Editor’s letter

Even though it’s never had a truly functioning democracy, Russia has produced some extraordinarily brave democrats. Take Alexei Navalny: He almost died in 2020 after Kremlin agents poisoned him with Novichok nerve agent. Yet after he recovered in a German hospital, he didn’t stay in the West but returned to his country to continue his pro-democracy work. He was immediately arrested, of course, and now, after sitting in a maximum-security prison for more than two years, is critically ill and in pain. His spokeswoman says Navalny appears to have been given a slowacting poison that is rotting his insides. Then there’s Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr., who was sentenced this week to 25 years in prison (see The world at a glance, p.9). He comes from a long line of intellectuals and dissidents: His great-grandfather was executed in one of Stalin’s purges, his grandfather survived a Soviet labor camp, and his namesake father, a TV journalist during the brief flowering of independent media in the 1990s, was an early voice warning of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian tendencies. Kara-Murza followed his father into journalism and anti-Putin activism. Like Navalny, he was poisoned with a nerve agent; one poisoning left him disabled and using a cane, the next landed him in the hospital for months. Still, he continued denouncing Putin. Last year, after the invasion of Ukraine, he gave a fiery speech to U.S. lawmakers accusing the Kremlin of war crimes—and then went home to Moscow to be arrested.

What spurs these men to return to certain doom? Are they being brave or foolhardy? The truth is, they would not necessarily be safe even outside Russia. The list of Putin critics murdered in foreign countries is long: Alexander Litvinenko, Nikolai Glushkov, Mikhail Watford, probably Boris Berezovsky, and on and on. After Navalny’s arrest he wrote to a friend. “Everything will be all right,” he said. “And even if it isn’t, we’ll have the consolation of having lived honest lives.”