Feb 20

Feb 20 Alexei Navalny made the ultimate sacrifice for democracy By James Bruno

Alexei Navalny’s death this week hit like a gut punch to all freedom-loving people. Only 47 years old, he stood apart from most other political dissidents with his trademark charm, irrepressible humor and radiant humanity. The Oscar-winning 2022 documentary on him bore these out. Seeing the joie de vivre of his beautiful family juxtaposed with his fearlessness was riveting. I recall shouting at the TV screen, “Don’t go back, Alexei! They’ll kill you. Remain with your wife and kids!” He, like Boris Nemtsov and so many others, are martyrs for freedom. Vladimir Putin adds another notch in his murder belt. I draw from an article I wrote for the Washington Monthly a few years ago describing some dissidents I’ve known through the years:

Few Americans fully appreciate the freedoms provided to us in our Constitution. Basking in them for 246 years, we tend to take them for granted. Having served the United States in countries where people are deprived of basic rights, I came to have a profound respect for the Founding Fathers and the pains they took to protect us from tyrants. But for the first time in our history, we have a would-be autocrat who, having lost the presidency, is hell-bent on returning to the White House to complete his stated mission of vengeance and retribution, and sidle up to Navalny’s killer, Vladimir Putin.

Throughout history, dissidents have notoriously gotten themselves into trouble for their ideas: Socrates was forced to kill himself by drinking poison for the crime of “impiety”; my namesake, Giordano Bruno, was burned at the stake for having the temerity to say, among other things, that the earth revolved around the sun; the British Crown convicted in absentia the great English-American firebrand, Thomas Paine, for “seditious libel”; Hannah Arendt, author of The Banality of Evil, managed to escape Nazi Germany by the skin of her teeth and resettle in the United States; and the Soviet Union expelled Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1974 for exposing the vast gulag forced labor camp system.

In more than two decades as a U.S. diplomat, I served in communist-ruled Vietnam, Cuba, Laos, and Cambodia, promoting human rights and basic freedoms, including that of expression. Part of that work included meeting with political dissidents, who often put themselves at great risk by talking with an American official. I helped resettle several Cuban dissidents in the U.S., and was later denounced by the Castro regime as a “Yankee ex-intelligence officer” who helped “carry out subversive actions against the Cuban government” for publishing a novel highly critical of that regime.

But my favorite Vietnamese dissident was the writer Duong Thu Huong. At our first get-together — over lunch in Hanoi — I asked her how she dealt with communist officials harassing her. With a twinkle in her eye, and without hesitation, she said: “I spit in their face!”

The groundbreaking Russian investigative journalist Artyom Borovik was intensely critical of Vladimir Putin. I’d occasionally meet him to pick his brain on Moscow’s role in Afghanistan. His “Top Secret” TV program exposed the corruption of Russia’s political and economic elite — earning him many enemies. Borovik quoted Putin in a 2000 article saying, “There are three ways to influence people: blackmail, vodka, and the threat to kill.” Days later, he died in a still-unsolved Moscow plane accident. He was one of many Putin critics who have randomly turned up dead. He was 39.

I found it a privilege being acquainted with these very courageous people, men and women who stood up against tyranny and authoritarianism — and who often paid a heavy price. Some were denied employment, others were harassed and imprisoned. Some lost their lives. These defenders of freedom deserve our unmitigated admiration and respect, not to mention our support.

Here at home, we Americans must stand up to the ongoing assaults on our democracy and fundamental freedoms. Each person can find their own way to do so, but they have to do it — for all of our sakes, even if it means making some fierce enemies along the way. As Winston Churchill reputedly said, “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” Alexei Navalny understood this and paid the full measure for his beliefs.

James Bruno (@JamesLBruno) served as a diplomat with the U.S. State Department for 23 years and is currently a member of the Diplomatic Readiness Reserve. An author and journalist, Bruno has been featured on CNN, NBC’s Today Show, Fox News, Sirius XM Radio, The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Huffington Post, and other national and international media.