I don't know how you are proficient in russian history, but we have a thing called гонка на лафетах. At some point soviet administration grew that old they all died off in a decade, without coming up with a next gen of rulers. I feel like in a coming decade there would be a lot of funerals and the new chaotic 90s for Russia, Iran, that would be very painful for these nations, but it'd be another chance to start it right, at least as a lib democracy. People say I'm too dumb and optimistic, but there's still no successor to Putin and he's born in 1952, and the clocks are ticking. He and his friends are just to afraid to lose their place so they don't bother with that, meaning it would be a complete hell when they'd die one by one.

Not another neoliberal shock therapy revolution, like Atlantic Council / New American Century stans want, it doesn’t.

Is not "shared values," the main reason is that Navalny pushes the current USA narrative/propaganda of "Putin bad." Not defending or saying Putin is a saint, sometimes, the best way to push Propaganda messaging is to use convient truths when applicable or when they align. This is not new, like at all. Russia, China, the UK, et al do it.

Assange does not push that narrative, quite the opposite that the USA Goverment can be highly hypocritical and that it can also commit war crimes and that it spies on its citizens, like what Snowden revealed, too. This is why the USA has tried to made Assange's life a total living hell and the main stream media barely touches on it.

Remember when the NYT, among others sold lies from the Feds to push the war on Iraq? I 'member.

Not the best bit this touches on it.

https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its-iraq-war-shame/

What was Navalny's alleged crime and what is Assange's alleged crime?

I've already written a long comment about him and his significance to Russia as I see it living here, with all his failings. You can check it in my post history.

He had a lot of shitstains on his white clothes, but what's important - is that he shut up about any of his politics and acted as a clever manager who took everyone in opposition to establishment together, for once they didn't fight each other and acted as a one. It wasn't enough as we see now, and they started to fight each other once again after he was incarcerated, but he tried. And I respect him for that. His death in captivity isn't right.

I didn't have time to research what Assange got at that moment, so I'd not comment on that.

Take it with a grain of salt as I'm from here and I can't be objective about him or local politics.

At the start of his political career before 2011 it was all over the place, including nationalistic marshes, pro-gun rhetoric and basic agitation against funding national republics of Caucasus (they have negative balance and are helped by dotations from the center). Not to the levels of actual fascist like NOD or Dugin fans, but still very shitty. It's still argued if he was opportunistic or genuinelly supported all of that, and it's pointless imho. I can see most average persons from some Volgograd or Tambov saying the same or worse. Yet - he was caught on camera and it's forever archived.

After co-triggering Bolotnaya and other demonstrations he dropped that pov and got onto the platform of fighting corruption, to get honest, legit elections and tried to elect himself and other oppositioners into power. Since that, he came to be pro-European and anti-Putin politician. His program was basically that — let's retire these old friends and partners, who in his opinion are a middle between a mafia and a late soviet nomenclature. and see if a peaceful transfer to some more liberal Russia is possible. He wasn't all that savvy about making an original program, but he was a talented organizer and public speaker that put a lot of orgs and people together for numerous protest actions, he became a face of a brand for all public anti-establishment talks, a man and a vehicle if you will.

The other bad thing many remember was in 2014, where he was asked about the faith of Crimea and he said 'it's not a sandwich for it to casually change hands' for what he had backlash for years to come, even though he tried to walk it back and explain many times after that. It too was a stain on his reputation, but imho after seeing how failing ratings of Putin jumped over Crimea's capture and how regular people celebrated it (and forgot that Luhansk and Donetsk were on fire at the same time), he could've thought he'd shoot himself in the foot by vouching against it – although Nemtsov, the soon-to-be-dead oppositioner I liked more, did just that.

I'd say he doesn't really have any politics, so he's probably a liberal europe-centric politician. If he could become the next pres, he wouldn't probably change anything but introducing democratisation and transparency of the government. His value for me and other angry russians is that he collected a lot of other oppositional persons who usually waste all their time arguing with each other and nitpicking each other's words. He's not the best, like mentioned Nemtsov or Novodvorskaya, but he was alive and he did something when most were passive.

I hope I answered your curiosity. If you held some vision of him asking that (I think you do, since you are from lemmy.ml) lay it there. This person was very complicated and there were many different opinions about him from a kremlin agent, to a fascist, to a savior, to a rubber duck. Whatever, I feel like he didn't deserve dying in prison like that, thus I was very displeased hearing he's dead.

Muslims are cockroaches, Crimea deserved it, deep nationalism.

Basically, fascism with a 21st century coat of paint.