Excerpt
The Successor
I was working at TV Rain and finishing this book when Alexei Navalny announced that he was returning to Russia from several months in Germany after being successfully treated for Novichok poisoning. My first thought was: “What, already?” It was clear that he would return at some point—this was Navalny, after all—but why the rush? He hadn’t fully recovered from being poisoned. What would a few months change?
I’d been writing this book for several years and had recorded an interview with Navalny a few years earlier. There was something I wanted to clarify—and then I caught myself. No, I won’t bother him. He only has a few more days of freedom. I had no doubt that Navalny would be arrested as soon as he returned.
The TV Rain channel first peaked in popularity when it broadcast live reports during the Bolotnaya Square protests in 2011–12. Three weeks before the annexation of Crimea, TV Rain was prohibited from airing on Russian cable networks for its broadcasts from Kyiv during Euromaidan. But by the time that Navalny was returning, it was already at its second peak of success. The independent TV channel, still resist- ing state ideological pressure, was rapidly growing in popularity, no longer on cable but accessible on YouTube.
On 17 January, TV Rain broadcast live coverage of Navalny’s return, showing him and his wife Yulia getting on a plane in Berlin and turn- ing on
Rick and Morty; tens of thousands of people coming to meet him at Vnukovo Airport in Moscow and then their arrest when the plane was diverted to another airport; Navalny saying he was happy to be back home and not afraid of anything at an impromptu press conference before going through border control; and a few minutes later showing him giving Yulia a quick hug before the police took him away for ever. It was the most popular broadcast in the history of TV Rain. The live coverage was watched by a record half-million concurrent viewers.
Of course, Navalny was counting on people coming out to protest his arrest. If millions had come out, Russia might have had a chance to get off its destructive path, but only about 150,000 people took to the streets across the country—far fewer than during the protests in winter 2011–12. Fear had enveloped the country. Protesters were beaten and detained, thousands of demonstrators received several days of detention, and there were soon more than one hundred criminal charges. Protesters were tracked through security cameras and then expelled from universities and fired from their jobs for “committing an immoral act”.
I had been detained before—no rallies had been authorized in Russia since the Covid era—but I’d recently had a chance to see how the system worked. In early February, my eldest daughter, Anya, was detained. She and her boyfriend had protested outside the court when Navalny’s sentence was announced. The police released her on the same day since she was a minor—she was seventeen years old—but she was registered at the police department and had to go to the district office so that the commission on juvenile affairs could consider our case. The commission wasn’t made up of police or FSB officers. It was made up of ordinary Moscow civil servants, mostly teachers and directors of neighbourhood schools. They had to punish us; otherwise, they would have broken the rules of the game and would have come under suspicion themselves. But I saw how easily they slipped into the role of inquisitors. This must have been how party trials were conducted in the Brezhnev era.
The Soviet power structure was built on a clear-cut party hierarchy. Since Stalin’s death, power in the Soviet Union had never depended on the will of just one man; it was the power of the corporation. Putin’s system of one-man rule seemed more vulnerable. Polls showed that his approval rating was continuing to decline gradually, while Navalny’s popularity was growing even though he was under arrest. When he returned to Russia, he posted on YouTube about Putin’s palace, a huge estate built for him on the Black Sea. It was viewed by more than 100 million people—still a record for non-entertainment videos on Russian YouTube. Navalny’s team found procurement documents for the palace interiors: one toilet brush had cost €700.
“Let’s look inside, and you’ll see that Vladimir Putin is mentally ill: he is obsessed with wealth and luxury,” Navalny said in the film’s narra- tion. The extravagant but tasteless palace instantly became a symbol of caste and corruption. At rallies for Navalny, people came out waving toilet brushes.
It wasn’t just Navalny. The public atmosphere was reminiscent of the period nine years before when the Bolotnaya Square protests were broken up. Repression was growing, but it didn’t produce love for the regime. On the contrary, discontent was growing. I could see it myself. The TV Rain channel was growing increasingly popular, and the other anchors and I were recognized on the streets more frequently and thanked for our work.
And so I sat in the district office, watching the members of the juvenile affairs commission zealously denounce my daughter and me as alienated, unworthy members of society—they apparently didn’t recognize me—and thinking that Putin’s power might be stronger than I’d thought. Yes, the corporate rule of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been replaced by the tyranny of one-man rule, but it still relied on a vast army of clerks and bureaucrats who enthusiastically carried out the will of the government.
After Navalny’s return and arrest, it quickly became clear that things would never be the same again. In the past the authorities hadn’t felt the need to justify their persecution of dissidents, but now they took another step. In the spring they simply outlawed all Navalny’s support- ers. The court declared that his headquarters throughout the country were extremist, and the parliament passed a special law banning anyone who had publicly supported or sympathized with Navalny over the past few years. A social media post was enough to break the law. The gov- ernment now deemed it “association with the activities of an extremist organization”.
At the snap of a finger, the government crushed a peaceful politi- cal organization and deprived tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of Russian citizens of their civil rights—simply for a like on Facebook. The zeal to destroy the entire sphere of lawful political expression—any dissent against the regime—was breathtaking. It was swift, brazen—a blatant misuse of power. And journalists were next in line.
Previously, the label “foreign agent”—someone who is paid by or under the influence of a foreign government, i.e. an enemy of Russia—had been applied to non-profit organizations. Now it was being applied to the press. Putin began his reign in Russia with the arrest of media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky, and censorship had increased over the twenty-odd years he had been in power. Now it had reached a new height.
Meduza, the most popular independent online news media outlet in Russia, had been operating out of Latvia since 2014 when the first harsh wave of censorship hit the Russian press during Euromaidan and the annexation of Crimea. In late April, it was declared a foreign agent. TV Rain was named a foreign agent in August.
But that wasn’t all. The Kremlin got personal: it began to label indi- vidual journalists as foreign agents—journalists like me, who was put on the list in December 2022. I knew almost all of them personally, and I had worked with many of them for years in the same newsrooms. Now they were officially recognized as second-class citizens. They had to put humiliating disclaimers under their posts on social networks: “This material has been created, disseminated and/or sent by foreign agent Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, who is registered as a foreign agent, or concerns the activities of foreign agent Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, who is registered as a foreign agent.” They also were required to submit reports to the state on all their spending. It was outrageous. I suppressed a sharp pang of anger and, like everyone else, realized that this did not bode well for us journalists.
It still wasn’t clear that a war was imminent, but since the beginning of the fall, I was quite aware that the finale was near: soon my usual life would be over, and I would no longer be able to continue working as I had done for more than twenty years under Putin. Nor would my colleagues.
