was used to murder Navalny, the reason a death sentence was executed at this particular moment may have most to do with ridicule – with Navalny’s latest piercing piece of mockery of the pompous, preening, puritanical, pathetically insecure Putin and his flunkey regime. It came last month in a video conference court appearance from the penal colony in Yamalo-Nenets.
Looking gaunt, with his head shaved, Navalny made jokes about the regime’s embarrassing overreaction to a notorious “nearly naked party” held by wealthy Muscovites. The rich and famous party-goers had been criticised for living it up when, thanks to Putin’s disastrous “special military operation”, so many young Russian lives are abruptly ending in the trenches of eastern Ukraine.
Putin was reportedly shown scandalous images from the event. Even he could see how bad it looked. The nightclub was shut and a military summons was issued for the rapper Nikolai Vasilyev, who had attended wearing a sock over his penis. As the guardian of traditional, conservative Russian values and self-appointed heir to the tsars, Putin simply could not tolerate such fun and games.
“Did you have a party?” Navalny asked the prison officers during the court video conference. “You probably had a naked party,” he suggested. Even the judge laughed. It wasn’t really anything. But Putin will have seen it differently. Once more, the incorrigible, irrepressible Navalny, despite all Putin had done to him, was poking fun at his expense. Here was Navalny defiantly getting the last laugh again.
So wretched Putin decided to ensure it was his last laugh ever.
Is this really what happened? Given the very long list of sudden deaths among Putin’s opponents and critics, only one thing seems certain: the full, unvarnished, ugly truth will not be known until, at the earliest, this tyrant is finally deposed or killed himself.
Last year the Wagner mercenary chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who had threatened mutiny, was blown out of the sky – until this week, the latest among Putin’s more prominent victims. In Britain alone, actual or attempted regime assassinations include Alexander Litvinenko in London, and Sergei Skripal in Salisbury. There have been many other killings – politicians, journalists, businessmen, lawyers – and that’s not counting the thousands of innocents murdered in Ukraine, Georgia and Chechnya.
It would be comforting to think this latest atrocity will spark a popular uprising against Putin’s dictatorship and bring the toppling of the tyrant. It would be nice to think Putin will be thrown out in next month’s manipulated, one-man presidential “election”. But that is not how things work in repressive, prison-state Putin-land.
It’s easy to condemn Putin, to rant and rave against his crimes, to demand his arrest, to make him “accountable”. But that may only be done sensibly from outside the country. For Russians, it may perhaps be wiser, and safer, to follow Navalny’s sad-courageous example. Laugh at the tyrant. Mock the fool. Little Putin is a clown. He is ridiculous, absurd. The joke’s on him.
Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s foreign affairs commentator
On Wednesday 21 February at 7pm GMT Guardian Live will be holding an online event about the Russia-Ukraine war, with panellists including Luke Harding, Charlotte Higgins and novelist Andrey Kurkov. Book tickets here
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