Murder as self-actualization

Extracts from Alexei Navalny’s interview with Mediazona published on Wednesday:

Although we know that the Kremlin is full of monstrous bloodsuckers, that they are so fixated on money and power that they have lost their minds… We didn’t expect them to resort to these formats [to poisoning]. At least I didn’t. You’ve just said this and had me surprised.

“You’ve just said this”: The interviewer, the fearless and hardworking Sergey Smirnov, pointed out that Navalny got poisoned exactly eighty years after a Soviet agent had attacked Leon Trotsky with an ice axe, killing him. Navalny: August 20, 2020. Trotsky: 20 August, 1940.

But it’s obvious that Putin is personally reveling in the idea that he has a squadron of invisible killers.

This, to me, is the best part of the interview. It may be off and wrong, and whimsical and fantastic – but it would still be the brightest. What if Putin is killing his opponents simply because he can and because he likes killing? What if the act of annihilation crowns his personal Maslow pyramid, as an act of self-actualization? Are you not superhuman if you can murder with impunity?

Perhaps the principal idea in this attempt to kill me is intimidating a large number of people. People fear these things more than the bullet, it seems to me.

Likely. But it’s a rationalization, however plausible.

And perhaps this symbolism [the Trotsky murder date] also plays a part. After all, those people visit astrologists. They visit old women in Siberia, chiromancers and all the other sorts. We understand that they are crazy about occultism and we see what kind of [Eastern] Orthodoxy they profess – something close to shamanism. Look at the Ministry of Defense church. It’s actually an occult building that’s as far from Orthodoxy as it’s possible to be. That’s why, perhaps, they chose this date…

Generally, I wouldn’t be surprised a bit, not a tiny bit, if they had made some voodoo doll before sending out that Chepiga guy, or if it had been as in Breaking Bad – do you remember those Mexican assassins crawling up to an icon, performing a sacrifice before setting off to kill Heisenberg?.. They are mentally unsound people and the money and power have made them even more crazy and much more dangerous.

Here’s a piece in Russian with pictures of the cathedral, including the interior. It resembles a pagan temple or something out of A Game of Thrones.