To ask if you have ever grieved for someone who’s passed away who you have never met?

[Acapulco12]

It seems strange, I know. I don’t think this has ever happened to me before, but at the moment, I think I’m feeling all the usual stages of ‘grief’ for someone whose death I read about in the news and who I’ve never met. It’s very strange and unexpected. I just wondered if anyone else has ever had anything like that.

That sounds great. I'll do the same. I know that the activist Bill Browser is calling for some international anti corruption legislation and for it to be called the Navalny Law. That sounds like a very fitting tribute to his work.

https://acf.international/
Navalny was one of the founders and they're determined to continue his work.

By the way, the Navalny doc was repeated on BBC the other night. I just couldn't rewatch - too sad.

Thanks so much, @Connected1 - I’ll look at the link you’ve posted here. I’ve just started watching that documentary as I got recommended it by a family member who’d seen it when it first came out. I’m not very far in yet but, when he speaks about politics and Russia, he has so much conviction, energy and passion that I found it both really impressive and moving.

I also love that he was able to keep a sense of humour in spite of everything. It’s quite dark humour, with lots of sarcasm and irony, so it’s not necessarily everyone’s cup of tea, but it appealed to me.

Both of my df's parents died when he was young, his father when he was a few months old and his mother when he was 15 with breast cancer. I became a gm a couple of years ago and my cousin died of breast cancer after living with it for more than 10 years. I cried thinking if my gm had lived 10 more years she would have met 7 of her 9 grandchildren.

Just returning with a long post.

I feel very conflicted about Navalny, to be honest. I admire his bravery, charisma and energy which he all used to great effect in his fight against Putin and against corruption in Russia.

The humour he managed to maintained throughout his frequent imprisonment, poisoning - followed by his horrific death - have all added to my admiration of him. I see him as someone who stood up time and time again for his beliefs.

However, I do understand that he had some very strong views on issues such as immigration, LGBT+ rights and gun control - for example - which I do not at all share. I do understand the importance though of not aligning his views to ‘Western’, ‘liberal’ views though, because the society in which he grew up - Soviet then Russian - has very different cultural values in many ways to those in Western Europe and the USA, for instance. So I want to try and avoid looking at his views through that lens.

In all honesty, I’m finding it very difficult to get my head around my admiration of his bravery, energy and charisma and the fact that he had such unpleasant political views.

I have approached this so far by focusing a lot on his courage and the determination he showed in his work as an anti-corruption campaigner, which I think is out of the ordinary and should be celebrated.

Being completely honest, I have blinded myself to the less savoury aspects of his politics. I have tried to address this by reading and watching a lot about him, and I have bought a book about him written by academics.

However, I know there is a lot more I need to learn about him. Does anyone have any recommendations for how I can learn more about him?

Unhelpfully, I don’t speak Russian, so that will of course limit the resources I can access to learn more about him. Of course, those resources - like with any resource - will have a degree of bias and a particular position and view on him.

Grateful for any advice and guidance. Thanks.

Just read up on Russia I guess. Russia hasn't really experienced democracy as such so the political terminology we use doesn't mean the same when talking about it. Eg calling him an opposition spokesman isn't strictly accurate - he used to operate within the structure, then he lost influence and started operating outside of it, which meant he openly worked against Putin because Putin operates within it. Likewise the concept of anti-corruption campaigning doesn't make much sense - there isn't a Russian alive who doesn't know that politics is corrupt. This is not news for Russians. I guess you could call him a corruption cataloguer or something. Interestingly his own money came from a couple of anonymous sources hidden behind paywalls constructed by his pals in the tech industry and with a daughter at Stanford University this is fundraising on a different level than a gofundme for tiddles to get his operation.

As for his unsavoury views, there are neo-Nazis and neo-fascists all over that area. For the modern history of that you could start with the war that broke up Yugoslavia. That's where a lot of those seeds were sewn. It's how Putin gets traction when he talks about neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Man's not wrong, there most certainly are neo-Nazis in Ukraine, and they're on the army payroll.

It's a complex situation that, same as everything in life, isn't a case of good guy vs bad guy.

Thanks Orab, that’s really helpful. I thought that at part of his money comes from anti-Putin Russian businessmen living outside Russia. He mentioned this on one of his Instagram posts that he made when he was recovering in Germany after being poisoned,
explaining where the funding had come from to pay for his medical bills for his recovery in Germany.

Thing is, "anti-Putin" covers a lot of ground.

Before Putin came to power the mafia were running things. It was quite usual for people to not be paid wages for years at a time under Yeltsin, who was a drunk and incompetent. So regular work and money stopped meaning anything. If you wanted regular income, it would come from under the radar activity. If you had a business then you had to pay bribes. As mafia built up their money they started to buy up all the legitimate institutions like banks and so on. They also fought a lot of turf wars, gunning rivals down as they walked from work to their car and such. It was very wild. Of course all the US businesses also operated within that and also made a lot of money.

Then the rouble crashed and only the dodgiest people had any money at all which was all hard (and dirty) currency. So they scooped up businesses and assets at rock bottom prices and these are the oligarchs.

Putin was selected as being the person who could control them and that is what he did and continues to do. They are rich and powerful so it's not possible to destroy them outright. And these people are naturally very "anti-Putin". But as I hope you can see they are not nice people. They are crooks and murderers. Their business interests extend way beyond Russia into the murkiest parts of international trade - private armies who control diamond and gold mining for example - and of course into more legitimate concerns like global housing and other asset markets. They are even richer since the US started the money printing craze in 2008.

Not that Putin is some caped crusader, anything but. For him this is a prolonged power struggle that you see playing out now still with these mysterious deaths and it is not about good and evil, same as it isn't for the people who go against him. However he's kept a lid on a lot of the violence that plagued Moscow in particular and at least people get paid actual wages now.