The Burden of the Potentate
Recreational torture1 is an art. Balance is critical. Discipline essential, near indifference indispensable. One must not get carried away. You want to feel that final moment coming, watch it coming, for the longest possible time. Maneuvering ever so cautiously towards that, you find indifference has left you. You are, in fact, keenly focused, agitated, tingling even, meaning you must be that much more careful. You dare not hurry the subtle transition from discomfort to pain, from pain to agony, from agony to despair. Most exquisite of all is the moment when sanity capitulates to terror. This raw phase of helplessness, when the creature relinquishes all, is when you triumph. Those are the moments to prolong and savor. But this is exactly when you must exercise utmost care. One stroke too many, a millimeter too deep, five seconds too long, and you will be left with nothing but a heap of mashed tissue, further from suffering than you’ll ever know. And you will be alone. Terribly alone.
Which is why Vladimir Putin outsourced Aleksei Navalny.
Navalny’s choice to return to Russia from Berlin January 2021 had been sheer stupidity. He had climbed back into Putin’s ring. To have the man once again in his power, this time truly in his power — in Russian prison — so intensely delighted the Russian potentate that he did not trust himself to be near him, or to pronounce his name, or even to know who he was. Wisely, Putin turned the task of keeping the man over to third parties, a move that permitted him to maintain benevolent indifference toward his victim. Mother Russia was to understand, of course, that Putin was anything but indifferent, but that he had no idea who this man was. How could he? The leader of Mother Russia did not waste time acquainting himself with the personal histories of every felon confined in Russia’s mighty prisons. So wasteful an activity would be to sap the energy he had sworn to devote to Mother Russia. So it was with Crown Prince MBS, a man of regal presence. How should he know what squirming thing a Khashoggi was or if a bone saw was involved?
For three long years Putin endured knowing all about the precarious existence of one unknown prisoner in particular. The enticing awareness pounded softly along the shores of his conscious mind — the more wonderful for being ever so faint. Indiscreet prurience erupted in moments Putin found himself dwelling on that wretch’s last agony, which frightened him. Those last moments must never come. But happily, at a distance, he could indulge his appetite safely by piling on prison sentences for whatever struck his fancy, the silliest pretense, the more outrageous the better, as much fun as dressing donkeys in petticoats. With every new conviction his pleasure intensified. The thought of keeping one particular man freezing, starving, dropping flesh day by day in heatless cells with forced walks at 6:30 a.m., nocturnal checks every half hour to make sure the whites of those blazing blue eyes had not escaped, such eyes that blazed as Putin’s could not, knowing that soon all this would affect that one particular mind and that one particular prisoner would collapse, reduced to desperation, overcome by panic, consumed by hatred, nearly mad, clearly broken. In anticipation of that, Putin turned the screws so carefully, again and yet again, and how close to ecstasy it struck.
Except this Navalny did not collapse. He laughed in the courtrooms, joked with the judges, suggested he be lent money because he was running out, celebrated the novel fashion in which he had spent New Year’s Eve for free. Putin suspected the man had endeared himself to his fellow inmates, that sympathy was growing even among Putin’s outsourced tormentors. That must not happen. Putin resorted to the elegant, so convenient alternative of solitary confinement. And to switch prisons. Yes, freeze the man in solitary at Polar Wolf. Things would be ideal there.
An event of February 2024 forced the potentate’s hand, robbing him of his pleasure. Within one desolate week, he learned — how had it slipped past him? — that his poppet was to be traded for an assassin incarcerated in Germany, his own man. Putin didn’t want that snot back, nor could he bear to let his poppet go. Better death than release him to someone else. And so Putin shifted in his chair, fiddled with his pen, rumpled his brow in utmost regret, and ordered cabbage for lunch. So they knew, and so it came to pass that news of Navalny’s death was relayed post haste to Putin on Friday, February 16, as a total surprise. (The greater the surprise, of course, to be informed post haste of the death of a man Putin had never heard of.) Yes, Putin’s poppet had succumbed to natural causes — extreme cold, hunger, exposure, exhaustion — and died.
The delight lasted until nearly noon, when something wicked doused Putin’s glee. The man with blazing blue eyes had not succumbed. He was laughing at him still, from Munich now, from blue eyes blazing in the pale, swollen face of the widow of that scum, standing tall and strong, defiant and resolute, loathsome eyes trained unflinchingly on him. Such ignorance! Such impertinence! It scoured Putin’s soul. The lust to exterminate enemies revivified, too tight to call pleasure, too exquisite to call pain. Putin breathed relief. His mission was far from over. Once again, he must rise to demonstrate that the democracy a fool named Navalny hallucinated did not exist, nor did any Russian want it.
- “Recreational torture” denotes that vocation of inflicting suffering on unconsenting victims — perhaps to death – but without purpose, that is to say, with no need or intent or desire to extract a confession or information from them. ↩︎