Patriot: A Memoir

“Dying really didn’t hurt,” Navalny’s memoir begins, as he describes lying on the filthy floor of an airplane in August 2020 flying to Moscow from Tomsk, Siberia, where, he had been poisoned by Putin’s agents, seeking to close down his Anti-Corruption Foundation. For several years Navalny and his colleagues had been filming the never-ending soap opera of corruption in Russia. Each episode got three to five million viewers on YouTube (closed down in mid-2024)—a small but potentially powerful threat to the regime.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel persuaded Putin to allow Navalny to be flown to a hospital in Berlin for treatment. He stayed in Germany for four months with Yulia, his wife of 20 years, and their children. He and his IT helpers completed films of Putin’s palaces and, by phone, got one of the poisoners in Tomsk to detail the assassination plot.

Alexei returned to Moscow with Yulia. in January 2021.  Why go back? Yulia knew that he wanted to be with his supporters, he wanted to be an example to all these people with his courage and his bravery to show people that there is no need to be afraid of this dictator.

At the airport in Moscow, he was immediately separated from Yulia and taken to a series of prisons, each more remote and inhospitable. Yulia says she was prevented from visiting or speaking to her husband for two years before he died. She says Alexei was tortured, starved and kept in "awful conditions."

He was displayed before a series of judges who kept extending the term of his incarceration. Navalny spent 295 days in solitary confinement, punished, for violations such as leaving the top button of his fatigues unbuttoned. In August 2023, he received another sentence of 19 years on extremism charges. Somehow, he kept writing—on notebooks, on scraps of paper and on whatever social media he could access. These fragments became this memoir.

If you read the entire memoir or just a few pages, you will learn a lot about Russia. You will also learn how one man fought a totalitarian dictatorship to his own death, He did exercises to moderate his chronic back pain and kept up his sense of humor, even joking with a judge one day before he died—probably killed on orders from on high, with no autopsy revealed. He had not seen his family for two years.

Navalny’s Christian faith sustained him to the end, If you honestly believe, he wrote, what else is there to worry about? “My job is to seek the Kingdom of God . . . and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else.”

After his death, the US, EU and UK announced new sanctions against Russia. These included freezing the assets of six prison bosses who ran the Arctic Circle penal colony. Yulia calls the reaction to his death by the international community “a joke” and urges them to be “a little less afraid” of Putin.

The book is as much a political work as a memoir, a rallying cry to anyone who believes in a free Russia. It is also being published in Russian, as an eBooks and audiobook. But the publishers won’t send hard copies to Russia or Belarus, because the book might not get through customs. How many Russians will dare to buy it, even in electronic form, is unclear—and how much impact it could have is unknowable.

Patriot is also a love story about two people fully committed to a cause they believed in—a cause for which Yulia has now become the figurehead.

Here is a whispered exchange between them:

“I whispered in her ear ‘Listen, I don’t want to sound dramatic, but I think there’s a high probability I’ll never get out of here. . . . They will poison me.’

“‘I know’, she said with a nod, in a voice that was calm and firm. ‘I was thinking that myself.’

“It was one of those moments when you realise you found the right person. Or perhaps she found you.”

Here some more precious observations by Navalny (January 7, 2022):

“Why live your whole life in fear, even being robbed in the process, if everything can be arranged differently and more justly?

“The pendulum swings endlessly. Or the tug-of-war. Today you are brave. Tomorrow they seem to have scared you a bit. And the day after tomorrow they have scared you so much that you despair and become brave again.

“I have no idea when my journey into space will end, if ever, but on Friday I was informed that another criminal case is being brought against me and going to court. And there is yet another coming up, in which I am supposedly an extremist and a terrorist. . . .

“Having spent my first year in prison, I want to tell everyone exactly the same thing I shouted to those who gathered outside the court when the guards were taking me off to the police truck: Don’t be afraid of anything. This is our country and it’s the only one we have.

“The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children.”

These excerpts show what you will find in Patriot. It is surely frightening—How could some politicians treat people like this? How could some individuals endure treatment like this for years, working for a cause that is worthy but not visible on the horizon? Quite the opposite: more countries are becoming inward-looking dictatorships. Navalny helps us anticipate what could happen . . . anywhere.