A Note to the reader:
I will be publishing exceptional content from other contributors occasionally. This beautiful elegy was composed by a Boston-based classicist, writing under the name of John Carpenter. I hope you find it as inspiring as I did.
-Ayaan
He went back. When he could have lived out his days in safety, he stayed faithful to a promise that he knew meant death. It was a promise which his family and friends would have been happy for him to break. Nothing would have been easier: All he had to do was stay where he was. But he loved his country and had served it all his life. So, fresh from a harsh captivity, having scarcely tasted free air, Marcus Atilius Regulus willingly handed himself back over to his captors and met his end in the prisons of a brutal regime.
In 255 B.C., Regulus was commanding Roman forces in North Africa as a proconsular general during the first great war with Carthage. As with so many heroes of the old Republic, it is difficult to sift history from legend. As Cicero tells it, the story runs roughly as follows: Taken prisoner in an ambush, Regulus was sent to Rome with a Carthaginian delegation to offer the Senate an exchange. Hamilcar, Hannibal’s father, was sure that in exchange for the beloved former consul the Romans would hand over a number of captured Carthaginian youths, the sons of the high nobility. Regulus swore an oath that if the mission failed he would return to his prison in Carthage.
Back in Rome he had ample reason to do as Hamilcar had bidden him—not least the prospect of being united again, for good, with his wife, his children, and his homeland. But once in the Senate, to the outrage of the Carthaginian delegation, he urged the Romans to reject the offer and to keep their Carthaginian prisoners. The captives were young, he said, but they had already proven themselves to be dangerous military commanders who would menace the Republic for decades to come. He, on the other hand, was already a weary old man.
Such was his authority that the Senate took his advice. But what would stop the Romans from refusing to hand their hero back to the Carthaginians? Regulus, however, would have none of it. “Neither love of his homeland nor love of his family and friends could keep him,” says Cicero, “nor was he unaware that he was heading to a most cruel enemy and to rare and refined tortures; yet he thought that he must keep the oath he had sworn.” Better, he reckoned, to stand by his word, though it meant dying an agonizing death, than to break a promise and live out his days having brought dishonor upon the institutions he loved.
So Regulus went back to Carthage. There, it was said, he was subjected to that peculiar form of death by sleep deprivation which follows from the removal of one’s eyelids and confinement to a nail-studded box.
Regulus in Russia
When Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny boarded his last flight to Moscow on January 17, 2021, he did so freely. The year before, an assassination attempt by the President of the Russian Federation had nearly killed him. The Russian state assented to his evacuation to Berlin, perhaps on the assumption that he would only leave Russia to die. But he was saved by some of the best doctors in the world. He received a hero’s welcome as he regained consciousness and convalesced, his beloved wife and children at his side.
Yet, in a matter of months, he was back in Russia.
Unlike Regulus, Navalny was bound by no oath to his would-be assassin. He was a lawyer, not a general. He never held high office. He was no tired old man, but in his prime, full of life and energy and with decades of work ahead of him. Regulus was a model of virtues which his people generally (if sometimes feebly) embraced. Navalny’s virtues ran flatly counter to his country’s rotten mainstream. Regulus was loved at home—feared and then hated abroad. Navalny was the opposite: Admired in countries which his own government deemed hostile, his Russian supporters, however devoted, were always outnumbered by those who preferred their national Stockholm syndrome. It was homeward that Navalny headed, not to a foreign enemy. And it was not an enemy’s youth that he sought to keep imprisoned, but his own people that he went to set free.
Where Regulus could boast of a string of victories behind him, where he could reasonably hope that more were in store and that his cause would prevail, Navalny could do neither. It is true that he stood and will now forever stand in a tradition of heroic Russians, a spiritually inspiring record of dissident writers and liberalizing politicians. One will even find the odd reforming tsar here or there. Navalny stands in that illustrious line. He will join young Alexander I, the Decembrists, Herzen, Gogol, Alexander II, Turgenev, Tolstoy, the old Constitutional Democrats, Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, Kozyrev, and others.
But there is simply no great tally of victories for liberal democracy in Russia, nor even of victories for an illiberal Rechtstaat. The triumphs of those dissidents and relative liberals have amounted to flashes in the pan, glaringly inconsistent with the general trend of Russian culture, and often enough inconsistent with other aspects of their own policies or visions. In political terms, the scant successes to count between the lot of them have nearly all proved to be ephemeral.
Despair at that fact, however, would miss at least half of the point. In a 1927 essay on F.H. Bradley, T.S. Eliot wrote that
there is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that it will triumph.
If you are going to lose, one might add, the way you lose matters. Even in that sense Navalny was a champion and a hero for the ages. But in another sense he was more hopeful than Eliot: he really seems to have lived and died in the expectation that his cause would prevail, whether or not he himself would live to see it. And even if, as in Eliot’s long view, all victories are as provisional as all losses, the possibility of winning at all seems to require the outrageous expectation of triumph.
Such a hope must have fed the joy we see in the final video we have of Navalny. Taken on February 15, 2024, the day before his murder in a frozen Arctic death camp, it shows him joking with his judge and a guard. They can’t help smiling and laughing along with him. This is a man alive and unbroken. The judge, for his part, looks much younger than Navalny’s forty-seven years. If he has any memories of Communism, they must be few indeed.
In 1983, when Navalny was seven years old, another dissident and Gulag veteran, a Latvian, had stood before a doubtless unsmiling Soviet judge of an older generation. For reading and distributing anti-Soviet literature, the prisoner, Gunārs Astra, was sentenced to seven years of hard labor in a “special regime colony,” not unlike the one where Navalny died, and five more thereafter in an ostensibly less “special” camp. Popular pressure for his release built steadily over the years of his first sentence. In early 1988, when Navalny was not yet twelve, Astra was cynically amnestied. But just after his release, while en route to Leningrad, he suddenly fell ill. The authorities sequestered him within a military hospital where he soon died. No autopsy was ever permitted on Astra’s corpse, which was released for burial without its organs. He was fifty-six years old.
The text of Astra’s 1983 address to the judge—certainly not televised—had been smuggled out long before its author’s demise. Published by samizdat under the title “The Last Word,” it circulated illegally, galvanizing the swelling movement that toppled Communism. Astra, calmly explaining the ways in which the USSR did not even follow its own constitution and laws, served as the voice of his people’s conscience. In life and death he was a reminder that the government under which they were living was an evil one, that their society was based on lies. He was a ray of hope that things need not be so and would not be so forever. In the speech’s most famous lines, Astra told the judge, “I believe that this whole period will melt away like a bad dream. That is what gives me the strength to stand here, and to breathe. Our people have suffered much. We have learned. And we will survive this dark time, too.”
Navalny shared Astra’s conviction and his courage. Nor, Cicero might say, was he unaware that he was heading to a most cruel enemy and to rare and refined tortures. So, kissing his wife farewell, Navalny handed himself over to the men who would kill him: and there went Russia’s gadfly, his people’s conscience and their hope, smiling all the way to the martyrdom he freely embraced.
Ultimately, Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny had bound himself by an oath just as firmly as had Marcus Atilius Regulus. His promise was an existential one, a choice he made every day, a resolve that grew ever firmer over the course of his adult life. With every new project he undertook, every word of truth he spoke to his persecutors, he lived in such a way as to promise his wife, his children, his parents, his people, perhaps himself, that there was hope for Russia. He lived so as to be the very evidence of things unseen. As the light seemed to fade, he smiled on, he kept working, and he dared to say he almost found it easy—in part due to his newfound faith in Christ, whose words from the Sermon on the Mount he both contemplated and lived: Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness.
“Yes, the world is burning, but no, Uncle Vlad is not going to save you.”
An afterlife in East and West
Navalny’s unquiet crucifixion is a clarion call. I hope we hear it in the West. How close to our capitals would we like Putin’s Russia, really? Or, what would it be like if half of our politicians had half of Navalny’s character? Or, what if we ourselves lived in our own families, communities, civil societies, and polities with half of his principle?
Now would above all be an excellent time for those among Western conservatives—especially among those Christians who have been seduced by decades of deliberate propaganda—to put aside the Kremlin temptation once and for all. Yes, the world is burning, but no, Uncle Vlad is not going to save you. The bit of Western civilization that he will save is brutal post-Marxist kleptocracy. Pause for just a moment and remember your martyred brother—to say nothing of the rates of abortion, divorce, and domestic violence in Russia—the next time you hear “family values” or the “low cost of living” in connection with his murderer.
But whatever Navalny may teach us in the West, he is in death, as he was in life, a great man first and foremost for the Russians. He was a patriot who weighed his life and counted it as nothing against the duty he felt to truth and to his country.
Such a man was Regulus, too. His afterlife is instructive: his countrymen told his story over and over again for centuries, until his name became for Western civilization a byword for courage, integrity, truthfulness, fidelity, and self-sacrifice. Regulus lived on after death as a reminder that only that which is truly noble is to our advantage. After his death, he shaped the moral imagination of our whole civilization, living on as a fixed point in our compass and a beacon to something higher than the barbarism and baseness to which we so easily revert.
Henceforth Navalny will be a Regulus for the Russians. They can make him do something similar for their culture. For the odds Navalny faced and for the nature of his hope, I dare say they have in him a hero greater than the Romans had in Regulus. So let his millions of Russian supporters make like those Romans and vow, as Navalny’s courageous widow Yulia has done, to tell his story over and over again—at the top of their lungs where they can, in whispers where necessary, and in all cases in their hearts:
Alexei Navalny was a man of courage, of hope, of mirth, of tireless self-sacrifice, who laid down his life for his friends—that is, for you and for me.
Though he faced solitude, torture, and death, he told us with a smile, “Despondency is a sin.”
Now let us, too, live in such a way as to be worthy of his sacrifice.
Our own lives, and every Russian life, and the lives of hundreds of millions of others hang in the balance.
So let us reject fatalism and despair and the lies that we used to tolerate.
Let us, like Navalny, take courage and heart, and let us go smiling into the dark until the light breaks through again.
The battle these heroic Russians face remains decidedly uphill. Those who have already been at it for years, at great personal cost, deserve our deepest awe and admiration. For them to carry on and win, some few will need, for now, to keep up their work abroad. Far more will need to work in obscurity within Russia, for years and perhaps for decades. Of these, some will have to risk Navalny’s fate. Thousands of elites and millions of ordinary people will need to work together—techies, bankers, lawyers, judges, teachers, journalists, workers, policemen, pensioners, students, soldiers—including the many whose daily choices, or whose refusals to choose, have brought about this metastasized hell.
These heroes-to-be, these millions of Navalnys in the making—most of whose names we will never know—now have a sacred gift to carry them through the worst of what is to come. For each of them has seen courage, honesty, integrity, hope, true patriotism in living color. When things are at their bleakest, let them pause in silence for just one minute, eyes shut to the horrors all around, just long enough to call that smiling face to mind, and remember: There was once such a man as Navalny, a man who mocked the sting of death, a man whose laugh not even his executioners could resist.
If they keep at it, someday these heroic Russians will tell that story on the floor of the Duma. They will proclaim it from the Kremlin. They will gather on Red Square and raise a statue to their martyred man of hope.
Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness, ran the Beatitude that Navalny so cherished. May the Russians who now rise to take up his torch always remember how the line ends: For they shall have their fill.
Navalny was indeed awe inspiring. We need our heroes like we need air and water. They help give us courage to stand for what we believe in. Navalny apparently was inspired by Natan Sharansky, another courageous Russian dissident, first through Sharansky's book, then through direct correspondence with him. One could well make the case that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is also a brave, resilient, inspiring hero. Whatever form of tyranny we refuse to bow down to, in the end the only way to be able to look ourselves in the mirror is to stand our ground.