In Fairy Tales, Idealism Pays Off. In Reality, Tyrants Usually Win—And Their Supporters Don’t Switch Sides
By Elena Smolina April 10, 2025 (ZocaloPublicSquare.org)
Disney’s new live-action Snow White and Alexei Navalny’s murder might seem a world apart. But as I watched the film with my daughter in L.A.’s beautiful El Capitan Theatre, I saw something disturbingly familiar in the story of a kind, brave princess forced to first become a servant in her own palace and then to flee into the woods, escaping the new queen’s order to assassinate her.
The whole ordeal made me think about how Navalny, the leader of the Russian opposition, had miraculously survived a poisoning attempt and, after recovering in Germany, chose to return to Russia, fully aware of the risks. Except that’s where the parallels end. Snow White gets a happily ever after. When Navalny returned to Russia in 2021, he was arrested; he died in a penal colony in 2024.
Snow White and Alexei Navalny’s fates are two sides of the reality that those of us living under the threat of totalitarianism must face. In the film, Snow White’s parents teach her (naturally, in a fantastic song), to be fearless, fair, brave, and true. But in life, sometimes being these things is not enough to win the battle against a tyrant. At times, nothing is. Especially in this volatile moment in history, fairy tales that teach our children to be delusional may be doing us all a dangerous disservice.
Snow White does understand its enemy. The queen, played by the regal Gal Gadot, is gorgeous, powerful, and sociopathic. In theory, her beauty is supposed to fuel her might (and maybe it did back when she married the newly widowed king). But the key to her grip on power is her absolute absence of conscience. She’s ruthless and unfamiliar with remorse. In this version, she’s also very fond of red caviar—an inexplicably Russian touch that hit even closer to home.
But the story’s clueless outlook on life comes through when Snow White, who, by the way, just recently survived her own poisoning attempt, faces the queen at the palace gates, surrounded by her guard. Snow White is unarmed and has neither an army behind her nor the support of the masses (the visibly malnourished common folk just stand there in the town’s Fachwerk-style main square and wait to see who’ll win, having lost all hope and drive to protest). So, Snow White does what she does best: She sings. In her song, Snow White addresses each member of the queen’s guard by first name, appealing to their conscience. Naturally, they switch sides.
As someone who has been at anti-Putin rallies that drew tens of thousands, I can attest that expecting this kind of behavior from members of the military is the definition of magical thinking. Law enforcement can chat and be friendly with protesters if their higher-up’s orders allow it. They will become a faceless punitive mass when the orders change.
Watching Snow White bravely putting herself out there and gearing up to face her evil nemesis, I felt the sinking feeling of knowing where this story would actually go next if it weren’t a Disney movie. Because we all have seen it.
When, months after miraculously surviving the August 2020 poisoning attempt, Navalny returned to Russia, it was an act of personal courage so bold that it was going to either end in tragedy or change everything. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama was among those who compared Navalny to Nelson Mandela: If Putin’s regime collapsed, Navalny, like Mandela in South Africa, would have emerged “as the unquestioned leader of a more democratic Russia,” Fukuyama wrote in his elegy, “Honoring Navalny.”
Even after Navalny was thrown in jail, he continued to feel like a character from a narrative that cannot end on a somber note. This collective refusal to believe he could be killed may have resulted from the fact that no matter where we’re from or how old we are, we’ve all been brought up on the same fairy tale tropes. In his famous 1928 book Morphology of the Folktale, Soviet folklorist and structuralist Vladimir Propp argued that all fairy tales, in fact, may stem from the same root— making the way we view stories a universal thing.
I suspect that’s why, a year after Navalny’s murder, his death remains unprocessed by most people. It was so shocking, in part, because the finality of this death defied everything we were raised to believe in.
This collective refusal to believe he could be killed may have resulted from the fact that no matter where we’re from or how old we are, we’ve all been brought up on the same fairy tale tropes.
I met Alexei Navalny twice. Both interactions were short and, objectively, meaningless. The first was in spring 2013 at a GQ Russia photoshoot, for what was supposed to become a cover story. That cover never happened. Even in 2013, when the lines between what was allowed and what was forbidden were murky, his face on the cover of a magazine was a risk not every outlet was willing to take. The cover of the May issue that year was given to a non-threatening Robert Downey Jr. But in the top right corner, right above Mr. Downey’s head, there’s a blunt cover line in black: Navalny.
The second time was in 2017 at a Christmas party for a children’s arts camp—Navalny and the camp’s founder, former Esquire Russia editor Filipp Bakhtin, were friends. I remember feeling that there was something unmistakably historic about this figure. Back then, I thought it was the striking combination of the normalcy of seeing him there and the absolute abnormality of it. Power in Russia is never approachable, and yet there he was with his wife, Yulia, the image of approachability. The very idea of down-to-earth Navalny overthrowing the infinitely powerful regime felt so unlikely that it simply had to happen. If we were living by the laws of a fairy tale, it would have.
The 19th-century Grimm Brothers’ version, “Little Snow-White,” was at least sober enough to give its heroine a plausible way to defeat the queen—by marrying a powerful man. It’s neither particularly empowering nor uplifting but that change in her social status offers a reason for why the queen loses her grip on the princess. Luckily, in 2025, Snow White doesn’t have to marry a creep. Instead, she’s reimagined as a revolutionary with a Robin Hood-like boyfriend. But her rebellion is lazy and unconvincing—there must be more to overcoming evil than just showing up. To suggest otherwise is setting the whole generation up for failure. (If I must cite an example of a fantasy adventure where an underdog overthrows the tyrant, and it’s brilliant, it’s William Goldman’s The Princess Bride.)
The original Snow White owes her name to the striking combination of three drops of red blood on the blindingly white snow. This latest version doesn’t mention it to avoid emphasizing the whiteness of Snow White’s skin.
But I still kept thinking of red on white. For me, the red isn’t blood. It’s the frostbitten flowers, carnations, that thousands and thousands of brave people left at Navalny’s grave on the day of his funeral. According to the photos, that day, the snow on the sidewalk was not white; it was brownish, like it should be in March. The police were everywhere—masked and unmasked, on foot, in cars, in police wagons (in case some of the grieving people would need to be arrested), even, fittingly for a dark fairy tale, on horseback. Every single one of them somehow justified the choice to keep doing this. No one switched sides.
Elena Smolina is a film critic and a former deputy editor-in-chief at GQ Russia. She lives in Los Angeles.