I’m not Russian either, despite my username pointing there in language space. I’m actually Estonian, and have been watching this train wreck from one click away. I speak Russian a bit more fluently than Ukrainian, but both skills are rusty.

I think a victimhood / injustice narrative must be acknowledged if the goal is to understand how things got to the current point. One doesn’t have to agree with it, and victims don’t get automatic pardon if they become criminals.

As for Navalny - at the point when many people who were against Putin kind of supported him, he was the only guy still kicking who could have made a difference. He also kept kicking long enough that he managed to change during his journey. I should note that he had no fear, to the point of being suicidal in the end game. :o He went back home to become a martyr. His friends should have knocked him out instead of letting him onto a plane headed for Moscow (which got diverted anyway to arrest him more privately).

He was rational in some sense. He focused on corruption and living standards, and if one asked around, corruption and living standards were issues that people cared about. In a poll, rule of law, human rights and democracy were bottom tier topics, but corruption was the visible and ugly face of state going illegitimate. Navalny knew that everyone hasn’t studied political science and made his goals simple enough for a tractor driver to understand. At one point, he received 1/3 of the votes in the municipal elections in Moscow, so his approach (before further clamp-downs) worked for a moment - he was one inch away from being mayor of Moscow. Later he was charged, prevented from running, demolished, imprisoned and probably killed.

He was a tragic figure in one particular way. Being half-Ukrainian (his relatives were from the Chornobyl region and as teen, he briefly managed to forget Russian and speak Ukrainian for one summer) - he held on to the idea of Russians and Ukrainians being brothers when others had already let it go. And he was a hostage of Putin’s popularity, and made ridiculous compromises and verbal acrobatic tricks on the subject of Crimea (writing this, I recall the “Crimea is not a sandwich” comment).

But the point of people choosing him - and he later (when barred from running) advising voters to choose the strongest non-Edinaya-Rossiya candidate in each district - was tactical: “choose the strongest challenger to the tyrant and hope to sort it out later”.

As for people being politically illiterate… despair is appropriate in several countries, but Russia gets a special mention. I wonder if there exists a country where voters are universally mindful of their actual needs, see through political tricks, have empathy towards out-groups and foreign countries, and don’t create a clusterf**k eventually. I’m not sure if one exists currently, but I believe such a country might be possible to create. Not in the borders of present-day Russia, however. Recently I’ve been looking at the US, and I’m seeing similar tendencies, fortunately at a lower level. Many of them can’t figure out international policy. Caring about what happens abroad has never been very popular, there is too much US around to care about. Just as others, they don’t see through tricks, their electoral system isn’t under severe influence yet, but can be gamed with money and is very polarizing…

…and the same, at an even lower level (possibly because over here, it’s impossible to ignore international politics) happens in the country where I live too. People can be tricked with unfulfillable promises, distracted with a topic largely irrelevant to their well being, can be whipped into moral panic over a low-priority issue… just the country is microscopic and has no potential of hegemonizing.