Reading Alexei Navalny’s book ‘Patriot’ has been a sobering experience. It is a conventional biography until his return to Russia after poisoning in 2021. From then on it’s the imposition of evermore stringent limitations on movement, not least the tiny cell, and on freedom of expression: his journal which takes up the second half of the book includes over 100 pages from 2022 and just 20 in 2023. He was murdered in February 2024. The sheer guts of Navalny and utter, indeed vile, vindictiveness of Putin mirror in extreme form the battle lines of our time.

At the other extreme has been the Artemis mission to and around the moon. Physical space constrained but limitless space beyond the capsule. Navalny didn’t have to go back to Russia, but he calculated that, if not in his lifetime, should they take his life from him, but in the lives of those that follow him, a world of limitless possibilities would be opened up in Russia. People might see this as a wild aspiration, when we’re always falling short, but to have aspirations is where freedom lies.

I’ve also been reading the remarkable, ‘Orbital’, the Booker-prize winning novel in 2024. We’re aboard the space station, four men, two women, two of the men being Russian. The Russians have separate quarters, Again, space constrained, but without gravity they have freedom of movement. Every ninety minutes they complete a circuit of the earth, and it is a thing of wonder, of colour and light, where human habitation only becomes visible when cities and roads light up as earth and spacecraft turn their backs on the sun.

‘This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with one another?  With the earth? Can we stop…’

Constraints of space are also a focus of the 2025 Booker-prize winning novel, ‘Flesh’, when a Hungarian boy in a Budapest high-rise escapes via the army to England, to a security job and marriage to his boss’s widow, to the greatest riches, and then … I’ll let the ending take you by surprise. Where ‘Orbital’ is about wonder, and imagination, ‘Flesh’ is pared down, contained in a world where sex is the stepping-off point. The two novels, ‘Orbital’ and ‘Flesh’, exist at different poles. Wonder is open-ended, reaches the stars. Escaping privation on the other hand is a roller-coaster, you claw up, you’re cast down, upward mobility with the threat of downward always present.

Hungary is also in the news because of the recent election, and the ousting of the kleptocratic populist and aspiring autocrat, Viktor Orban. I don’t want to push parallels too far – or maybe I do. We’ve seen twelve years of a government encroaching on everyday freedoms. But not to the extent that an election could be fixed, though Orban tried his best. It was just this kind of attack on political and personal liberty that could possibly have been stopped in its tracks maybe twenty and more years ago in Russia.

Hungary can now be open again to Europe and the EU, and enjoy ordinary freedoms. We can parallel their absence for Navalny with the freedoms now opening for Hungary. And the freedom to wonder, whether you’re bound to the ground or circling in space, at all the earth has to offer.

Before I sign off I’ll also put in a word for Pope Leo, new to the job, but taking on Trump, Trump as aspirant Jesus (as he depicted himself in Truth Social)), and Trump as tyrant. For Pope Leo it is simply a case of speaking truth. He of course can speak from the elevation of a papal chair. But given his opponent, it takes courage.

Navalny was speaking from prison. That took courage to a whole other level. As he wrote from prison in 2022, ‘I knew from the outset I would be imprisoned for life – either for the rest of my life or until the end of the life of the regime.’

The old democratic certainties are gone, maybe forever, but we can still aspire to them, always, if we can, keeping one step ahead of the bad guys.