'People Have the Power' — A Navalny Campaigner on How We Can Help Get Political Prisoners Out of Putin's Dungeons.

Heidi Siegmund Cuda talks to Alexei Navalny campaigner Dmitrii Kovegin on what the West can do to help dissidents and journalists falsely imprisoned in Russia.

The makeshift altar to honour Alexei Navalny Photo: Heidi Siegmund Cuda

“The people have the power

To redeem the work of fools

Upon the meek the graces shower

It's decreed the people rule.”

—Patti Smith

On my daily walk, I see a makeshift altar on a tree. I walked on by the day before — I didn’t want to go near it. I use my walks to try to clear my head of the Sturm und Drang that comes with investigating the corrupt of heart, and I needed a momentary reprieve from grieving another lost soul. I just wanted to listen to music and stare at the clouds.

As I walked by the tree in my neighborhood park the next day, the altar had grown, there were now photos nailed to the old growth oak tree, and I knew I had to pay my respect to whomever this person was. Despite the rainstorm that drenched Los Angeles the night before, the photos were clear, the flowers intact.

As I neared the tree, I saw a Ukrainian flag at its base, and bouquets of yellow roses, white hydrangeas, and potted plants with orange and pink blossoms. Above them, nailed to the tree, were photos of Alexei Navalny; of him with his family; in the hospital after the 2020 poisoning; a photo of a mural painted of him on the night of 28 April, 2021 holding his hands in the shape of a heart, with the words ‘A Hero of a New Time.’ The St. Petersburg mural was painted from a photograph where he is sending a love-heart to his wife, Yulia, from a defendants’ cage. St. Petersburg police destroyed the mural within hours.

There’s a photo of him smiling in front of a Christmas tree with hand-scrawled words in Russian, ‘I’m not afraid and you shouldn’t…’ the words obscured by another photo. 

There’s a portrait I recognize from February 2020. It was taken at a march in memory of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, the man who would be President if he hadn’t been assassinated in front of the Kremlin five years earlier.

Navalny, too, was murdered by the Putin regime in February, in an arctic penal colony, where he was serving a 19-year sentence for having the audacity to challenge and expose the corruption of Putin and the St. Petersburg mob.

I think of the beauty of Navalny and Nemtsov — for they will always be young and beautiful — and then I think of the ugly botoxed spy, a pathological liar, made uglier by the barbarism of his regime.