It feels like my blogs these last two weeks have been highly personal — almost like a Dear Diary entry. And, even though I am an incredibly transparent person (often to my own detriment), I promise that it won’t always be like this.
In fact, I had a very different blog planned for this week. And, then I woke up last Friday morning to more than 100 messages on my phone from friends in Russia, and friends who have fled the brutal political oppression there, alerting me that Alexei Navalny had been murdered in a horrific Russian prison in the far flung Arctic.
As many of you know, I lived in Russia for almost 10 years. And, I had a prominent job there — first as the spokesperson for an oligarch who ran in Putin’s inner circle and later as the public face for one of Russia’s corporate success stories on the London Stock Exchange.
This job put me in close contact with journalists — both for the state media and the now largely extinguished independent press and politicians — and politicians — both those who mindlessly echo the Putin propaganda line and those who have courageously stood up for their beliefs. And, my own values and interests meant that I also established a broad network of friends who could best be described as dissidents.
I have long since stopped counting the number of friends who I have lost to the murderous whims of Putin and his cronies. But, I will never forget the tears I have shed — tears when my first journalist friend plummeted out of a window, tears when opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down outside the Kremlin and now tears for Navalny (who I only knew tangentially through mutual friends).
There have been far more articulate tributes to Navalny and his transformative work in Russia. This is not meant to be yet another in a long line of these pieces, instead it is meant to continue to ring the alarm bell that the Republican Party continues to play footsie with Putin and his ilk around the world. From Tucker Carlson’s obsequious interview with Putin to House Speaker Johnson’s adamant refusal to take up the Ukrainian aid bill, the Republicans not only enable Putin, but also compromise geopolitical security around the world. The best interests of the United States and a Putin-led Russia are diametrically opposed.
As Maya Angelou poignantly stated, “When they show you who they are, believe them … the first time.” Putin has repeatedly shown us that he is a brutal dictator. And, Trump has demonstrated countless times that he is a wannabe dictator. Believe them and vote resoundingly for democracy — and Democrats up and down the ticket — in November.
-Bree J. Schuette
