What Navalny Represented

Until the Czech border guards began to wave East Germans through into West Germany and Austria, the general consensus was that the Berlin Wall and the Warsaw Pact were around to stay. We know what happened a few months later, no?

Putin's assumption of power, and the resurgence of the KGB as the FSB, are disheartening to be sure, and Russia is probably a harder nut to crack than were East Germany and Czechoslovakia (where there were shared languages and people could literally look across the border to see how much better the West was!), but on the flip side, any Russian with internet access can set up a virtual private network and see not only what the rest of the world is like, but also images of what the old Soviet Union was like. At a certain point, without western technology (largely out of reach due to sanctions), everything reverts to the old Soviet model. That includes bread lines, no meat or bananas, and the like. They will eventually realize "we used to have nice things, now we have Putin", and make the connections.

Hopefully sooner rather than later, there will be a revolt, and the files of the FSB will be opened in the same way that those of the Stasi were in 1991.