I was getting ready to climb onto the top bunk in our dog box on the Indian Pacific. Ronald received a news notification during a rare moment of reception: “Alexei Navalny’s dead.” I screeched and a day looking out a clattering window onto the Nullarbor Plain dropped away.

What do I know of a Russian activist who has fought the Russian State for the last decade? Nichego. But I do know oppression and murder when I see it. I, along with countless others, read and saw Navalny’s eye-watering accounts of the corruption and terror that Putin and his thugs have carried out over these years and yet I can believe in a fairy tale. It’s the lazy way to give one a good night sleep. I have believed that good can win over evil because, well it’s Alexei Navalny! He’s on YouTube!

The news of Alexei Navalny’s death exploded something I wanted to believe or more accurately, have been too complacent and privileged to understand. Sometimes, perhaps too much, life is a total cock up. Just because one wants scores to be properly settled; demi-gods and bullies to be thrown into the furnace, is not a thing that can be possible in these dark and unknowing days. I am not and probably never will be in a situation where my government actively suppresses its people. I witnessed the barest soupçon of demagoguery in the last four years living in the US but that was as an observer. I had an ironclad escape hatch that could be exercised at any time were things to seriously head south and I most definitely did and do not have the stomach to return to a country that would rather line my underpants with Novichok and wish me dead instead of allowing me my rights to question power.

I have been listening to Next Year in Moscow. A series with Arkady Ostrovsky that speaks to free-thinking Russians about the war in Ukraine. Its latest episode talks to a human rights lawyer and a photographer. Both women work with and document the lives of Russians who are being persecuted if they speak out about the war. The photographer knew Navalny and she speaks to Ostrovsky about him with much warmth and also such faith in his fight. It’s only at the end of the podcast that Arkady tells the listener that since his death, the photographer cannot finish her interview with him. The hope is gone.

I wanted to wail for her and all those others who have lost Navalny to the inevitable. And yet…who am I to have this pure emotion about someone and something that is beyond the boundaries of my comfortable life? Is this appropriation at its worst? I am genuinely shocked and grief struck by his death but the caveat here is it’s not my fight. And maybe the guilt is also an idiotic envy for this now dead man. His fight was all-consuming. He quite rightly is now cast as an epic hero despite his all too human-ness when he was alive. I do envy those people whose lives are writ so much larger than the rest of us. It must be fantastical to live with such clarity of purpose that everything else drops away from that one thing. To be so fixed about the right thing to do such that you make clear-eyed decisions to leave your family, your children, and face the maw knowing what probably awaits. And laugh. How can one not be astonished and also feel utterly diminished?

What now for Russia? What now for all of us as we face many worldwide elections this year that, on a bad day, can give even a pessimist pause for thought? Right here, right now it’s anyone’s guess. I do wish for the good counsel of my parents who would undoubtedly give their opinions which would help me with mine. How I miss them.