Features The death of Alexei Navalny and the eternal return of the Gulag

Commemoration in Russia of Navalny, also one person with one life, revealed historical continuity with the pain of the past, but perhaps more importantly established a sense of community with those who suffered before us. When the first flowers appeared in front of previously desolate memorials to victims of political oppression, grief mixed with hope to create an unexpected feeling of togetherness.

Published in the printed edition of Baltic Worlds BW 2024: 1-2. pages 4-7
Published on balticworlds.com on April 23, 2024

The funeral of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on March 1, 2024 was well-attended by both mourners and militia. On the same day, the international branch of Memorial, the human rights organization founded in the Soviet Union in 1988 and forcibly shut down in the Russian Federation in 2022, made several posts on social media. One of them included the following observation of a funeral attendee:

[…] a line of mourners stretched out onto the path. And suddenly, a column of military men approached. Above this column was the red coffin. We, stepping through the deep snow, pressed ourselves against the fences of the graves. Relatives followed behind the uniform hats and gray overcoats, then a company of soldiers with rifles […] 1

Although evocative of other media coverage about Navalny’s funeral, this observation was not about that particular event. It was about the funeral of Varlam Shalamov, Russian writer and survivor of almost twenty years in the Gulag. If militia outnumbered the approximately hundred brave mourners on that afternoon in 1982, some forty years later, we witnessed the reverse: law enforcement eventually ran out of fence as the line of those who wanted to pay their respects to the fallen opposition leader numbered more than ten thousand. This difference notwithstanding, it seems that what happened to Navalny — from sentence, through prison, to death — has generated a renewed sense of historical continuity with the darkest legacy of the Soviet Union: the Gulag. In this essay, I explore how Russia today remembers as well as forgets the legacy of the Stalinist camps and how the events surrounding Navalny could come to change the future memory of this past.
Navalny died — or better said, was murdered — as a political prisoner serving a 19-year sentence in the men’s maximum security corrective colony known as “Polar Wolf.” This was where he was brought at the end of last year, to a prison founded on the site of a previous Gulag camp, built by the same camp’s prisoners, located in the Arctic town of Kharp. The prisoners’ forced labor was also used for one of Stalin’s vanity projects: the transpolar railroad, now known as “the dead road.” To move Navalny to a place where the Gulag is only a name change away, from a prison in Vladimir oblast where prominent dissidents served time during the Soviet Union’s twilight years, seemed ominous to many but also mostly symbolic. After his death, the symbolic turned literal. Immediately and all over Russia, spontaneous commemoration of him began at monuments dedicated to the memory of victims of political repression in the Soviet Union.
Monuments to victims of political repression are ubiquitous in the Russian Federation. These constructions of often generic design — usually made of stone and decorated with barbed wire — appeared during the first decade after the fall of the Soviet Union but have since then been either largely neglected or only considered virtue signaling. When Navalny died, these once gloomy memorials to the Gulag became center stage for civil conscience in twenty-first century Russia. In Moscow, people laid flowers at the Solovetsky Stone in front Lubyanka Prison and the Wall of Grief next to Sakharov Avenue. In the weeks that followed, almost two hundred impromptu shrines emerged all over the country — as well as in Russian-occupied Luhansk in Ukraine.

The authoritarian backlash was swift: some of those who laid flowers were pictured, some were arrested, some were given jail sentences, and a few of these even presented with military draft notices upon release from jail. All copies of the February 20th issue of Sobesednik, the only newspaper within Russia that published a report of Navalny’s death with a picture of him smiling on the cover, were promptly confiscated. The reaction of the authorities felt like a return to Stalin times, which, although disconcerting, seemed strangely apt as the sentence and death of Navalny already signaled the eternal return of the Gulag.
This philosophical concept, in which identical events occur again and again in an identical way, is another way to conceptualize the historical comparison now being made by many between those who suffered and died in the Gulag and Navalny. His letters in 2023 to Natan Sharansky, a dissident who spent nine years in Soviet prisons during the 1970s and 1980s, were published as “Navalny’s Letters from the Gulag.” 2 In them, he reached out to Sharansky after reading his memoir Fear No Evil: The Classic Memoir of One Man’s Triumph over a Police State (1988) in prison: “I was amused by the fact that neither the essence of the system nor the pattern of its acts has changed” (ibid.). Navalny ended his first letter to Sharansky with the expression used by the latter when he in 1978 was sentenced to 13 years in prison: “Next year in Jerusalem.” Sharansky’s reply stressed the hope this expression contains: “Today we are slaves — tomorrow, free people. Today we are here — next year, in Jerusalem” (ibid.) Sharansky was not the first Soviet prisoner to evoke the words spoken during Passover. The writer and university teacher Eugenia Ginzburg, who was sentenced in 1937 and ultimately came to serve 18 years in the Gulag, recalled in her memoir Into the Whirlwind (1967) how the same phrase sustained her in prison. It would be safe to say that Navalny will not be the last to write the same sentence from a Russian prison.

Although the most internationally prominent political prisoner in Russia, he was not the only one. Many still remain behind bars: politician Vladimir Kara-Burza, for example, is currently serving the 25 year prison sentence he received in 2023. And he is far from alone. Photos of current political prisoners in Russia together with their sentences now appear regularly in social media posts made by Memorial, which despite being labelled as a “foreign agent” still compiles a continuously growing list of such prisoners on a separate website. 3
It is tempting to consider the closure of Memorial, the central mission of which is to preserve the memory of the Gulag, as ultimate proof that Russia today only wants to forget this past. However, that is not the whole story. Indeed, the current regime has chosen to publicly remember specific parts of it. In 2017, 80 years after the height of the Great Terror in 1937, Putin opened “The Wall of Grief” in Moscow together with Patriarch Kirill. This new monument to the victims of political repression was presented with a speech by Putin in which neither Stalin’s name nor the Gulag was mentioned. Subsequently, reception of “The Wall of Grief” presents a mixed bag: some consider it a hypocritical move by an increasingly oppressive government, whereas others hope it could still be a turning point toward a new era of national memory. The presence of Patriarch Kirill at the opening ceremony can also be seen as symptomatic of how the Russian Orthodox Church attempts to co-opt remembrance of Soviet repressions with a focus solely on those who suffered for their faith. The Butovo Firing Range outside Moscow, where Putin marked the 70th anniversary of the Great Terror in 2007, is not only owned by the Church, but the same Church has also canonized 330 of the 20,761 victims as saints. The new martyrs of Butovo thus outnumber by 30 the total sum of saints canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church up until 1988. While the Butovo Firing Range thrives as a memorial complex, Perm-36, the only museum in Russia located in a former Gulag camp, was forced to close in 2014. 4

Yet official remembrance is not the only way to preserve the Gulag for future generations. In 2015, “The Immortal Barracks” project was initiated by the activist Andrei Shalaev as the Gulag’s response to the commemoration of veterans from World War II in the government-endorsed civil event “The Immortal Regiment.” The latter event, which culminates in a parade, took place for the first time immediately after the Moscow Victory Day Parade on 9 May 2015. During “The Immortal Regiment”, the participants carry large posters with blown-up photos of their relatives who served in the Soviet Armed Forces during World War II. The result is a flood of enlarged faces in black and white floating over the heads of the crowd. The similarity with the portable icons used in traditional processions by the Orthodox Church seems intentional rather than coincidental. In 2015, Putin took part with a photo of his father, Vladimir Spiridonovich, a conscript in the Soviet Navy. Every year since, he has walked with “The Immortal Regiment” with the same photo, and in 2022, he walked first.
“The Immortal Barracks” is not a parade in public, but a movement mainly online. Those who participate commemorate their relatives who suffered in the Gulag by sharing family stories, private photographs, archival documents, and oral histories by former prisoners. The emphasis of the project is on ordinary people and the subjective experience of history, as if in contrast not only to the official “The Immortal Regiment” but also to such larger-than-life survivors-turned-writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, whose takes on the camps are already well-known. The project received a wide response: thousands of stories with photographs and documents were amassed already in the first month in 2015. These were later preserved on a website where the collection of recollections and the preservation of more names of those who perished in the Gulag continues even today. When the project began, Navalny emphasized in a conversation about Stalinist repressions the importance that such non-governmental initiatives like “The Immortal Barracks” have for the preservation of memory.5
“The Immortal Barracks” continues to live on on its website and in posts on social media and has, surprisingly enough, been left alone by the Russian authorities.6 Unfortunately, the same is not true for its founder Shalaev. When he left the country in October 2023, after months of surveillance, those who followed him screamed that he was “an enemy of the people.” That the mortal moniker given as a legal justification for the oppression of those whose names Shalaev tries to preserve should again be used seems to almost hyperbolize the eternal return of the Gulag in Russia.

Despite driving its founder into exile, the authorities have not forced “The Immortal Barracks” to shut down. This ambivalence toward the project suggests a conundrum for the aspiring totalitarian state: on the one hand, the project interferes with attempts to minimize the meaning of the Gulag experience, but, on the other, it seemingly lacks any civil ambition beyond that of commemorating obscure individuals who left no other trace in the history books. While the latter aspect has thus far discouraged the government from interference, I would argue that in this lies the project’s provocation and also its significance for the future of the past in Russia. “The Immortal Barracks” is a new way of remembering the Gulag: it tells not of the human being in history, but rather the history of one human being. Photos of the dead provided by their living relatives from private collections look at us, rather than we at them. They remind us that what was lost was not millions — a number too great to even cognitively appreciate — but this one person, this one life.
Commemoration in Russia of Navalny, also one person with one life, revealed historical continuity with the pain of the past, but perhaps more importantly established a sense of community with those who suffered before us. When the first flowers appeared in front of previously desolate memorials to victims of political oppression, grief mixed with hope to create an unexpected feeling of togetherness. We the living are together in this with the dead — no matter how long this lasts — because even the Gulag had an end date. And even if it comes back over and over again, it also inevitably must end every time.
“In our business, funerals are everything,”7 said Shalamov, whose 1982 funeral was remembered by Memorial on the day of Navalny’s funeral. What I think he meant by these words is that funerals are for the living: it is up to us to reject or embrace the legacy of those who came before us. And judging by the mountain of flowers still growing on top of Navalny’s grave in Moscow, the future of Russia might contain many still unforeseen twists. ≈

References

1. The Free Press. “Exclusive: Navalny’s Letters from the Gulag.” Anna Lyubarskaja and Rebekah Koffler, trans., February 19, 2024. Available at: https://www.thefp.com/p/navalnys-letters-from-the-gulag (accessed March 11 2024).
2. For more about this, see, for example, Hyldal Christensen, Karin. The Making of The New Martyrs of Russia: Soviet Repression in Orthodox Memory, (Routledge: London and New York, 2018).
3. See the official website in Russian: https://memopzk.org (accessed March 11, 2024).
4. See the official website in Russian: https://bessmertnybarak.ru/ (accessed March 11, 2024).
5. Medvedev, Sergei with Evgenia Lyozina, Aleksandra Polivanova, Aleksei Navalny. Roundtable on TV Rain, October 29 2015. Full transcript in Russian: https://www.levada.ru/2015/10/30/pochemu-vazhno-pomnit-o-stalinskih-repressiyah-i-vozmozhno-li-ih-povtorenie/ (accessed March 11 2024).
6. Translated from the post in Russian made on March 1 2024 by @topos.memorial: https://www.instagram.com/p/C3-kpY-igvS/?img_index=3 (accessed March 11 2024). All translations from Russian to English are my own.
7. From Shalamov’s third notebook dated 1971: https://shalamov.ru/library/23/18.html (accessed March 11 2024).

Josefina Lundblad-Janjić