If you give a dictator a cookie...
When you trade a little bit of freedom for security, you end up with neither.
If you’re a parent of young children, chances are you have a copy of this book lying around your house somewhere:
The entire story is told in second person. A boy named Matthew gives a cookie to a mouse. The mouse asks for a glass of milk. He then requests a straw (to drink the milk), a napkin and then a mirror (to avoid a milk mustache), nail scissors (to trim his hair in the mirror), and a broom (to sweep up his hair trimmings). Next, he wants to take a nap, have a story read to him, draw a picture, and hang the drawing on the refrigerator. Looking at the refrigerator makes him thirsty, so the mouse asks for a glass of milk. The circle is complete when he wants a cookie to go with it.
Or maybe you have one of the 33 sequel or spin-off books which were published in its wake. When it comes to exploiting a recognizable IP, Hollywood has absolutely nothing on the children’s book industry.
I don’t know if Navalny is familiar with If You Give a Mouse a Cookie - Wikipedia says it was published in Russian in 2012, so his daughter was likely too old for it by then - but in his posthumously released prison letters to Natan Sharansky he describes a similar phenomenon.
Unfortunately, this one doesn’t just result in the house getting messed up and the fridge emptied, but one that gets people like him thrown into the new Gulag, his country plunged into darkness and fear and global isolation, and neighboring countries ravaged by offensive war and destruction and genocide.
The most important thing is to arrive at the correct conclusions, so that this state of lies and hypocrisy does not enter a new cycle. In the preface of the 1991 edition [of Sharansky’s memoir, See No Evil] you write that dissidents in prisons have kept the “virus of freedom” and it is important to prevent the KGB from inventing a vaccine against it. Alas, they have invented it. But in the current situation, it is not them who are to blame, but us, who naively thought that there was no going back to the old ways. And for the sake of good, it’s okay to rig elections a little bit here, or influence the courts a little bit there, and stifle the press a bit over here.
These little things, and the belief that it is possible to modernize authoritarianism, are the ingredients of this vaccine.
I’ve said that if Vladmir Putin had dropped dead of a heart attack around 2008, he might have gone down as the greatest leader in Russian history.
The collapse of the USSR in 1991 was followed by a period of unprecedented freedom of speech and assembly for the Russian people - but also shocking crime, corruption and economic collapse. But things really did improve - at least on the surface - after Putin took power at the turn of the millennium. High oil prices revived the Russian economy, street-level crime fell dramatically, and it actually looked like Russia might finally live up to its incredible potential after centuries of dictatorship.
In retrospect, the warning signs were always there. Even the circumstances surrounding Putin’s accession to power were extremely suspicious.1 But for most Russians, their lives had improved considerably after Putin had been in power for eight years.
And then came the invasion of Georgia. A sign of things to come.
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