Sandwich, Navalny and aliens

In the first year of his imprisonment, which was during the pre-war period, Navalny's associates did not care about the Ukrainian issue, so they continued to ignore it in their usual way. In the second year of his imprisonment, which coincided with the beginning of the full-scale war, the situation began to change: it turned out that people from Navalny's entourage could no longer simultaneously promote Navalny on all platforms and ignore Ukrainian issues. It took them a whole year to put two and two together, until the main ideologue of Navalnyism, SMM specialist Lenya Volkov, conveyed to Navalny through his lawyers that as long as he was called 'Sandwich' ('Navalny said Crimea is not a sandwich and it won't be returned to Ukraine’ – ed.) more often than his last name in comments to news stories with any mention of Navalny, any effective promotion was out of the question, because Ukraine had become the very center of a global trend and it would no longer be possible to ignore it as before.

All that was required of Navalny was to literally repudiate his past great-power statements and at least outwardly not demonstrate his imperial-Moscow dexterity, which could be played to the maximum benefit of his brand: Russia's main opposition politician performs a symbolic washing in the Jordan River, washes away all the sins of the past and emerges from this river as a true holy, equal-apostle dissident. Plus, in accordance with that worn-out phrase “a real politician knows how to admit his mistakes,” his fans would adore him with even more effort, if that's even possible. And all his chauvinism could be attributed to benevolent opportunism, as if he were willing to say that yes, he was supporting everyone from the Nazis to the traditional communist electorate of state employees because he wanted to unite them against Putin and prevent a war, but it didn't work out, so now I'm sitting on the stake for your sins. A small note could have changed everything dramatically. But the paradox is that if there had been an adequate and rational way out of this situation, this situation would not have arisen in the first place, and these people would not be where they are, and Russia as such would not be what it is.

Instead, Navalny publishes "15 Theses" a few weeks after Khodorkovsky published a similar manifesto, meaning that a Russian oppositionist must necessarily be a prophet with messianic aspirations - “Arise, prophet, and wait and listen, Fulfill my will, and, going over seas and lands, With your message set the hearts of men on fire”, as Pushkin bequeathed, - so while passing their days in exile and in prison, they continue to prophesy and make appeals (this, by the way, is remarkably reminiscent of the plot of The Gulag Archipelago, in one of the chapters of which Solzhenitsyn recalls how a fool, Emperor Alexei, was put in their cell, who, while working at a factory, wrote an appeal to the Russian people to ban collective farms and restore the monarchy). In these theses, instead of admitting his mistakes and saying, “Yes, I took the wrong position, I was a jerk, but now I've made amends, as if nothing had happened,” he claims out of the blue that we should recognize the internationally recognized borders of Ukraine in 1991, with the impenetrable confidence of absolute moral authority, as if this has always been our position, as if he hasn't been running around for the last 9 years with his numerous statements ranging from “not a sandwich” to “a historical misunderstanding (Crimea as part of Ukraine)” and “two million Russian citizens whom we cannot just give to someone (about mass passportization)” (at that time he was asked what about Donbas, where everyone has already been passported); and when he is asked to just say that you are not an imperialist and that Russians are not imperialists either, he literally says the following: “Are all Russians characterized by imperial consciousness? This is nonsense. For example, Belarus is involved in the war against Ukraine. Do Belarusians also have an imperial consciousness? No, they also have a dictator in power.” So his friend Lenya is shouting at him from the outside: “Alexei, come on, put on a democratic face, say that we are not imperialists, otherwise no one will give us money.” Navalny: “Well, as you can see, we are not imperialists, because we have our colony, which does everything we order it to do.” Curtain.

The existential problem for us is that he does this not because he is a bad or malicious person, but because their Russian identity is so impenetrable that he simply does not physically understand what is wrong with his behavior, views and statements, he does not see any contradictions or problems in them. Similarly, another colleague of his, both in the opposition circle and in prison, Ilya Yashin, uses the opportunity to appeal to the world from prison, not with an appeal to his fellow citizens to repent, realizing the gravity of the catastrophe to which they have all doomed themselves with this war, not to apologize to Ukrainians, hundreds of thousands of whom have lost their loved ones, millions of whom have become refugees, but with an appeal “not to scold Russians and not to make life difficult for them!” “The Russians are also an injured party and deserve sympathy.” The only theories that can explain this behavior are speculative. For example, it sometimes seems that Russian society is a society of defeated transhumanism, with the difference that traditional transhumanism claims that man is a rope stretched between the ape and the superhuman, and that it is humanity's duty to move toward the Nietzschean ideal, the Russians chose transhumanism with a vector in the other direction, because otherwise it is impossible to believe that such a thing can happen at all within the framework of human anthropology and some kind of naturalistic ethics inherent in man as a species.