Article

Culture

Politics

23 February 2024

4 min read

Shall the tyrants win?

Understanding Navalny's death.

Michael Bird

Michael Bird is Deputy Principal at Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia.

Flowers and notes of condolence for Alexander Navalny lie in a pile.

Commemorations of Alexei Navalny, Berlin.

Nikita Pishchugin on Unsplash.

Russian Opposition leader Alexei Navalny was murdered in prison. Precisely how he died, we do not know. But many have wondered whether his death signals the end of organized opposition to Putin’s regime in Moscow.

Navalny was famous as an anti-corruption and pro-democracy activist. He survived a Novichok poisoning attempt in 2020, then, after recuperating in Germany, decided to return to Russia a short time later. Once back in Russia, he was soon arrested, sentenced to 19 years in a penal colony inside the Arctic Circle, and then – as we now know – murdered.

The torrid history of Russia as an empire and the violence of Putin’s regime against its own people make one wonder if any democratic and liberal resistance is futile.

On hearing of the death of Navalny, I watched the documentary about his life’s work, how despite harassment, murder attempts, and imprisonments, he tried to bring freedom and democracy to Russia. This was always going to be an uphill battle since Russia or parts thereof have been a dictatorship since the defeat of the Tatars in 1480. Moscow. Its Russian lands have been ruled by the Tsardom of Russia (1547), the Russian Empire (1721), the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1922), and the Russian Federation (1991). Despite a brief flirtation with democracy in the 1990s, Russia returned to its de facto state as a military dictatorship when Putin took power in a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, whether as prime minister or president, Putin has increasingly locked Russia under his iron grip and become increasingly hostile towards the west and western notions of liberalism.

Putin’s regime is known for its brutality, from the Salisbury poisonings against Sergei and Yulia Skripal back in 2018, to the gunning down of Russian defector Maxim Kuzminov in Spain a few days after Navalny’s death.

The torrid history of Russia as an empire and the violence of Putin’s regime against its own people make you wonder if any democratic and liberal resistance is futile.

As King Theoden in the Lord of the Rings says when his people faced annihilation by an army of Orcs, “So much death, what can men do against such reckless hate?”

God’s promise of the believer’s resurrection is not pious longing, but a political doctrine.

But Navalny had an answer, it was to tell the truth, even if that cost him, even to the point of being willing to lay down his life for others. These things came directly from Navalny's Christian faith.

Navalny, during his show trial in 2021, stated:

“The fact is that I am a Christian, which usually sets me up as an example for constant ridicule in the Anti-Corruption Foundation, because mostly our people are atheists, and I was once quite a militant atheist myself,” Navalny said, “but now I am a believer, and that helps me a lot in my activities because everything becomes much, much easier.”

Navalny claimed that he was especially motivated by the words of Jesus: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied”.

Death is the tyrant’s ultimate weapon to terrorize, to force people to suffer in silence, to make them accept enslavement and despotism as normal and unchangeable. But the promise of resurrection means that God intends to undo whatever the tyrant does. The worst of evil is no match for resurrection. The goodness of God’s power and the power of God’s goodness always defeats death. God’s promise of resurrection is not pious longing, but a political doctrine, the hope for creation to be renewed, powers to be reconciled, and all things to be put to rights.

Faith in God’s life-giving power is our defiance against evil powers, “against the leaders, against the authorities, against the powers that rule the world in this dark age, against the wicked spiritual elements in the heavenly places”, as St Paul writes. And defiance is contagious.

When evil men hunger for power, Christians are called to thirst for righteousness, as Navalny did.

Putin is not the only brutal dictator on the scene. There is the communist leader Xi Jinping (China), the socialist dictator Nicholas Maduro (Venezuela), the military council led by Min Aung Hlaing (Myanmar), the Shia theocrat Ali Khamenei (Iran), or the kleptocracy of Manasseh Sogavare (Solomon Islands). Then there is the danger of Christian Nationalism that also looms in the winds of Hungary and the USA. Yet the Christian faith teaches us that every Caesar, Tsar, King, General, and President who sets themselves up as an invincible and infallible icon of power will see their icon smashed eventually. Like the statue of Ozymandias in Shelley’s poem, irrespective of what depths of horror despots attain, not matter how much they self-aggrandize, their reign will one day be no more than a “shattered visage” at the feet of Jesus.

This is the truth that Jesus spoke to Pilate, what Paul said to Herod Agrippa II, and what courageous Christians like Navalny say today.

In the face of tyranny and terror, what is to be done? We can cherish Navalny’s memory, pray for his work to continue. But above all, we take solace in the fact that Jesus says, “Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world”.

That is not a dream or a distant hope, it’s a promise, a promise we make good with prayers, protests, energy, and efforts to build for the kingdom of Christ, to prepare the earth for the day when tyrants, terror, and tears are no more. By doing such things, we in effect erect a billboard saying, “The powers will be pacified, the lost will be found, the darkness will be cured by light, the world’s injustices will be undone, and God’s love will reign supreme.”

In other words, a time is coming, and now is already burgeoning like a breaking dawn, when Navalny’s thirst for righteousness will be more than satisfied.

Michael Bird is Deputy Principal at Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia. Together with N.T. Wright he is the author of Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracy published by SPCK and Zondervan.

Column

Culture

Migration

Politics

20 November 2025

4 min read

From MI6 to migration: the tangled legacy of empire

Britain’s security dilemmas, from LinkedIn spies to post-colonial legacies, reveal a deeper global story

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.

Home Office.

There’s a food chain in the British intelligence services and the government offices they serve. The Foreign Office is advised by MI6, or the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) or more usually simply “Six”, which, though it would deny it in favour of claims of collaboration, looks down on the national security service, MI5, which serves the Home Office.

An old acquaintance from Six used casually to call the parochial Home Office the LEO, short for Little England Office. There’s less of that now, to be sure, as they struggle to accommodate their political masters. Foreheads were rubbed wearily at MI6’s HQ by Vauxhall Bridge when Yvette Cooper, fresh from proscribing Palestine Action at the Home Office as a terrorist organisation alongside al-Qaeda and ISIS, was made up to foreign secretary at the last re-shuffle.

Meanwhile, over the river, MI5 faces the challenge of a new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who may believe that the prospect of limiting leave to remain to a maximum of 20 years and confiscating their jewellery might dissuade those with ill intent against the British state from embarking on a small boat.

Taken together, these challenges make it not a good time to be an intelligence officer, or even an intelligent one. It gets worse on the canvas of large superpowers. The problems with an erratic clown of American jurisdiction are well recorded. But China is something else.

They’d be chuckling merrily at MI6, if it wasn’t so serious, at the headlines this week, suggesting that China’s principal infiltration of the British state is through agents posing as headhunters on LinkedIn. The immeasurably greater threat from Chinese intelligence has come from the global march that China has stolen in the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), the network of Chinese-sourced sensors, software and chips embedded and monitored in technologies that connect and exchange data globally.

This isn’t tin-foil hat conspiracy territory; it’s real and has been called out for years. It’s significantly why the case against two alleged British spies for China was recently withdrawn. Britain has to keep China sweet for fear of what it knows of and could do with British data. That’s a massive US problem too.

To that end, trade and co-operation are the way to keep China onside, not confrontation. It’s an example that the Foreign Office might set for the Home Office. And, indeed, the two might work more closely together (just a suggestion).

The Home Office has long acknowledged that there are “Push and Pull” factors to our immigration crisis. It almost exclusively concentrates on the Pull, by trying to make the UK a less attractive destination for migrants through limits of right to remain and by nicking their jewellery. The Push factors are war, oppression and economic deprivation and these are very much more the territory of the Foreign Office.

A big problem arises when the Home Office tries to do the Foreign Office’s job, as when Mahmood threatens Trump-style visa bans for the likes of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and Namibia. Good luck with that – it betrays a neo-colonial instinct and there, perhaps, is the rub.

We pay a post-colonial price in both illegal and legal immigration. A predominantly Christian Europe and New World endeavoured to make disciples of every nation and now many of them are coming home. Christian culture as a former weapon of oppression is perhaps overstated, but there’s some truth in it. An even more stark truth is that we have to address the Push elements of migration if we are to find common ground on which we can make progress.

Our colonial oversight left Afghanistan a modern and post-modern historical mess. Syria is almost untouchable in its post-Assad dynastic horrors. The Indian subcontinent is still a wreckage that we abandoned only some 80 years ago.

Trying to deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan or the former al-Qaeda breakaway al-Sharaa interim regime in Syria may not be so much a triumph of hope over experience as of naivety over history. But our current position with China may point a way forward. Tariff-free trade and economic co-development is a surer way to address migration crises than making arrivals unwelcome.

It’s admittedly more complicated than China. A US/UK post-colonial future will need to align neo-Christian western cultures with an enlightened Islam that concentrates on the Quranic instructions of co-existence, respect, fairness and the explicit injunction that there can be “no compulsion in religion”. But if it was easy everyone would be doing it.

That’s the call of the 21st century and it is, quite clearly, a global rather than nationalistic one. The US will need to recover its position in the world. And, in the UK, foreheads will need to be raised from being banged on desks to solve foreign crises before they wash up on our shores.