Wow, my heart is heavy.

I was in Russia for parts of 1994 and 1995. Yeltsin was running for re-election and the democracy movement was still in its infancy, barely five years old. The working-class Russians I talked with lived in a state of anxiety, not sure of how to leave the past, but also unsure of how to move forward. For a country that had been under complete central control for nearly a century, the concepts of working for yourself, freedom to say anything, do anything, and look the way you want to, were still quite foreign. The terms free market and profit were obscure.

While Mikhael Gorbachev opened the country to reform, it was Yeltsin who gained the support of the masses and ended up the first real elected President. Times remained tough for the ordinary Russian for several years, and I could still see bullet marks in the President’s house from a failed coup attempt in Moscow. I interacted with Russians who looked back with nostalgia on the old Soviet Union and all they had lost. I remember a Russian teenager named Sasha who said what they needed was a strong man like Stalin to bring things back, despite all of the factual history of the millions of Russians and neighboring peoples who perished under the dictator’s rule. I recall another Russian who told me of a time when he was in college in Moscow at the perestroika, the opening in the late 1980s and seeing a banana for the first time in the open market and how it was an epiphany to him to purchase it and share it with his brother.

Many countries, including the United States, spent much time and energy assisting Russia’s transformation into a free and open country. While most were well-intentioned, the shock of moving to a market economy pushed by western influence led to great pain among the ordinary Russian population. In the end, an ill Yeltsin began to lose the support and hopes of the common people. Yeltsin would be openly drunk in public and many Russians were embarrassed by this buffoonish behavior. In the end, Yeltsin won re-election, though he was generally ill and out of sight from a heart attack. Before getting to the next election, he chose a young Vladimir Putin to turn the country over to, and slowly but surely, Putin ended up being the exact opposite of what he first professed to be.

An ex-KGB agent, Putin valued the lost prosperity and image of the Soviet Union, never mind that it was arrived at brutally and without regard for the wishes of neighboring countries. One by one the voices of democracy were silenced.

Boris Nemtsov was one of the first new leaders I heard about in the early 1990s. He was a democratic politician and former governor of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, a beautiful, ancient area of Russia that had been closed to the west for decades. He was the one I would regularly see mentioned in the Western press, working and campaigning for reforms, and at one time appeared to be the consensus choice to follow after Yeltsin.

With the lurch toward authoritarianism by Putin, Putin began to unravel Western reforms and to put his people into places of government. Nemtsov, one of the real bright shining stars of the new democratic Russia, was assassinated on a bridge in Moscow in 2015.

There were many others.

Anna Politkovskaya, a well-known journalist critical of the war in Chechnya and critical of Putin, was shot and killed in the elevator of her apartment building. Stanislav Markelov, a human rights lawyer and advocate for democracy, was shot dead near Red Square. When a journalist, Anastasia Baburova, tried to help him, she was shot and killed as well. Sergei Magnitsky was a lawyer who exposed large-scale theft by Putin and his government placements. He was arrested and beaten to death in prison. You can read more about Magnitsky and our government’s passing of the Magnitsky Act in Bill Broder’s exceptional take on those early days in the new Russia called Red Notice. Special note: there are reports around Russia today on the arrests of demonstrators, including those who laid flowers at the bridge where Nemtsov was killed. Let us hope these acts will continue.

These Russians became the faces of the fight for freedom and for truth, and they courageously fought for democratic values and paid the ultimate price for their convictions.

Alexey Navalny may have been the greatest of them and he carried the weight of what was left. His story will someday be a move. It is already a documentary.

Now he too is gone, though I think his passing may have the dramatic effect he was hoping for; that is, to inspire the Russian people to action.

We will see.

This interview with 60 Minutes captured the pain and the promise of Navalny and what he accomplished in his short life and career. Stop and watch it if you can.

I want to pay tribute to him today by recognizing some of the commonalities between Russians and Americans.

We are families with kids. We are workers. We are taxpayers. We are environmentalists. We are teachers. Despite the ease in which we label entire countries, we must always remember it is the governments, not the people, who typically cause problems for others. Whether Iran, Russia, N. Korea, or China, remember that large swaths of their citizens are just like us except they live in a state of anxiety and fear, and their governments will kill them to keep control.

Once one has had the experience of living in other countries, of breaking bread with mothers and fathers around the world, one gets beyond the normal black-and-white thinking that is pervasive in American society. The us vs. them, democrats vs. republicans, love it or leave it. All of this is a way to bully you into a shortcut from seeking deeper understanding.

But we are really all the same, and every generation needs freedom fighters like Navalny to both ensure that the principles of democracy stay afloat and to push back against tyranny and oppression and division. It was Thomas Jefferson who once said that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

And we have done so.

Most of American history is rife with examples of bullying people or places into submission; the Southern rebellion of the Civil War, the lynching of blacks, the widespread killing and relocating of Native Americans, the battle for civil rights, interning the Japanese during WWII, stopping black children trying to go to school, and even protecting the thousands of species we live with, the land we walk over, and the water we drink.

Freedom is not free, so if you’re a teacher, a minister, or a parent, I hope you will take just a moment with your class, your flock, or your kids, and tell them to remember Alexei Navalny, a hero of our times. Don’t let this moment pass without a pause. Play the 60 Minutes video. Show them how far someone goes in their country to fight for the kinds of freedoms we take for granted. He may have spoken a different language, and been from another country, but he was as American as the Founding Fathers, Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Medgar Evers, Rachel Carson, and MLK.

He gave everything for the greater good.

I firmly believe that most of us go through life in a state of distraction, unable or unwilling to look deeper. It makes it easier for us to do bad things and find fault in others. The Bible talks of casting out the beam of thine own eye before judging others.

I watched this documentary early last year, and what I liked about it is its honest portrayal of actor Jonah Hill and his therapist. This isn’t some glitzy job meant to make money. It’s a project of love and you can tell by Hill’s interactions with his therapist. The model the therapist, Phil Stutz, brings forth is cut straight from his own life and I think you’ll find it quite applicable and memorable to almost anything you are dealing with. I include it here in hopes while you spend some time thinking on Navalny and his family, you’ll contemplate some time with yourself.

In closing, as we say goodbye to Alexei Navalny, I want to pay respect by urging you to live your life with some examples directly from his. Here are the final personal leadership lessons:

• Speak truth to power.

• Be authentic.

• Be willing.

• Have a sense of humor.

• Be kind.

Thank you for reading.

Cпасибо, Алексей!