In an Oscar-winning play, Navalny himself plays the chief’s senior officer and demands to know what went wrong with the “operation” – because, in other words, the Kremlin failed to assassinate him. The unfortunate FSB man, Konstantin Kudryatsev, spreads the details of the whole plot and explains why it failed: because the plane on which the poisoned Navalny fell ill made an emergency landing. By another twenty minutes, the nerve agent Novichok would have completed his goal. Questions and answers go into absurd detail. Where was Novichok applied? In Navalny’s underpants. In which part of the underpants? The crotch area. What color were the underpants? Blue. Kudryatsev suspects nothing and provides a full description of this episode of state assassination attempt, while Navalny’s team listens with bated disbelief. The scene is just as scary and extremely funny. What makes this clear is a unique paradox: that modern tyrants are inherently ridiculous but, nevertheless, extremely dangerous. Indeed, their danger may be directly proportional to our inability to comprehend this particular kind of irrationality. In modern times, democracy, fundamental freedoms and the rule of law are considered to be normal political expectations. At least in developed countries, this case makes dictatorship a rather comical anomaly: a phenomenon that has nothing to do with reality. At the same time, both cunning and undetectable, the tyrant is, as every cartoonist knows, easy to ridicule because he seems, by our standards, not only cruel or unjust as many ancient rulers were known to be, but also mad. Could one really believe what Putin is saying? That Ukraine must be brought under Russian control because it is overloaded with fascists, when we know that the proportion of its far-right voters is infinitesimal – much lower, say, than Germany, with which the Kremlin is happy to work? Could one believe, as Kudryatsev seemed to do, that what he did – trying to assassinate a political opponent – was perfectly legal? How do we take with any seriousness those Kremlin idiots who are constantly trying to yell at the interviewees who confront them with empirical facts? All of this is certainly beyond parody, and the temptation to laugh at the tyrant in oblivion has a particularly strong appeal to Britons who tend to believe that intelligence is an effective military weapon. (It is, in terms of maintaining morale on your part.) But the danger here must be obvious. Once people decide you’re crazy, that it does not make sense to confront facts or come up with an alternative, you can pretty much do whatever you want. Exemption from the need for reasoned arguments or objective validity can be redemptive. What the Russian leadership seems to be saying is utterly shamelessly rational: it invokes a historical destiny based on a religious mission. His goals are far beyond the material world. They represent a completely different view of what nationality is – and life itself. Not that they are immune to ridicule. I’m sure the Kremlin gang is outraged by the West ‘s refusal to take its claims seriously – to dismiss them as silly lies or paranoid fantasies. This rage is probably too close to being inflammatory. We can, if we are not careful, die laughing. Here’s the dilemma: the West clearly cannot accept the Kremlin line as logical, even on its own terms. Which means that Russia’s actions must continue to be met with whatever force is required. But this policy plays a role in the Kremlin’s own mythology of eternal victimization, and thus enhances a sense of justice. How do you deal with a predator who thinks that any attempt to counter his attacks – or to refute his allegations – is more proof that he is right? This is the puzzle that needs to be solved, but there seems to be a lack of positive solutions right now. The leaders of what we must begin to call, once again, the Free World are clearly struggling to reach an agreement on the way forward – and this is not just because of Europe’s dependence on Russian fuel. The Kremlin’s behavior has blown away the most comfortable assumptions about the post-Cold War world on which the Western democracy was based. It is not entirely true that Putin has succeeded in reviving NATO and restoring Western self-confidence. The Western allies are making the right noise, but there is only so much that rhetoric can accomplish, and our side is not blessed with a brilliant generation of heads of government. On the eve of the French elections, I was having a depressing chat on WhatsApp with a friend in Paris. At a particularly low point, I wrote: “With Biden in the US and Macron in France, this may be the last twenty minutes of the West.” But in reality, I do not believe that. Eventually, I think, the West broke it: the combination of a free market economy and a liberal democratic government provides the best solution to human social organization. It promotes almost anything that improves the quality of life and enables progress: initiative, self-determination, ingenuity, talent and individual moral responsibility. The evils it allows are the price of freedom and we have learned to live with it. Perhaps most importantly, it is based on logic, without which any evil can triumph. Ultimately, it must be insurmountable, at least so far. There may be reason for anxiety but probably not despair.
