Worshippers at Glencarse church in the Perthshire hills are not used to hearing the words of a Russian dissident read to them from the pulpit. But Sunday was different. In the aftermath of Alexei Navalny’s murder in a Russian penal colony, his thoughts on what it takes to challenge tyranny and oppression became the running theme of that day’s service.
They were relayed to the congregation by Baroness Kinnaird, herself half-Russian, who said that in 2021 Navalny had revealed the extent of his Christian beliefs. He promised to “turn up the volume of heartbreak to the maximum,” and talk about “God and salvation”. He said it was not always easy to follow the scriptures, “but I am actually trying”.
What came across from his words was an interpretation of the Bible that should cause anyone who shares the world’s horror at Vladimir Putin’s ruthless regime to stop and think. Forgiveness was not its theme. Navalny quoted the Sermon on the Mount about those “who hunger and thirst after righteousness”, and suggested it was a call to action.
“I’ve always thought this particular commandment is more or less an instruction to activity,” he said. “And so, while certainly not really enjoying the place where I am, I have no regrets about coming back to Russia or about what I’m doing. It’s fine, because I did the right thing. On the contrary, I feel a real kind of satisfaction. Because at some difficult moment I did as required by the instructions, and I did not betray the commandment.”
That should resonate with anyone who admires Navalny’s courage — whatever their beliefs. Scotland, these days, is not considered an openly religious country, but when a man voluntarily returns to his country as a gesture of defiance against a dictator whose only creed appears to be to eliminate his opponents, that should transcend the normal boundaries of faith, and prompt thoughts about how the West should observe Navalny’s “instruction to activity.”
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The most obvious way is to show solidarity with Putin’s most vigorous opponent, and express open disgust, not just at the manner of his killing but at the profoundly unchristian way in which his body was withheld for days from his family, presumably to give the authorities time to tamper with the medical evidence pointing to how he died. Navalny’s mother accuses prison officials of “abuse of a corpse”; his widow Yulia Navalnaya says Putin was personally responsible.
Scotland’s first minister, Humza Yousaf, agrees. “There should be no equivocation about it, Putin should be held accountable for the death of Alexei Navalny,” he said. “Alexei demonstrated a colossal amount of courage in standing up to the Putin regime despite the torture he knew he would endure.”
If, as most commentators believe, killing Navalny was a sign of weakness rather than strength from the Russian president, then it is important for the world to exploit that weakness, and to lose no opportunity of pointing to its significance, highlighting the support Navalny won from ordinary Russians — however dangerous it is even to lay flowers in his memory.
Thus, when the former president, Dmitry Medvedev, sneers at Navalnaya, and says she has been “waiting for this event”, we should express our contempt for him, and echo her dismissal of Medvedev as “a nobody”. She said: “Write about Putin’s murder of Alexei. Write every day. As long as you have the energy.”
The second is to support Ukraine. As that country enters its third year of war, holding the front line against Putin’s aggression, we should remember that Ukrainian soldiers are defending, not just their own nation, but the West’s common values of freedom, national integrity and the security of every Nato country. When I was there last year, the one message I was given, time and again was: “Please do not forget us.” Sadly, as the war drags on, we are in danger of doing just that.
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There is another reason for remembering Navalny. He stood for the Russia of civilised values, the literary heritage of Tolstoy and Turgenev, Chekhov and Pushkin, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn — a heritage that has been submerged by Putin’s gangster economy and his corrupt regime. Who could have imagined Navalny would die in the kind of prison Solzhenitsyn once so graphically described in The Gulag Archipelago?
During the war, Britain and Russia stood as allies against another kind of tyranny — that of Nazi Germany. In a churchyard at Errol, just a couple of miles from Glencarse, there is a monument to that alliance. A stone carved from a quarry in northwest Russia, and brought to Scotland from St Petersburg in 2020, commemorates a group of Russian pilots, who trained at Errol in 1943, in defence of both countries.
At Fearnan, on the shores of Loch Tay, there is another monument, to a Russian crew from the same group, killed when their plane crashed near the village; their sacrifice is remembered in a ceremony by local people every year.
The more Putin threatens to divide world opinion, the more important it becomes to remember this kind of legacy. Navalny himself was driven by it, but also by his revulsion at those who had replaced it with an alien culture. “I really hate the people in power,” he once said. “I hate them with every fibre of my being. That is what drives me in almost everything I do.”
We do not need to share that hatred. But we should never forget the man who felt it. There should, perhaps, be a Navalny day on February 16 every year, to mark the day he was killed. It would be our way of remembering his call to action. Maybe it should start in Scotland.
