Hello, fellow Bluestockings! Today I want to thank my newest paid subscribers Lou Kinsey and Nancy Breitfeller. Your patronage allows me continue Bluestocking Bombshells and develop it further.
Thank you to everyone joining and being part of my salon. If you enjoy posts like today’s, think of becoming a free or paid subscriber. Paid subscribers help sustain Bluestocking Bombshells. In addition, paid subscribers have access to my “Novel Observations,” interactive salon and posts responding to current news in literature, art and sociocultural events. Founding members receive these benefits along with my response to their written work of up to 6,000 words; that response also includes an hour remote conference.
My review of Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny was to be today’s post. It’s tragic irony why I must delay it.
Like many of you yesterday, I awoke to the news of Alexei Navalny’s death in a brutal Russian Artic-Circle penal colony. Navalny’s imprisonment resulted when he resisted Russian President Vladimir Putin and fought for democracy in Russia. Not only did the Russian lawyer, dissident and activist try to run for the Russian presidency in 2018, he also spoke out against Putin and The Kremlin. One of his more famous opposition tactics was revealing Putin’s mansion while one third of Russian hospitals go without running water.
That opposition came with danger. Navalny, a Gen-Xer like Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and me, told his followers and viewers in the Oscar-winning 2022 documentary Navalny what they must do if he is killed.
I never planned to address U.S. or world politics in this newsletter. My intention for writing Bluestocking Bombshells was to encourage the practice of creative writing and art in addition to addressing literature, culture and society, education and feminism. I wanted to create a salon. I did not want to center on news or politics. But that was not to be.
Circumstances changed because of a collective lean toward autocracy and increased violence.
I forgot that “the personal is political,” a phrase popularized by radical second-wave feminist activist Carol Hanisch. In her 1969 essay of the same name, she expounded on the idea already taken up by student and Civil Right groups. Current politics in the U.S. and around the world have impacted my creative and literary passions and praxis along with my life. Two writers whose writing I aspire to achieve with my own (always unsuccessfully) are James Baldwin and Susan Sontag. Their respective creative work and essay collections addressed society and politics; Baldwin’s essays in 1963’s The Fire Next Time resonate in 2024.
A gaunt but apparently healthy Alexei Navalny the day before his death.
Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who came to the United States from the Soviet Union when he was three years old, wrote to his paid Substack subscribers on Friday that the subpar inmate number P01135809 and the subpar perennially fired television host Tucker Carlson “should be seen as accessories to murder.”
Navalny understood arrest and possibly death awaited him when he returned to Russia from Germany in 2021 after surviving a 2020 Novichok poisoning. He knew his dissent and activism’s importance to bring democracy to Russia and end Putin’s murderous authoritarian regime. That regime began after the late Boris Yeltsin resigned on New Year’s Eve 1999 and Putin took over his presidency . Despite the danger, Navalny still expressed himself and fought for a democratic state.
I don’t hold degrees or have experience in international relations or government. I leave that to Lt. Col. Vindman and other experts. But from my writing and literature education, I know how infrequent it is for people to express themselves and resist injustice when the consequences are negative or deadly. People like Navalny, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Sophie Scholl, Josephine Baker, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Cesar Chavez and Angela Davis are rare in addition to inspirational and aspirational.
Despite the terror we may feel, we must resist autocracy and its efforts to silence us. After Hitler and the Nazis achieved their legal coup of Germany, more then one academic, writer and artist did not resist. With autocracy taking hold even in countries as progressive as The Netherlands, we have to actively work together to end it. Disability theorist Eli Claire advocated in Exile and Pride for single-issue movements to form coalitions with different social movements; those coalitions would demonstrate and utilize effective power. Like Navalny, we all must express ourselves and act to protect democracy, freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Only then will democracy around the world emerge, continue and prevail.
If you have Max, you can watch Navalny here.