And he’s no Abraham Lincoln either News came last week of the death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny last week. He had survived an attempted assassination by poison in 2020 but eventually returned to Russia, where he was immediately detained and sentenced first to two and a half years, then nine years and ultimately 19 years in prison on charges of “extremism.” In December he was sent to a distant prison in the Russian Arctic. And now he is gone. Navalny was the most famous political dissident in the world, probably since Nelson Mandela. Those who care about such things held out hope that he would survive incarceration, as Mandela did, and prevail one day in a new Russia. In this era of rising authoritarianism, the death of this man — and his bravery in embodying a dream of freedom and liberty, now for the moment crushed — adds more fuel to fears of the creeping fascism now gaining traction around the world. For those of us in the U.S., this is particularly distressing because the timing of Navalny’s death feels as though it may be directly connected to the unhinged rhetoric of Donald Trump, the putative presidential nominee of the Republican Party. It’s true that an “election” is scheduled soon in Russia in which it is certain that President Vladimir Putin will be triumphant. There has been some speculation that Navalny’s death was related to that, although it’s hard to understand how that would help Putin domestically. More likely…