221. The Killing of Alexei Navalny

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1:35Welcome to the Restus Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Nice to see you, Alistair. Nice to see you. Talking to you from the United States, Yale University. I'm looking at you from the United Kingdom, University of Life. Just back from La Belle Thrange. Well, I think we can play out our positions. You can tell us a bit about what's happening with Marine Le Pen and Macrot, and maybe I can chip in a little bit on Trump and we can discuss France and America as well as other stuff, right? Well, actually, the thing I want to discuss is what's going on in a little place called Myot, which is a little known fully fledged French dip at the moment of the east of Africa.

2:14All sorts of stuff kicking off there, but it actually does relate to domestic politics as well. We're obviously going to have we should kick off with Navalny and Russia. Lots going on at the Munich Security Conference, which I think we should cover. And as you say, a bit of France and a bit of America. But first of all, shall we just thank the actually many thousands already who have bought tickets for our October, we think election tour. There's still some tour soon that might go for May. Just put himself out of his misery, but I think we're still banking on the autumn. It never seems to be that it's very plausible that the reason why a Prime Minister would call an election is to put themselves out of their misery and then it doesn't seem like a very likely reason to do something.

2:59No, what might be likely is if he thinks that for example, terrible local elections, assuming they are going to have terrible local elections, and then all this sort of rather low -level talk about, you know, shall we try and have a sixth Prime Minister before the next election that actually might kick off? It just doesn't make sense to me. I mean, I'm willing to. To Chile a lot of life. Did Listerus make sense? No, but did Listerus make sense? No, didn't. But put it this way, he is not going to be Prime Minister beyond the end of the year. This is his one shot in life to be Prime Minister. Why would he cut it short by six, seven months?

3:39When if he goes to an election in May, he is absolutely destined to lose. And the only way it would happen presumably is if he was under a massive rebellion and his party with huge numbers of MPs flooding and begging him to do a May election, but I'm not getting that sense. No, but you are getting quite more and more of them muttering that he can't do the job, and he's not very good, and he's not going down very well with the public, etc, etc. And that's they're more preparing a smith for leadership. I mean, we should get onto that at some point, but there's so much maneuvering going because they're all assuming that he'll lose the election, and so all these people are trying to position themselves to be the next leader, aren't they?

4:12Anyway, Roy, while we're drawing on about this, the producers are putting endless messages into the chat box saying, if you want to buy tickets, go to therestispolyzix .com. Yeah, and very central to this is that we're playing the O2 Arena. So it's going to be very, very exciting. It's going to be the biggest live podcast thing ever done in the world. So is he going on a limb? And so please come on, and hopefully he should be a lot of fun. So thank you. We've already sold more tickets than we did at the Albert Hall, but there are still some tickets to get us to come along, and it'll be really fun.

4:46Good. Okay. Now, shall we start with Alexi Navalny, RIP? Do you know where I want to start with this, Roy? Is the theme of courage? When we interviewed Anthony Scaramucci last week on leading, do you remember he had that line about John F. Kennedy wrote a book called Profiles in Political Courage? And he was asked why it was so short, and he said, because he didn't find many people who are real courage. I've been sort of, I've been thinking lots about Navalny and about what it means for Russia, and what it means for, you know, America, and all the sort of different facets that flow from it. But I sort of, one question I asked myself is, what would the limits of one's own courage be?

5:32So there's a guy who gets on a plane having been poisoned, having survived, is determined to leave his wife and two kids behind and go back to Russia when everybody is saying he will be arrested immediately and flung in jail on all sorts of trumped -up charges and is risking his life, but he was determined to do it. So I was thinking, is there any circumstances in which I might do something like that? And I think the answer is probably no, which is what makes him so rare. Do you think there were moments in your life when you would have been more likely to do it, maybe when you were younger? I guess this is, you know, we do at least live in a freedom as it were.

6:11So I've never, I've never known that feeling as to what that would be like to go somewhere where you will not feel free. So I don't know, I mean, I don't think any of us really know these things until we get properly tested. I mean, I think I've always had moral courage and physical courage up to a point. But I think the thought of leaving wife, kids into such uncertainty is, I think, you know, I think that's why people have been so moved and so touched by this. And, you know, because the fact is, I mean, we've mentioned John Sweeney before on the podcast and he wrote a book killer in the Kremlin.

6:46There have been a lot of assassinations. I mean, a lot of state -sponsored murders in different parts of the world. And so I don't know, I just think it is an incredible act of courage. It is incredible, isn't it? And it's part of a bigger theme of the sort of courage you need to be a politician in many countries in the world. I mean, if you think of, we were talking about Pakistan last week, we were talking about Imran Khan, who's now in jail and extended sentences. But remember that Billo Al -Butu, who was the Foreign Minister in Torisni, his mother was assassinated, his grandfather was executed, there were assassination attempts against Imran Khan.

7:22So there are those environments in which you really do feel that being a politician or I mean, obviously, if you go back in time, if you're an ancient Roman, the chance is pretty high that you were going to end up getting shot. But we're not, we're not used to that. And I think one of the reasons why I'm so full of contempt for the American senators in Congress from the Republican Party who did not come out against Trump is that the stakes in our society are so much lower. And what's the worst that could happen if you came out against Trump? You might, you know, lose your seat and go and get a lobbying job or something.

7:53And here we have an example of somebody who, yeah, went knowing there was a very, very good chance that he would be killed because, as you say, they had actually tried to kill him. I mean, he'd only just come out of a coma from the Russian security forces, putting this novice shock in his underwear on a plane. And when he was back in prison pretty quickly, they were subject to him to sleep deprivation again, depriving him of medical care, almost killed him a couple years ago in prison. So it's absolutely unbelievable. So why don't we talk about courage? So, you know, you and I can sit here and we can slug off Donald Trump.

8:28We can slug off Boris Johnson and Micheal Suneak and anybody we want. And although I do feel there are, there are sort of signs of, you know, really kind of anti -politics, anti -political thought and conduct in Britain at the moment. Nothing, nothing like happens in a dictatorship, like Russia. The day before Navalny was killed, I was reading a piece on, in an old foreign policy magazine by a guy called Alexi Min, M -I -N -I -A -I -L -O. I'm not sure how you pronounce that. And he founded something called Chronicles, which tries to do opinion polling in Russia. And I don't know how they do it, but they, they claim that it's a much more accurate form of polling.

9:13And he's an opposition figure. He's an activist. And so he runs this thing called Chronicles. And he wrote this really long piece about what it's like to be a figure of opposition in modern Russia. And it's very, very, very, very difficult and it's very, very, very scary. And it's kind of chilling at now. This was just written just, I think it was just for Christmas, this came out. So he's listing some of the people who've been killed, you know, journalists who've been killed, Boris Nemtsoff famously near the crime of the 2015, he mentions Vladimir Karamurtsa, who's, you know, well -known to quite a lot of people in Britain who's currently in jail.

9:46And he says, Alexey Navalny, Russia's most famous opposition leader, barely survived being poisoned by the FSB and today he's in prison. Well, of course that's now outdated. Today he's dead. And his mother, I don't know if you saw today Roy, his mother did a piece of camera outside the prison in this, or God awful part of the world, minus 26 degrees. She's not being given access to the body. And not being given access to body people believe because almost certainly it's still got toxic substances in it. I mean, it's another sort of, at least the regime is implying that they poisoned him by not allowing access to body.

10:21There's no other reason not to give access to body. I heard a review on German radio of how this has been reported in Russia. And of course, there's nothing about Navalny. The big story has been this sort of, you know, this advance that they're making in the war and the heroic soldiers who've just taken this place that they've been fighting over and very, very little about Navalny. But what they will then do is put out a statement saying that there's been a thorough investigation. And, you know, so what the three days will we do is about so as they can say there's been an investigation, and they'll give a cause of death, which goes beyond what they said on day while it was sudden death syndrome, which was announced by Peskov, by the way, Putin spokesman very, very, very soon after the death.

11:03So I think there's part of the Russian Putin establishment that once actually wants us to think they've done it and then they go out and deny it. But what it does is spread that fear. So it goes back to his point about courage. If you're an opposition figure in Russia today, does this make you more or less likely to campaign against Putin? Well, that would depend on what sort of personality you were. But then his wife, his widow Yulia, goes out. She was at the Munich Security Conference, she gets a standing evasion when she spoke on the day that his body was found, that the announced he was dead.

11:33She then did another piece to camera yesterday where she said she was going to carry on his work. She went on Twitter. I don't know what's going on there because it seems that her account was suspended today. Yeah, maybe a brief explainer on Navalny for lessons. I think people will have heard quite a lot about him, but he was a really fascinating character. So he half Ukrainian, half Russian, father was a military officer, went off to a university that's called the Patrice Lumumba universities, one of the best universities in Russia, but it was set up with a strong focus on training revolutionaries from the developing world in the 60s and 70s, became a lawyer.

12:09Joined the mainstream liberal party of the day, so he went into this party called Yabloko, which was led by Gregory Yavlinsky, who we could talk a little bit more, and then broke with him, flustered with nationalism, talked a lot about anti -immigration, and that's one of the reasons he broke with the liberal party. The liberal party in fact thought that he'd become a populist and didn't like the fact that he was attacking migrants and that Navalny was out there making comments attacking Georgians, and he was pretty ambivalent about Crimea. He didn't come out strongly against the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, and he went on these marches with far -right nationalists, so there was that phase in his life.

12:50But by 2011, he was really getting going as a very active politician and a very active politician driven by the use of the internet. I mean, he was one of the first real e -politicians, so he had this blog, which if people are interested in we can put a link up. You can read some of the English translations of the blog. Huge focus on anti -corruption, so a lot of what he did was around anti -corruption. Really smart use of video. He produced a video on Putin's Dacia, the one that you describe, actually, that you saw, which had about 120 million views, and Putin then denied that he lived in anything like that, so maybe we should get you out, testifying that he did indeed live in such a place.

13:27Well, I don't know if it was the one. It was one of the ones. People should watch, if they haven't already, they should watch the film because it is a brilliant piece of journalism. And because he, you know, very handsome guy, very very easy on the eye, very good sort of talking to camera without a script, but it was brilliant who researched, brilliantly presented. By the way, Rory, you talked about the lack of respect for Americans who sort of, you know, scared to stand up to Trump. But just before we started recording, I saw a thing on CNN, and it was an interview with the guy called Andrew Hitt, who's the ex -chairman of the Republican Party on Wisconsin, and he was being interviewed by CNN, and he basically said, he went along with this fake electors plot, and he said that he was worried that if he didn't go along with it, he was in fear of his life, because of the anger that Trump was whipping up at the time.

14:20And Trump, I don't know if he saw Trump's reaction to Navalny. I mean, Putin needless to say has said nothing, but I'll just read you Trump's reaction. The sudden death of Alexei Navalny, okay, get it? The sudden death has made me, let's talk about myself, more and more of where of what is happening in our country. It is a slow steady progression with crooked incaps, radical left politicians, prosecutors and judges, leading us down a path to destruction. Open borders, rigged elections, grossly unfair courtroom decisions are, or back into capital letters, destroying America, we are a nation in decline of failing nation, exclamation mark, MAGA 2024.

14:58This is something we've talked about before, and I think it's really important, which is that there is something Trump can exploit here. We've talked about how regimes up and down the world use law fair, use the courts as a way of going off their opponents. So, four weeks ago, we talked about how in Bangladesh, 1 .2 million members, the opposition party had tied up the courts. We talked about how in many Latin American countries, as soon as you're out of office, you're immediately prosecuted for corruption and the judges go after you. We talked about how in Pakistan, Imran Khan is currently in jail because the judges have gone after him and they went after his predecessors.

15:32And of course, Navalny, a very extreme example of this. I mean, he was 2011, they put out an arrest warrant, 2013, he was running for Moscow mayor and they sentenced him to prison, then the regime decided to let him out because they wanted to, it seems, they liked the idea of pluralism and the election and then they were horrified by how well he did. And then of course, they've put him, put him in jail again. In fact, he was due to serve an additional 19 years till 2038. Now, the problem with all of that is of course that if it becomes the norm that judges are used to go after your political opponents, that of course provides a huge opportunity for the Trumps this world when the judges go after them to say this whole thing is politically motivated, which is why I personally believe it's been a big mistake for the Democrats to put so much weight on these legal cases, particularly when there's like 97 of them.

16:21By the time there's 97 of them, most Trump voters quite understandably are going to say, this is ludicrous, how can he possibly have that number of cases against him? Yeah, but I think it's probably a bit... Yeah, Rory, you've just had one where he's been fined whatever it was, hundreds of millions of dollars because a court of law, I mean America's meant to be a country governed by the rule of law. I don't think we should be making direct comparisons with some of the countries that you talked about, least of all Russia. I absolutely agree. It's government of law, it's not anything like Russia, but it is just one of the reasons why, as you've pointed out, every time he appears in the number of these cases makes it feel to his base, as though this is politically motivated, and you can understand why it feels like that, because there's so many of these cases.

17:06You know there's a danger. You've been asked because that could be Rory, because he's a serial law breaker, and also because so much of the law in America is done state by state. So if you go through something as complicated as what happened after the election and the insurrection on the capital. So for example, I've just been mentioning Wisconsin. I don't know if there's a case going in Wisconsin, but there's one state where this guy is saying he was doing something which he knew was wrong, which he knew was not true, this fake electors plot. Now that's a crime. So surely, if you believe in the rule of law, prosecutors have to go after that.

17:41I suppose my point is that it's a bit more complicated than that. A lot of Democrats and a lot of Democrat donors have been funding these cases as a way of stopping him, and I've been to conferences in the US because I'm broadly on the Biden's, I'm I am. I'm on the Democrat side in this. So I go to a lot of meetings where the prosecutors stand up and it's shared and applauded and everyone loves the work that lawyers are doing to get Trump. I guess my point is though that it feels to me like a political mistake. They thought this was a real move of genius, which was going to guarantee the discrediting of Trump.

18:15And I think politically, actually, the results have been the opposite. It's still might though. I mean, you know, if we go back to the interview with Anthony Scaremucci when he gave his reasons why he thinks Trump is going to lose. He did say, he thinks the country will get the drip drip of these court cases. And we're talking, you know, the one that happened last week where he's been banned from running a business for three years. He's got to have this sort of supervisor overseeing all the that's going on within the Trump empire. His two sons have been banned for two years. All because he did what I think everybody always knew that Trump did was to sort of inflate his worth when it suited him and deflate his worth when it suited him.

18:51And by the way, the judgment, I don't know if you read it, but I mean, I was surprised. There was one sentence where he basically said that Trump was pathological. No, I think we both agree that it would be far better if you didn't have judges that were labeled politically. But that's the system that they have. Just to go back to Navalny, why did he take out Nemtsov because he was a leader? Why is he taking out Navalny because he was a leader? Where do leaders emerge from? Will his wife be able to to fill that gap? So I think Putin will be sitting there, not giving a damn what West, what world leaders are saying, knowing that people will move on pretty quickly because I'm afraid that's what they do.

19:29And meanwhile, people in Russia who do want to like the guy acquired from Chronicles who do want to sort of keep an opposition going, feeling I suspect more and more intimidated, more and more scared. There's nothing they can do into wait till Putin pops his clogs. It's also an interesting thing, isn't it, that the modern face of authoritarianism and populism is different from what it was in the past. So the way that Putin is doing it is by killing a few dozen people in very dramatic ways. He'll blow up an aeroplane, he'll put some amazing radioactive substance, which only security services can make into somebody's underpants or their drink.

20:06But what he's not doing, of course, is what silence doing. I mean, he's not going through mass terror, he's not rounding up a million people, he's not killing tens of thousands of people. We don't maybe talk enough about this, but it's also true with populists. I mean, Victor Orban again, in Hungary, it's a very nasty piece of work, but he's not mass jailing journalists. These regimes use different techniques now. I mean, they're more subtle, but you know, I think with Putin, for example, we have to put our hands up to this when he first came on the scene. When I mentioned John Sweeney, I've told you before about when Putin's very first visit, first press conference he ever did with Tony Blair, and John Sweeney saying, you have got no idea what you're dealing with here.

20:47And he's been proved right. I think there was a sense that people were sort of seeing the Putin and the Russia that we wanted to see. You know, maybe we should have just been taking him at face value, some of the things that he was saying and doing. Briefly, the guy in Spain is a guy, a Russian pilot, Maxim Kuzminov, who defected to the Ukrainian side, and he's been found dead in a car park in Spain. Yeah. And I think bringing together all the names of people who've been killed by Putin, reminding people as you say about Nepsov, but also Larissa Ubina, who was an investigative journalist back in 98, Yorish, Jekko Kutschichin, who was an MP, killed in 2003 with an apparent allergic reaction.

21:33And the problem that these parties have, I've been reading quite a lot by a man called Gregory Yavlinsky. Some people will have heard of him because he was a presidential candidate and was almost prime minister. And he was the big leader of this liberal party, Yablukov, and who then ended up in an argument with Navalny. And he represents another approach to Russian opposition, which is to try to hold up to these quite austere liberal values. He encourages people not to go on demonstrations because he thinks they're just going to be beaten up by the security services. And he's set out a platform trying to explain how he thinks Putin can be defeated.

22:07And the problem is when you look at it, he's saying we need 900 ,000 election observers. We need more members of our party. We need petitions with 20 million signatures. We need candidates. We need funding. Basically, he's betting the House on trying to play by the rules of a liberal democracy against the guy who's not a liberal Democrat. And he ends up looking entirely unrealistic. And you can see, in a sense, Winavalny, who was probably it's true, more populist, more nationalistic, took more risk. I was beginning to develop more momentum. And which is why he's taking them out. Just on this guy from this thing, Chronicles.

22:44And as I say, I don't know how they do his polls. But one of the findings they had, he said, according to our team's phone polls, more Russians want the state to prioritize social spending over military spending. 46 % would rather have money spent on social services in the military. 47 % empathize with people who try to dodge military service. 36 % condemn their behavior. Now, I don't know how you do those polls, but it's an interesting perspective. And also something like him, I mean, even as I was reading it, I was thinking, well, how does this cooperate? He builds himself as a critic, as an activist, as a critic of the government, as a critic of the war in Ukraine, where if you call it a war, rather than a special military operation, you can go to jail.

23:29And journalists have gone to jail for that. Yeah. The other thing I think that we've sometimes missed is we've got that Putin's Russian authoritarian regime and Xi Jinping's China is an authoritarian regime. But we're missing the extent to which they've got more closed, more repressive over the last couple of decades. That if you talk to journalists who were reporting in China 10 years ago, they were much freer. People are now much more frightened to talk to them. Again, Russia, people were much more outspoken. It's much easier to conduct proper opinion polls 10 years ago than it is today. And the final thing, there's a big picture of a lexene of only now up in I'm a Yale University at the moment teaching.

24:06And outside the classroom I was in yesterday, big picture of him because he was a fellow here at Yale in 2010. I'm very interestingly, along with the mayor of Bristol, Marvin Reese. And also a Lebanese politician, female politician who at some point I'd be interested in maybe getting them on. Maybe not so much to talk about Navalny, although Marvin became quite close to to a lexene of only, Marvin Mayor of Bristol was given the lifts by him. They spent many evenings together discussing how Navalny was going to campaign. So I think he is really mistier. And the sense that one gets is that he was just a very smart, charismatic, inspiring, funny guy.

24:47But what you said at the beginning, I think, is the most important thing. A man of complete EastJupendus courage. I mean, he essentially went to what was an almost certain martyrdom. Yeah. Now, the Munich Security Conference, we mentioned where his wife, Noido, spoke on the day that his death was announced. And I mean, Munich Security Conference is kind of interesting gathering. And I suppose this year, the main themes, I guess, there was a lot of kind of what do we do with Trump wins. There was obviously a lot about the Middle East and what is going to happen there. There was a lot about Ukraine.

25:20And there's been some interesting developments on Ukraine, not just the Russian advance. But I thought for me one of the most interesting things was the Danish government announcing that they were going to be giving all of their, I think it was all of their artillery to Ukraine. And there did seem to be a Munich, a sense of movement on this. Ursula Fondeline was talking about their perhaps the Neifer European Defense Commissioner. There's a big debate going on in Germany post Trump's speech about NATO, about whether the Germans should think about finally accepting Macron's offer for Germany as it were to come under the French nuclear umbrella.