Recently Trump has compared his troubles to that of Alexei Navalny, the recently deceased political opponent of Putin. Fox News aired a Trump interview with Laura Ingram where she asked how he is going to pay his enormous legal costs. He described his troubles as “a form of Navalny” and quickly pivoted to his large-scale legal woes. He stated that “We are turning into a communist country in many ways.”

First, 4 grand juries of fellow citizens in 4 jurisdictions indicted him on 91 felony counts. He has been given due process. For, Navalny, not so much. He was poisoned with nerve agent in 2020 (a particularly Russian trick) but managed to survive. Following treatment abroad, he returned to Russia where he was quickly apprehended, convicted and sentenced to 19 years in a maximum security prison for recidivists and those with life sentences for violence.

He was sent to penal colony number 3, a distant arctic prison in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. According to Hugh Williamson of Human Rights Watch, “The Russian authorities have abandoned any pretense of justice in dealing with dissenters, and with Navalny they have thrown a litany of charges against him, each more brazenly absurd than the next.

The Soviet Union had a large number of Gulags prior to its collapse. The map below shows the locations of the camps. During Operation Barbarossa in WWII, Hitlers army and Himmler’s SS were under orders to kill all Jews encountered and they did. Many non-Jewish Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians were murdered during Hitler’s advance to Moscow and subsequent retreat. Poland in particular suffered greatly during this time. Some fraction of Jews were sent to various concentration camps but a great many were collected into groups and shot en masse just outside of their villages. As the Red Army moved into Poland killing and pushing the Germans west, Stalin gave orders to take over control of the country and establish a communist government. The participants of the weak non-communist provisional government of Poland were captured and killed by the Soviets and the Polish government was taken over under communist control. Many, many Poles were captured and sent into forced labor in the Gulag system. Poland was savaged by both the Soviets and Germans.

As an American, I have been exposed to the history of both the western European and Pacific theaters of WWII. However, the history of Central and Eastern Europe, especially from WWI through WWII has largely been absent in my experience. I just finished reading the 2010 Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder. Snyder is a Yale historian and writes in detail on the period in the Central and Eastern European regions between the times of the Bolshevik revolution and the end of WWII.

The period of 1932 to 1933 (the Holodomor) in Ukraine is particularly interesting and sheds light on the fear and revulsion Ukrainians must feel at the prospect of once again coming under Russian rule. During this time the Soviets, on orders from the Kremlin in Moscow, blocked any exit from Ukrainian territory and starved the Ukrainians in an effort to speed collectivization. Their agricultural products were stolen leaving Ukrainians to starve. Many tens of thousands were killed or sent to the gulags. Being sent to the gulags entailed being packed into rail cars and shipped off without food or warmth. Sometimes when they arrived, they found that they would be forced to build the prison camp they would be imprisoned in.

Some critics complained that the book presents nothing new. It is after all heavily referenced to extensive existing literature. Nonetheless, it is a very compelling read for we non-scholars. For Americans in general, this bit of history is probably unheard of.

For Trump to compare his “treatment” by the American Justice system to that of Navalny betrays great ignorance of the history and contemporary politics of Russia. His lack of compassion for Ukraine is only a small slice of his overall absence of compassion.

Trump bitches that his troubles are of political origin. I agree, they are. Our democratic republic is in part a political system of government. Citizen voting and the legislative process are inherently political, but adherence to the law require is absolute. This political structure has a built-in justice system based on due process and the presumption of innocence with many checks and balances- perhaps to the point of generousness. Trump and his legal team routinely take advantage of our due process by filing for delays, dismissals, objections, nuances in civil trial procedure and lawsuits for the purpose of delaying judgement. He learned from his first attorney, Roy Cohn, former chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Trump and his squad of attorneys are very good at it. Trump is a very ignorant and narcissistic man-child who attracts national news coverage because of his outrageous behavior. It’s cheaper than advertising, just like in the 2016 campaign. For him to compare his predicament to that of Alexei Navalny is preposterous. In Trump’s portfolio of legal trouble, where there is smoke, there is fire.

Handing over the presidency of the USA again to Trump would be a tragic mistake that might not be recoverable.