AlekseiNavalny meeting with volunteers during his campaign to unseat Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2018.
Credit...James Hill for The New York Times

In His Memoir, Aleksei Navalny Speaks From the Grave

The Russian opposition leader, who died in an Arctic penal colony earlier this year, tells the story of his struggle to wrest his country back from President Vladimir Putin.

by · NY Times

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PATRIOT: A Memoir, by Alexei Navalny

Aleksei Navalny did not set out to write a posthumous memoir. He began the project in 2020 as a conventional autobiography propelled by an “intriguing thriller about uncovering an assassination attempt.” Of course, he was the victim of the assassination attempt — a nerve agent laced into his clothing took hold on a flight from Siberia to Moscow that summer as Navalny was sitting beside his wife, Yulia, and watching an episode of the sci-fi cartoon “Rick and Morty” on his laptop. He stumbled to the airplane bathroom. Thanks to Yulia, he came to in a hospital in Berlin.

Months later, before he could complete the manuscript, he boarded another flight to Moscow and soon found himself in a jail cell. Over the next two and a half years, he faced a series of trumped-up charges, from embezzlement to insulting a Russian World War II veteran. “Wow, what a dramatic turn in my book,” he writes, a quarter of the way through. “This chapter is being written in prison.” The irony is deliberate; Navalny had every reason to believe he would be arrested the moment he stepped foot on Russian soil.

For years, he writes, he and his family were routinely harassed. In 2018, his younger brother Oleg was released after three and a half years in prison on fraud charges that the European Court of Human Rights declared “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable.” Navalny reports that a couple weeks before he was hospitalized, Yulia, who helped edit the book, had herself survived a probable poisoning. He is worried for their children. “I try to minimize the risk to my family,” he writes, “but there are certain things that are beyond my control.” He adds, “I’m not prepared to live in fear.”

The son of a Soviet army officer, Navalny spent many of his childhood summers in the early 1980s with his grandmother in a small Ukrainian village near Chernobyl. (“I was in charge of Grandma’s immense cow,” he recalls. “That made me feel very cool.”) After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, the village was devastated. The Soviet government’s lies in the aftermath of the accident, Navalny writes, “had a formative impact on my outlook.”

He joined the liberal Yabloko party after Putin’s ascent in the late ’90s, but a few years later he marched alongside far-right ultranationalists, on the grounds that every element of the opposition would be needed in the fight against despotism. In 2008, as Russia waged war on Georgia, Navalny called on the Kremlin to deport all Georgians, referring to them as “rodents.” As late as 2013, in an unsuccessful bid for mayor of Moscow, he railed against undocumented immigrants from Central Asia.

In his memoir, he seems exasperated by such details, but in the past decade he apologized for some of his earlier comments and spoke out against racism. His blog posts and YouTube videos on corruption in Russia gained an ever wider audience. By 2017, he had come out in support of same-sex marriage, a deeply unpopular proposition in a deeply homophobic country. Did his politics evolve — or did he simply wager that a more cosmopolitan approach, friendlier on the world stage, would be more effective in the long run? He suggests that, before the attempt on his life, he believed greater renown might ensure his safety, but otherwise “Patriot” is silent on this question.

After his incarceration, Navalny’s wardens permitted him to keep some notebooks, and he began to document, in meticulous detail, life behind bars, but many of the pages were “moronically confiscated” before he had a chance to smuggle them out. He laments that the resulting text will be “a mishmash of bits and pieces, a traditional narrative followed by a prison diary.”

There is, however, some mortar here. Navalny’s publisher has inserted legal transcripts, contextual information about his trials and his treatment as an inmate as well as many of his social media posts, which his lawyers sent out on his behalf after he was locked up. Navalny writes, portentously, that “if they do finally whack me, the book will be my memorial.” And so it is. In February, after three years in confinement, Navalny, just 47, collapsed and died in an Arctic penal colony.

A third of the way through the text, Navalny tries to abjure the term “Kafkaesque,” as it is “bad form to keep using such a hackneyed phrase.” And yet the cliché so aptly describes his circumstances, and modern Russia, that he can’t help himself. His keepers subject him to solitary confinement after he undoes the “top button of my prison uniform.” When he refuses to partake in compulsory menial labor, noting his bad back, they demand a medical certificate. When he requests a medical examination, they inform him that there is no medical unit. “We go around in circles.”

Against this sordid backdrop, Navalny’s indefatigable goodness is all the more poignant. His cellmates are “great guys,” despite their indoor chain smoking. His overseers, whom he calls “the dudes,” are “all very polite, pleasant even.” After being made to remove all his belongings from his cell for an inspection, the second in two days, he mouths off to an elderly guard, then expresses contrition. “I apologize for yelling,” he tells his jailer. “I think, of course, that basically I am in the right, but I shouldn’t have yelled at you.” Some of this posturing must have been for the good of his own survival and out of a concern that his notebooks might be intercepted, but it also feels genuine. Reading letters from his supporters, he is brought to tears. “People are so good,” he confides to his diary.

Navalny often uses the word “patriot” cynically, to refer to members of Putin’s inner circle. Even so, it fits him like a glove. “I love the Russian language,” he writes. “I love the melancholic landscapes.” He appreciates his compatriots’ gallows humor, as when someone on the outside sends a letter to Navalny, housed, according to the postal address, in the prison’s “Death Chamber.” “We’re very jolly people,” Navalny notes. “Our jokes are often on the edge of what’s acceptable.”

One might expect a work by an anti-corruption activist and political prisoner, serving multiple sentences adding up to more than 30 years, to read like a righteous diatribe. It does not. “Patriot” reveals less about Navalny’s politics than it does about his fundamental decency, his wry sense of humor and his (mostly) cheery stoicism under conditions that would flatten a lesser person. In solitary, he devours Yuval Noah Harari’s “21 Lessons for the 21st Century,” in which Harari recommends Vipassana meditation. “People pay to be locked in a room where they remain silent for two weeks, eat scant food and have no contact with the outside world,” Navalny observes. “I’m getting all that for free.”

At one point, Navalny imagines how successful the memoir will be if he is killed before publication: “The book’s author has been murdered by a villainous president; what more could the marketing department ask for?”

Good for his sales abroad perhaps, but what about back home? After his death, according to polling conducted by the independent Levada Center, only one in 10 Russians held a favorable view of Navalny. He may have died for his country, but in his final years he spoke principally to an international audience, and to history.

Still, had he lived, he might have emerged from captivity as an old man. Like a Slavic Nelson Mandela, he might have become leader of a Russia exhausted by war and repression and ready for change. What specific policies he might have advanced, on health care, taxation and immigration, are anyone’s guess. By the time of his death, he had effectively shed all political commitments but the most basic ones. In an authoritarian police state, the struggle to bring into being a “normal country,” as he puts it, where citizens can freely squabble and freely vote, is revolution enough.

PATRIOT: A Memoir | By Alexei Navalny | Knopf | 479 pp. | $35

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