The extraordinary power struggle between Vladimir Putin and Alexei Navalny

By Dilip -

Alexei Navalny was in defiant mood last Tuesday, as he waited for his inevitable sentence. He made a heart gesture for his wife, Yulia, who was sitting at the back of Moscow’s city courtroom. Navalny smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t be sad! Everything is going to be all right,” he yelled at her. She waved back. Meanwhile, a state prosecutor droned on.

Last week’s sham trial was the latest episode in an epic stand-off between two men for a nation’s future. One is the man in the dock, Russia’s foremost opposition leader, and now a global figure, likened by some to Nelson Mandela. The other is the country’s president of two decades, a former KGB colonel who appears determined to stay in power and to smash a popular revolt against him.

On the face of things, the struggle ended last week with a decisive victory for Vladimir Putin. Navalny was sentenced to two years and eight months in a penal colony. On Friday, he was in court again charged with insulting a war veteran. More criminal cases are likely, with Navalny now in effect a hostage of Putin’s authoritarian regime.

But the Kremlin has been unable to do what it wants most: to break Navalny….

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/06/face-off-the-extraordinary-power-struggle-between-vladimir-putin-and-alexei-navalny

Andrew Roth - The problem is Putin: protesters throng Russia's streets to support jailed Navalny // Russia’s courageous historic protests against Putinism

Navalny’s new YouTube video sensation: Putin’s secret palace, and “the biggest bribe in history”.

STANISLAV MARKELOV - Patriotism as a diagnosis

Allies of slain Putin critic Nemtsov allege cover-up after guilty verdict

Russian Justice: Sergei Magnitsky’s Torture and Murder in Pre-Trial Detention

Solidarity with Memorial: Russia’s most prominent civil rights group in danger

Nick Hopkins and Luke Harding - Intelligence sources vouch for credibility of Russia dossier author / Mark Sumner - Trump Was Bailed Out of Bankruptcy by Russia Crime Bosses

The destruction of society EUROZINE REVIEW

British banks handled vast sums of laundered Russian money

Lawyer For Russian Whistleblower’s Family Falls From Building One Day Before Hearing

Alexei Navalny, Russian opposition figure, unconscious in hospital

Simon Tisdall: Putin, a criminal and incompetent president, is an enemy of his own people

Book Review: Inside the Stalin Archives, by Johnathan Brent (2009) // Books from "Annals of Communism Series", Yale University Press

Review essay - What’s Left? Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 5 new books on the Russian Revolution

Book review: Midnight in the Century by Victor Serge – life in the Stalinist Soviet Union // Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge – review

Book review: - The Conscience of a Revolutionary

Alec Luhn - Gulag grave hunter unearths uncomfortable truths in Russia

100 years of the outbreak of the Russian Revolution March 8 (February 23), International Women's Day

Anil Nauriya - Indian Struggles in 1917 : On the eve of the Russian Revolution

State memory: 1917 and Russian memory politics. By MANFRED SAPPER and VOLKER WEICHSEL

The legacies of 1917 Orlando Figes & Daniel Gascon

Madhavan Palat: Utopia and Dystopia in Revolutionary Russia

The Bolshevik Heritage. By Dilip Simeon

Alexander Rabinowitch: The Bolsheviks Come to Power in Petrograd: Centennial Reflections
Marcel van der Linden: Why Leninism and Bolshevism Are Not the Same

Jairus Banaji: A Hundred Years After October Revolution, Rethinking the Origins of Stalinism

The Soviet Retreat From the Emancipative Ideas of 1917. By Arup Banerji

Mar 8, 1917: February Revolution begins in Russia

Hari Sankar Vasudevan (1952 – 2020). A tribute by Madhavan K. Palat




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