If this sounds vaguely familiar, you’re right. We’ve taken a slight detour from “Where’s Yevgeny?” to concentrate for a bit on another disappeared Russian — though this one is not technically missing. And, unlike the infamous Yevgeny Prigozhin, this man is only a threat to the Putin regime, not to the good people of his own or any other country. But his plight deserves our full attention and support. His name is Alexei Navalny, and we know where he is: he’s rotting in a hellhole of a Russian prison, convicted of a litany of trumped-up charges designed simply to keep him out of Putin’s hair.

Navalny is already serving sentences totaling more than eleven years in a maximum security prison known as IK-6 Penal Colony at Melekhovo, Russia, located about 155 miles east of Moscow. His “crimes”? Corruption (a charge usually reserved for those who have enriched themselves through dishonest means); fraud; and — most incredibly — violation of probation. Why this last charge? Because, after being poisoned in August of 2020 by agents of the Russian government with Novichok — a series of deadly nerve agents developed by the Soviet Government beginning in 1971 — and recuperating in Germany for several months, he returned to his homeland in January of 2021, only to find that he was considered to have violated the terms of an earlier probation by being out of the country fighting for his life. His real crime at that time was to have survived the poisoning.

He was arrested immediately upon arrival at the airport in Moscow, and has spent the past two and one-half years facing charges, trials, imprisonment, and a variety of illnesses for which he has been unable to obtain proper treatment. He is, at age 47, a dying man. And today, he was sentenced — in a closed-door proceeding at the same prison in which he has been kept — to a further 19 years, for allegedly creating an extremist community, financing extremist activities, and several other related “crimes.”

It would take too long to reiterate the entire history of this man, whose only continuing crime has been to speak out against the Putin regime’s crackdown on all forms of democratic society and the increasingly onerous sentences for those who dare to oppose Russia’s creeping return to Stalinism. In any event, his story is well documented in news reports, books, and the 2022 Academy Award-winning documentary, “Navalny.” But to give you a sense of the measure of the man, I will simply quote his response to today’s sentence:

“19 years in a maximum security penal colony. The number of years does not matter. I perfectly understand that, like many political prisoners, I am sitting on a life sentence. Where life is measured by the term of my life or the term of life of this regime.

“The sentencing figure is not for me. It is for you. You, not me, are being frightened and deprived of the will to resist. You are being forced to surrender your country of Russia without a fight to the gang of traitors, thieves, and scoundrels who have seized power. Putin must not achieve his goal. Do not lose the will to resist.”

This is his real crime: courage. The courage to recognize the rot that infests the Putin government . . . to speak out against it . . . and to remain firm in his convictions, despite being consigned to a slow, agonizing death in the most abominable circumstances imaginable.

The entire free world has spoken out — loudly and clearly — against the treatment of this brave man; but all of the protests fall on deaf ears. And he is not alone; there are others, perhaps not as well-known but equally honorable and courageous individuals receiving the same treatment: the Russian-British journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza comes immediately to mind. And reviewing their stories, I have to ask the gut-wrenching question: Can the return of the Soviet GULAGs be far behind?

Brendochka
8/4/23