Radio War Nerd EP #428 — Navalny and Limonov
Recorded: February 20, 2024
We look back at the life, politics & death of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, and the many ways he intersected with the radical writer and opposition leader Edward Limonov.
Texts cited:
-"My Fear and Loathing" by Alexei Navalny, August 11, 2023
-"ANALYSIS: Is Jailed Alexei Navalny Really Writing All of His Public Messages?" Kyiv Post, August 16, 2023
-"Journalists, analysts, and opposition figures respond to Alexey Navalny’s manifesto on the wicked 1990s and failure of Russia’s democrats", Meduza, August 15, 2023
-"'It wasn’t written by Navalny!’ Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny responds to those skeptical he writes his own posts" Meduza, August 29, 2023
-His Butler's Story, Edward Limonov
*IMAGES:
*2006: (left to right) Limonov, Garry Kasparov, ex-PM Mikhail Kasyanov, leaders of the Other Russia anti-Putin movement
*2007: Navalny (right) with National-Bolsheviks member & author Zakhar Prilepin (left) and Yabloko's Sergei Gulyaev (left of Navalny) announcing NAROD's "national-democratic ideology"
*Navalny NAROD video, self-described as "accredited nationalist" the video ends with the slogan: "Think about the future. Become a nationalist!"
*Navalny after fight with heckler outside Club Gogol in central Moscow, 2007
*The heckler that Navalny shot and yelled racist pejoratives at (some say the heckler was related to an FSB agent; the heckler dropped all charges against Navalny so his identity was never known)
*Navalny arrested and detained after fight
*2008: Navalny (far right) with extreme-right Russian March umbrella group. left to right: Andrei Savalyev of Great Russia; Konstantin Krylov of Russian Social Movement; Alexander Belov (left of Navalny), leader of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI); and Navalny (NAROD).
*2011: Limonov and Boris Nemtsov, two main leaders of anti-Putin opposition, months before it explodes and Navalny becomes its new leader
*2012: Limonov goes after Navalny
*2017: Limonov's Other Russia party flyer mocking Navalny: "Protesting with Navalny is like sex without an orgasm! You wanna play with revolution? Play with the NatsBols — with us everything is authentic! Yachts-villas-wineries and every sort of consumerist bullshit — the result not of corruption [as Navalny claims], but of the criminal privatization in the 1990s. They stole everything before you were even born!...Does Lyosha Navalny bother talking about this? Lyosha Navalny will lead you around for the next 40 years from one city square to the next, until you'll wanna vomit from the thought of yet another protest at another city square..."
*from one of Navalny's last, and his most controversial letters, August 2023:
Total time: 1:45:04
Direct link to this episode's mp3 here
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Comments (46)
I’ve revisited this like 5 times, great episode. It pointed toward some sources for my capstone thesis on the NBP - and as of a few days ago, I found out it got me into grad school! Thanks RWN :)
congratulations!
I went back to hear the Gettleman on Africa ep. 100. Whoa. Vapid and self important.
Holy shit— I just realized— is that the same Jeffrey Gettleman who just wrote the insanely fabricated “Screams without Words” Israel propaganda piece???!!! 🤯
Hi guys, not trying to be argumentative but as a reader of John Helmer’s Dances with Bears, I thought Navalny was diagnosed at Charité in Berlin as heavily dependent on benzodiazepines and lithium, which led to his collapse. Also, isn’t Novichok supposed to be lethal? I’d love your comment on this.
Waited almost 70 minutes to hear the critiques of this scratched liberal.
Dolan and Ames have mentioned Limonov many times before, but this is my first time seeing a picture of him. Am I the only one who thinks he looks like he's trying to look like Trotsky? Or am I just seeing things?
Waited almost 70 minutes to hear the critiques of this scratched liberal.
If mark was a real one, he’d podcast til he couldn’t talk, then start podcasting in morse code
I'm looking for a source on the "Jews make up 37% of 'antisemitic' arrests in Germany" claim. I believe it but can't find much on first search.
Yes! The nature of the search terms make it very difficult to find
any recommendations for Limonov books/this time period in Russia in general?
Emmanuel Carrere’s biography Limonov is a good start.
Mark's friend Yasha Levine was at that meeting where Navalny shot the heckler, I think... Yasha gave a great description of it in one of his podcasts... I've found a link to it - it's in a preview of the full podcast: https://yasha.substack.com/p/episode-6-navalny-the-kremlin-and-0a2
Yasha wasn't at that debate at Gogol, but like me he remembers the incident well. It was the first time both of us had heard of Navalny, but we hadn't put the two together until after Navalny got big in the 2011/12 protests and we started looking into the story. The ep he did a few years ago was very good.
If a RWN intro is lacking in Dolan Body Horror I'll take that as code that you are under duress 🚨
I want the Decrepit Dolan super cut, just pure misery.
This is premium content
I really knew nothing about him except that he was lauded by people who would have loathed him had he actually come to power. This helped me get to know who he was past the symbol, thank you!
I will take your word for it that navalny was "courageous" because the only other things I know about him are his bigotry towards muslims and his ties to NED I could just be making the mistake of conflating courage with moral good
The only other time I heard of sudden death syndrome for an adult was a dude playing Wiifit who just dropped dead But again he was 47 in russia, in a prison camp, so chances were probably high of stroking out (I am assuming the Novichok bullshit was bullshit because why the fuck would you poison a guy and then send him to Berlin for medical treatment)
My opinion is that the original poisoning might’ve been some nerve agent but not Novichok. The previous cases of its use make it sound far too lethal to “wound” you. There was a Russian business man killed by it and when his secretary came in only brief contact with a trace of the stuff it killed her too. It all comes down to dosage so I suppose Navalny could’ve gotten a very very weak exposure, but for a couple years it seemed like Novichok was being blamed for every time a politically dissenting Russian experienced unexpected illness.
Great episode!!!
Could y'all speak to this insane line from Israel defenders that "95%" or "the vast majority of Jews around the world are Zionists, therefore being anti-Zionist is anti-Semitic." Not so much to refute it, it's an insane logic, but more to speak to its origins.
Exceptional, thank you.
Great analysis, lots of details I haven’t seen in other takes. I want to push back on something though; I wouldn’t use the term ‘CIA agent’ to describe Navalny. However he is a product of western interference and influence. He was active with DA! (Democratic Alternative) which were bankrolled by the NED. Just because hes complex and expressed some regrets and blunt realities from prison, hes not then off the hook as a western backed regime change agent. I think John was right to ask what spurred Navalnys change of heart, perhaps it was prison. But this question is more an exploration of his personality and motives not his direct links to US regime change operations which cannot and should not be trivialized. DA!s NED links evidence here: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06MOSCOW12709_a.html His work with DA! is even mentioned in WIKI.
Putin was put into power by the US government's two main Russian assets in the 1990s: Anatoly Chubais (who brought Putin into the Kremlin in 1996 and got him the chief of FSB job), and Boris Yeltsin (who appointed him PM and then president). So you could say Putin owed his rise to the presidency to US power/money, and a lot of people initially dismissed him as just another in a line of neoliberal lackeys.
My small addition to a very helpful episode- if my friend B's storage room is any indication, a basket weaving operation could be very profitable. They are used by almost every mail order gift company to arrange, display, and ship their products. I don't get many such baskets, but they are a "go to" solution for what to send to mark such occasions as funerals, births, etc.
That’s a good point… comment worthwhile reading
Perfect classic RWN. Knowledge and storytelling regarding Russia is, as always, unmatched
This did feel like a prime, 2016 era episode. In a good way
I remember showing people the extremely racist and anti semitic comments of navalny, only to be called a “Putin simp”. Replacing one problem with a worse one, classic American geopolitics.
Beautiful episode
German general in charge of special operations KSK was fired over a decade ago for questioning the utility of Israel’s bombing campaign in Palestinian areas. There will be no tolerance of anything that could be spun as anti Israel in Germany…
Then again, there is something brewing in Germany. Comments on the website of the Suddeutsche Zeitung are tending against Israel. And even though that’s a left liberal newspaper, I’ve never seen that tendency among German left-liberals before
Long shot, but does anyone have a hardback copy of It’s me, Eddie they’d be willing to part with for (much) less than $500?
That's quite an amazing statistic about arrests in Germany. But I think it's worse than just a recent threat to diaspora Jews. What if that was a selling point for the creation of the state of Israel in the first place? I don't think I'm the first to say that, but is it a reasonable possibility?
Russia is not a monolith, especially with what Navalny was doing he made enemies outside of the Kremlin. I don't think it came top down. I think someone took an 'idiot' executive decision to poison him. Many of the governor's are ex-fsb....
Hold up, your newspaper was publishing nazbols? Are we just gonna ignore that?
Do Americans just support any and all Russian nationalists because they're the most likely to start a civil war
The sick men of Europe
You forgot Larry Summers’s dear friend Jeffrey Epstein!
I knew an episode was imminent
I think the Democrats' support of Israel is also generational thing. All the older, liberal and even left leaning members of my family (60+ years) barely know what's happening in Israel, but if they do have an opinion, they're basically Pro-Israel. This could purely anecdotal, but these same people are very apolitical. But they basically give the blank stare look when your describe what Israel is doing. It's just not computing in their heads, and that seems common for those from that generation, regardless of politics.
Deeply ingrained in the 40+ crowd. They don’t know much about foreign policy but they ain’t budging.
This is gonna be a good one..... What do Ames and the war nerd think of the work of John Helmer?