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It’s very useful for a politician…facing death. Because it changes you a bit. Maybe, ironically, I became kind of more human.

Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny loved Star Wars. In those Hollywood morality plays, the rebels triumph against all odds. That’s not very Russian, but his bleak humor was in the grand national tradition. Russia’s most celebrated dissident often discussed the likelihood of his own murder; the inevitable crime would at least be a measure of his movement’s appeal. If bloody-minded attacks on kleptocracy made him a target, he had a cinematic knack for survival. Which makes Navalny’s Feb. 16 death hard to believe. For this awful moment, the empire has won.

The official story—which no one will ever buy—is that Navalny, 47, died of “sudden death syndrome” in a Siberian penal colony. Conveniently, the body has been mislaid. This farce plays out while the killer smirks in the Kremlin. Navalny was poisoned, arrested, exiled, forced into hard labor and shoved into a cramped cell. His crime was to insist that Russia is a mafia state, pillaged by Vladimir Putin and his cronies. After surviving exposure to a toxic nerve agent in 2020, he explained the persistence of his assassins: “Kill me and terrify the others. It’s something really scary [when] people just drop dead. There are no guns. There are no shots.”

No guns, no shots, but plunges from balconies, mystery viruses, banishment and blood clots—so many that they are the subject of dark jokes. Navalny joins a long list of liquidated critics. These crimes are the triumph of cynicism: Punishing a bear-poker gets everyone else to clam up. We are meant to believe governments are venal and life is a rigged power game. “Every leader kills people, some kill more than others,” said Tucker Carlson on Feb. 12. “Leadership requires killing people — sorry.”

Carlson said this days after interviewing Putin. The subject of Alexei Navalny did not come up. “I didn’t talk about the things that every other American media outlet talks about,” he said. Rarely does a Western journalist have a chance to put such things to Putin directly, of course. Ever the KGB pot-stirrer, Putin himself wrote it off as a softball exchange: “I thought that he would behave aggressively and ask so-called sharp questions. Frankly, I did not get full satisfaction from this interview.”

Not since the days of Soviet Life have we seen such fawning coverage of a global adversary. Carlson traipsed around Moscow, making videos in sparkling subways and lavishly appointed grocery stores. All that was missing was a jaunt to the Bolshoi. “So much nicer than any city in my country,” he observed, as if he were on a Socialist Worker’s Party junket in 1977. He’s entitled to his opinion, and to eat blinis off the floor of the Mayakovskaya metro station while he’s at it. Still, it’s hard to see how Walter Duranty-style fan serves anybody but Putin.

This comes at a most precarious time, for America, Europe, Russia and the world. We have Carlson’s boondoggle, Trump’s attacks on NATO, the stifling of aid to Ukraine, and Navalny’s death, which unhappily coincides with the Munich Security Conference. What would a cynic say about such a constellation of events? Why are those who once styled themselves as patriots so eager to bash liberal values? Perhaps we should ask Carlson.

Despite what Russians (among others) endure, there are those who dare to speak the truth. They refuse to yield the floor to mobsters. Not all of them can be poisoned and disappeared. Long after Navalny’s death, they will keep coming. Sorry, but a stubborn expectation of justice is as much a part of human nature as an inclination to crime. How foolish it was for Alexei Navalny to stake his life on such a grand idea. How eternally noble.

Yours Ever,

Thomas Stockmann

Conscious Coupling

Life & Beth (Hulu). Season 2 of Amy Schumer’s autobiographical dramedy wades into the marriage of mixed-up Long Islander Beth (Amy) and farmer John (Super Bowl Star Michael Cera). Not long after they tie the knot, he’s diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Off we go to counseling with therapists who include Beanie Feldstein and Tim Meadows. There’s also a Very Amy Schumer Pregnancy. — Kim Townsend