#the putin palace

[tomorrowusa]

Dictator Vladimir Putin probably hates this film which Alexei Navalny made about his greed and corruption. That's the best reason to watch it!

Much of the documentary focuses on what we call the Putin Palace – Vlad's opulent crib on the Black Sea near Gelendzhik. The Putin Palace makes Saltburn look like a cheesy AirBnB. The Putin Palace is said to be the largest single residence in Russia.

Speaking of Saltburn, this is even longer than that film. So make sure there's plenty of popcorn on hand. 🍿

Since it's probably banned in Russia, look at ways of sending this vid to friends and family there which can get around digital censorship.

EDIT: Putin is as afraid of the dead Navalny as he was of the living Navalny.

Russian digital map service reportedly blocking reviews at memorial sites visited by Navalny mourners

Alexei Navalny death latest: Putin critic’s wife says Kremlin ‘waiting for novichok poison’ to leave his body

Putin's assassination of Navalny seems to be turning into another Russian public relations disaster.

[anncanta]

PUTIN'S PALACE: HIDDEN FILMING IN "tsarist" interiors 

Please, share.

[witekspicsbanknotes]

Putin & his large palace on fancy banknotes.

[gme-news]

Report: Putin Fled to his Bunker after Declaring Martial Law

via IFTTT

[quotesfromall]

Putin wants to stay president and continue stealing money.

Jason Matthews, Palace of Treason

[i-merani]

I get all of that and I agree but what I'm saying is that a dictator who has the largest country in his pocket doesn't really worry about not being able to go to Milan or Paris. He doesn't need outside world to live a good life. This obviously doesn't mean that icc's decision is without a weight and i am more than happy they finally issued a warrant for him.

For Putin Russia is not a prison, its his private plaything. He's not imprisoned there because he still can do anything he wants from there (start a war with another country). He can still travel to China for example because China hasn't ratified rome statute, same with India (two main partners).

Solobodan killed himself because he was in custody already. No one will get Putin in custody because he doesn't need to leave russia and countries he travels to dont have to arrest him.

(Sorry this is a bit long but convos about this topic are interesting, so the more we talk the better)

Another issue is that Putin isn't the only war criminal. There are generals, soldiers etc who are aslo responsible. If everything goes as it should, generals should be tried at the trial as well for war crimes. Warrant for them could be a problem but not much (speaking from Georgia's experience, despite numerous warrants none have yet been jailed). This is what I'm talking about. Real results have not been achieved yet (not in case of Georgia for 2008 and Ukraine for 2014).

So im not only talking only about Putin here. There were others, easier to persecute individuals and even they have not been persecuted because issuing a warrant took literally 10 years or so and yet still nothing (literally soldiers who committed war crimes in 2008 got their warrants issued by icc just a few years ago, some of them were already dead and other were living in russia on pension already. They didn't care)

Obviously west's "awakening" will significantly lower Putin's influence outside russia and it might mean that icc will give out arrest warrants for russian soldiers/generals faster (and not 10 years later lol) but this is still a "might" situation.

One thing about International Criminal Court (ICC) starting a case against Russia is that there is already a case against Russia submitted by Georgia after 2008 invasion but to this day the results are inconclusive and by inconclusive I mean the ICC doesn't give two shits about Georgia and it keeps dragging the investigation for years despite Georgia proving sufficient evidence against Russia.

What Im trying to say is that yes, good job for ICC that they began, yet again, a case against Russia but they now have two cases against Russia and it shows how ridiculously they failed first time, so im not very optimistic about any swift results.

[warningsine]

The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in jail, the country’s prison service has said, in what is likely to be seen as a political assassination attributable to Vladimir Putin.

Navalny, 47, one of Putin’s most visible and persistent critics, was being held in a jail about 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle where he had been sentenced to 19 years under a “special regime”. In a video from the prison in January, he had appeared gaunt with his head shaved.

The Kremlin said it had no information on the cause of death.

In early December he had disappeared from a prison in the Vladimir region, where he was serving a 30-year sentence on extremism and fraud charges that he had called political retribution for leading the anti-Kremlin opposition of the 2010s. He did not expect to be released during Putin’s lifetime.

A former nationalist politician, Navalny helped foment the 2011-12 protests in Russia by campaigning against election fraud and government corruption, investigating Putin’s inner circle and sharing the findings in slick videos that garnered hundreds of millions of views.

The high-water mark in his political career came in 2013, when he won 27% of the vote in a Moscow mayoral contest that few believed was free or fair. He remained a thorn in the side of the Kremlin for years, identifying a palace built on the Black Sea for Putin’s personal use, mansions and yachts used by the ex-president Dmitry Medvedev, and a sex worker who linked a top foreign policy official with a well-known oligarch.

In 2020, Navalny fell into a coma after a suspected poisoning using novichok by Russia’s FSB security service and was evacuated to Germany for treatment. He recovered and returned to Russia in January 2021, where he was arrested on a parole violation charge and sentenced to his first of several jail terms that would total more than 30 years behind bars.

Putin has recently launched a presidential campaign for his fifth term in office. He is already the longest-serving Russian leader since Joseph Stalin and could surpass him if he runs again for office in 2030, a possibility since he had the constitutional rules on term limits rewritten in 2020.

[azspot]

Buried deep in a letter Democratic senators sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting a special prosecutor to investigate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s potential federal ethics and tax violations is something shocking: Democrats claim that the Supreme Court justice accepted a 2003 yacht trip to Russia and a helicopter flight to Yusupov Palace in St. Petersburg, Putin’s hometown—both paid for by Republican billionaire donor Harlan Crow.

Clarence Thomas Took Free Trip to Putin’s Hometown

[princessnastyaromanov]

приветик from Siberia

Novosibirsk is beautiful in autumn. I am enjoying an iced chai in my "winter palace" in Leninsky. My ancestral thirst for blood is calmed, soothed, and slumbering. I am an awe-inspiring, lethargic, and teleological woman. I am tightened, rejuvenated, and heated thoroughly through the center. Every day is a new opportunity, and you have to forget that.

I'm hoping to use this account to educate westerners on correct thought when it comes to the USSR and international socialism. My mother taught me well the truth about communism and Putin's nationalistic chauvinism. She passed down secrets to me that her mother passed down to her that she received from the great feminist who I was named after. Through these secrets, I am able to channel spirits who can show me economic data and historical information unavailable to philosophers, historians, or economics who analyze history from a kulakpilled state of mind. The historical materialism I am capable of is impossible for others to understand.

The truth is this: Anastasia Nikolaevna escaped the Bolsheviks. She survived. She did not escape unscathed and some of her DNA did get buried with the other Romanov children in those mines outside Sverdlovsk. That is how they "found" her "corpse" but that was only a part of her body. She took on the name Ilya Levovich and disguised herself as a boy. She joined the Komsomol in order to hide in plain sight, but it was in the Komsomol that she was informed, reformed, redeemed, and resurrected. She became "woke." She came to be one of the strongest advocates for communism in all of the USSR. She fell in love with my great grandfather, a bisexual short king if there ever was one. He loved her as a man and as a woman. She raised my grandmother on Simone de Beauvoir, Rosemary Hennessy, and Eva Kolstad and my grandmother did the same for me. My family does not associate with the fascist bourgeois royals in the Patriarchal Romanov Family Association. We have left behind our royal heritage and embraced the proletariat as our international family.

I do not attend royal banquets and weddings and funerals or engage in petty discourse about who is and is not a legitimate successor to an illegitimate throne. I make bath bombs and scented candles and I channel spirits to better understand history from a dialectical materialist perspective. It is through the dialectic of science and seance that the truth is revealed.

[mariacallous]

Alexei Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021. Right before he boarded the plane, he posted a film titled “Putin’s Palace: The Story of the World’s Largest Bribe” on YouTube. The video, nearly two hours long, was an extraordinary feat of investigative reporting. Using secret plans, drone footage, 3-D visualizations, and the testimony of construction workers, Navalny’s video told the story of a hideous $1.3 billion Black Sea villa containing every luxury that a dictator could imagine: a hookah bar, a hockey rink, a helipad, a vineyard, an oyster farm, a church. The video also described the eye-watering costs and the financial trickery that had gone into the construction of the palace on behalf of its true owner, Vladimir Putin.

But the power of the film was not just in the pictures, or even in the descriptions of money spent. The power was in the style, the humor, and the Hollywood-level professionalism of the film, much of which was imparted by Navalny himself. This was his extraordinary gift: He could take the dry facts of kleptocracy—the numbers and statistics that usually bog down even the best financial journalists—and make them entertaining. On-screen, he was just an ordinary Russian, sometimes shocked by the scale of the graft, sometimes mocking the bad taste. He seemed real to other ordinary Russians, and he told stories that had relevance to their lives. You have bad roads and poor health care, he told Russians, because they have hockey rinks and hookah bars.

And Russians listened. A poll conducted in Russia a month after the video appeared revealed that one in four Russians had seen it. Another 40 percent had heard about it. It’s safe to guess that in the three years that have elapsed since then, those numbers have risen. To date, that video has been viewed 129 million times.

Navalny is now presumed dead. The Russian prison system has said he collapsed after months of ill health. Perhaps he was murdered more directly, but the details don’t matter: The Russian state killed him. Putin killed him—because of his political success, because of his ability to reach people with the truth, and because of his talent for breaking through the fog of propaganda that now blinds his countrymen, and some of ours as well.

He is also dead because he returned to Russia from exile in 2021, having already been poisoned twice, knowing he would be arrested. By doing so he turned himself from an ordinary Russian into something else: a model of what civic courage can look like, in a country that has very little of it. Not only did he tell the truth, but he wanted to do so inside Russia, where Russians could hear him. This is what I wrote at the time: “If Navalny is showing his countrymen how to be courageous, Putin wants to show them that courage is useless.”

That Putin still feared Navalny was clear in December, when the regime moved him to a distant arctic prison to stop him from communicating with his friends and his family. He had been in touch with many people; I have seen some of his prison messages, sent secretly via lawyers, policemen, and guards, just as Gulag prisoners once sent messages in Stalin’s Soviet Union. He remained the spirit behind the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a team of Russian exiles who continue to investigate Russian corruption and tell the truth to Russians, even from abroad. (I have served on the foundation’s advisory board.) Earlier this week, before his alleged collapse, he sent a Valentine’s Day message to his wife, Yulia, on Telegram: “I feel that you are there every second, and I love you more and more.”

Navalny’s decision to return to Russia and go to jail inspired respect even among people who didn’t like him, didn’t agree with him, or found fault with him. He was also a model for other dissidents in other violent autocracies around the world. Only minutes after his death was announced, I spoke with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the Belarusian opposition leader. “We are worried for our people too,” she told me. If Putin can kill Navalny with impunity, then dictators elsewhere might feel empowered to kill other brave people.

The enormous contrast between Navalny’s civic courage and the corruption of Putin’s regime will remain. Putin is fighting a bloody, lawless, unnecessary war, in which hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians have been killed or wounded, for no reason other than to serve his own egotistical vision. He is running a cowardly, micromanaged reelection campaign, one in which all real opponents are eliminated and the only candidate who gets airtime is himself. Instead of facing real questions or challenges, he meets tame propagandists such as Tucker Carlson, to whom he offers nothing more than lengthy, circular, and completely false versions of history.

Even behind bars Navalny was a real threat to Putin, because he was living proof that courage is possible, that truth exists, that Russia could be a different kind of country. For a dictator who survives thanks to lies and violence, that kind of challenge was intolerable. Now Putin will be forced to fight against Navalny’s memory, and that is a battle he will never win.

[tomorrowusa]

Two years ago on Sunday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Ukrainians that he and other high ranking officials would remain in Kyiv and defend the country against Putin's illegal invasion.

The video above, made less than 48 hours after the start of the invasion, was intentionally filmed outside recognizable buildings in Kyiv. At the time, Russian assassination squads were out looking for Zelenskyy. Invading Russian troops committing war crimes got within 22 km of the government district.

This video was one of the most audacious uses of the internet to date. If top government officials were willing to stand and fight, Ukrainians felt more confident they could do the same. 730 days after the start of Putin's planned three-day "special operation", Ukraine still stands.

Here's the Ukrainian text of that vid:

Zelenskyy: «Всім добрий вечір. Лідер фракції тут, голова Офісу президента тут, прем’єр-міністр Шмигаль тут, Подоляк тут, президент тут. Всі ми тут. Наші військові тут. Громадяни, суспільство тут. Всі ми тут. Захищаємо нашу незалежність, нашу державу. І так буде й далі. Слава нашим захисникам! Слава нашим захисницям! Слава Україні» Others: «Героям слава!»

[anonymoushouseplantfan]

Spanish radio chatting about #Picassogate.

Summary: The French are a lot better at hiding high-profile adultery, and the Danes have a lot to learn. The pics were sold for 25-30,000 euros. Genoveva’s flat has two bedrooms and her ex-husband may be paying for it. Danish press is pretty passive, at least by Spanish standards, but some have wondered if Fred wanted the photos to come out. Genoveva knows the press very well. The photographers didn’t see Fred arrive with his suitcase, so he may have been in the apartment for several days.

Fred was caught kissing a brunette once and he apparently had a bridge opened (it had been closed due to weather) so he could visit a girlfriend (I hadn’t heard that one) after his children’s christening. Fred may still be seeing his old underwear model girlfriend. The Danish are very tolerant of adultery (not sure about that).

Much discussion of Juan Carlos and Corinna. Corinna slept with Putin???? Genoveva is friends with Carolina Herrera.

Amalia spends a lot of time in Spain because security in the Netherlands is difficult. Many European royals like vacationing in Spain because of the security. News to me, honestly. I guess that explains all the vacay pic in Ibiza and Mallorca.

Much discussion of the suitcase. Did his security bring him his suitcase? Did he keep clothes in Genoveva’s flat?

Genoveva studied philosophy. She leaked her soup kitchen work to Hola!, just like Meghan. Lol, this is hilarious. After her divorce she still worked for the Duchess of Alba Foundation and she spent the quarantine in one of the Alba palaces.

She was going to sue if the pics weren’t unpublished and the magazine didn’t apologize in 24 hrs, but she hadn’t done so.

Not sure how accurate any of this is, but it’s a fun listen.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Alexei  navalny did not like tragedies. He preferred Hollywood films and fables in which heroes vanquish villains and good triumphs over evil. He had the looks and talent to be one of those heroes, but he was born in Russia and lived in dark times, spending his last days in a penal colony in the Arctic permafrost. A fan of “Star Wars”, he described his ordeal in lyrical terms. “Prison [exists] in one’s mind,” he wrote from his cell in 2021. “And if you think carefully, I am not in prison but on a space voyage…to a wonderful new world.” That voyage ended on February 16th.

Mr Navalny’s death was blamed by Russian prison authorities on a blood clot—though his doctor said he suffered from no condition which made that likely. Whatever ends up on his death certificate, he was killed by Vladimir Putin. Russia’s president locked him up; in his name Mr Navalny was subjected to a regime of forced labour and solitary confinement. Mr Navalny will be celebrated as a man of remarkable courage. His life will be remembered for what it says about Mr Putin, what it portends for Russia and what it demands of the world.

A man of formidable intelligence, Mr Navalny identified the two foundations on which Mr Putin has built his power: fear and greed. In Mr Putin’s world everyone can be bribed or threatened. Not only did Mr Navalny understand those impulses, he struck at them in devastating ways.

His insight was that corruption was not just a side hustle but the moral rot at the heart of Mr Putin’s state. His anti-corruption crusade formed a new genre of immaculately documented and thriller-like films that displayed the yachts, villas and planes of Russia’s rulers. These videos, posted on YouTube, culminated in an exposé of Mr Putin’s billion-dollar palace on the Black Sea coast that has been watched 130m times. Despite the palace’s iron gates, adorned with a two-headed imperial eagle, Mr Navalny portrayed its owner not as a tsar so much as a tasteless mafia boss.

Mr Navalny also understood fear and how to defeat it. Mr Putin’s first attempt to kill him was in 2020, when he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok smeared inside his underwear. By sheer good luck Mr Navalny survived, regained his strength in Germany and less than a year later flew back to Moscow to defy Mr Putin in a blast of publicity.

He returned in the full knowledge that he would probably be arrested. On the way back to confront the evil ruler who had tried to poison him he did not read Hamlet. He watched Rick and Morty, an American cartoon. By mocking Mr Putin, he diminished him. “I’ve mortally offended him by surviving,” he said from the dock during his trial in 2021. “He will enter history as a poisoner. We had Yaroslav the Wise and Alexander the Liberator. And now we will have Vladimir the Poisoner of Underpants.”

Mr Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in jail on extremism charges. He turned his sentence into an act of cheerful defiance. Every time he appeared in court hearings via video link from prison, his smile cut through the walls of his cell and beamed across Russia’s 11 time zones. On February 15th, on the eve of his death, he was in court again. Dressed in dark-grey prison uniform he laughed in the face of Mr Putin’s judges, suggesting they should put some money into his account as he was running short. In the end there was only one way Mr Putin could wipe the smile off his face.

In his essay “Live Not by Lies”, in 1974, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel-prize-winning Soviet novelist, wrote that “when violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting: ‘I am violence. Run away, make way for me—I will crush you’.” Mr Navalny understood, but instead of running he held his ground.

His great strength was to understand Mr Putin’s fear of other people’s courage. In one of his early communications from jail he wrote that: “it is not honest people who frighten the authorities…but those who are not afraid, or, to be more precise: those who may be afraid, but overcome their fear.”

That is why his death portends a deepening of repression inside Russia. Mr Navalny’s murder was not the first and it will not be the last. The next targets could be Ilya Yashin, a brave politician who followed Mr Navalny to prison, or Vladimir Kara-Murza, a historian, journalist and politician who has been sentenced to 25 years on treason charges for speaking against the war. The lawyers and activists who continue to defend these dissidents are also in danger. Since Mr Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, the number of prisoners has increased 15 times. Even as the remnants of Stalin’s gulag fill with political prisoners, professional criminals are being recruited and released to fight in Ukraine.

Mr Navalny’s death also casts a shadow over ordinary Russians. In Moscow and across Russia, people flooded the streets at the news. Before the police started to arrest them, they covered memorials for previous victims of political repression in flowers. Yet that repression is intensifying. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, 1,305 men and women have been prosecuted for speaking out against it. A wave of repression is also swallowing up people who never before engaged in politics. The president will shoot into the crowds if he must.

For the West, Mr Navalny’s death contains a call to action. Mr Putin considers its leaders too weak and too decadent to resist him. And for many years Western politicians and businessmen did much to prove that fear and greed work in the West, too. When Mr Putin first bombed and shelled Chechnya in the early 2000s, Western politicians turned a blind eye and continued to do business with his cronies. When he murdered his opponents in Moscow and annexed Crimea in 2014, they slapped his wrist. Even after he had invaded Ukraine in 2022, they hesitated to provide enough weapons for Russia to be defeated. Every time the West stepped back, Mr Putin took a step forward. Every time Western politicians expressed their “grave concern”, he smirked.

The West needs to find the strength and courage that Mr Navalny showed. It should understand that Mr Navalny’s murder, the soaring number of political prisoners, the torture and beating of people across Russia, the assassination of Mr Putin’s opponents in Europe and the shelling of Ukrainian cities are all part of the same war. Without resolve, the West’s military and economic superiority will count for nothing.

Western governments should start by treating people like Mr Kara-Murza as prisoners of Mr Putin’s war who need to be exchanged with Russian prisoners in the West or prisoners of war in Ukraine. They should not stigmatise ordinary Russians living under a paranoid dictator and his goons, or put the onus on ordinary people to overthrow the dictator who is repressing them.

The best retort to Mr Putin is by arming Ukraine. Every time America’s Congress votes down aid, Russia takes comfort. The leaders assembled at the Munich Security Conference, who heard Mr Navalny’s wife, Yulia, speak of justice for her husband’s death, need to stiffen their resolve to see through the war. For their part Ukrainian politicians must see that standing up for Russian activists and prisoners is also a way of helping their own country—just as Mr Navalny called for peace, for rebuilding Ukraine and the prosecution of Russian war crimes. Liberating Ukraine would be the best way to liberate Russia, too.

The voyage ends

After he had been poisoned, Mr Navalny returned home because he believed that history was on his side and that Russia was freeing itself from the deadly grip of its own imperial past. “Putin is the last chord of the ussr,” he told The Economist a few months before he took that last fateful journey. “People in the Kremlin know there is a historic current that is moving against them.” Mr Putin invaded Ukraine to reverse that current. Now he has killed Mr Navalny.

Mr Navalny would not want Mr Putin’s message to prevail. “[If I get killed] the obvious thing is: don’t give up,” he once told American film-makers. “All it takes for evil to triumph is the inaction of good people. There’s no need for inaction.”

Mr Navalny’s death has seemed imminent for months. And yet there is something crushing about it. He was not alone in believing that good triumphs over evil, and that heroes vanquish villains. His courage was an inspiration. To see that moral order so brutally overturned is a terrible affront. ■

[justforbooks]

Patriot by Alexei Navalny

The late Russian activist’s memoir is an insightful, sharp, even humorous account of his fight against Putin’s regime – and a warning to the world

Alexei Navalny was watching his favourite cartoon show, Rick and Morty, when he suddenly felt unwell. He was 21 minutes into an episode where Rick turns into a pickle. The late Russian opposition leader was on a flight back to Moscow after campaigning ahead of regional elections in the Siberian city of Tomsk in August 2020. Something was clearly wrong, and Navalny staggered to the bathroom.

There, he recalls, he had the grim realisation: “I’m done for.” He told a sceptical steward that he’d been poisoned and then lay down calmly in the aisle, facing a wall. Life didn’t flash before his eyes. Instead, he compares his experience of death – or near-death, as it turned out – to something from a dark fantasy. It was like being “kissed by a Dementor and a Nazgûl stands nearby”.

He is clear who gave the order to kill him with the nerve agent novichok: Vladimir Putin. Navalny calls Russia’s president a “bribe-taking old man” and a “vengeful runt” who sits on top of a “sinister regime”. The assassins were members of the FSB, the KGB’s successor agency. Navalny spent 18 days in a coma, waking up in hospital in Germany.

It was while recovering in Freiburg that he wrote the first part of his extraordinary memoir, Patriot. The second section consists of letters from prison, following his January 2021 return to Moscow, when he was dramatically arrested at the airport. Navalny says he embarked on an autobiography knowing the Kremlin could finish him off. “If they do finally whack me, this book will be my memorial,” he notes.

It took three years for his gallows humour prophecy to come true. Navalny died in February this year, his likely murder taking place in an Arctic penal colony. He was 47. Prison documents hint he was poisoned and the authorities removed the evidence: clothes, vomit, even snow he had come into contact with.

This is a brave and brilliant book, a luminous account of Navalny’s life and dark times. It is a challenge from beyond the grave to Russia’s murder-addicted rulers. You can hear his voice in the deft translation by Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel: sharp, playful and lacking in self-pity. Nothing crushes him. Up until the end – his final “polar” entry is on 17 January 2024 – he radiates indomitable good humour.

Patriot includes a manifesto for how the country might be transformed: free elections, a constitutional assembly, decentralisation and a European orientation. Days before his murder, he predicted the Putin regime would crumble, while acknowledging the resilience of autocracies.

Trained as a lawyer, Navalny first attracted attention as a transparency activist. He bought shares in notoriously corrupt oil and gas companies and asked awkward questions at shareholder meetings. The Kremlin controlled TV and most newspapers, so Navalny wrote up his exposés online. In 2011 he founded FBK, an anti-corruption organisation which grew into a grassroots national movement run by volunteers. He expresses pride at the way his campaigns encouraged young Russians to take part in opposition politics. Police detained him for the first time in 2011 when he attended protests against rigged Duma elections. Undaunted, he stood two years later to be mayor of Moscow, coming second, before finding himself in an “endless cycle” of rallies, arrests and spells in custody.

The Kremlin’s response to all this was vicious. His brother Oleg was jailed after a fake trial, a provocateur threw green gunk at Navalny, blinding him in one eye. In 2016 he tried to run for president. His videos – of Putin’s tacky Sochi palace and former president Dmitry Medvedev’s dodgy schemes – attracted millions of views. Navalny writes movingly about his wife, Yulia, – whom he met on holiday in Turkey – as a soulmate throughout this period.

Given his understanding of Putin’s Stalinist methods, why did he return to Moscow? His answer is that the struggle to make Russia a normal state was “my life’s work”. He wasn’t prepared to dump his homeland or his convictions, he says. At first, jail conditions were bearable. Well-wishers sent sacks of letters and a tiramisu cake. In one dispatch, Navalny ponders the “amazing ability of human beings to adapt and derive pleasure from the most trivial things”, such as instant coffee.

Behind bars, he chatted to his cellmates and read. He preferred Maupassant to Flaubert and enjoyed Oliver Twist (though he wonders if Dickens got working-class dialogue right). The FSB spied on him 24/7; his warders wore body cameras and barked commands.

As conditions worsened, he made fewer diary entries. More criminal “convictions” piled up – for insulting a war veteran and for extremism. He was shuffled from one penitentiary to the next. Meanwhile, “perverted” prison staff refused to treat his back pain, prompting a hunger strike. He was categorised as a flight risk and woken throughout the night, put in a tiny punishment cell and denied his wife’s letters.

None of these privations stopped Navalny from denouncing Putin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine as an “unjust war of aggression”. The reason for the war is Putin’s desire to hold on to power at any cost, and an obsession with his “historical legacy”, he writes. Critics regard Navalny as a closet nationalist. But Patriot calls for Russia to withdraw its troops, respect Ukraine’s 1991 borders and pay compensation.

During one of Yulia’s visits, Navalny told her there was a “high probability” he would never get out of prison alive. “They will poison me,” he said. “I know,” she replied. He sketches out what this means – no chance to say goodbye, never meeting his grandchildren, “tasseled mortar boards tossed in the air in my absence”. Maybe an unmarked grave. His philosophy: hope for the best, expect the worst. His death is a terrible loss, for Russia and for all of us.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[ridenwithbiden]

THIS MOTHERFUCKER !!!

"Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been accused of not disclosing a yacht trip to Russia and a private helicopter flight to a palace in President Vladimir Putin’s hometown, among a slew of other gifts and loans from businessman Harlan Crow.

Buried on page 14 of a letter that two Democratic senators sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday, in which they urged Garland to appoint a special counsel to probe Thomas, was an astonishing list of dozens of “likely undisclosed gifts and income” from Crow, Crow’s affiliated companies, and “other donors.”

In the letter, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) said Thomas, one of the court’s staunchly conservative justices, even may have committed tax fraud and violated other federal laws by “secretly” accepting the gifts and income potentially worth millions.

“The Senate is not a prosecutorial body, and the Supreme Court has no fact-finding function of its own, making the executive role all the more important if there is ever to be any complete determination of the facts,” reads the letter requesting the appointment of a special prosecutor.

“We do not make this request lightly,” said the letter.

The list of potentially secret gifts also includes a loan of more than $267,000 provided by Thomas’ close friend Anthony Welters, the yacht trip to Russia from the Baltics, and the helicopter ride to Yusupov Palace in St. Petersburg. ProPublica first reported last year on the existence of extensive undisclosed gifts and lavish trips from Crow.

Additionally, Justice Thomas is accused of not disclosing tuitions for his grandnephew, free lodging, real estate transactions, and home renovations. The action escalates Democratic senators’ efforts to hold Thomas accountable for perceived ethics controversies.

According to the senators, Thomas’ conduct could violate the Ethics in Government Act, which requires officials like Supreme Court justices to file annual reports disclosing gifts and income accepted from outside sources.

“It is a crime,” reads the report, “To knowingly and willfully fail to file or report such information.”

Since 2023, two Senate committees have been looking into the 1991 loan from Welters that was connected to Thomas’ purchase of a luxury motor home. Welters previously responded to a New York Times request for comment on the loan only to say that it was “satisfied.”

Thomas, for his part, belatedly disclosed some—but not all—gifts from Crow this year and has defended the gifts as “personal hospitality” from some of his and his wife’s “dearest friends.”

“The evidence assembled thus far plainly suggests that Justice Thomas has committed numerous willful violations of federal ethics and false-statement laws and raises significant questions about whether he and his wealthy benefactors have,” Durban and Wyden wrote."

[cantseemtohide]

What I read in 2023, pretty good going 👍 (apologies for long non sims post)

1. Middlemarch by George Eliot

2. Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century: Through the Prism of Value by Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts

3. The Temple House Vanishing by Rachel Donohue

4. The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction edited by Michael Emmerich, Jim Hinks & Masashi Matsuie

5. Clipped Coins, Abused Words, and Civil Government: John Locke's Philosophy of Money by George Caffentzis

6. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

7. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

8. Civilizing Money: Hume, his Monetary Project and the Scottish Enlightenment by George Caffentzis

9. An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans

10. Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata

11. Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris

12. Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard

13. Exiles from European Revolutions: Refugees in Mid-Victorian England edited by Sabina Freitag

14. The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P by Rieko Matsuura

15. A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance by Claudio Pavone

16. Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

17. Dracula by Bram Stoker

18. The Silent Dead by Tetsuya Honda

19. Lady Susan by Jane Austen

20. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century by Giovanni Arrighi

21. This Should be Written in the Present Tense by Helle Helle

22. The Citadel of Weeping Pearls by Aliette de Bodard

23. The Invention of Art: A Cultural History by Larry Shiner

24. Sister, Maiden, Monster by Lucy A. Snyder

25. The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

26. Ninety-Three by Victor Hugo

27. Carol by Patricia Highsmith

28. Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question edited by Nicola Diane Thompson

29. Some Recent Attacks: Essays Cultural & Political by James Kelman

30. Mem by Bethany C. Morrow

31. Russia Under Yeltsin and Putin by Boris Kagarlitsky

32. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

33. The History of the British Film 1918-1929 by Rachael Low

34. The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System by Henryk Grossman

35. Mayhem & Death by Helen McClory

36. White by Marie Darrieussecq

37. Dream Houses by Genevieve Valentine

38. The Vanishers' Palace by Aliette de Bodard

39. Maigret Takes a Room by Georges Simenon

40. The Lodger, That Summer by Levi Huxton

41. Mistakes Were Made by Meryl Wilsner

42. Grundrisse by Karl Marx

43. A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske

44. Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield