“Everything will be alright. And even if it isn’t, we’ll have the consolation of having lived honest lives.” –Alexei Navalny in note smuggled from prison to Yevgenia Albats in April 2021
Russian dissident Alexei Navalny must have known he was a dead man when he boarded a flight back to Russia in January 2021. In August 2020, he’d been poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent and medically evacuated to Berlin, where he miraculously survived. Navalny was the most prominent opponent of the Putin regime, an anti-corruption activist and politician who had organized anti-government protests and boasted millions of YouTube followers. He’d been arrested and jailed on fabricated charges before, and upon returning to Russia was promptly imprisoned again. He went missing in December 2023 for several weeks, reappearing in the brutal “Polar Wolf” penal colony in the Arctic Circle.
On February 16, Navalny suddenly fell unconscious after a walk and died. He was only 47 years old, and his family reported that he’d been as healthy as he could be under the circumstances. With his death, the opposition movement in Russia has been beheaded, as Putin surely intended. He also joins a growing list of dissidents murdered for speaking out against the regime. In 2015, almost exactly nine years ago, dissident politician Boris Nemtsov was shot to death within sight of the Kremlin. Nemtsov was an Orthodox Christian, and his murder sparked fear amongst Russia’s Christians.
Putin’s use of the Russian Orthodox Church as a potent repository of cultural identity has won him the loyalty of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which has a longstanding tradition of being coopted by and cooperating with the state—but he is a staunch opponent of religious liberty for any non-Orthodox Christians, especially evangelicals. Inconveniently for those who weirdly wish to view Putin as a defender of Christianity, many of the dissidents he persecutes are Christian. Indeed, Navalny spoke of his own Christianity in the closing statement of his 2021 trial, explaining that his beliefs are at the heart of his political commitments—comments which, the Moscow Times noted at the time, were sure to irritate his many secular admirers.
“If you want, I’ll talk to you about God and salvation,” Navalny told the judge. “I’ll turn up the volume of heartbreak to the maximum, so to speak. The fact is that I am a Christian, which usually rather sets me up as an example for constant ridicule in the Anti-Corruption Foundation, because mostly our people are atheists, and I was once quite a militant atheist myself.” Navalny’s courtroom speech, which detailed how his Christian beliefs informed his actions, unsurprisingly received little coverage in the West—but in it, Navalny spoke in the tradition of great Christian dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in the gulag himself:
But now I am a believer, and that helps me a lot in my activities, because everything becomes much, much easier. I think about things less. There are fewer dilemmas in my life, because there is a book in which, in general, it is more or less clearly written what action to take in every situation. It’s not always easy to follow this book, of course, but I am actually trying. And so, as I said, it’s easier for me, probably, than for many others, to engage in politics … [Quoting from the Sermon on the Mount]: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied. I’ve always thought that this particular commandment is more or less an instruction to activity. And so, while certainly not really enjoying the place where I am, I have no regrets about coming back, 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 did not betray the commandment.
Navalny was not the only persecuted Russian to use a courtroom appearance to detail the Christian foundation of his dissidence. In December 2019, the student activist and blogger Yegor Zhukov, dubbed “Moscow’s New Face of Dissent” for his YouTube videos, was tried for “inciting extremism” after participating in a wave of political protests. On December 4, Zhukov delivered a powerful speech, rebutting the Putin regime’s claim to being the “last defender” of “the institution of the family” by highlighting the dire state of the Russian family; the widespread alcoholism, suicide, and despair; and top-down atomization deliberately facilitated by the state.
Christianity, he stated, is the antithesis of all this, “based on the story of a man who has decided to put the suffering of the whole world on his shoulders, the story of a man who has taken responsibility in the greatest possible sense of the word” and who gave us the command to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’—this is the main phrase of the Christian religion.” Russia, Zhukov said, has “become a nation that has forgotten how to love.” The speech attracted a lot of attention, and the lightness of his sentence—three years probation—was likely due to his public support. Zhukov began hosting at the Echo of Moscow radio station, interviewing dissident figures including Navalny—but on August 30, 2020, Zhukov was brutally beaten by two men and taken to the hospital.
Since then, Zhukov seems to have vanished, with no known public appearances and silent social media networks. It makes his concluding remarks five years ago seem eerie:
The only traditional value that the current Russian state truly honors and strengthens is autocracy. Autocracy that tries to break the life of anyone who sincerely wishes the best for their homeland, who doesn’t hesitate to love and take responsibility. As a result, the citizens of our long-suffering country had to learn that no good deed goes unpunished, that the authorities are always right simply because they’re the authorities, that happiness here may be possible—but not for them. Having learned that, they began to gradually disappear.
There are many other examples. On July 18, 2021, Pastor Stanislav Moskvitin, who pastors a member church of the Russia Council of Christian Evangelical Churches, was arrested on allegations of “brainwashing” and running a “cult” (a designation leveled by the Russian Orthodox Church against Protestants who proselytize). He was sentenced to one and a half years in a penal colony on March 12, 2023, and the Ministry of Justice stated that his church should be liquidated. Jehovah’s Witnesses are the subject of frequent home raids (over 1,200 recorded) and imprisonment; one report noted that: “Multiple evangelical Protestant groups have been persecuted with Protestant Christians often being fined for ‘illegal missionary activity.’” The charges, of course, are often worded to make persecution appear to be legitimate prosecution.
Despite all this, Vladimir Putin has gained fans in the West who see him as a defender of Christianity. It has been utterly bizarre to watch this unfold, not least because Putin is following the oldest propaganda trick in the book: portraying himself as a defender of traditional values against Western decadence in order to deflect criticism from an oppressive regime maintained by murder, censorship, mass arrests, a rigged judiciary, and faux elections. As I’ve written before, Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, who utilized rape, death squads, and torture to control his subjects, famously condemned the LGBT movement at the UN in defence of “traditional values.” Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi vocally opposed homosexuality at the African Union while running covert rape rooms and forced abortion chambers. Dozens of other examples could be cited.
Indeed, Chinese Communist leader Xi Jinping is doing almost precisely the same thing as Putin in cracking down on the LGBT movement and censoring certain films, citing a defence of traditional Chinese values and a need to combat Western influence. Jinping also presides over the mass persecution of Christians, the murder of dissidents, and a genocide against Uyghur Muslims. In North Korea, where LGBT lifestyles are presented by state media as a Western corruption, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un went so far as to ban mullet hairstyles and skinny jeans with those who repeatedly violate fashion laws sent to the labour camps. All of these leaders see “traditional values” as an identitarian and political issue rather than one of biblical piety or religion—Putin very much included, as I discovered on a 2018 research trip to Russia to examine the alleged resurgence of Orthodoxy.
Putin’s propaganda has been so successful that at least one large Christian Canadian family decided to move to Russia to escape Western decadence. “Canada’s not the same country it used to be,” the father explained to a Russian interviewer. “We didn’t feel safe in the future for our children anymore; there’s a lot of left-wing ideology, LGBTQ, trans, a lot of things we don’t agree with that they teach. We wanted to get away from that for our children … Russia also has the strength to stand up against Western pressures. I think it’ll stand on its own and keep that stuff away for many, many years.” Now, it has been reported that they regret that decision—their bank accounts have been frozen, and the wife noted that: “I’m very disappointed in this country at this point. I’m ready to jump on a plane and get out of here.”
I agree with everything that the Canadian father said about Canada and the LGBT movement—much of my writing focuses on the ongoing transformation of Western civilization by the sexual revolution, as well as our exporting of that decadence abroad. I also recognize that much of what I write about Western leaders would get me censored or even jailed if I wrote it about a dictator like Putin while residing in his country. Those who find jackboot totalitarianism preferable to Western decadence would do well to consider that, for the moment at least, criticism and dissent is only still possible in one system. Indeed, Tucker Carlson’s claim that the stocked shelves of a Moscow grocery store “radicalized” him gets even weirder when you consider that Putin’s Russia is guilty of being precisely the country he claims America to be. As I write this, Russians merely mourning Navalny’s death are being arrested by security forces.
Despite what Putin propagandists and the progressive pundits who do so much to enable them say, we do not face a binary choice between defending a bloody dictatorship or Western moral bankruptcy. It is very possible to condemn both, and to defend a different, much narrower way. It is the responsibility of Christians to refrain from calling evil good and good evil, whether it is the transgender mutilation of children in the West or the murder of dissidents in the East. The man who rules Russia defends what he believes will strengthen his regime; the man murdered in an Arctic gulag this month was willing to die for his principles, which were fueled by his Christian beliefs. Surely if we must choose a side in this great geopolitical and moral drama, Russia’s Christian dissidents have earned our support.
Russia’s Christian Dissidents
Alexei Navalny speaks at a rally, 2018 / Shutterstock
“Everything will be alright. And even if it isn’t, we’ll have the consolation of having lived honest lives.” –Alexei Navalny in note smuggled from prison to Yevgenia Albats in April 2021
Russian dissident Alexei Navalny must have known he was a dead man when he boarded a flight back to Russia in January 2021. In August 2020, he’d been poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent and medically evacuated to Berlin, where he miraculously survived. Navalny was the most prominent opponent of the Putin regime, an anti-corruption activist and politician who had organized anti-government protests and boasted millions of YouTube followers. He’d been arrested and jailed on fabricated charges before, and upon returning to Russia was promptly imprisoned again. He went missing in December 2023 for several weeks, reappearing in the brutal “Polar Wolf” penal colony in the Arctic Circle.
On February 16, Navalny suddenly fell unconscious after a walk and died. He was only 47 years old, and his family reported that he’d been as healthy as he could be under the circumstances. With his death, the opposition movement in Russia has been beheaded, as Putin surely intended. He also joins a growing list of dissidents murdered for speaking out against the regime. In 2015, almost exactly nine years ago, dissident politician Boris Nemtsov was shot to death within sight of the Kremlin. Nemtsov was an Orthodox Christian, and his murder sparked fear amongst Russia’s Christians.
Putin’s use of the Russian Orthodox Church as a potent repository of cultural identity has won him the loyalty of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which has a longstanding tradition of being coopted by and cooperating with the state—but he is a staunch opponent of religious liberty for any non-Orthodox Christians, especially evangelicals. Inconveniently for those who weirdly wish to view Putin as a defender of Christianity, many of the dissidents he persecutes are Christian. Indeed, Navalny spoke of his own Christianity in the closing statement of his 2021 trial, explaining that his beliefs are at the heart of his political commitments—comments which, the Moscow Times noted at the time, were sure to irritate his many secular admirers.
“If you want, I’ll talk to you about God and salvation,” Navalny told the judge. “I’ll turn up the volume of heartbreak to the maximum, so to speak. The fact is that I am a Christian, which usually rather sets me up as an example for constant ridicule in the Anti-Corruption Foundation, because mostly our people are atheists, and I was once quite a militant atheist myself.” Navalny’s courtroom speech, which detailed how his Christian beliefs informed his actions, unsurprisingly received little coverage in the West—but in it, Navalny spoke in the tradition of great Christian dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in the gulag himself:
Navalny was not the only persecuted Russian to use a courtroom appearance to detail the Christian foundation of his dissidence. In December 2019, the student activist and blogger Yegor Zhukov, dubbed “Moscow’s New Face of Dissent” for his YouTube videos, was tried for “inciting extremism” after participating in a wave of political protests. On December 4, Zhukov delivered a powerful speech, rebutting the Putin regime’s claim to being the “last defender” of “the institution of the family” by highlighting the dire state of the Russian family; the widespread alcoholism, suicide, and despair; and top-down atomization deliberately facilitated by the state.
Christianity, he stated, is the antithesis of all this, “based on the story of a man who has decided to put the suffering of the whole world on his shoulders, the story of a man who has taken responsibility in the greatest possible sense of the word” and who gave us the command to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’—this is the main phrase of the Christian religion.” Russia, Zhukov said, has “become a nation that has forgotten how to love.” The speech attracted a lot of attention, and the lightness of his sentence—three years probation—was likely due to his public support. Zhukov began hosting at the Echo of Moscow radio station, interviewing dissident figures including Navalny—but on August 30, 2020, Zhukov was brutally beaten by two men and taken to the hospital.
Since then, Zhukov seems to have vanished, with no known public appearances and silent social media networks. It makes his concluding remarks five years ago seem eerie:
There are many other examples. On July 18, 2021, Pastor Stanislav Moskvitin, who pastors a member church of the Russia Council of Christian Evangelical Churches, was arrested on allegations of “brainwashing” and running a “cult” (a designation leveled by the Russian Orthodox Church against Protestants who proselytize). He was sentenced to one and a half years in a penal colony on March 12, 2023, and the Ministry of Justice stated that his church should be liquidated. Jehovah’s Witnesses are the subject of frequent home raids (over 1,200 recorded) and imprisonment; one report noted that: “Multiple evangelical Protestant groups have been persecuted with Protestant Christians often being fined for ‘illegal missionary activity.’” The charges, of course, are often worded to make persecution appear to be legitimate prosecution.
Despite all this, Vladimir Putin has gained fans in the West who see him as a defender of Christianity. It has been utterly bizarre to watch this unfold, not least because Putin is following the oldest propaganda trick in the book: portraying himself as a defender of traditional values against Western decadence in order to deflect criticism from an oppressive regime maintained by murder, censorship, mass arrests, a rigged judiciary, and faux elections. As I’ve written before, Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, who utilized rape, death squads, and torture to control his subjects, famously condemned the LGBT movement at the UN in defence of “traditional values.” Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi vocally opposed homosexuality at the African Union while running covert rape rooms and forced abortion chambers. Dozens of other examples could be cited.
Indeed, Chinese Communist leader Xi Jinping is doing almost precisely the same thing as Putin in cracking down on the LGBT movement and censoring certain films, citing a defence of traditional Chinese values and a need to combat Western influence. Jinping also presides over the mass persecution of Christians, the murder of dissidents, and a genocide against Uyghur Muslims. In North Korea, where LGBT lifestyles are presented by state media as a Western corruption, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un went so far as to ban mullet hairstyles and skinny jeans with those who repeatedly violate fashion laws sent to the labour camps. All of these leaders see “traditional values” as an identitarian and political issue rather than one of biblical piety or religion—Putin very much included, as I discovered on a 2018 research trip to Russia to examine the alleged resurgence of Orthodoxy.
Putin’s propaganda has been so successful that at least one large Christian Canadian family decided to move to Russia to escape Western decadence. “Canada’s not the same country it used to be,” the father explained to a Russian interviewer. “We didn’t feel safe in the future for our children anymore; there’s a lot of left-wing ideology, LGBTQ, trans, a lot of things we don’t agree with that they teach. We wanted to get away from that for our children … Russia also has the strength to stand up against Western pressures. I think it’ll stand on its own and keep that stuff away for many, many years.” Now, it has been reported that they regret that decision—their bank accounts have been frozen, and the wife noted that: “I’m very disappointed in this country at this point. I’m ready to jump on a plane and get out of here.”
I agree with everything that the Canadian father said about Canada and the LGBT movement—much of my writing focuses on the ongoing transformation of Western civilization by the sexual revolution, as well as our exporting of that decadence abroad. I also recognize that much of what I write about Western leaders would get me censored or even jailed if I wrote it about a dictator like Putin while residing in his country. Those who find jackboot totalitarianism preferable to Western decadence would do well to consider that, for the moment at least, criticism and dissent is only still possible in one system. Indeed, Tucker Carlson’s claim that the stocked shelves of a Moscow grocery store “radicalized” him gets even weirder when you consider that Putin’s Russia is guilty of being precisely the country he claims America to be. As I write this, Russians merely mourning Navalny’s death are being arrested by security forces.
Despite what Putin propagandists and the progressive pundits who do so much to enable them say, we do not face a binary choice between defending a bloody dictatorship or Western moral bankruptcy. It is very possible to condemn both, and to defend a different, much narrower way. It is the responsibility of Christians to refrain from calling evil good and good evil, whether it is the transgender mutilation of children in the West or the murder of dissidents in the East. The man who rules Russia defends what he believes will strengthen his regime; the man murdered in an Arctic gulag this month was willing to die for his principles, which were fueled by his Christian beliefs. Surely if we must choose a side in this great geopolitical and moral drama, Russia’s Christian dissidents have earned our support.
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