Less than a week after Russian President Vladimir Putin put on an intelligent, reasonable, face for visiting American journalist Tucker Carlson, the bloodsoaked visage of a Russian boyar or vozhd appeared, with a report from Russian officials that top dissident Alexei Navalny was dead in an Arctic prison.

According to the Associated Press:

Alexei Navalny, the fiercest foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin who crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests, died in prison Friday, Russian authorities said.

Dissidents said they didn't believe it because nothing the Russian government says is to be believed.

But it doesn't help the Russian government any to report this, given the global condemnation that has followed. Joe Biden, for one, vowed "devastating consequences" for Putin in 2021 were Navalny to die in prison.

For a lot of us, there was faint hope that Navalny's high profile would keep him alive, somehow, despite the terrible conditions he was enduring in the GULag-like prison camp 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle in the dreaded Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, which one of the world's coldest places.

It didn't.

That he did die is almost unprecedented.

Not even the Soviets killed off Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn when he was the biggest thorn in their side, winning the Nobel prize for literature for his mighty GULag Archipelago as well as the rest of the body of his work.

Up until now, modern dictators have always kept the "big" dissident alive if in horrific prison conditions. They killed the little dissidents, but not the really big ones.

The South Africans, after all, never killed dissident Nelson Mandela. The Chicoms never killed Harry Wu. The Polish communist regime never killed Lech Walesa. The Czechs never killed Vaclav Havel. The Burmese tinpot junta never killed Daw Aung San Kyi. The Castroite Cubans never killed Huber Matos, although they did murder Oswaldo Paya. Perhaps they thought he was small. The broad pattern is that if a dissident is big enough, and visible enough, and important enough, they'll stuff him away in a box, but they won't kill.

Putin, who recently appears to have blown away a disloyal mercenary ally, the Wagner Group's Yevgeny Prigozhin, from an airplane in the sky over Russia, is different.

He's bold, he acts, and when he's asked questions, he just deflects and smiles. Everyone knows what he does and he seems pretty comfortable knowing that everyone knows.

He is also believed to have assassinated top dissident political rival Boris Nemtsov right there in Red Square in a 2015 gunshot assassination. Nobody behind the act was caught, though a few Chechen triggermen were arrested.

He will take out the Big Dissident.

And that creates a different kind of terrain for the world's dissidents in the world's dictatorships.

Tucker Carlson's interview with Putin was useful, so there's no need to criticize him for it, but it didn't give a complete picture of the Russian leader.

Since Putin doesn't care if anyone is upset about the political killings that go on his country (and beyond), it's disturbing to think of other innocent people in his prisons, such as poor Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal, who has been unjustly detained by Putin's henchmen.

According to the Journal:

Evan has been in Russia’s notorious Lefortovo prison since March 2023, largely cut off from the world. He spends 90% of his day in a small cell. The State Department has declared Evan wrongfully detained and President Biden has promised his family he would bring Evan home. A Russian court on Nov. 28 extended his pre-trial detention for another two months. It is unclear when he will face trial.

Is he safe? Does Putin fear Joe Biden after he just crapped out on his threat of "devastating consequences" for Putin if Navalny died in prison? Biden also said that he was "serious" about a prisoner swap and Putin told Tucker Carlson he was open to one. 

No sign of Biden on that one and Evan's still there.

I think there's a lot of reason for concern for him.

The other two I am worried about are in Venezuela, Russia's top ally, where Maria Corina Machado, the big dissident there, has just been disqualified from her presidential run and is subject to constant threats and government goon violence.

There's also a top human rights activist named Rocio San Miguel, who was snatched off the street by the Maduro dictatorship's goons and has since "disappeared," and so has her family.

This is terrible, scary, stuff in itself but now that Putin's act has lowered the bar on dictator behavior Maduro is perfectly capable of imitating him.

I don't know how any of these democracy campaigners take it. 

For years, I read Navalny's blog on Russian corruption and was astonished at his courage in writing what he did. He was eccentric, humorous, and some of his views on things wrong. He also didn't seem particularly presidential, a lot of people called him 'crazy.' After that, he was poisoned, he ended up in Germany for recovery, and then he told 60 Minutes he was going back to Russia, again, a man of incredible courage. Now Putin has done his worst and yes, he's responsible -- he didn't have to have him arrested and he certainly didn't have to stick him in Russia's worst GULag if he wanted him alive. That he ended up there pretty well offered a suggestion of what he had in store for him. Navalny's legal team said he looked healthy enough two days ago for a court appearance, so his sudden death sounds like it may have been a homicide.

Bill Browder, a former hedge fund manager who has crossed with Putin in the past and described his ordeal in his riveting book, Red Notice, watched his employee, named Sergei Magnitsky (of the Magnitsky Act) slowly get murdered in Putin's prisons.

He now describes what is likely to follow after this:

Navalny was fine yesterday. We should expect a full Magnitsky style cover-up from the Russian government in short order. I can almost predict the language they will use: “natural causes”, “no sign of violence” “unexpected death” etc https://t.co/m560kp49Qk

— Bill Browder (@Billbrowder) February 16, 2024

It's outrageous. And it's made possible by weak U.S. leadership against Putin's tyranny, which knows it has little to fear as had been when Donald Trump was president.

A couple days ago, Vladimir Putin said it was "better" for Russia with Joe Biden in the U.S. presidency.

Then the top dissident was eliminated.

Now we know why. 

Image: Twitter screen shot