Knowing the Half of It

“On Monday, just three days after her husband’s death, Yulia Navalnaya rebranded herself as a political force, vowing to pick up where her husband left off. ‘I don’t have the right to surrender,’ she said in an eight-minute video posted to her dead husband’s social media channels. ‘I ask you to share with me in rage.'” The courageous Yulia Navalnaya is raising hopes for a renewed Russian opposition. She will face huge challenges.

+ “If the Russian opposition had been eviscerated two years ago with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the introduction of military censorship, the death of Navalny seemed to have snapped its spine. Most of the opposition now lives abroad, in exile, and those who are left in Russia are either in jail or fear the kind of increasingly Stalinist atmosphere enveloping, suffocating the country. A 72-year-old woman was sentenced to five years in a penal colony for sharing someone else’s posts on social media. А young woman was given jail time for wearing rainbow earrings after the Kremlin named the ‘international L.G.B.T. movement’ an extremist one, on par with ISIS. A small-town veterinarian is under criminal investigation for her antiwar TikToks. A history student was arrested for reading a book about the S.S. on the Moscow metro. A single father was put in jail for his antiwar posts, and his 12-year-old daughter was taken from him and put in an orphanage.” The excellent Julia Ioffe in Puck: The Tragedy of Navalny. (Puck makes you sign up even to read gift articles. I don’t love that policy, but I am a big fan of the service.) “‘By killing Alexey, Putin killed half of me,’ Yulia said in her address, ‘half of my heart, and half of my soul. But I have a second half left, and it is telling me that I have no right to give up.'” (Hopefully the US House will give her half a chance.)