Masha Gessen writes:

For years I have been content to be conflicted about Alexey Navalny. On the one hand, I thought he was an extraordinarily brave, inventive, and committed opponent of Vladimir Putin’s regime. On the other hand, he had allied himself with ultranationalists and had expressed views that I found extremely objectionable and potentially dangerous. Over the years, I’ve had a couple of arguments with Navalny and a few with my friends whose support for him flummoxed me—a mentor of his who is Jewish, a tireless campaign volunteer who is Armenian—but I felt I could respect him and disagree with him at the same time. Nationalist leaders have, historically, often played key roles in building democracies. And it’s not as if I had to decide whether to vote for Navalny.

Now Navalny is in jail, facing years behind bars. (His current sentence of two years and eight months is likely just the beginning.) He has survived more than one Kremlin-backed assassination attempt, and people close to him fear that he will now be killed in prison. The Kremlin, which for years banned his name from the airwaves, has accused him of staging his own near-death and unleashed a propaganda offensive against him, deploying, among others, the accusation that he is a far-right ethno-nationalist. In the English-language press, the socialist magazine Jacobin published an article branding Navalny an “anti-immigrant” nationalist who cannot be trusted; the British journalist Anatol Lieven, who covered Eastern Europe in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, has warned against idealizing Navalny; and the N.Y.U. professor Eliot Borenstein, one of American academia’s most prolific commentators on contemporary Russia, wrote on Facebook, “He’s not Nelson Mandela. He’s Aung San Suu Kyi.”

On the other hand, several academics, politicians, and policy experts have nominated Navalny for the Nobel Peace Prize—an initiative that now includes Lech Walesa, the former Polish President and leader of the Solidarity trade-union movement, who received the prize in 1983. The effort was launched last September by Alexander Etkind, a Russian exile, professor at the European University in Florence, and, in my opinion, the single most insightful scholar of contemporary Russian culture and politics. Etkind is Jewish. A nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize is not something one undertakes while holding one’s nose. I called Etkind and other prominent and decidedly anti-nationalist Navalny supporters to learn why they didn’t seem conflicted about him. I learned a few things about Navalny’s personal and political evolution and also about the workings of the Kremlin propaganda machine. I also realized that I should have undertaken this research sooner. [Continue reading…]