31 August 2020
At first glance, Alexei Navalny seems like exactly the
sort of man the West would want to sit in the Kremlin. He’s anti-corruption,
anti-oligarchy, anti-ballot rigging and – most importantly – anti-Putin. Many
in the West believe his election would result in a seismic shift in Russian
foreign policy – and perhaps even lead to historically unprecedented positive
relations with Moscow.
The Western media have certainly reinforced this idea,
as they’ve reported on Navalny’s attempts to break Putin's stranglehold on
Russia and the many moves to silence him with a series of arrests, assaults,
and poisonings – the most recent of which led to his hospitalisation last week.
Perhaps influenced by the fact that many of those targeted by the Kremlin in
the past (such as Boris Berezovsky, Anna Politkovskaya, Sergei Skripal, Sergei
Magnitsky, and Alexander Litvinenko) have had pro-Western sympathies, the media
have been keen to portray Navalny in a similar light. But while the coverage of
Navalny as an anti-corruption and pro-democratic crusader is generally
accurate, its implication that Putin's worst enemy would become the West's new
best friend is definitely not.
Navalny has never, for instance, made any attempt to
hide his Russian nationalist sympathies. In 2006, he openly said the Russian
March (an ultra-nationalist, far-right demonstration) should take place, and a
year later he founded a political organisation, The People, which aligned with
the openly nationalist Great Russia and Movement Against Illegal Immigration
movements. The Kremlin often attempts to discredit its internal opponents by
claiming they are agents of the West. They have not been able to do this with
Navalny, even though he briefly attended Yale university.
Navalny is not aligned with the West either when it
comes to Russian military interventions. In 2008, conflict broke out in the
Caucasus after Georgia sought to prevent Russian-backed separatists in the
regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia seceding from the country. After
intervening to expel Georgian forces from the region, the Russian military then
invaded Georgia proper. Tbilisi was bombed and Russian troops only halted their
advance 20 miles from the city limits.
Since its independence from the Soviet Union, Georgia
has been a staunch Western ally, contributing thousands of troops to Nato operations
in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Navalny, though, did not support the West in the
conflict. Not only did he back the invasion, he also called for the expulsion
of Georgian people from Russia and called them ‘rodents’ (grizuni) – a common
ethnic slur used by Russian nationalists. Although Navalny later said that he
regretted his use of the racial insult, he does not appear to have changed his
stance on the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia – territories
recognised as integral parts of Georgia by the international community, with
the obvious exception of Russia.
Georgia is not the only post-Soviet state where
Navalny supports pro-Russian separatist movements. While Transnistria and
Crimea are internationally recognised as belonging to Moldova and Ukraine
respectively, in both cases Navalny has affirmed his support for pro-Russian
movements. Indeed, in an interview with Ekho Moskvy, Navalny claimed that he
would not return Crimea to Ukraine if he became President, and advised
Ukrainians ‘not to deceive themselves [that Crimea is not part of Russia]’. He
also said he did not see a difference between Ukrainians and Russians, a
pan-Slavic trope common to ultra-nationalist Russians, and one that has been
used on a number of occasions to justify Russia's military activities in the
near abroad.
If Navalny is ever suspicious of Russian foreign
interventionism it’s usually for economic rather than moral reasons. Navalny
believes that the money used to fund wars in Ukraine and Syria could have been
better spent on improving the lives of those at home.
Were Navalny or his party to ever win power, it is
doubtless that the lives of the Russian people would improve exponentially. But
by his own admission, Navalny is a 'democratic nationalist'. Given his demonstrable
hostility to former Soviet states turning their eyes westward, and his many
public expressions of Russian nationalism, a thawing of relations between
Moscow and the West would not necessarily follow the ascendancy of a
Navalny-led administration.
Tim Ogden
