The sticky truth about Navalny

His courage is exhilarating. Even if you think his cause hopeless, Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader and Putin-baiter, deserves our admiration. To return to Moscow after being poisoned, surely knowing arrest awaited him, is beyond brave. The chances are he will be crushed. But annihilation is not certain; and if one day he wins his battle with Putin, his return to Moscow this winter will become the stuff of legend. Navalny is not crazy: he has made a rational calculation, weighing the relative safety of a tedious future in grey and indefinite exile against a small possibility of making Russian history. With open eyes he has chosen risk.

That sooner or later Vladimir Putin will be swept away is likely — but when? Might it be sooner? I hear those many media commentators who, after rehearsing with approval the story of Navalny’s return, go on to caution that he hasn’t a chance, and that all the cards are stacked in favour of Putin’s continuing and uninterrupted hegemony. They remind us that the Russian president has the armed forces, the police, the secret service, the economic establishment, the whole hierarchy of power, solidly behind him; and that the ordinary people are for the most part acquiescent. Wise advice, no doubt.

But a word to the wise. Political history is full of big surprises. They are surprises precisely because there was so little warning that they were imminent. It goes as follows. Conventional wisdom says the situation appears stable, and nothing suggests anything big will happen. Something big then happens. Conventional wisdom then opines that it was ‘always inevitable’. When Russia turns against Putin there will be no shortage of pundits saying it had to happen.

Now the point about this is that both the pre-shock and the post-shock wisdoms contain much truth.