A call written shortly before death: Comrades publish Navalny's last message

An invitation written shortly before death
Colleagues publish Navalny's last message

March 14, 2024, 5:56 pm

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Shortly before his death, Alexei Navalny wrote an article about the upcoming presidential election in Russia. Little did he know that it would be his last article. He asks his fellow campaigners to release the speech just before the vote. Now is the time for that.

The team of opposition activist Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian prison in mid-February, has published an essay the politician allegedly wrote shortly before his death. By The text is now published Navalny writes about how Russians should vote in the upcoming presidential election. According to Navalny's website, the politician asked his colleagues to release this record shortly before the upcoming referendum from 15th to 17th.

In the article, Navalny calls on his supporters to install the “Photon-2024” app developed by his colleagues on their smartphones and come to the polls on March 17 at 12 noon. Russians should vote for any candidate – except Vladimir Putin. The app is a sort of random generator that helps the uninitiated decide which name to put a cross next to.

“Mother Walrus” has to decide

“Depending on your worldview, you can assume that God, nature, chaos, the universe, chance, or Mother Walrus made the decision for you,” Navalny writes about the app. The Walrus Mother is a goddess worshiped among the shamans of the Far Eastern Chukchi Peninsula.

“You suffer, I'm fine. I don't have this problem – prisoners are not allowed to vote,” Navalny writes ironically, referring to the upcoming election, in which not a single Putin or war opponent is allowed to participate. . The three candidates who want to challenge the Kremlin leader are little-known officials who support Putin's policies and the invasion of Ukraine. Boris Nadezhdin was excluded from participation because the signature lists required by the candidate were said to contain too many errors.

“Vote for everyone who isn't Putin”

In his article, Navalny insists that in his opinion “it would be wise to vote equally for all non-Putin, without singling out anyone.” “If you have already voted, the new app helps you decide what to do on March 17 at noon,” he believes. Navalny continued that the application “is intended to prevent us from a pointless debate about who we should vote for. It will demonstrate how many people in Russia do not want Putin to be elected for a fifth term.”

Navalny's colleagues have been calling on Putin's opponents for weeks to gather in front of the polls next Sunday at 12 noon. “We need to use election day to show that we are here and there are many of us,” Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of an opposition activist, says in a video. In an ntv.de interview in early February, Navalny's confidant Leonid Volkov said the move was to show that “Putin is not equal to Russia, and there is no support for war in society.” Volkov, a migrant living in Lithuania, was attacked and seriously injured by an unknown man in Vilnius on Tuesday evening. Lithuanian intelligence believes it was probably “an operation organized and carried out by Russia”.

According to Russian officials, Navalny died on February 16 in a Russian prison camp in the Arctic, where he had served 19 years in prison. According to Russian reports, the 47-year-old died of “natural causes,” although the exact circumstances are unclear. Navalny's supporters and many Western politicians blame the Russian leadership and President Putin for the opposition figure's death.