Alexei Navalny Was Ultra-Right Nationalist Who Compared Muslims to Cockroaches
The death of Alexei Navalny in a Russian prison camp Feb. 16 prompted a wave of eulogies from Western politicians and media, Canada summoning the Russian ambassador in protest, and the immediate accusation that Russian President Vladimir Putin had had the Western-backed opposition leader killed. Such accusations may or may not be true; the authoritarian Putin has long been credibly linked to the assassination of his political rivals. But the campaign to portray Navalny as some liberal hero of democracy and human rights — perhaps reaching its height with the 2022 film Navalny, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature — is pure fiction, a Western propaganda invention.
In reality, Navalny was a far nastier piece of work: an ultra-right racist and Russian nationalist, who railed against immigration and compared Muslims to “flies and cockroaches”. It’s ironic that Western liberals who view Donald Trump as a puppet of Russia/Putin and the very incarnation of evil are mourning a figure whose politics in all essentials are very similar to Trump’s. Consider Trump’s infamous attack on illegal immigrants launching his 2016 U.S. presidential campaign — “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists” — to Navalny’s remarks in a 2012 interview stating, “Immigrants from Central Asia bring in drugs [to Russia].”
Like Trump, Navalny encouraged and welcomed support from the most extreme fringes of the far right. In 2007, Yabloko, Russia’s oldest liberal party, kicked out Navalny for his “nationalist views” and participation in the Russian March, an annual rally that brings together thousands of far-right Russian nationalists, monarchists, and white supremacists under the slogan “Russia for ethnic Russians”. Shortly thereafter, Navalny released a video in which he presents himself as a “certified nationalist” who wants to exterminate “flies and cockroaches”, his rant intercut with shots of bearded Muslim men. In the video, Navalny then takes out a gun and shoots an actor wearing a keffiyeh, who is portrayed as trying to attack him.
As we’ve seen in every modern genocide, from the Nazi Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide to Israel’s current attack on Gaza, comparing human beings to insects and vermin is a hallmark of pro-genocide propaganda, paving the way for mass killing by dehumanizing the targeted group.
Of course, at this point it’s less surprising to see politicians, pundits, and celebrities embrace racists and ultra-nationalists who espouse genocidal rhetoric. After all, endorsing Nazis and genocide is now mainstream for Western imperialists: from aiding neo-Nazis in Ukraine to Canada’s Parliament giving a standing ovation to a Waffen-SS veteran, to ongoing support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. For the same individuals and institutions to embrace Navalny is to be expected. Nevertheless, when bourgeois politicians and media in the West endorse Nazis, they feel obliged to try and gloss over the unsavoury far-right views of these figures and portray them as icons of “freedom” and liberal democracy.
So it is with Navalny. In his remarks after Navalny’s death, U.S. President Joe Biden said Putin was responsible for Navalny’s death and added, “People across Russia and around the world are mourning Navalny today because he was so many things that Putin was not: He was brave. He was principled. He was dedicated to building a Russia where the rule of law existed and where it applied to everybody.” This is the kind of response we expect from the nominal head of U.S. imperialism, which has historically draped its predatory policies in the rhetoric of “freedom” and “democracy” and sought to sanitize unsavoury allies such as Navalny by portraying them as champions of these values — facts be damned.
All the same, the fawning tributes to Navalny by reformist politicians and celebrities beggar belief in their willful disregard for this man’s racist, far-right politics. Instead, they adhere to the bourgeoisie’s standard rubric by which those who support the interests of U.S. imperialism are hailed as champions of “freedom”, while those who oppose the interests of U.S. imperialism are vilified.
Hence the U2 concert in which Bono, longtime friend of war criminals like George W. Bush and Tony Blair, led the audience in chanting Navalny’s name. “Apparently Putin would never, ever say his name,” Bono said. “So I thought tonight, the people who believe in freedom must say his name.” To reiterate: Bono believes that all “people who believe in freedom” must chant the name of a vile racist and Russian neo-Nazi. In a similar vein, independent U.S. presidential candidate Cornel West put the final nail in the coffin of any remaining credibility he had by offering prayers to the family of the “courageous Russian political prisoner the late Alexei Navalny”, obscenely comparing Navalny to political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier.
Contrary to what Joe Biden, Cornel West, and Bono would have us believe, the mere fact of being Russian and opposing Vladimir Putin does not make someone an icon of freedom. U.S. imperialism and its allies have a long tradition of funding far-right forces abroad as proxies. To cite one obvious example, in the 1980s the United States armed and funded the Afghan mujahideen, who would later form the Taliban, to weaken the Soviet Union following the latter’s invasion of Afghanistan. There are countless other examples, such as during the Cold War when the U.S. funded any right-wing dictator who could be counted on to fight “communism”, from Francisco Franco to the Shah of Iran to Augusto Pinochet. Today, Canada, the United States, and NATO continue to arm and support the genocidal Netanyahu regime, the most right-wing regime in Israel’s history, as it carries out the ethnic cleansing and extermination of Gaza’s population.
To be clear, Vladimir Putin is a reactionary bastard. But supporting any Western-backed bourgeois opposition forces, especially far-right racists like Navalny, will not solve any of the problems facing the working class inside or outside Russia. As the International Marxist Tendency said in its statement on the war in Ukraine, “The task of fighting against the reactionary gang in the Kremlin is the task of the Russian workers alone.” The task of workers in the West is to fight against our own bourgeoisie, whose interests are opposed to those of the working class in Western countries, Russia, Ukraine, and anywhere else.
