5 hours Ago
In his autobiography “ Patriot ,” Alexei Navalny, killed in a Russian prison a year ago, asks if Leo Tolstoy’s idea that great men are not solely responsible for the story of history is correct. His experience enduring the targeted brutality of Russian President Vladimir Putin made Navalny think Tolstoy was wrong. The consequences of other regimes in Russia, Boris Yeltsin’s and Mikhail Gorbachev’s, also needed to be considered.
Did these men not twist the current of events into wholly new paths? Before retiring, Nancy English worked for 11 years as a paralegal in the Portland Office of Corporation Counsel. Prior to that she co-authored “Maine, An Explorer’s Guide.” And of course, consider Navalny himself.
His life of incredible grace under pressure, his courage in the face of death, was surely a force that undermined the totalitarian state he lived in, right? At one of his “last word” speeches in a Russian court in 2014, however, he had this to say: “On one side of [the battlefield] are the crooks who have seized power in our country, and on the other are people who want to change this. We are fighting over the people who look the other way, the people who shrug their shoulders, the people who are in a situation where all they have to do is not do something cowardly, who do it anyway.” I think that paragraph undermines the idea that great men control history simply with the use of the word “we.
” As I consider resuming work on my own memoir, a personal history about cruelty I experienced as a teenager, it has never been more clear to me that we are all to blame. We are also all deserving of honor when we chose not to be cowards, when we choose not to look away. Consider the recent revelations about the beloved writer Alice Munro, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
How horribly sad, how outraged so many of her readers were to learn she had stayed with a man who had sexually abused her third daughter. We wanted this wise, eloquent woman to be better than we learned she was. But when you count the number of people who protected Munro from the information, from her first husband to Munro herself, and those who refused to publish anything about it until she was dead, or who failed to follow up on it, there is a regular army of people looking the other way.
The perpetrator was actually prosecuted when Andrea Munro made a report to the police at the age of 29. According to the New Yorker article about this story, published in its Dec. 23, 2024 issue, “There were journalists at the courthouse in Goderich [Ontario].
” But the conviction for indecent assault of the husband of one of the most famous people in Canada was not reported. Remaining in the realm of personal history, think how we always ask, why do abused women (and men) not leave their abusers? How can they stay? But isn’t the question instead, how can they go? They know they are in danger if they leave. They know we have failed to keep some of them alive.
It takes tremendous courage to leave a violent domestic tyrant. Our society has resources for their protection, but they are not always enough. It takes a village, a town, a city, a state to hold domestic tyrants back from their worst behavior.
If I had known when I was 13, 14, 15 that other people in my town would protect me and take me in, I would have left my own tyrant in a heartbeat. To return to the question and take another tack, would World War II have ended if Hitler had been assassinated? Surely the incredible brutality of the Third Reich was an engineered machine that would have survived him. Think of the collusion that that war effort entailed.
Think of the villages nestled alongside the concentration camps; the architects, the builders, the suppliers of poison gas — there were so many working so hard to keep it going. And they are us. We face another dramatic moment in world history with the presidency of Donald Trump.
History is what we will make together, to our shame, if we look the other way. But he is not in control. We are.
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